Happy Thanksgiving

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which means that there are two types of things written about, either humorous food disasters or things that we’re thankful for. I’m not sure which category this is going to fall in.

This time of year, I always think about my friend Skeet Malone, who I met when I lived in Carnegie, Oklahoma. Skeet, who passed away a few years ago, was a fascinating guy for a couple of reasons.

First, he had a permanent trachestomy tube that would pop out suddenly if he coughed or laughed. The first few times it was really startling to see that plastic plug shoot out at you like the cork from a champagne bottle, but once you realized it was tethered to him and wouldn’t hit you it just became another aspect of his character.

Especially when you found out how he got it.

Skeet was a very young man who was at the invasion of Normandy Beach. He married his wife Jeanne just two days before deployment. While he was there, he took a strafe of machine gun fire across his chest and toward his right arm.

At the time, he was given up for dead and was stacked up with the other bodies for disposition, much like cordwood waiting for a cold winter day. Someone heard him gurgle as the blood seeped into his lungs, yelled, “This one’s alive” and they pulled him from the stack.

As a result of his injuries, his right hand was curled and paralyzed much like that of a stroke victim. It didn’t slow him down from becoming a school teacher and later high school principal, from following several different business paths after retirement or from becoming a very skilled stained glass artisan.

Skeet was also a master storyteller, and one of his favorites centered around growing up during the Great Depression. I can’t recount the tale with his panache (or without his glass of scotch), but those who knew him will recognize it immediately.

It seems that there was a family near his who had about a dozen children. The mom had died in childbirth and the dad had quickly remarried a much younger woman who was expected to become the mother of these children.

To say that they were “dirt poor” was a vast understatement. They lived in a tiny two room house without electricity or running water. The step-mom, who was in her early 20’s, was charged with the care of all the children who ranged from about 14 down to infancy. Because it was the depth of the Great Depression, money was almost non-existent and the family occasionally received “Relief”, the precursor to food stamps.

As with lots of government programs, there were occasionally glitches in the system.

One time, they got ten pounds of lard. Nothing else. Just lard.

Useful, I suppose, but hardly sustenance for a family of 14.

Occasionally, though, especially around the holidays, the delivery was a bonanza of treats that were otherwise unknown in western Oklahoma. In the year that Skeet liked to talk about, the delivery included a 25 pound bag of California Grapefruit.

Remember that this was prior to the days of supermarkets. Food tended to be locally grown and seasonal or home canned.  Besides, they had no money to go to the store to buy food. Most of what they ate was grown in a garden out back of their little house.

Skeet himself said he’d never tasted a grapefruit himself until he was in the army, and that while growing up he generally got an orange once a year – from the Santa who came to the First United Methodist Church Christmas party.

A bag of such bounty was an absolute goldmine to anyone then, much less a family with such meager resources.

The day after the relief food was delivered, though, the young stepmom walked about half a mile down the road in tears to talk with Skeet’s mother, who had become something of a mentor to her.

“I don’t know what to do with these things,” she said. “I’ve tried to boil them, to fry them and to bake them, and the kids just won’t eat them. How do you cook them?”

We have much for which to be thankful. Food, for the most part, is abundant and as close as the corner grocery store without regard to the season. Most of us have the resources to feed (and overfeed) ourselves. The internet provides information about how to fry your grapefruit, although I haven’t tried it yet.

I’m thankful also for all the men and women who have and are currently serving in the armed forces, but especially for three young men – Ither D. “Skeet” Malone, Robert Weidenmaier and Gene Sawyer – all from Caddo County, Oklahoma, who, in 1942 answered the call of their country and then returned to continue to serve their communities and influence others in ways that they probably never realized.