A Season for Taking Stock

Despite the economic uncertainties, it is, indeed, a time for thanksgiving

Having passed a new Bill of Rights, established a Supreme Court and performed various other wonders, the U.S. House of Representatives paused, in late September of 1789, to consider whether it should declare a national day of thanksgiving. Congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey thought it should. He introduced a resolution asking President Washington to proclaim a day in which the people might acknowledge, "with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God." There was immediate opposition. Congressman Thomas Tucker, wary of the threat of Big Government, declared that the House "had no business to interfere in a matter which did not concern them." Added he: "Why should the President direct the people to do what, perhaps, they have no mind to do?"

Boudinot's view prevailed, however, and so Washington issued a declaration naming the last Thursday in November as something that would later always be special in American life. The day was "to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be ... rendering ... humble thanks for [the] conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquillity, union and plenty, which we have since enjoyed."

Thanksgiving Day was even then an old tradition, of course. The first one had been celebrated in 1619 at the Berkeley settlement near Jamestown, Va., and this year the same feast was re-created at Berkeley Plantation, as it traditionally is, with an outdoor turkey roast on the first

Sunday in November. But folk tradition --New England tradition, at least--considers the first Thanksgiving to have been the conciliation in 1621 between the hungry Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indians, who had helped them to grow food. At Memorial Hall, near Plymouth Rock, this week, some 2,000 people will gather at the customary turkey feast that has come to be shared across the land as a kind of national communion. Says Carolyn Kneip of Plymouth: "If the Pilgrims returned today to see what they had started, they would be dumbfounded--and rilled with pride."

The season is traditionally a time for taking stock, for judging and assessing. This year, although there is widespread anxiety about the current inflation, and about the ability of the Carter Administration to control it, the nation is undeniably prospering. This year's unemployment rate is the lowest since 1974, and 95.2 million people are at work, more than ever before. The output of the nation's industries last month was a healthy 6.8% higher than a year ago. And the crops are in, a record, silo-bursting harvest --an estimated 6.8 billion bu. of corn, 8% more than the 1977 mark, and 1.8 billion bu. of both wheat and soybeans.

The farmers were helped to achieve that abundance by an Indian summer that blessed much of the country this month: maples on Martha's Vineyard held their bright leaves until last week, and the Chinese tallow trees of the Texas prairies continued their spectacular display of long red leaves. In the San Fernando Valley, Calif., as citizens started using their fireplaces, the tangy aroma of burning eucalyptus logs hung in the air. Only a few flurries of snow have dusted the highest mountains of New England, though by last week the first real blast of winter had struck the Rocky Mountain and upper Plains states. Inhabitants of Rapid City, S. Dak., glided through the streets on skis after the storm dropped up to three feet of snow from California as far as the Great Lakes.

The mild weather that prevailed in the rest of the country was perfect for the season's feasts and fairs. It was time for the Harvard-Yale game, U.S.C.-U.C.L.A., Nebraska-Missouri and a hundred aching clashes between rival high schools. There will be parades this week in Philadelphia, Houston and Hollywood, and of course the big Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. (Missing from that extravaganza, however, will be the familiar figure of Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney officials, who control appearances by replicas of the celebrated mouse, do not want him to become too familiar during the celebrations of his 50th birthday. Last week his chief sortie was to a White House party given by Amy Carter, where he got a hug from the hostess's father.)

One of the oddest celebrations is the Great Gobbler Gallop in Cuero, Texas, a town of 7,000 that raises 200,000 turkeys a year. There, a local fowl named Ruby Begonia disgraced the honor of Texas by losing to a bird named Paycheck from Worthington, Minn. But the gaiety of

Cuero's Turkeyfest--which includes parades, dances, a rodeo and a procession of wild turkeys scurrying down the street --was not notably dampened.

There had been warnings from the Agriculture Department that there would be a shortage of turkeys, because Americans now eat the bird year round to escape the high price of beef, but supplies proved plentiful, although prices were as high as 950 per lb., an average increase of 45% over last Thanksgiving. There was no drop in sales. "After all," said a Jewel food stores official in Chicago, "what's Thanksgiving without a turkey?" At Camp David, where the Carters were celebrating with a swirl of Georgia relatives from both sides of the family, a 36-lb. turkey named Purdue Pete was flown in from Indiana in a black and gold cage to be prepared for the dinner table.

But feasting, as George Washington indicated, is not the primary purpose of Thanksgiving. The nature of Americans' thanks, in turn, was as varied as their lives.

> Citizens living along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau once paddled his skiff, were thankful that a workman at the Lawrence Dam spotted a 9 1/2-lb. salmon last week.

The fish was once a common Indian fertilizer, but it had been driven out of the river by the textile mills, and this newcomer was the first big success of a three-year restoration program.

> Alfred Summers, 30, who spent more than three days buried alive in the rubble of a collapsed hotel in Joplin, Mo., last week was thankful that a trained German shepherd sniffed him out. Workers began digging where the dog indicated, and soon Summers' muffled voice was heard calling for help. He will eat Thanksgiving dinner in a hospital --but in satisfactory condition.

> Kent Waldrop, 24, of Grand Prairie, Texas, is thankful to be able to stand again, and particularly grateful to the Russians who helped him accomplish this task. Waldrop was paralyzed after a football injury at the University of Texas, and his doctors said there seemed to be nothing they could do. But a Leningrad hospital offered him special treatment, which was successful in allowing him, after four years of confinement to a wheelchair, to stand in a walker.

> Gamblers in Maryland were thankful because the state lottery hit a strange losing streak. Last Tuesday, when the number 777 came up, was a real gamblers' bonanza: the state had to pay out $3.1 million on $900,000 worth of tickets.

>Dennis Rainear, 26, of Midland, Mich., was thankful that he was alive. While running in a race to qualify for the Boston marathon, he was hit in the head by a stray bullet, did not realize what had happened, wobbled to the finish line, then was taken to a hospital, where the bullet was removed from his skull.

Thanksgiving sometimes runs the risk of sounding smug. The feasting takes place in a world where people die of starvation every day. The self-praises and even the thanks for good fortune are of little use to those who are less fortunate. So if this is a time to give thanks, it is also a time not to take the stored harvest for granted. Americans sense an uncertain and uncontrolled element in their lives. That is evident in the kind of restless discontent that appeared in the off-year elections, not only in the cautious and sometimes contradictory voting but also in the low numbers of votes cast. "There is a mood of apprehension and anxiety, a fear of the unknown," says Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti. Boston Globe Columnist Jeremiah V. Murphy summed it up neatly when he wrote, "We should feel better than we actually do. But nobody knows why we don't."

Thanksgiving bids all Americans address themselves to that problem. The Rev. Peter Gomes, 38, who is preacher to Harvard University, expressed some interesting views on the holiday. Said he: "I've never really quite thought of it in terms of a shopping list, but one thing I continue to be grateful for is simply for possibilities, that things do not necessarily always have to be as they are. I'm grateful that God is not a God of the status quo. The remarkable thing about that episode in Plymouth in 1621 is that whites and Indians enjoyed themselves not out of great prosperity but out of a sense of having been spared--and spared for something, not from something."

True. Even in mundane ways, Americans like to look ahead. In Manhattan last week, long before anyone ate a turkey, a giant spruce tree from New Jersey was raised over the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink. The Christmas season was already under way. In the Northern California lumber town of Burney, Don Whitman, 67, closed down his barbershop and his wife Edna locked her antique shop, and the two of them renewed a family tradition: cutting Christmas trees. "It's a happiness business," says Mrs. Whitman. "I imagine all the excitement and joy connected with every Christmas tree I cut." By the time they are through, they will have cut 60,000. For that they give thanks--and so do we all.

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