Yachats Oregon Writer Rick Schultze

Forty nine years ago I was in San Antonio Texas on Thanksgiving Day. I had been in the Air Force for ten days and like all the other rookie airmen around me very lonesome and homesick.No matter how hard the chow hall cooks tried, they couldn’t provide us with the Thanksgiving dinner we were all missing. However, I must say that while the first nine days for we new recruits had been very tough and hard to comprehend Thanksgiving Day was much more oriented towards the spirit of Thanksgiving and even though the tough discipline of basic training still was paramount, the drill sergeants eased up a bit for one day only. I’ll always remember that day as a mixture of both good and bad. The bad was that I was away from home my first Thanksgiving ever but the good was that even though none of the airman in my basic training flight knew each other we seemed to form a bond that day. All of us missed someone, someplace, and home but we discovered we had each other and over the course of our basic training became a solid and cohesive unit. It all started on that Thanksgiving Day in Texas. I was born in Portland Oregon and had a lot of family there. For as long as I can remember we gathered on Thanksgiving at one relative’s house or ours and shared Thanksgiving Days with as many as twenty people, all related. We as kids sat at the “kids” tables and it wasn’t until we grew to large to sit at the tiny card tables did we manage to be integrated into the “adults” table. I remember the Thanksgiving Day when my cousin Katie and I reached the pinnacle of our youth and joined the adults while our younger siblings were banished to the “kid” table for yet another year. It was surely a rite of passage. Those kinds of memories always come to mind when Thanksgiving rolls around and over the years I’ve had many more great Thanksgiving Day memories, having been invited to many fine folks homes, been to traditional and non-traditional Thanksgiving dinners, enjoyed different ways of observing Thanksgivings and watched some very interesting Thanksgiving Day National Football League games. I love holidays but Thanksgiving is always my favorite. Partly because of the food aspect but mostly because of what it means to give thanks for what we have and to share with those that don’t. Every year I also think about our military personnel who may be spending their first Thanksgiving away from home or their twentieth. I hope they can have a day of peace and get some feeling of being thankful for being able to be doing something as valuable as they our doing for our country. We most certainly thank these men and women and let’s keep “Thanks” in Thanksgiving here and pass it on to one another. Happy Thanksgiving; I hope you enjoy it! To reach Rick Schultze email: yarick@pioneer.net.