Thanksgiving 1954

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Jim Petersen wrote Thanksgiving 1954 about 25 years ago. It first appeared on our website during the 2014 Thanksgiving season. It is one of several essays Jim has written about his boyhood that have become part of My Father's Ashes, a memoir he wrote that we will publish next spring...

I recently ran across an old photograph that reminded me why Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year. It was tucked away in one of many photo albums that my mother assembled for me that chronicle my growing up years. She dated every photograph she ever took.  Her inscription on the back of this photo reads, “Thanksgiving 1954.”

Mother was our family photographer, which explains why most of the photos in which she appears were taken by me after I was old enough to be entrusted with the folding Kodak Six-20 camera she bought the week before she started her first teaching job in a one room school house in Virginia City, Montana.

Dad never took pictures, although he had a beautiful Zeiss Ikon that his boyhood friend, Marvin Clark, had removed from the body of a dead German soldier on June 7, 1944 somewhere near Pointe du Hoc on France’s Normandy coast. I know this date only because Marvin had climbed the cliffs above Omaha Beach the day before amid withering German machine gun fire.

This particular photograph, taken in my grandparent’s sprawling country kitchen, is a far more joyful scene, though even now - 70 Thanksgivings later - it remains a fitting reminder of the peace that Marvin and some 16 million Americans bought for us in Europe and the South Pacific between 1941 and 1945.

In Marvin’s case, the savagery were so horrific that he took his own life not long after he was discharged.  Years later I asked Dad if he knew why Marvin had killed himself. After what seemed like an eternity, I began to think he could not form the words to answer my question. But he eventually did. "Marvin never really came home from the war,” he said quietly. Then silence.

My grandmother’s kitchen was a marvel to behold. It fed more than 20 farm hands, as well as a good many hobos who showed up at the kitchen door most days in hopes of trading a few hours of work for a hot meal. She’d have them split stove wood or shovel coal or snow or mow the lawn. Whatever needed doing at the moment. No one who was willing to work was ever turned away.

Although she never said, my guess is that my grandmother’s generosity had a lot to do with the fact that she was scrubbing floors on her hands and knees in an orphanage before she was 10 years old. She lost both of her parents – Broadway actors and owners of their own touring company - to typhoid fever in the spring of 1904.

My grandfather’s story was different, but much the same in a haunting sort of way. When he was not much more than a boy, he saddled his horse and rode west across Colorado, then north, skirting Utah’s Grand Escalante Badlands – a desolate but beautiful area made famous by the poet-adventurer, Everett Ruess, who disappeared there in 1934, nearly 30 years after my grandfather rode through on his way to southwest Montana, where he found work as a cattle drover on the Jackson Ranch near Twin Bridges. It was there that he met and courted my grandmother. They were married in Dillon in 1917.

Four smiling faces greet me in Mother’s 1954 photograph: My grandfather, the official sharpener of carving knives he had forged himself on an anvil I now have; my father, the official carver of the turkey, who had worked as a meat cutter in his youth; my grandmother, in her finest hand-sewn apron and Mrs. Hook, whose stern countenance hides the fact that she was a wonderful and warm-hearted woman who helped in the kitchen for years.

Dad was in his bow tie phase then, and so he is wearing one with his white shirt. My less discriminating grandfather never much cared what shirt he wore with his tie, so this one is some sort of long-sleeved plaid. It is engaged in a furious battle with his powder blue tie, which features Gene Autry atop his horse, Champion.

The tie was my Christmas gift to him in 1953. I was nine - old enough to pick out gifts by myself and pay for them with my lawn mowing and snow shoveling money. When I graduated from high school in 1962, my grandmother gave me his Elgin work and dress pocket watches - and the tie.

The shutter on mother’s camera forever freezes this moment in time. They are standing on the far side of a huge kitchen table that sits on casters so it can be rolled about easily. The top is gleaming stainless steel. Mrs. Hook has just removed three turkeys from my grandmother’s double oven – the only wood stove I ever saw with three fire boxes and two ovens. Its surface area was so large that when it was used as a pancake griddle, the first pancake had to be turned over before the batter on the last pancake was poured.

My grandfather is on the right. Dad is standing next to him, then my grandmother and Mrs. Hook. Grandmother and Mrs. Hook are smiling at the camera, but my father and grandfather are smiling at each other. It is a symbolic reminder that my grandfather was Dad’s mentor and, in many ways, the only father he ever really knew. He was 12 when pneumonia killed his real father.

The loss was so devastating that Dad could never bring himself to talk with me about him. And so what I know about Paul Randolph Petersen I learn by discretely asking other family members what they knew. Over the years, I assembled a picture in my mind’s eye of a tough as hell lumberman who immigrated from Norway in 1902 and made a helluva lot of money in his 48 years, but never had much time for his three children.  He was buried on Dad’s thirteenth birthday.

Charlie Albertson of the Great Escalante Badlands – the only grandfather I ever knew – always had time for everyone. And so, when my grandmother telephoned me on a June evening in 1961 to say that he had been killed that afternoon in an accident on the ranch, I suddenly realized how empty my dad’s life became when he lost his father in July of 1928.

It would be thirty years before I could bring myself to talk about my grandfather. Now, blessedly, I can, though I still well up when I see Dad standing in memory’s mist weeping silently at my grandfather’s graveside. It was the only time I ever saw him cry. In ways I did not understand when I was 17, my grandfather had replaced the father that Dad had lost 33 years earlier.

My father and my grandfather were the biggest men I will know. Big in the sense that they were modest men whose quiet generosity touched the lives of many who did not even know them. And they were camera-shy in the sense that they never needed anyone to know about their kindnesses. So it was with “The Greatest Generation” that Tom Brokaw wrote about in his fine book by the same name. Such a far cry from today’s “what about me” generation.

I did not get to know my own father until after I went off to college at the University of Idaho in the fall of 1962. He worked for a big mining company in northern Idaho and was on call day and night during the Korean War and for years thereafter. If he got a day off, he slept. Vacations were rare treasure.

Dad showed up at my fraternity house the first time in the spring of 1963. I’ll never forget it. A friend came upstairs to say that he was downstairs waiting for me.  At first, I didn’t believe it, but there he was waiting patiently for me in the foyer, as though his visit had been planned for weeks. It hadn’t been.

The drive from Kellogg to Moscow was a three-hour endurance test on a curvy uphill-downhill two lane highway that drivers shared with full of slow moving log and chip trucks.

"Is everything okay at home," I anxiously asked dad.

"Everything is fine," he assured me. "But it's lunch time and I thought I'd buy you a bowl of soup and a sandwich."

Over the next three years, we got to know each other over bowls of chicken noodle soup and tuna sandwiches. When lunch was over, he'd drop me off at the fraternity house and drive another three hours home.

I have had 61 years to think about our lunches, and how we got to know one another in a way that never could have happened before I traveled through my own Grand Escalante Badlands - in a figurative sense - after I graduated from high school in 1962.

I drove the length of the real Grand Escalante in 1997. It was beautiful. So was he.

After Lewy Body disease stole Dad from us, I casually mentioned our lunch rendezvous to my mother. “What!” she cried out. In that unforgettable moment, I realized that Dad had never told her about our many visits. I'm not sure why but I suspect that he simply wanted a little piece of me that she could not touch that he could call his own.  

Dad often felt outclassed by my mother. She was the beauty who never missed a dance in her youth and who rode horses like she was born in the saddle. She had a college education, taught school for 41 years and was revered by her students.

She was also my constant companion for the first 18 years of my life, years in which two wars kept Dad on the job day and night for weeks on end. When he came home, he ate and went to bed. When I got up the following morning, he was already gone. Vacations were treasures.

Dad dropped out of school soon after his father died. Although the country was sinking into the Great Depression, I think his own emotional depression had more to do with it. After he died, his sister told me that Dad refused to eat at the dinner table for a year after their father died.

"Why," I asked her.

"Your dad was our father's favorite," she explained.

"Then what happened," I replied.

"When my brother came back to the table, there was only one empty chair left."

Dad never went back to school. Nor did he ever get over feeling small and uneducated in my mother’s presence. But I had seen him effortlessly work complex math problems in his head that many graduate engineers could not complete on a slide rule. He was the smartest man I have ever known, and I was very proud of him. I still am.

Everyone in Mother’s Thanksgiving 1954 photograph is gone now: Dad in December of 1986, my grandmother in September of 1983, Mrs. Hook sometime in the late 1970s, Mother in June of 1985, and my grandfather in June of 1961.

I miss them all, but I have my mother’s photo albums, and the flood of memory they bring, to remind me why Thanksgiving Day will always be my favorite day of the year.