50+ Lifestyles

National Gobble Day Has Local Ties

By Mary Schricker Gemberling

During the last week of November a time-honored tradition once again marked the unofficial beginning of our 2020 holiday season. I am referring to the ‘Official Pardoning of the ‘White House Turkey’ at which time two fine-looking and well behaved “Toms” are presented to the President of the United States by the National Turkey Federation. These lucky birds do not end up on anyone’s Thanksgiving table, but instead are pardoned by our Chief Executive and allowed to live out the remaining years in an ideal setting.

Although there are varied versions of the event’s origin and ceremonial specifics, it is best explained in the
following article by Betty Monkman, a former curator of the White House and a regular contributor to White House history.

Pardoning the Thanksgiving Turkey

The official “pardoning” of White House turkeys is an interesting White House tradition that has captured the imagination of the public in recent years. It is often stated that President Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony. Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well-fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee.

In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler enroute from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

Recently, White House myth-makers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of
“pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultry-less Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm. The 1978 turkey, presented to First Lady Rosalynn Carter, met a similar fate when it was sent to Evans Farm Inn to live in a mini zoo.

After 1981, the practice of sending the presentation turkey to a farm became the norm under President Ronald Reagan. The turkey ceremony also became a source of satire and humor for reporters. The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when President George H. W. Bush, with animal rights activists picketing nearby, quipped, “But let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy — he’s granted a Presidential pardon as of right now — and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here”

My interest this year in the pardoning ceremony stems from the fact that the 2020 turkeys presented to the White House were local turkeys preened and trained on the Kardel farm in Walcott Iowa. Susie and Ron Kardel, a 6th generation farmer, have lived on the land, homesteaded by his family in 1858, since they married in forty-four years ago. They began raising turkeys two years later in 1978. Ron became involved in the National Turkey Federation about fifteen years ago and became chairman of the organization in 2020. The chairman is usually responsible for raising and presenting the turkeys at the annual National White House ceremony.

When Susie first told a group of us that they would be raising these special turkeys, I assumed that they would just choose two likely candidates from one of the huge turkey barns on their property. Little did I know there was much, much more that needed to be done to insure that the turkeys chosen would cooperate and not just fly the coop when they arrived in Washington DC. The first step was designing and building a special smaller turkey building to the same standards as the larger ones on their farm. The building specifications would insure that the baby turkeys remained free from disease or predators. The building was started last spring and completed sometime in late June, just in time to house the shipment of 30 poults as they are called. Commercial birds are not normally used to being around people, so once they arrived and were
settled in Ron began walking through the building twice a day, talking to the turkeys and eyeing each of them for irregularities which might eliminate them as finalists. In early

September he began removing those that didn’t ‘pass muster’. Over the next few weeks, the qualifications stiffened until a final decision was made; Ron had picked out two turkeys, that he was confident would make the best show in our nation’s capital. A few days before the event the chosen turkeys were loaded in a van by a turkey expert who was cognizant of their needs and stress levels on the long drive east to Washington DC. Upon arrival both turkeys were given the red carpet treatment by the staff of the Willard Intercontinental Washington Hotel, where they had their own room for the two nights prior to the ceremony. The light-hearted ceremony was attended by some two-hundred people including Ron and Susie and their family of thirteen children and grandchildren. After the ceremony, the pardoned turkeys strutted majestically away from the White House and were once again loaded in the van to be driven to their new retirement home, in the Poultry Department of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University, Ron Kardel’s alma mater!

There they will live out the remaining years of their lives knowing they made history! It should be noted that all of this hard work and preparation was accomplished in the middle of the worst pandemic our world had seen in over one hundred years. At any time Ron could have received that phone call telling them that the entire event had been cancelled. But I can tell you even if that had happened Ron and Susie Kardel would still have looked at the entire process as a great experience because for them the glass is half full. In the words of Will Rogers, “ The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.”

Mary Schricker Gemberling

Mary, a former educator and Seniors Real Estate Specialist, is the author of four books, The West End Kid, A Labor of Love, Hotel Blackhawk; A Century of Elegance, and Ebenezer United Methodist Church; 150 Year of Resiliency.

Mary, a former writer and educator, is the author of three books: The West End Kid, A Labor of Love, and Hotel Blackhawk; A Century of Elegance.