Pardon Me?

By Gordon Hopkins Turkey is not just a bird. Turkey is not just a country. Turkey is not just a favorite insult from the 1970's, mostly likely created as an alternative by TV executives trying to figure out a way to keep cuss words off the tube in prime time.Turkey is an American tradition. For as long as Thanksgiving has existed as a holiday, turkey has not just been the main course of that massive meal that brings family members together once a year for their annual reminder of why they don't spend the rest of the year with those annoying people. Turkey is the one recognizable symbol of Thanksgiving.As a result, turkey becomes the centerpiece not just of dinner but of all manner of Thanksgiving traditions. That includes what has to be one of the weirdest traditions ever conceived.The U.S. Poultry and Egg Association says 46 million turkeys are eaten on Thanksgiving.Two, however, will be spared.In a ceremony on Monday of this week, at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington DC, President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys in what has become an annual tradition rivaling Groundhog's Day as an event containing far more pomp and circumstance and press coverage than any day focusing on an animal that has no idea what is going on really should.Said birds were named Liberty and Bell. Despite being named for a Philadelphia icon, they actually hail from Willmar, Minnesota. Willmar is also the birth place of Earl B. Olson, founder of the Jennie-O Turkey company.National and international news has been disheartening for some time and sometimes we all need a break. So, I do not take our president to task for taking time away from affairs of states to take part in a light-hearted event with some truly bad humor, like when Biden said, “They have a new appreciation for the phrase, 'Let freedom ring.'”But why do we do this, anyway? How did it get started?I set out to research it and, like many holiday traditions, the origins seem a bit hazy.The earliest example of a president pardoning a turkey I can find dates back to Abraham Lincoln, who evidently granted a reprieve to a turkey in 1863 at the behest of his son, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln. Yes, Lincoln's son was named “Tad.” I only just learned this and haven't had time to properly process my feelings about it.However, White House historians cannot confirm or deny the veracity of this story. The first documented pardoning of a turkey was 100 years later, in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy told those in attendance at a ceremony, “Let's keep him going.”While that is the first time it happened on records, I'm still unclear exactly why it happened. Was it just somebody's idea of a governmental joke that got out of hand (kind of like Congress)?While some birds were still granted clemency by the White House once in a while, it was sporadic at best. It would not become an annual tradition until the George H.W. Bush administration in 1989 when the president gave that lucky bird the first official presidential pardon.Closer to home, I must tell you there was no such mercy at my own Thanksgiving feast. But, please, shed no tears for that foul fowl. I can assure you, that bird was a vile and villainous fiend completely deserving of it's cranberry-smothered fate.

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