I remember the last time our complete family assembled for Thanksgiving at our home in Hillcrest. Both sets of grandparents, my aunt and uncle and their spouses, and I recall watching those big purposeful men coming in the side door, up, and into the house, with their big coats going into the closet.
Before dinner I was regaled by stories by uncle Bill Clubb, who managed Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo, and who would die in a car crash the next year, and by uncle Jerauld Dershimer, who served as a NY State Police investigator in Manhattan, and who soon would be divorced.
Both grandfathers would soon pass away as well, one a fire chief and the other a business man.
But that Thanksgiving, ignorant as we were of God's plans for us all, we had that last joyous feast in the greatest country on earth, and laughed and joked that special day away.
I sat, as I did at that early age, in my miniature rocking chair, and felt a part of a great passage of people and time, a living part of America, as all the old relatives were discussed, our roots in Germany and England and Italy, veterans of all the wars, the missionaries to China, the witnessing of the passing of Lincoln's funeral train, down to my uncle's hounding of the Mafia and my old man's naval adventures in
WWII.
And then it was time to leave and everyone at their own time departed and our house fell quiet; Thanksgiving of 1952 was over.
Little did any of us know at the time that we were celebrating in an America at the height of her power, which would ebb away in my life time, like Rome's, from politicians afraid to make the choices necessary to survive.
John Burtis is a former Broome County, NY firefighter, a retired Santa Monica, CA, police officer. He obtained his BA in European History at Boston University and is fluent in German. He resides in NH with his wife, Betsy.
