Seacoast History Blog #06
November 8, 2008

The first Seacoast history piece I ever wrote was about Thanksgiving. I called it "Turkeygate". I think it was the mid-1970s and I was living in my first post college apartment on Union Street and trying to make a living as a freelance writer. It was a miserable year for a fresh young ego.

The Obligatory Thanksgiving Blast

READ THE ORIGINAL TYRKEYGATE ESSAY  

My girlfriend was still attending college at UNH. We had toured England the previous year and being back in the States was a drag. I was dead broke, doing odd jobs and driving a Domino’s pizza car. Every day I sat at the kitchen table and banged out story ideas on a portable Olympia typewriter. That was back when we used carbon paper and White-Out.®. I sold a few pieces here and there, but mostly I got back rejection slips that I posted on the refrigerator and eventually used to paper a wall. I got rejected by every major publication you can think of including Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, even a few sleazy men’s magazines. One day I was killing time in the UNH library and, probably because it was fall, began reading one of the Pilgrim diaries looking for something to write about. The scary thing is, on second thought, this might have happened years later, in the early 80s when I was teaching journalism to high school kids. Okay, I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I do remember that I was stunned to learn that Portsmouth, NH was founded only three years after Plymouth Plantation. I was especially shocked to learn that Miles Standish had actually visited this region looking to purchase fish from David Thomson, New Hampshire’s first settler, and that Thomson then went to Plymouth and that the pilgrims celebrated a second thanksgiving in his honor. This was the dawning of the idea that New Hampshire’s history is often a day late and a dollar short compared to key national events. We are, like Avis, often the next guy across the line – and who remembers second place? That’s when I wrote the story about "Turkeygate", the 400-year cover-up. It appeared in New Hampshire Profiles magazine, probably when Peter Randall was the editor. If you can find a copy of that magazine, you can tell me whether it was the 70s or the 80s. It has appeared in lots of publications since. The New Hampshire history "hook" is to cast aspersions on the textbook historical event using self-deprecating humor, the way Avis made fun of itself in order to make fun of Hertz. I’ve been doing that pretty much since. And every year for decades I pick up on that concept in November, dust it off, and take another tilt at the windmill. Which is what I have to do this weekend. So I am pulling out the files about Thomson, checking my facts, and getting the old Thanksgiving show back on the road.

© 2008 J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.