It’s almost Thanksgiving! Here are a few tidbits to jumpstart your holiday.
The number of days off have flucuated over the years with students having a voice in the schedule.
The 2009 issue of Here We Have Idaho reported in 1973, “another appropriation for furnishings facilitated the final move to the new building during Thanksgiving of 1973. The good timing was not lost on Menard, then head of the Law School: “It was truly a day of Thanksgiving.”
The Moscow Food Co-op Newletter in 2005 offered a receipe for tofu turkey as well as this story by Judy Sobeloff:
One busy Thanksgiving morning, about to cook her turkey, my friend Sarah accidentally hit a button on her oven that said “clean,” automatically locking it for the next 24 hours. Her futile attempts at tricking the unruly appliance into thinking the sun had set and risen again included shutting down the power to her entire apartment building, resetting the fuse box, and putting the oven in a cage with a dark cloth draped over it. Sarah was finally calmed down by a very nice lady at G.E. who assured her that, although there was no way anyone could physically pry the oven open, “Honey, it will all work out.”
… And there is always football.
In the Latah County Oral Histories, Lola Gamble Clyde remembered that for “Thanksgiving and New Year’s many of the communities made a regular habit of putting on a big Thanksgiving dinner at the schoolhouse and everybody’d come.”
Lucille Riddell Genevan talked about her sister throwing parties for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years “for the young men around town that didn’t have homes. And she’d fix these big dinners for them. Have her table stretched out in her dining room. Gosh, I don’t know how many she could sit at it. And most all the time, if I was available so I could help her, I did. If I couldn’t help her, most of the time she did it herself.
![Dee and Burton Ellis preparing a turkey. [MG 409-178-18]](https://webpages.uidaho.edu/library/spec/harvester/objects/small/thanks7_sm.jpg)
An item in the 1964 Argonaut wrote that members of the Intrafraternity Council purchased and distributed Thanksgiving baskets in Moscow.
Enjoy the break, Vandals!
Sources
MG 415 Latah County Oral History Collection, 1971-1986
PG 2 University of Idaho Student Organizations Collection, 1890-1992