DDT's story of a T'giving spent years ago reminded me of a situation I found myself in. It was October, 1962 and I was due for discharge the following January. My wife and I decided she and our three girls would leave in early October and head back to the Chicago area, whereupon she would go about finding an apartment and set up housekeeping for my arrival after discharge on January 6, 1963. We were stationed in northern Maine at Loring AFB and we felt it best for her to leave before snow fell...which turned out to be a good decision. She got as far as Porstmouth, NH and spent the night with some old friends since that was our previous station. In the middle of the night, the husband was called in for duty....it was the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I had moved back into the barracks and we couldn't leave unless headed for our duty station, and we were on a tight schedule to report in or you had best have a good excuse for taking longer than 30 minutes to get there. Eventually, the crisis blew over much to our collective relief. Now it came to my attention I had an excess of leave time I would lose if I didn't use it so I put in for some of it to be used over Thanksgiving. Plans were made, I had no car now....it was in Illinois, so I decided to catch a ride on the daily courier flight out of Westover AFB in Springfield, Mass.
I checked scheduling and headed for Base Ops, only to find out the schedule had been moved up as a result of the missile crisis. Whatever! I headed for the main highway and stuck out my thumb, got a ride with a trucker all the way to Springfield where my intentions were to catch that courier flying back to Offut AFB, Omaha, NE. Guess what....schedule changed there as well so I headed back out to the main highway outside the gate, dress in AF Blues, I'm standing under an overpass and am cold and wet....but stuck out my thumb and hoped for the best. A new Oldsmobile pulled up, driven by a captain and asked where I was headed, told me to jump in and he would take me as far as Owosso, MI where he was headed for T'giving.
Somewhere around Buffalo, NY he crossed into Canada and drove straight west toward Detroit to shorten the trip rather than go south around Lake Erie. When we arrived at his home early T'giving day and after greeting and meeting everyone, he took me to the local bus station to buy a ticket to Downers Grove, IL where my wife was now located. After that, we headed back to his place and I questioned him as to what he was up to. He had me change into civvies after a hot shower, then his mother grabbed my arm and led to the dining room where there was this huge Thanksgiving spread and the whole family sitting around, including grandpa and grandma, a couple uncles/aunts, a few kids at a separate table. After grandpa said grace(reminded me of my own dad), we all dug in. I was treated like a long lost member of the family, then later that afternoon I was taken down to the bus station, got a good seat at the back after chatting with the driver to let him know my mission. It wasn't long before the drone of the bus put me to sleep and I was awakened about a half hour from my destination.
The driver actually stopped the bus on a toll road near where I had arranged for my in-laws to pick me up. I scooted down the slope and headed for the gas station nearby where we were to meet, fortunately there wasn't any fencing to work around off the expressway. I contacted that family only once in the months that followed, but it was also a Thanksgiving I'll never forget. To top it off, my wife and her family held off the big T'giving dinner until I got there. A time to remember....two food comas in one week.
