Thanksgiving at the Marshalls

Over the years, what stands out in my memories of our family Thanksgiving dinners is that they were remarkable for their lack of drama.

In the years before Martha Stewart made everyone feel guilty for not creating memorably lavish gastronomic triumphs, Jack and Giffy Marshall did a pretty good job of creating memories for me with the small core group of regulars who each year came to our house on Audubon Place in Shreveport to give simple thanks.

In my recollection, there was nothing outrageous enough to make into a movie, or even into a sitcom script. No breathtaking revelations from family members, no drunken brawls amongst aunts and uncles, no unruly dogs eating the turkey from the kitchen counter. Nothing but good food and a larger than normal group around the table.

Don't get me wrong though. Thanksgiving at the Marshalls always was a special day, and I looked forward to it as a highlight of each year of my young life.

First was the food itself. Not so much the quality -- although our mother was an excellent cook -- but the quantity. The Marshalls were neither poor nor rich. But, on the 364 regular days of the year, there were limits imposed on what we could eat and drink. ONE slice of bacon and ONE glass of orange juice at breakfast. (There was a lot of bartering, however, between siblings.) Lots of spaghetti and casseroles. Salmon croquettes or fish sticks on Friday. Roast beef with rice and gravy once a week, on Sunday. Few snack foods or desserts.

Thanksgiving was just the opposite. There was a full and diverse menu from which to choose and plenty of everything!

Most memorably, we ate in the dining room, not the kitchen. Mom and Dad made a big deal out of putting the large oval top on the dining room table, which made it big enough for 12 or more. If the crowd was particularly large, a series of card tables was attached from the bottom of the oval, and stretched into the living room area. Thanksgiving was the one meal a year when we ate off the "good china" with the "real silverware." And thanks to Land O'Lakes and the A&P Supermarket, there always was "real butter" too -- an unheard-of treat!

Another thing that was special about Thanksgiving to me was that there usually was no kids table. My sister Mary says Giffy wanted it that way, for everyone to sit together. I always liked that. Even when I was small, I remember sitting with the grown-ups and listening to grown-up talk, about President Kennedy, maybe, or the new Pope who had changed the rules regarding fasting before communion, or whether Navy could beat Army in the week's big game. My mother's mother, Mere, had a favorite expression from growing up in a large, multi-generational, French-speaking home. "Let only six talk at a time," Mere would say, and at our Thanksgiving table, that often was the case.

When all was ready, Jack Marshall would begin the blessing. Nowadays, we usually improvise, with one person or everyone giving specific thanks for the many blessings in our lives. Back then, Dad's leadership was limited to saying the familiar first words, "Bless us oh Lord..." and then we'd all join in, "and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen." It was the same blessing we said every day, for every meal, but on Thanksgiving, we recited those well-known words with special fervor. For on that day, the word "bounty" really meant something.

The pictures with this post were taken 39 years ago today, on Thursday, November 26, 1970. When I saw the date noted on the back of Jack Marshall's contact sheet, I was amazed that Thanksgiving fell on the same date, November 26, as it does this year. I checked an online calendar to make sure it was true!

Before the meal, everyone trooped out front for Dad to take our picture: Mom, my brother John, and my sister Mary, with only brother David missing; Mere, and my father's mother, Catherine; my father's sister Doris and her husband Harry (in his Navy uniform), along with their daughter Patty and her husband Bill, and Catherine's sister, Blanche. I believe I took the other picture, of Dad, just before he began carving the turkey, with a happy Mere to his right and his mother Catherine to his left. Dad always made a big show of honing the knife to its sharpest just before starting to slice.

There are so few pictures of Dad -- since he usually was the one behind the camera -- that I really love this photo. Even though he is giving me a big, cheesy pose, I think I can see the twinkle in his eye and his true joy at being surrounded by his family. He is not quite 50 years old, in the very prime of his life.

Less than 6 years later, Jack Marshall was gone.

If he were still alive today, we could be celebrating Thanksgiving dinner with a crowd including his 4 children (and spouses), 11 grandchildren -- many of them now with spouses, and even a couple of great grandchildren. There could be 30 or more around the table, and I bet Dad would still be leading us in "Bless us oh Lord" before proudly carving the turkey. I'm sorry Dad died without ever sharing that huge Thanksgiving feast. There might have to be a kids table now, and there definitely would be even more food.

And I'm very certain Jack Marshall would have taken the definitive photograph of the assembled group, because that's what he always did. He would have enjoyed this day immensely.

Today when I give thanks for the many blessings in my life, I will, as I always do, say a silent prayer of gratitude for our heroically normal, quietly loving father, Jack Marshall. For he gave us the gift of a happy, secure, wonderful family, his forever legacy to us all, a gift of infinite, inestimable value.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

--Tom Marshall, New York City,
Celebrating Thanksgiving 2009 in Seattle

Veterans Day 2009

One of my most treasured possessions is a textbook from Jack Marshall's senior year at Centenary College of Louisiana. The book, “Advertising Procedure,” sits on a shelf near my computer here in New York City. I find myself picking it up fairly often, flipping through the pages with their illustrations of what now would be considered classic advertising. For some reason, the fragile yellow pages and my father's carefully scripted margin notes always give me a strong sense of his everlasting presence in my life.

At the end of Chapter 11 in Dad's book, there is a handwritten assignment dated “12/5/41” with a notation to read certain pages by “12/8/41.” I guess as he was studying that weekend and completing that assignment, his world changed forever, because that Sunday as we all know, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and a few short months later Jack Marshall and many of his classmates were thousands of miles from home, in Europe and Asia, fighting for the freedoms we continue to enjoy as Americans today.

My father, John Wilcox Marshall Jr. (known to all as "Jack"), graduated from Centenary in May of 1942 and, barely 21 years old, immediately joined the Navy. By the summer of 1943, he was on board the USS Mullany when the destroyer was commissioned in San Francisco and steamed into World War II in the Pacific Ocean. The photo above shows Dad, by now about 22, standing second from left, and other officers on the Mullany sometime in 1943.


More than 20 years later, my oldest brother, John Wilcox Marshall III (above, at bottom of airplane steps, in a picture taken by Jack Marshall), followed his father into the Navy, serving aboard the guided missile cruiser USS Galveston during the Vietnam War. Though the circumstances of John's enlistment and the war itself were far different from our father's service, I know my brother too believed in the importance of fulfilling his duty to serve our country.

The newsman Tom Brokaw has written a book calling Jack Marshall and his contemporaries "The Greatest Generation." Not only for their service in World War II but also for their relentless hard work and optimism building America into an even greater nation in the years that followed. I have many friends whose fathers also served in World War II. Over the years, those friends and I have shared memories of our dads, and the qualities and values we know they gave our families and our lives.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that about 2 million veterans of World War II still are living, but they are dying at a rate of about 1,000 per day. All are expected to be gone by 2020.

Jack Marshall came home from World War II, met and married my mother, and together they raised four children in what for me was a wonderful, happy and supportive environment. Dad was not perfect, but he loved his family and his country. My father died far too young, at the age of 55, in 1976. I still miss him every day.

On Veterans Day 2009, I want to publicly express my gratitude to my father John W. Marshall Jr., my brother John Marshall III, my nephew Andrew John Marshall (John's son, an Air Force B-52 navigation officer) and all of the men and women who ever have served or now are serving in the armed forces of the United States of America.

Thank you for your service to our country!

–Tom Marshall, New York City

Rocky Mountains, Hi

Imagine this.

The year is 1964. Trips to Hawaii, Europe or the Caribbean – anything that requires a passport or an airplane ticket – are strictly fantasies, suitable only for the rich.

Although the revolutionary system of smooth, straight interstate highways is under construction, it is a time when cross country car trips cover many miles on old two- and four-lane highways that pass through the center of each little town along the way. Air conditioning is a relatively new option on automobiles and it is something you pay extra for in motels. Almost everyone drives an American made car; you are either a GM family or a Ford family.

So, just for fun, you load 4 children into a 1961 Buick LeSabre which nominally features air conditioning – tepid at best and tending to make the engine run hot. You put a giant canvas tent in the trunk, along with all the powdered food and canned goods you can fit. You fill the fuel tank with 20 gallons of gasoline at about 27¢ per gallon.

And then, you leave Shreveport, Louisiana, headed for the Great American West.

That's exactly what the Marshall family did for fun. Our father, Jack Marshall, thought it might be interesting, educational – and cheaper – to go on a camping vacation "out West."

Just before his 1943 World War II deployment as a U.S. Navy officer in the Pacific, Dad had for a time been stationed in San Francisco, and had fallen in love with the Western landscapes immortalized by Ansel Adams. So when the logistics and expense of beach vacations became too much for our growing family, and when we all clamored for something other than vacation trips to visit our relatives in New Orleans, Dad hatched his plan for camping.

After a couple of trial runs to Arkansas and Oklahoma, we finally were ready for our grand adventures to the West. Although this 1964 trip was the first, we ultimately took several car and camping trips to the West that gave our wide-eyed Louisiana family (and a couple of unsuspecting guests) memories of a lifetime, with stops at landmarks such as the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Pikes Peak, the Air Force Academy, Rocky Mountain National Park, Garden of the Gods, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Las Vegas, Lake Mead, Death Valley and eventually even Yosemite National Park, Los Angeles, Disneyland and the Pacific Ocean.

We did it all without cruise control, cell phones or video games. And most of the time without television, air conditioning, electricity or even running water.

On the first day of that 1964 trip, as would be the case in all future trips West, we drove across Texas. Not all the way across Texas, but almost. That first-day drive of nearly 600 miles always was as far as a family of 6 in a recalcitrant, low riding, prone-to-overheating Buick could tolerate in one day. When you leave Shreveport heading west, you almost immediately cross the Texas border. Starting soon after sunrise and driving hard for 14 hours or more, we usually limped into Amarillo (or "Armadillo" as Jack Marshall insisted on calling it), long after the sun had set in a blazing wet pool on the asphalt in front of our hot, tired car full of intrepid adventurers.

Nothing ever looked as welcoming as that Best Western Motel, just off what is now referred to as "Historic Route 66," where we usually spent our first night. After a shower and the last of the sandwiches and fruit my mother had packed in Shreveport, we all fell into our beds, exhausted. And we slept well that night, knowing it was the last night for a while with artificially cool air or blessedly hot water.

Day Two always dawned with excitement. First of all, we got to eat breakfast in an actual diner. Jack Marshall used to proudly announce as we trooped in, looking like we hadn't eaten in a week, "Kids, you can have anything you want, as long as it doesn't cost more than 59 cents!" We were pretty sure he was joking, but then again, maybe not. And once, a waitress dutifully trying to clarify my mother's order for an egg, asked her, "Over easy?" To which Giffy Marshall , suspicious of any meal not prepared in her own kitchen, tersely responded, "Oh, no, not greasy!"

The second day of our trip also was exciting because it was the first day we would see the mountains. Leaving Amarillo, we headed northwest, through a corner of New Mexico. At some point, the road began to rise, and soon we were in Raton Pass, which would carry us into Colorado. The heavily loaded Buick (see above) labored to climb the hills and Dad carefully pumped the brakes as we lurched down steep inclines.

The first morning of our first camping trip to Colorado, everyone woke early. It was still dark outside, but the Eastern sky showed traces of the coming sun. My father reluctantly rose with us, and we joined some new neighbors at their campfire. As we huddled together in excitement, Dad guessed with the other father how cold it must be. Then, stifling a yawn, my Dad squinted at his watched and remarked that he couldn't remember the last time he was awake at 5:30 in the morning. Incredulous at my father's "rookie mistake," the neighbor pointed out that we were now in the Mountain Time Zone, and it was actually 4:30 a.m. Dad was horrified, but he told that story for the rest of his life.

Still, Jack Marshall the photographer was in heaven, with breathtaking landscapes in every direction. One of his favorites is at the top of this entry.

For the next two weeks, we snuggled each night into sleeping bags against the Rocky Mountain chill. We sang songs around roaring campfires. We bought blocks of ice to keep milk and eggs fresh in a cooler. We ate pancakes and bacon cooked on a Coleman stove. We drank Tang, just like the astronauts. We went on nature hikes conducted by National Park Service rangers. We looked for – but never found – arrowheads and other Native American artifacts. We drank ice-cold water from roaring creeks. We saw snow in July and mailed postcards to friends and relatives back home in Louisiana.

Our camping trips to the West were grand, glorious, memorable and happy. Without a doubt, these trips ultimately helped define who we were as a family, and who we kids became as adults.

– Tom Marshall, New York City