Thanksgiving thoughts

NOTE: COLUMN RETURNS ON CYBER MONDAY AFTER THE HOLIDAY. FUNNY, WE KNOW HAVE BLACK FRIDY AND CYBER MONDAY. DON"T PEOPLE SHOP ON THE WEEKENDS?

Happy Thanksgiving. Just as I did on Labor Day with my Cow Pie Bingo article, I wanted to get away from health care, card check, cap and trade, county budgets and even Pip the Mouse for a day and focus on our national holiday.

Thanksgiving is as American as any holiday could be. We have the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. We have turkey—which should have been the national bird according to Ben Franklin. We have football.

Yet, I am thinking of the lyrics I heard at lunch today (and 30 years ago to boot). “You know, they don’t know what they got til it’s gone. The paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I’ve been thinking that way about Thanksgiving. It was bad enough working Black Friday back when I worked in a Kresge store (does that date me?) back in the 70’s. Back then we were open 10 til 9. In fact, Black Friday started the extended hours. Well, Monday through Friday. We still closed at 5:30 on Saturday and Sunday—oh, those old Blue Laws—we were closed.

Then we started having 7 a.m. sales at stores, then 6. Then 4. Several stores are advertising 4 a.m. starts on Friday. Of course, many are open tomorrow! Whatever happened to the holiday?

But, I am a freelance writer and my photographic assignment tomorrow is purely voluntary. I even offered to deliver meals to shut-ins. My Thanksgiving is Friday. My kids, adults, are with mom.

But, I think back to Thanksgiving past and to something my kids never experienced. It was an Eastern Pennsylvania tradition. Actually, Easton and Phillipsburg keep it going to this very day. High school football on Thanksgiving. I miss that.

Growing up in Scranton, we had three high schools. West Scranton served all of west Scranton. Makes sense. The rest of the city went to either Central or Tech.

Scranton Central, blue and gold, the Golden Eagles, was the academic high school. 99% white. Probably 30% Jewish. Scranton Tech, red and white, the Red Raiders, was the technical high school. A bit more racially mixed than central.

Families in Scranton often had siblings that went to both. It all depended on your career path.

From the beginning of time (ok, football time) these two schools met at 10:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Families planned meals around “the game.” They sold tickets to the game at the grade schools and junior high so you wouldn’t be shut out of it.

We didn’t have a homecoming tradition. This was it. Whether 8 and planning to go to Central or 80 and remembering your days at Tech, you went to the game. Families had the winners gloating over dinner and the losers fuming.

It was an annual civil war. It was even better than most Thanksgiving games, like Phillipsburg-Easton, because Tech and central had the same geographic footprint. Kids went to North Scranton or South Scranton Junior High for grades 7-10 and then off to Tech or Central for the last two years. You may have been in school with your rivals for 9 years before you split off to Tech and Central. The kids in the Hill Section went for 9-12 because they didn’t have a junior high.

It gave it an extra special flair because neighbors and siblings were at war with each other.

In those days when Scranton was still growing, they finally added West Scranton. Before that, they were also part of the mix. In fact, in my mother’s family, the 4 oldest went to Tech (3) or Central (1—mom) but by the time the baby came along, he went off to West. So, West Scranton started a Thanksgiving rivalry with Dunmore, the borough that borders Scranton.

I believe they played in the morning if at Dunmore but since all three Scranton schools use one stadium, the played at 2 p.m. if they had the home game. It was also part of tradition. Tech and Central families ate dinner at a reasonable time while West and Dunmore ate very early or late.

Life was good. My first high school football memory is a Tech-Central game when I was in 5^th grade. We lost. But I remember it.

Then the backhoes appeared in Paradise. People started pushing for a state play-off. We had something called the Eastern Conference but no state championship in football. The problem was to have play-offs, you need to end the season before Thanksgiving.

There was also that 70’s kind of equality and righteousness. The West Scranton people complained that they didn’t like the 2 p.m. start. The school board relented. Thanksgiving 1974 (if memory serves me right that is the Cling Longley year in the Cowboys Thanksgiving game)) my senior year (and to be clear—I was a fan not a member of the team), they made Tech and Central play at 2 p.m.

The football gods were not amused. It was good drama though. West upset Dunmore in the morning. All Central (which had one loss) had to do was beat Tech (which had one win) and we’d be in the Eastern Conference championship. No problem. As I recall, Central scored quickly and was up 7-0. Tech scored in some fluke fashion and, lo and behold, they had no placekicker so they had to go for two. That would be all the scoring. Central lost 8-7. A 100-to-1 underdog had roared. We ended up in a three-way tie with Dunmore and West and they sent West to the championship.

The pavers were out in full force. The game was moved after that year and made part of the schedule rotation. It lost its meaning when it was no longer on Thanksgiving. It was just another game. Families weren’t going to gather together to gloat or feel bad as to the result.

I went to one more Tech-Central game while in college. It had all the excitement you’d expect with one good team and one bad. Funny, the magic that was there for Tech in 74 playing on Thanksgiving just wasn’t going to be there on a Friday night in October.

When we played on Thanksgiving, you threw out the records. Playing in October, they mattered. I think they even tried for a while to play on Thanksgiving if the teams were out of contention but the magic was gone. I may be confusing that with teams here that did that before they gave up altogether.

It was a slice of growing up. It is a slice that is gone. It got worse when declining population in Scranton forced them to combine Tech and Central into Scranton High School.

Other than Phillipsburg-Easton, we have lost the Thanksgiving games here. That one has been televised by ESPN.

I guess I prefer to think of Thanksgiving as a day when every store is closed and families come together by being apart on high school football to the way it is today. Stores are open in many cases and Thanksgiving is just a warm up for the Black Friday shopping marathon.

In the old days, we had to pull ourselves away from the TV after that Dallas game (whether it was John David Crow looking to throw or a wayward defensive lineman falling on a blocked field goal and giving Miami the game). You turned away from football in the evening and were forced to have family time. Now, we have added a third game at night.

Things change and evolve. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. So, I give thanks that I grew up in a simpler time and place where a high school football game was part of the tradition and checking the ads for Friday’s sales was not. Then again, we didn’t have a newspaper on Thanksgiving. It was a holiday after all!