NOT ALL Thanksgiving stories are quite so sublime(Shutterstock).

For some reason, the Thanksgiving holiday provides some of the most memorable – and not always in a good way – moments of the holiday season.

Some of them are imaginary, having been provided for your amusement by television and movies. Some are a little closer to the wishbone, if you know what I mean.

Most of us baby boomers remember the classic “WKRP in Cincinnati” episode about the T-day promotion at a fictional radio station in which a helicopter was hired to air-drop turkeys over the parking lot of a shopping center.

The birds were released and descended … well, you know the rest. It ended up with the immortal line of “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

My stories aren’t quite that timeless, but I do still smile at an incident many years ago when I was at the old Orange County Evening News. The publisher had the idea that a good Thanksgiving photo for the issue before the holiday would somehow combine a turkey and football.
Our managing editor, Don Holden, knew the publicity director for the Los Angeles Rams, who trained at Blair Park in Long Beach in those days. He got the idea that we should rent – yes, you could do that back in the 1970s – a live turkey and have it held by Rams’ star linebacker Jack Youngblood.

“Oh, he’ll do it,” said Don. “He does all kind of crazy stunts.”

The “stunt” went south real fast. We took a pickup truck to the turkey farm, and placed the bird in a wire cage in the back. What we didn’t figure on was that at freeway speeds, the wind quickly began to pluck feathers off the poor critter. When we finally got to Blair, that was one cheesed-off and chilly fowl. Once out of the cage, the bird raged around, surrounded by members of a professional football team who gamely tried to tackle it.

You’ve heard the phrase “Mad as a wet hen”? Nothing compared to mad as a naked turkey. After a ridiculous amount of chasing, we finally were able to round it up and a thoroughly disgusted Youngblood held on as best as he could as our photographer snapped some fuzzy, out-of-focus shots of man vs. near-naked beast.

I don’t know what happened to the bird, but we were never again welcome at the Rams training camp. In November, at least.