The stuffing is back in the turkey

As a kid growing up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, all I knew about Texas I learned from watching the cowboy movies at the neighborhood 15-cent cinema. The films of Buster Crabbe (especially Buster Crabbe as Billy Carson), Ken Maynard, Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid, Lash LaRue (who came to our theater one Saturday afternoon for a live demonstration) and the heavyweights like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and, yes, John Wayne captured my imagination. I won't bore with the details of how I sat through repeated showings of "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" when I was 6-years-old, but I did.

Even years later, when my dad informed the family we were moving to Texas, I was convinced we would going to have to turn in 0ur car at the state line and take a stagecoach the rest of the way to our destination.

My other lessons about Texas all came on Thanksgiving. Each year on that day, the family would travel to my grandmother's house in Westchester County for the traditional turkey dinner. Part of that dinner included the viewing of the two football games -- one pro and one college -- that were shown across the nation on Thanksgiving. The teams never varied from one year to the next. The pro game always featured the Detroit Lions playing the Green Bay Packers and the college game was always Texas vs. Texas A&M.

Never at the that tender age did I ever conceive I would go to one of those schools (thoughts of college never entered this pre-schooler's head), but as the fates would have it a decade and a half or so later I wound up as a freshman at the University of Texas. Not only that, I wound up on the sports staff of the Daily Texan and found myself covering a number of memorable Texas contests, including those with A&M played on Thanksgiving. I remember after graduating, making sure the family Thanksgiving dinner was completed in time for me to jump in the car and drive to either Austin or College Station to spend the rest of that holiday cheering on the Orange.

All that ended around 15 years or so ago, when the television powers that be convinced the two schools to move their game from Thanksgiving to the Friday after Thanksgiving. The game was still special, but, for some reason, it simply wasn't that special any longer -- it was no longer the game I grew up on (of course, the Lions-Packers game left Thanksgiving long before that).

All this is my way of saying I was more than delighted to hear the news today that the game is going to be played on Thanksgiving again, at least for this year and next. And when I heard the news, I didn't think about the tradition, or the bonfires, or the memorable games, but I thought about a time, a place and all my family who are no longer with me now--my grandmother and her tiny apartment in White Plains where we all gathered, my father, my mother and my little brother. It's always a good thing to hold onto the past, even if it was shaped in large part by Buster Crabbe.