Tolkkinen: Young Arne Carlson and the great turkey surprise

Arne Carlson, the former Minnesota governor, doesn’t remember why his family didn’t have a turkey that Thanksgiving.

It was the late 1940s. They had immigrated to the U.S. from Sweden but had just tried to move back, hoping to improve their fortunes there. But they found a country as economically desolate as any other in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

Back in the U.S., his dad landed a job in the Bronx as the caretaker of an apartment building. The family lived in the basement apartment. Carlson thinks they must have had beds, or at least mattresses, but he does recall that they used fruit crates for furniture.

They were poor but far from morose. They always found humor in something, even though there wasn’t much to eat and they had no turkey to carve.

“As we were sitting and chatting, we were interrupted by the sound of a large thud outside in the back alley,” Carlson wrote in an anecdote he sent to me. “My brothers and I rushed to see what happened. There lying partially splattered on the concrete was a browned, fully cooked turkey.”

Someone in an apartment above theirs had evidently set the Thanksgiving turkey to cool on the fire escape, from which it had toppled.

“We scooped it up and brought it in, and everybody just laughed,” he told me this week. “And that’s probably the most humorous, delightful Thanksgiving we’ve ever had.”

“It was wonderful,” he said. “And we kept joking about this poor woman upstairs who put the turkey out to cool, probably thinking it flew away.”

Carlson shared his story with me after reading my column about receiving public food assistance as an adult. The turkey story is fun, but he also told me a not-so-happy story about when his younger brother had appendicitis. His mother brought him to a New York hospital that was supposed to be free, but a doctor said he wouldn’t treat her son without payment. She couldn’t come up with the money and the appendix burst.

“If my son dies, you will too,” their 4-foot-11 mother told the doctor.

The hospital saved her son’s life. But it left Carlson with a lasting disgust about those who prey on vulnerable people.

Many other readers messaged me with their own stories of poverty and food assistance in solidarity with the people who lost their food aid temporarily during the government shutdown.

It was also good to see people speaking publicly about their own financial struggles, putting to rest the idea that the 12.3% of Americans on food assistance at any given time are loafers and ne’er-do-wells.

One person who opened up to me about being on food assistance as a child was embattled University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham. Cunningham has not spoken publicly about the turmoil involving the U’s doctors, but she wanted to talk about generational poverty.

Her family’s financial struggles began with her great-grandparents. Her great-grandfather died suddenly, leaving her great-grandmother alone to raise eight kids on a farm that they ended up losing. At 13, her grandmother was hired out as domestic help and never finished school. Cunningham’s own mother left a troubled marriage with three daughters. The older two went into foster care, leaving her mother to care for Cunningham.

Her mother had no family to rely on for financial help, and they received food assistance for years when Cunningham was a child. It wasn’t until her mother went through college, got a master’s degree in computer science and landed a good job that their finances stabilized.

“As a younger person, it was something I talked about less, right?” she said. “You just kind of want to move along. But I’ve come to understand and want other people to understand that the situations we were in were not our fault. ... There shouldn’t be that shame there, because so many people are just doing the best they can.”

May everyone have enough to eat this holiday. May those who have plenty remember to share with those who have nothing.