Turkeys Leave Country, Spending Holiday Overseas!

Turkey May Be Rarity on Thanksgiving Table, 

But You Can Be Thankful It's in Good Hands

Courier Express September 18, 1943

  There are 68 more days until Thanksgiving, and you can do your worrying about that turkey during the last 41. The first 27 days, or until October 15th, you can spend being thankful that the turkey you might not get will go to our boys overseas. This about sizes up the situation. Some time ago the government slapped a two-way freeze order on the national turkey crop.  It froze the sale of the birds until it can buy up 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 pounds needed by the armed forces, and it is now freezing the birds for shipment overseas.
Turkeys remaining after Uncle Sam has his share, will be allocated for civilian use.

   While October 1st is the date set tentatively for relaxing the freeze order, Buffalo poultry dealers heard at their national convention in Chicago this week that, to date, the government has bought only 5,000,000 pounds. They figure the quota will not be completed before mid October at the latest. What are the chances of getting a Thanksgiving turkey? One leading Buffalo poultry dealer said yesterday that "we can't even think of that possibility yet." A "sprinkling" of turkeys may come through after October 15th, and by the time Thanksgiving rolls around on November 25, there may be enough to go around, he said. But he made it clear that everything is up in the air now.  One of the poultry dealers who attended the Chicago convention said it was reported there while the nations poultry crop this year, is the largest on record, turkeys are down 10 percent from last year.

  With the government's 1943 holiday turkey order much larger than last year, and on a smaller crop on which to draw, the prospect of enough turkeys to supply the civilian demand is extremely slender, this dealer said.  

  On the other hand, he pointed out, with the biggest crop of poultry of all time, there will be a choice of substitutes for the Thanksgiving piece de resistance. While poultry is rather scarce right now, it is expected to start coming to market in quantity when the poultrymen bring in their young flocks from the range and begin liquidating old stock to make room. "By early November, and until over the holidays, the poultry supply should increase by leaps and bounds," this dealer added.  The small local turkey grower heads a priority list of consumers reasonably sure of having turkey to eat on Thanksgiving.

  Next in order of reasonable sureness are his consumers of long standing, many of whom have had their Thanksgiving and Christmas orders in since last year.

   Although the turkey grower with flocks of up to a few hundred birds is subject to the freeze order, the government has not called on him so far. Buying in such huge quantity, it has to depend chiefly on the big western turkey ranches. Still another factor in the local small turkey growers favor, is that his birds are not due to be ready until a few days before the holiday. Uncle Sam wants birds that are ready now, so they may be frozen and shipped in time to reach their far-flung destinations before the holidays.

Land Girls on an Essex turkey farm round up the 

turkeys for the last time. December 23, 1944

Courier Express Nov. 14, 1943

   Home used to be the only place to get a  real old fashioned Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings. This year it may be the only place you can't. Speaking of old fashioned Thanksgiving dinners...It's what the soldiers at Fort Niagara will down at their noonday meal on November 25, and is typical of the fare to be served that day at all the service posts in this area.  "We expect to have two shifts of cooks working all night before Thanksgiving"...said Capt. Harry Betts, food service officer at Fort Niagara. "Our Thanksgiving menu calls for 2,300 pounds of turkey." 

The only men at Ft. Niagara not sure of having turkey for Thanksgiving are the 10 percent who will be home on furlough.    

   Turkey to the tune of 40,000 pounds is being readied for the Naval Training Station at Sampson, largest of the service camps in the Buffalo area. Smaller military posts in the area all are building their holiday menus around turkey. These include Camp Curtiss Air in Cheektowaga, Camp Bell in Niagara Falls, the aviation students at the University of Buffalo and Canisius College, the M.P.'s of the Second Service Command, and the anti-aircraft crews.  

Woman Land Army Trainees
 Carrying Turkeys

  There is just one drawback to the whole Thanksgiving show as far as the men are concerned. With few exceptions, Thanksgiving will not be a holiday. They will have the usual hour to eat the holiday meal and enough work afterwards to work it off. The Military Police guarding Italian war prisoners at work in Western NY canning factories will have to take pot-luck unless they work out of an army post such as the one at Attica. Guards stationed at such posts as the Heinz plant at Medina, are fed at the plant Cafeteria, and take whatever is offered.

  None For Prisoners

   Asked if the Italian war prisoners--some 800 of them are working in the Buffalo area--would have turkey for Thanksgiving, Col. McDowell said: "With thousands of Americans having to go without turkeys this year so our men in the armed forces could have them, my guess would be, no."

Courier Express November 17, 1943

Roast Chicken Joins Turkey in the "IF" Class

Dealers Fear Supply May Not Fill Demand

  If your all through worrying about the turkey that you can't have for Thanksgiving, and you'll settle for a nice, fat roasting chicken, you can now start worrying about getting that nice, fat roasting chicken.  While Buffalo poultry dealers expect a fair supply of chickens for next weeks holiday, they also anticipate a demand all out of proportion to other years, as a result of the acute turkey shortage.  They fear that no matter how many birds they get, the supply will be too small to go around.  As to the OPA cracking down on certain dealers who, it charges, "have deliberately corralled the turkey market in this territory," these dealers enquired yesterday: "What turkey market?"               

 Defends Buffalo Dealers    

   "You've got to have the merchandise before you can corner the market on anything," said one.  "If there are any turkeys in Buffalo, outside of the exception to prove the rule, I'd like to know it." Harley T. Jones, a poultry buyer for Hickman, Coward & Wattles, Niagara Frontier Food Terminal, returned yesterday from a buying trip to the midwest, where, he found few turkeys available at ceiling prices. "But I bought all the chickens in sight, and they weren't too easy to find either.  We are laying in about three times as many chickens as we ordinarily do, as we expect the demand to be tremendous, with families going in for two or three chickens in place of the one turkey they would have bought."

OPA Official Explaining New Rationing Procedures

   A spokesman for the Will Poultry Co., 1223 William Street, attributed the turkey and general poultry shortage to the fact that "the government froze turkey sales too long." They were frozen during August, September and October, he said during which time the packers usually dress and freeze their stock for the holiday market. As another result of the government freeze order, he said, birds not taken for the armed forces were permitted to get too big for the ordinary market. He reported one turkey farmer in Fredonia, who raised between 6,000 and 8,000 birds, has many weighing as high as 28 to 30 pounds.
  The Will Poultry Co. representative said that while his company will have more chickens than usual for the holidays, roasting birds will be fairly scarce. Fairmont Creamery, which expects to have 15-20% of it's normal allotment of turkeys, said yesterday, it's supply of chickens "will not be anywhere near what we'd like." We found, General Manager Ingraham said, "that chickens as well as turkeys are pretty scarce in the Midwest."
    Editor: So Everybody be thankful for what you have this Thanksgiving, whatever fare is on your table.  If you have little, be thankful for what it is you do have, there are others who have even less. If you have much, be thankful for the abundance bestowed on you, and give what you can to those who have less and help restore a balance and faith in Mankind. And always give thanks to those in our armed forces who are putting their lives on the line everyday, fighting, so we may all celebrate in peace.  
   

Leaving Home...

Buffalo NY 1942 - some excerpts from an undetermined local paper

When the Last of the Seneca Indians Left 

Buffalo 100 years Ago - 1842

  Buffalo was actually founded by the Seneca Indians in 1780.  They welcomed the white settlers who later forced them to sell their land rights in 1842 and move out of the city they founded, onto reservations they occupy today....

  One of the most difficult problems the founders of Buffalo had to solve, was getting the Seneca Indians to give up their land along Buffalo Creek. The first permanent settlement on the site of modern Buffalo was actually made by the Seneca Indians in 1780. On Buffalo Creek some three or four miles from it's mouth, the first Seneca villages were established during the Revolutionary War, after Sullivan's raid destroyed their old homes in the Genesee Valley. The proud and formidable nation fled, panic stricken, from their 'pleasant valley', abandoned their villages and sought British protection under the guns of Fort Niagara.
   Col. Guy Johnson fed the Indians from the British commissary at Fort Niagara during the winter of 1779-80.  British officers from Fort Niagara encouraged some 1,500 of them to settle on Buffalo Creek to plant these places, to lessen the burden and expenses at the Fort.  In this neighborhood was built a council house, at which councils and treaties of national importance were held. Associated with it are the names Young King, Farmers Brother, Red Jacket and other Native American celebrities. In this vicinity is the well known site of the Seneca Mission Church built in 1826 and abandoned in 1843. Indian Church Road runs through the old church yard and near the site of the building.

   The date of the beginning of settlement "was probably May or early June" of 1780. There had been no permanent abiding place there until that time. Soon after their arrival the squaws began to clear the land and prepare it for corn, while the men built some log-huts then went hunting. The Senecas at Buffalo Creek were under the leadership of Siangarochti, or Sayengareghta, and influential Chief, sometimes called Old King. His family alone raised seventy-five bushels of corn during that first summer at Buffalo Creek.

Map Showing Location of Buffalo 
Creek Indian Reservation

  After the Revolution, the Seneca title to the land along Buffalo Creek was recognized by the government, and the Seneca Village occupied some of the choicest land in Buffalo. As the white settlers continued to come into Buffalo, the Indians became a greater problem. When Buffalo began to expand with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the Seneca Indians became a first class "headache" for the Village Fathers. Those remnants of the once mighty Iroquois had not taken too well to the white man's way of living...but the Senecas legally owned the land, and they would not sell or move.

  In 1838, a combination known as the Ogden Company began negotiations with the Indians in Western New York, and in January of that year, a council of chiefs was held in Buffalo.  How the Ogden Company got the various chiefs to sign away their land rights is a dark and shameful chapter in Buffalo History. Scandalous methods of bribery and intoxication where used, and many of the signers were not  recognized chiefs of the Senecas. The Ogden Company offered fabulous sums of money (which were never paid) and 1,820,000 acres of land in Kansas. The people of Buffalo were incensed over the way their Red neighbors were treated, and because of their opposition, the Ogden Company did not attempt to force it's questionable claims to the Indian lands.

The Great Seneca Orator - Red Jacket
1751 - 1830

  A committee of arbiters from Buffalo finally brought the dealings with the Senecas to a successful conclusion, and in May, 1842, the Senecas agreed to give up their land on Buffalo Creek and move to reservations set up for them at Cattaraugus and Allegany. The Buffalo arbiters saw to it that the Indians were paid a fair price for the land they gave up at Buffalo Creek, but the Senecas at Tonawanda flatly refused to deal with the Ogden Company or the arbiters. The government finally bought the entire claim of the Ogden Company and dealt with the Tonawanda Indians seperately.  

   True to their agreement with the people of Buffalo, the Senecas began to move out of Buffalo in 1842, and soon there were few of them left along the Creek. The land they once owned on Buffalo Creek has since become the heart of the industrial and shipping enterprises in Buffalo. 

     

  

George Adell Buffalo's Early Aviator - 1911

Buffalo News May 28 1929

Blazed Trail Over Niagara in 1911

----------------------------------------

Man Who Flew Spidery Plane over Niagara Still Hale at 72

In a Curtiss type biplane, which he built himself, George Adell, 72 of 142 Masten Street, made 

frequent flights over the Niagara River in 1911. Seated at the controls of the plane is Charles Mills, 

his partner in exhibition ventures.

   A Spidery looking contraption which made noisy and sometimes erratic progress through the air around Buffalo in the year 1911 evoked no little comment on the foolhardiness of it's sole passenger. Nevertheless the man that built that primitive airplane and flew it on the first flight across the Niagara River 18 years ago is still hale and hearty and as deeply interested in aviation as he was then.  He is George Adell, 72 of 142 Masten Street, an employee of the Lamson Co. of Boston for more than 45 years.  Back in 1872 when he was a boy in his teens in Auburn, he assisted an itinerant fakir to construct what would be known now as a helicopter.  His lifelong interest in aviation dated from that day.  

                                                                                                     It  Failed  to  Fly

Photo from my own collection of what may be Mr. Adell's plane
flying near Niagara River around Buffalo

   A portable steam engine was installed in the center of the platform and was surmounted by a huge propeller, which incidentally would not lift the clumsy ship, but proved a great drawing card for curious persons who were willing to pay money to see even an airplane that wouldn't fly.  Five or six years later entered into a partnership with a Professor Baldwin and the daring couple spent several months making balloon flights at county fairs.  The venture was a huge success until one summer day the valve in the envelope refused to function and they finished the flight from Auburn in a farmers apple tree ten miles away. That finished Mr. Adell's brief career as a balloonist.

Mr. George Adell

Built  First  Plane

   Mr. Adells interest in aviation, which waned somewhat after that disastrous experience, revived again after he moved to Buffalo in 1898, and when Orville Wright and Glenn Curtiss were experimenting, he decided to construct his own plane.  He secured plans for nine different types of ships for the percival Marshall Co. of London, England, and choose the Curtiss ship as the safest and easiest of operation.  At a cost of $2000 he built the machine in a shop in the Sidway Building in 194 Main Street. It was two years in the making.  After several brief but successful flights in it from the Country club grounds at Niagara Falls, he made the longest trip up the river to Fort Erie.

Photo from my own collection what may be Mr. Adell's plane
landing somewhere in or around Buffalo

                                                    Flew  Over  The  Cataract

 The decision to make exhibition flights when he took into partnership with him Charles Mills, an electrician aviator, who flew the machine over the Cataract for the first time.  They demonstrated in all parts of the state with only one accident.  In Binghampton one day Mills crashed from a height of 100 feet, breaking his collar bone and smashing the airplane. The dismantled ship is packed carefully in boxes in a warehouse in Tonawanda at the present time, but Mr. Adell has never lost his deep interest in aeronautics and is at present constructing planes of new and radical design.

Editors Note: Still looking for more information on this gentleman. If any one can provide more insight on Mr. Adell, please contact me.  The photo's are just an assumption on my part that they are of him.  They came from a collection I acquired from someone in the Buffalo area.  Any aeronautical  experts that wish to chime in on this feel free to do so. Thanks,  Jerry Malloy