A Welcome Visitor at a Time of Thanks

An Arctic wind blew down as an old Indian sheepherder cupped his calloused hands and touched a match to a clump of sagebrush in an earthen fire pit.

Within hours, a crackling blaze would envelop sweet-smelling juniper logs in the two-foot-deep pit, ready to roast a dozen tender turkeys. Then, as many as 300 families would ride horses or drive from miles around for a Thanksgiving Day feast on this remote and impoverished corner of the Navajo Indian Reservation.

As Hosteen Nez Etsitty, 68, fed the fire this week, his wife Louise stood behind and chanted softly in her native tongue: “Thank you earth, mother earth, and the moon and the sun. We are going to bake our turkey in the ground for Thanksgiving.”

The wind blowing her long gray hair, the 61-year-old woman looked up from this traditional prayer of blessing, adding, “And thank you, Danny Davey.”

A cigar-chomping deliveryman from Santa Ana, Danny Davey, 62, is revered in some parts of the Navajo Reservation and the smaller Hopi Reservation, which sprawl across the great canyons, mesas and deserts of the Colorado Plateau in northeastern Arizona. Some families like the Etsittys even keep a picture of him, wearing his trademark cowboy hat and his trademark grin, tacked on their walls.

Davey has made the 18-hour drive to bring Thanksgiving dinners to the reservations every year since 1948, when as a young man fresh from aircraft carrier duty in World War II he first saw Indian poverty. It happened when three tires on his pickup truck blew as he drove through Navajo country.

That year, Davey said, he brought Thanksgiving to the three families who had helped him get new tires. He spent the next 20 years delivering food to Indians on his own.

Then he enlisted the help of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Costa Mesa to raise money. Eventually, he formed a fund-raising group, the Thunderbird Foundation. Now, Davey estimates, with the help of friends, family and volunteers he feeds about 2,000 Indians each Thanksgiving. “I don’t collect stamps. I don’t collect wives. And I don’t play golf. I just help the Indians,” said Davey, a United Parcel Service deliveryman in the Laguna Beach area. “This here is just to let them know someone cares about them.”

Late last Sunday, a four-truck convoy loaded with 30 tons of food, clothing and assorted supplies set out from Orange County. Splitting up in Arizona, the trucks headed for half a dozen Indian communities, where they would make deliveries in time for the holiday.

As the rented U-Hauls creaked and groaned toward their destinations, the Indians were busy making preparations.

In the Navajo community of Tees Toh, where a few dozen Indian families live miles from each other in adobe homes, Rocky Yazzie, 63, spent last weekend hauling wood from a gully for the large stone oven that sits on their land. Yazzie said he expected about 200 Navajos from 30 miles around to arrive for the feast. On a reservation with unemployment of 60%, most could not afford a turkey, he said.

‘Some Big Celebration’

The gathering, said Yazzie’s son, Morgan, 35, would reunite old friends and loved ones.

“It’s going to be some big celebration,” he said with a grin, as he whittled with a hunting knife. “I’ll see some of my old relatives that I haven’t seen in a long time.”

Morgan, who ekes out a living by raising sheep and clearing property with his tractor, said he would smooth some rough ground for the visitors to sit and would start the fire.

“We will build a fire in the big stone oven at about noon and let it warm until evening,” he said Tuesday. “Then we shovel out the ashes, sit the turkeys inside and put the ashes back in.”

The turkeys would cook for five hours, Morgan Yazzie estimated.

In Klagetoh, about 60 miles east near the New Mexico border, the Etsitty family also was busy getting ready for a big turnout. It had been five years since the family had offered to host one of Davey’s Thanksgiving dinners because it was so much work.

Louise Etsitty, a rug weaver whose smile is missing several teeth, said the tribe is ready for a big Thanksgiving celebration this year.

Good Weather for Feasting

“Every year people ask about Thanksgiving and if we going to have it again, so I think there will be a lot of people,” she said through her English-speaking daughter, Mary, as they made Indian-style fried bread on a pot-bellied wood stove inside their hogan.

Her husband, who rode up earlier after herding sheep all day, said he, too, was expecting a big time and good weather.

“Lots of people, I think,” said Etsitty, whose long gray hair was tied back Navajo-style with a blue bandanna.

The sheepherder, who also works as a silversmith making belt buckles and jewelry, predicted the day would be a good one for the feast.

“Some evenings, the sky turn orange. That mean the winter not be bad,” he said.

Davey confides that it is somewhat “terrifying” to him how many Indians have come to depend on him at Thanksgiving. The pressure is great for him to get the food to the Indians--whatever the cost or weather.

One Thanksgiving, he said, he had to follow a snowplow into a reservation after a major winter storm hit the area. And in 1964, Davey said, blizzard conditions forced him to enlist the help of two Marine Corps buddies, Bud Hohl and Ray Hainline, to drop food supplies to the reservation by air. Hohl, now 67, and Hainline, now 61, have helped Davey deliver the turkey dinners every year since.

‘We Know What It Is to Serve’

“It’s a long trip. It’s a rough trip on occasions,” said Hohl, who lives in Costa Mesa. “But both Ray and I have been in the Marine Corps, and we know what it is to serve somebody.”

If the weather is not a problem, truck breakdowns often are. In fact, Davey said, “I could write a book” about the breakdowns.

Sometimes the engine dies, and a truck must be towed to the nearest town for a quick and expensive repair, he said.

Last Sunday night, the headlights on Davey’s rig blacked out while he was negotiating a steep downgrade from Needles. His “co-pilot,” Joe Surgofd,c 46, of Anaheim, managed to get the power on enough for the two men to get to Flagstaff for repairs.

“We spent two hours there getting it fixed,” Surgofd said as he and Davey rested in a Winslow motel Monday night before pressing on.

At breakfast the next morning, Hohl and Hainline arrived in Winslow in their 24-foot rig, which was towing another trailer filled with supplies. The truck was so full it appeared to buckle as it sat parked outside the Falcon Restaurant, where the two men joined Davey and Surgofd at a table. Talk centered on the weather, and how the forecast was holding out so far.

“It’s going to be a good day. It’s going to be a great day,” Hainline said as he sipped coffee in the nearly deserted restaurant at daybreak. “But there could be a foot of snow on the ground by tonight. That’s the way it is up here.”

Surgofd said he had heard snow was forecast for Thanksgiving Day.

“We might be driving back on ice,” Hainline mused.

An added complication was that Davey’s wife, Peggy, had become ill Monday night in Orange County and had to be hospitalized. Although the illness proved not to be life-threatening, Davey was prepared to fly back home and leave Surgofd alone to bring the big truck back.

“This is the first time in any trip that my wife went out on me,” Davey had said worriedly.

As if he needed any more, Davey had yet another problem: Trying to make this trip break even, as he has somehow always managed in the past. Hohl, the secretary-treasurer of the Thunderbirds, reported to Davey after breakfast Tuesday that the group had raised about $7,000 against a projected $9,000 cost for the trip, much of that for truck rental.

But donations can come at any time and from any quarter, as they have in the past.

On the day before the trip, for instance, Hainline, who lives in Irvine, reported to his job as a campus coordinator at Orange Coast College and discovered an $800 check tucked into an envelope in his desk. The check was made out to the Thunderbird Foundation and represented donations raised by the students and faculty, Hainline’s wife, Barbara, said.

“My husband just cried,” she said.

Also just before the trip, Davey received in the mail a $500 check from an 80-year-old woman. And at a Fullerton restaurant, the waiters and waitresses pooled their tips for a day and sent $40 to help Davey’s cause. Another group of telephone company workers raised money through a bake sale.

When Davey recounts these kinds of donations, he begins to choke up. He becomes especially moved, he said, when he reads some of the notes people send with their checks, such as this one: “On behalf of the human race, thank you, Mr. Davey.”

If people cannot donate money, they often donate canned food, clothing or cooking utensils. Some of the biggest needs on the reservations, Barbara Hainline said, are blankets and tube socks for winters when the temperature can plunge to 10 degrees below zero. She said tube socks are especially useful because they fit snugly into the moccasins that Indians commonly wear.

Davey never knows what people are going to bring, though.

“One gal drove up in a Jaguar while we were loading and said, ‘Are you Danny Davey?’ and she kicked out two turkeys,” he said, grinning at the remembrance. Why all the outpouring for a people who live hundreds of miles away, in another state?

“We have such abundance in Orange County that our throwaways are their treasures,” said Barbara Hainline, 60, as she helped to load the trucks at a Santa Ana storage warehouse last Saturday.

Rose Price, 64, of Costa Mesa, a Navajo, worked beside her, packing bread stuffing, mashed potato mix, cranberries and other Thanksgiving dinner fixtures into boxes.

Price and her husband, Willson, 65, a decorated World War II veteran, have helped Davey deliver the dinners for the last 20 years. She grew up on the Navajo reservation.

“It just really makes you feel good to help others rather than sitting back and doing nothing,” she said.

Charity may come from hundreds of miles away in Orange County, but it does not often come from the non-Indians who live nearest the reservations, many of whom say Indians already get too much from the government.

“The people who live up here are not that fond of Indians,” said Edward L. Edwards, a Winslow civic leader and local motel owner. “What Davey’s doing is good because not that many other people will help them. If someone wasn’t helping them, the government would be helping them. So it’s saving our federal government whatever it cost Danny. They’re poor. They do get snowed in, and they need the food, no doubt about it.”

Davey’s generosity toward some Indians angers others who are not recipients. The Thunderbird Foundation food drive reaches only a tiny fraction of the total population of the reservations. About 100,000 Navajos live on their reservation and about 6,500 Hopis live on their reservation, which occupies three mesas appropriately named First Mesa, Second Mesa and Third Mesa.

“We don’t get nothin’ down where I live,” grumbled Tees Toh sheepherder Ned Jensen, 74, who lives about five miles from where Thanksgiving was to be celebrated at Rocky Yazzie’s. “If you have a turkey,” he told a visitor, “I’ll take it. You have a turkey?”

On First Mesa, where Hopi families still live in cliff-top dwellings dating back to AD 1100, an elderly Indian woman leading a tour of the village said Monday that she had not heard about any big turkey shipment, even though Davey was scheduled to stop there the next day.

“If they bring something down below,” she sniffed in disdain at the reference to Hopis living at the base of the mesa, “we’re the last to hear.”

The woman would not give her name. Hopi custom likewise would not permit photographs of the village. The village commands a breathtaking view over surrounding desert and the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks, which dominate the horizon 60 miles to the west. The Hopis believe beneficial spirits called kachinas live in those 12,000-foot-high mountains during the summertime.

Davey admits that his is a very limited undertaking, and cannot hope to seriously address the Indians’ overall needs.

“I wish I could do more,” he said, frowning, “but with the amount of volunteers we have you can only do so much. We can’t do much, but at least someone knows we care.”

He added: “I’ll tell you when it’s all worthwhile. Two weeks ago I was up here, and I gave a blanket to an 80-year-old blind woman. As I drove away, I looked in my mirror and I could see her stroking the blanket and going ka-hey (thank you) ka-hey . It’s things like that that make me feel good.”

With that, Davey tipped his hat and said, “Gotta go now.” He climbed in his truck and roared away to make his rounds.