Country Store Serves Tornado Victims : Free Meals, Family Feasts Mark Day

Tornado victims and thousands of the disadvantaged received free Thanksgiving meals Thursday, while millions of other Americans watched parades and feasted at family dinner tables.

Millions of people watched on television and an estimated 2.2 million lined sidewalks as 11 huge helium balloons depicting cartoon characters highlighted Macy’s 62nd annual parade in New York City.

“I think parents come for themselves and the kids are just an excuse because they want to see it themselves,” said Vivien Maisey of Rockland County, N.Y.

Thousands of Texans lined Houston streets for the 39th annual Foley’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with floats depicting Christmas songs.

The nation’s oldest parade, established in 1919, drew an estimated 100,000 people to Philadelphia, where they were entertained by giant balloons, marching bands, floats and 5,500 participants.

Cotham’s Country Store in tiny Scott, Ark., served turkey dinner free to surviving victims of a tornado that killed three people in the town Nov. 15.

“These people are trying to at least get roofs back on their houses, to rebuild. They are busy trying to get things prepared to start over. They can come here and at least not worry about Thanksgiving dinner,” owner Bill Cotham said.

Donations and volunteers enabled up to 18,000 homeless and other underprivileged people to receive a free Thanksgiving meal in Atlanta. The Rev. Hosea Williams said volunteers also would deliver at least 3,000 meals to shut-ins.

Social activist Mitch Snyder and his Community for Creative Non-Violence arranged to dish up 2,000 pounds of turkey and all the trimmings to at least 1,500 homeless people on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol.

“The human community is one very large family, and the moment we realize that we’ll have a decent livable world,” Snyder said.

About 25,000 senior citizens and homeless people in Philadelphia got Thanksgiving dinner Wednesday thanks to Minnie Moore. She started serving people in her home about 20 years ago, but the crowd now gets dinner--financed by donations--at the Civic Center.

In Texas, volunteers in Houston began cooking Wednesday and expected to feed about 20,000 homeless and poor people in front of City Hall.

Several Indian nations sent tribal leaders to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York for an evening ceremony of reconciliation between descendants of the Indians and those of the Pilgrims.

“We, the boat people, will be thanking the natives for giving us Thanksgiving, giving us their tradition,” said the Rev. James Parks Morton, the cathedral’s dean, “and asking forgiveness for the ways in which they have been mistreated by the newcomers. . . .”

And at the site of the first Thanksgiving dinner in Plymouth, Mass., thousands of visitors, some from as far away as Japan and Australia, thronged the sidewalks, graveyards and churches of the coastal town.

Organizers of an annual dinner sponsored by the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce prepared two tons of turkey to feed about 1,400 people who jammed Memorial Hall for a dinner served in four shifts.

The dinner followed a solemn procession of 52 men, women and children representing the Pilgrims who survived the first winter after the Mayflower landed there in 1620.