Thanksgiving With an Old Yankee, Fond Memories, and a Stamp Story

By James C. Johnston, Jr.

Ethnic Holidays dot the calendars of this great nation. Our nation is made great by our ethnic diversity, and even the traditional Yankee holiday of Thanksgiving belongs to everybody as it should. We all have hundreds of twelfth-times-removed-great-grandparents, and like half-a-million people, John Alden and Pricilla Mullins just happen to be one of these essential pairs of folks who have made my present existence on earth possible.

When we think of all of our common human roots, and ancestors going all the way back to Africa where all of human life as we know it originated, it is amazing to think that if even one of our ancestors died before giving birth to one of our forebears, we would not be here. Our very existence hangs on some very fragile yet lucky threads of our undiscovered individual histories, but here we are on Thanksgiving Day 2025. I am very fortunate indeed as this is eighty-second celebration of this my favorite holiday and I am still here to celebrate with feasting and good cheer.

I can look back on a very exciting personal history of heroic Thanksgiving feasting with the fabulous people who were my family and friends. I can remember with love my Great Grand-Father Joseph Martin, his daughter, my Grandmother Gertrude Foss, my own dear mother and father, and so very many aunts, uncles, favorite cousins, like my Cousins Elaine, Fred, and Joyce, who is with us still, and so very many good friends who are now gone but not forgotten.

The aromas of apple, mince-meat and pumpkin pie, and the heavy sweetness of the groaning table in the very air itself, the smell of logs burning on the fire, and all the sounds of those distant holidays thrill me still along with the old stories of my family and their glorious and distant holidays remembered long before I was born but related to me like holy lore of wonderment and sacred memory.

On Thanksgiving Day, we can all be Yankees celebrating the brave endurance of our Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers clinging to the rough and unforgiving edge of a hostile continent during the Mini-Ice-Age that still embraced the Northern Hemisphere of our planet in 1620. It was much colder then, and if you visit Plymouth Plantation, you can get a pretty good idea of just how precarious life was some four hundred and five years ago in long-ago Massachusetts. Yet, there are millions of Americans today who have some small residual traces of Pilgrim ancestry flowing in their veins. On Thanksgiving Day, we are all just a little bit of Old Yankee ancestry.

As a descendant of John Alden and Pricilla Mullins, I share ancestry with a lot of people who have no idea of our relationship by blood, and most likely never will. Among these are some note-worthy individuals like: Dick van Dyke, and his late brother Jerry, the late Julia Childe, Norma Jean Baker, A/K/A Marilyn Munroe, former Vice President of the United States, Danforth Quayle III, President John Adams, Former President John Q. Adams, historian Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, American Revolutionary firebrand Samuel Adams, and more names than I can relate here including maybe yours.

Among my “relatives” who I never met was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but I did know somebody who actually did meet “The Great Man” before his death in 1882. This person was one of the nicest people I ever had the great pleasure to know in the course of my life, my third grade teacher at the Parmenter School, in Franklin, Mass., Mrs. Welch. I was only nine years old at the time which was in November of 1953. At this particular time, Thanksgiving Day was just a scant two days away, and Mrs. Welch was telling our class about Mr. Henry Wardsworth Longfellow, the great American Nineteenth Century poet, writer, and story teller.

What I found most fascinating in her story was how her father had taken her as a little girl to meet the great man and spend an afternoon with him at his home. Mrs. Welch, her father, and Mr. Longfellow had even had tea together in his big framed house which she also described in some detail from the perspective of a little girl with a very sharp memory. I was captivated by her story, and my restless mind began to examine the facts of her interesting narrative. It has always been my habit to analyze everything ever told to me, even casually, for historic context even at the age of nine.

I am reasonably sure that I was the only individual in that room who was putting together quite another tale from that which I was being told. My precocious mind was ever busy on alternative stories when one story was being related to me. This is called a “Back-Story”, and I always found back-stories more interesting than the surface narration. This day was no different. When recess came, all of my classmates went out to the playground. But, I hung behind. I just had to talk to Mrs. Welch about a very important issue involving a point of law which I had heard discussed over the last couple of years, and her narrative which just did not fit the facts that troubled my nine-year-old-history-detective’s mind..

When I was a child, I did not like foolish games that I found pointless and childish. I found that most of my contemporaries were also boring and childish, because of course they were in fact children. I had grown-up in a world exclusively populated by adults who were far more interesting than kids of my own age. Because the older girls who lived next door liked to play school, and I was their student, I could read before I attended school and knew quite a bit of history. I had access to my grandfather Foss’ books, and could read them rather well by the time I was in third grade. Indeed, I approached Mrs. Welch with some caution and asked her, “Mrs. Welch do you remember the year that you met Mr. Longfellow?”

“Not exactly dear. It was a long time ago,” she replied.

“It must have been before 1882,” I said.

“Really? Why do you say that Jimmy?” she replied.

“Because that was the year he died.” I replied.

Her smile was becoming nervous, and she asked, “How do you just happen to know that?”

“I collect stamps,” I answered.

“Really. Now that is interesting, but what has that to do with what you seem to know about Mr. Longfellow? Your classmates didn’t even know who he was. Why do you know so much about him?” she asked.

“In 1940, our government printed a series of thirty-five stamps known as “The Famous Americans Series,” They were made up of seven sets of almost square stamps commemorating: famous American: authors, poets, educators-including Horace Mann born right here in Franklin in 1796-, scientists, composers, artists, and invertors. Each stamp has the date of birth and death of the famous American commemorated on it. Mr. Longfellow was born in 1807 and died in 1882. Now if you were eight years old in 1882, for example, that means that you must have been born in 1874, and that would make you about 79 years old. If this is true, the law says that you should have retired nine years ago.”

The poor woman shook her head, and she really looked frightened. I quickly said, “Oh don’t be scared. I will never tell this to anybody. I would never want anybody else to be my third grade teacher, but what I did want to tell you is never to tell that story about Mr. Longfellow again as long as you are teaching school. Somebody else might figure it all out you see.”

She smiled and shook her head, “I am pretty sure that nobody else would have put that all together, but you must never tell anybody about this. I am not quite as old as all that, but since my husband died, I am alone in the world, and I can’t afford to be retired just yet. This has got to be our secret Jimmy.”

“I would never tell anybody. I want you for my teacher as long as possible.”

“That’s very nice dear. Could you go outside for the rest of recess? I would like to be by myself for a little bit.” I shook my head, grabbed my jacket and left. We never discussed this again. To my best knowledge, Mrs. Welch taught a few more years then I never saw her again She was a very great Lady, and I really loved her. Today she would be around one-hundred-and-fifty years old, and she was one of the best teachers I ever had.

The reason she comes to mind is that Mr. Longfellow is my very distant cousin, many times removed, and re-located. He was best known to me, after I discovered him in my stamp album, as the author of Tales From the Wayside Inn. I became a habitué of that lovely old place some time ago, and celebrated such events as my mother’s 75TH birthday there in 1993 with a family dinner party. I celebrated one Thanksgiving there many years ago with some friends who invited ne to share their holiday with them. I never think of the place without remembering one of my favorite teachers, the kindly and understanding Mrs. Welch who was so very nice to this strange little boy so very long ago.

A very good friend suggested that we go there this Thanksgiving to have Thanksgiving dinner. And as another of my very good friends and fellow writer, Eileen Ubillous once said to me, “The best tasting meal is the one you don’t have to cook!”

That Lady was not only a great writer, but one of the best natural philosophers I ever knew who also loved The Wayside Inn of Longfellow Fame. I wish all of you a wonderful holiday. Happy Thanksgiving!