Amanda Ensor, 17, left, and Emily Olson, 21, cut up and bag turkey hearts and livers as the birds are processed at Tom Reynolds’ farm in Reisterstown. There are a handful of women who take part in an annual tradition where family and friends help Reynolds prepare 1,500 turkeys in time for Thanksgiving.

Robert Salonga/Capital News Service photo

For many Marylanders, Thanksgiving marks a reunion of family and friends in their Sunday best as they bow their heads over a stuffed, golden, roasted turkey.

 

 

At Tom Reynolds’ hideaway farm, turkey is also the focus of a reunion. Except that the turkey is still alive — for a while — family and friends are dressed in rubber aprons covered in turkey blood and the stuffing and roasting come days later.

 

Last Saturday marked another year in a nearly two-decade tradition on the farm northwest of Baltimore, where about 30 longtime neighbors, old college buddies and local friends pitch in to help Reynolds process 1,500 farm-fresh turkeys just days before the big Thursday.

 

The reward? Their own farm-fresh turkey and a hard-to-come-by sweatshirt bearing the words “Gobble Gobble Gobble” on the front and the Reynolds farm logo on the back.

 

You can only get a sweatshirt if you help out somewhere in the daylong sprint of turkey cutting, plucking, cleaning and icing, unless you’re willing to clean up various turkey discards or cut up and bag turkey hearts and livers for separate sale.

 

But for longtime participants, some since early childhood, the sweatshirt is just a token compared to the camaraderie they enjoy during what is often a community reunion.

 

“They’re good friends,” said Lester Ettl, 45, a former classmate of Reynolds at Pennsylvania State University. “It’s a reason to come down and see everyone.”

 

Work begins before sunrise when the turkeys are gathered in a pen that usually houses steer and pigs, which have been relegated to a temporary spot behind the barn. A small number of the birds are cordoned off in a corner of the pen where they can be more easily handled and hung upside down on a hook attached to a sliding carousel where their necks are cut and their feet clipped.

 

Strong men do much of the dirty work in this phase, but helping to push the turkeys along the line are a handful of pre-teen boys, who revel in the task. One boy, Lucas Ettl, 14, appears to be the leader of the youths, and he has the turkey-blood saturation to prove it. He is one of several volunteers who cast aside rubber aprons in favor of absorbing the spatter.

 

It gets to the point where you wonder if he can see through his eyeglasses.

 

“I wash them off every once in a while,” says Lucas, who is in his fourth year of turkey duty. He pauses, and then turns to shoo away a turkey trying to get an advance look at his fate.

 

The newly slain turkeys are next dipped in hot water and fed into the plucker, which can be best described as putting a turkey in the spin cycle and having it come out with most, if not all, of its feathers removed. The birds enter a new room and