By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
As the turkeys hovered overhead, the crowd waited in quiet anticipation.
With more prizes and less carnage, the annual turkey drop fundraiser at the Wood County Museum again paid homage to the 1978 episode of the TV sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati.”
“So many people still remember that show,” Annette Wells, museum director, said earlier this month as last minute purchases were made of the foam turkeys. “It was comedic gold.”
To set the scene from the sitcom, retired local newscaster Jerry Anderson described the WKRP radio newsman Les Nesman on the ground at Pinedale Shopping Mall, waiting to broadcast the descent of the turkeys from a helicopter to the mall parking lot below.
“It’s still one of the all-time classics,” Anderson said.
The scene in the museum parking lot was far more festive, with people who had purchased numbered foam turkeys gathered in hopes of winning prizes. Some munched on turkey-dogs while they waited.
Reciting some of the more memorable lines from the episode, Anderson re-enacted Les Nesman’s dismay at seeing the flightless birds’ descent to earth.
“They are hitting the road like sacks of wet cement,” he announced. One smashed through the windshield of a car.
“Oh the humanity,” Anderson wailed as he channeled his best Les Nesman. “Not since the Hindenburg tragedy …”
The turkey drop at the museum was much less impactful, with up to 150 each of the foam creatures being set free from netting under two drones, bouncing on the blacktop targets below.
As if on cue, Travis Chapin, portraying WKRP station manager Arthur Carlson, ran into the museum parking lot, reciting the classic line, “as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Chapin was decked out as the TV character, with a torn sports coat dotted with feathers from the unsuspecting turkeys. Elmer’s Glue held the feathers on his face and in his hair.
“My goal in life is to embarrass my wife,” Chapin said with a smile.
After the turkeys landed near the bullseyes, museum staff Marissa Muniz Kolhoff and Wells came prepared with tape measurers to make sure the buyers of the closest turkeys wobbled home with the prizes. Owners of the top three turkeys to each bullseye were awarded$1,000, $750 and $500 each, followed by museum swag gifts, and frozen turkeys – from a freezer, not from the sky.
“You’ll be set for Thanksgiving,” Wells said.
