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Official Organ Of The Slavonic Benevolent Order Of The State Of Texas, Founded 1891. HUMANE TY
BENEVOLENCE
VOLUME 60 — NO. 47
BR OTHERHOOD
Postmaster: Please Send Form 3579 with Undeliverable Copies to: SUPREME LODGE SPJST, P.O. Box 100, Temple, Texas 76501.
NOVEMBER 22, 1972
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK
From your editor, family, and all personnel at the publishing company, "May yours be a Happy and Healthy Thanksgiving Day, 1972.
* Thankfulness is a wonderfully warm and profoundly decent - thing. To feel it, and express it, is a blessing of the highest order, for to be grateful is to be happy.
Thankfulness is a reflection from the mind that realizes man's insignificance. Such a mind, holding itself receptive to the Infinite, receives guidance and protection and provision. Men whose lives are lighted by such illimitable trust place themselves beyond the pettiness in which human misery is bred. They are happy men. For this benison they give thank.c. Thus does chain reaction fill man's life with goodness and contentment. A grateful heart will initiate it. Rather than wait for some especially bountiful gift from Providence, let us be thankful for what we already have, remembering that much good may
AUTUMN The morns are meeker than they were, The nuts are getting brown; The berry's cheek is plumper, The rose is out of town. The maple wears a gayer scarf, The field a scarlet gown. Lest I should be old-fashioned, I'll put a trinket on. —Emily Dickinson
come from heartfelt thanksgiving for simple, little things. Thanksgiving is as old as the neea to worship. A rite of nearly every known culture, it may indeed date from prehistoric times. Yet in the United States, where each Thanksgiving Day renews the faith of the founding fathers, it is widely, though pardonably, regarded as a purely American occasion. Of all holidays and festivals, Thanksgiving is not only the most character-
istic, but also the oldest American celebration. Its origin was the Pilgrim's thanksgiving for their first harvest at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. The Pilgrims — persecuted in England for separation from the established church and rorming a congregation of their own — sailed to America in the Mayflower in 1620 to find a place where they could worship freely. Because their little ship encountered heavy storms, the 102 passengers, men, women and children, had been at sea for more than three months when, in November, they dropped anchor at last off the sandy shore of Cape Cod. This unexpectedly long voyage had forced them to draw heavily on their provisions. Moreover, since they had landed in the northern part of the New World instead of the southern part, as they had planned, there was no chance to plant gardens to supplement their fare. As a result, many of them died of scurvy before the spring crops could be planted. One spring day an Indian walked