On Thanksgiving morning when most of the streets were quiet, a dozen yellow school buses rolled through Franklin Park headed to East Leyden High School loaded with about 250 Navy recruits from Naval Station Great Lakes who would be the school’s holiday dinner guests.
The Thanksgiving meal Nov. 23 was hosted by Leyden High School District 212 – which includes West Leyden and East Leyden schools – and was the district’s first since the pandemic, according to organizers.
“We’re honored and blessed to be able to give back to these young service men and women,” Superintendent Nick Polyak said at the event.
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Dozens of community members, officials from the district, as well as local police and fire personnel, and more also attended, welcoming the recruits with waves, smiles and endless applause.
The tradition started in 2018 when SD212 first helped American Legion Post 974 co-host the meal for about 80 recruits at the post in Franklin Park, according to District 212 school board President Greg Ignoffo, who also helped drive this effort.
Then the meal event moved to West Leyden in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic brought a halt to the tradition.
“We would be honored to do it every year as long as Naval Station Great Lakes allows us to,” Polyak said.
The school district funded the meal, with the help of community donations, including Spunky Dunkers Donuts, which provided donuts for the breakfast before the Thanksgiving meal started around lunchtime.
The approximately four-hour long event included breakfast and coffee, a mini concert by the chamber choir, and a traditional Thanksgiving meal. There were several different types of pies served that were prepared by SD212 culinary students. Dozens of National Honor Society students also volunteered to help serve the food and mingle with recruits.
However, what had the recruits beaming was the ability to reach out to their loved ones, even on a screen.
Bootcamp is 10 weeks – without their personal phones and only limited outside contact. And while they can call home from the base, for most of them, Thanksgiving morning was the first time seeing their parents’ smiling – sometimes teary – face on a device screen.
Bryce Heath, 18, of Aiken, South Carolina, was huddled in a corner of the East Leyden High School cafeteria beaming into the smartphone in his hand while talking to his mom, often pressing the phone into his ear to hear her better.
“She cried most of the time,” he said, smiling.
Heath, who calls himself a patriot, decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who were also in the Navy.
“I wanted to do more for my country.”
Growing up, he heard stories from his dad, who had been stationed on the USS Chancellorsville – which was renamed the USS Robert Smalls earlier this year. Heath doesn’t yet have stories of his own to tell, he said, other than what he’s learned so far: basic seamanship and discipline, as well as some financial classes, how to recognize different ranks and that John Paul Jones is known as the father of the Navy.
There were several smartphones floating around the cafeteria, and Kimberly Stewart, who came out to support the event with her husband, Franklin Park fire Chief Mark Stewart and her daughter, Emily, was one of those who had donated their personal cells for the cause.
Because of the donation from those like Stewart, Morgan Lacey, 19, of California, Maryland, was one of the recruits able to FaceTime relatives. She video-chatted with her dad, a Marine, and introduced him to all her new friends from bootcamp.
“Do you want to meet my dad?” Lacey asked her friend Rodriguez as she walked by.
In the Navy, they go by last names and have already gotten so used to it after two months that Brianna Rodriguez, 20, of Miami, Florida, had to think for a second to remember Lacey’s first name.
“As soon as he answered the phone, I started tearing up,” Lacey said, still grinning long after hanging up with her dad.
Tom Zito, a member of American Legion Post 974, knows how much the Thanksgiving morning event means to recruits. He was in the Air Force because he was “too tall for the Navy,” and went through his own military boot camp in the ’70s – “a different world back then,” je said.
“This is not only a meal but a kind of camaraderie,” Zito said.
He was a bus monitor on one of the buses dispatched to pick up the recruits.
“During training, you can’t go home. So to be able to do this is a big deal,” he recalled.
In addition to the calls home and eating, recruits also mingled with various members of the post, who had years of wisdom to share. The veterans encouraged the newcomers to get involved with their local veterans organizations.
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Zito, now 73, of Franklin Park, calls the recruits “kids.” Upon seeing the firefighters’ salute driving through town, he said, “These young kids had tears in their eyes. From their point of view, they’re going to remember this, I think, for years to come.”
Christine Won is a freelancer.