November 23, 2011

Grantland Rice's Thanksgiving Dream

Nov. 23, 2011

Editor’s Note: Fred Russell, the legendary sports editor and Vanderbilt alumnus, graced the pages of the Nashville Banner for 70 years. We are including a column he wrote in the mid-1990’s that honored his friend and kindred soul, Grantland Rice, and his thoughts of Thanksgiving. Russell was a charter member of Vanderbilt’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008 and Rice was inducted in 2010. This reprint was previously run on vucommodores.com Nov. 23, 2006; we think it bears remembering today.

Sidelines
By Fred Russell

At Thanksgiving time, the late, great sportswriter and poet Grantland Rice’s thoughts often turned to his native Middle Tennessee.

Born in Murfreesboro on Nov. 1, 1880, Rice moved with his family to Nashville by age 4. By 1912 he was in New York City on his way to becoming the most widely-read and most respected sportswriter in the nation.

Shortly after his death in 1954, John Kieran of New York Times fame selected poems written by Grantland to appear in a book published by A.S. Barnes & Co. In the forward, Kieran wrote:

Grantland Rice gave his heart and his life to the writing of sports but above that, and often at the top of one of his sports columns, he put his soul in verse. He loved poets and poetry, he reveled in rhymes.

Keats and Shelley, Tennyson and Swinburne, Housman and Masefield were his heroes. Kipling was his idol.

Rice often borrowed the verse forms and the rhyme schemes of his favorites for sportive purposes, to brighten a dull day, perhaps, or add luster to a stirring story. Much of this was ephemeral. It touched on the topic of the day and its significance vanished overnight.

But there were other days when the verses atop the column dealt with things that were close to the heart and deep in the soul of Grantland Rice. They were too good to be lost in yesteryear’s newspapers.

In them the reader will find what Keats said was all that we needed to know on earth – Beauty and Truth.

They vary in mood, tone and tempo but they join in revealing the whole man that was Grantland Rice – athlete, sportswriter, philosopher, soldier, poet, husband, father and the finest friend any of us shall ever know.

Making these selections was a labor of love and great joy because going through the dusty clippings brought back myriad memories of happy days with a man who did more than anyone else to make them so for all around him. At his death it could have been written of him as his idol, Kipling, wrote of another:

E’en as he trod that day to god, as walked he
From his birth,
In simpleness and gentleness and honor and clean mirth.

A Dream of Thanksgiving

There’s an old house in the clearing where
the smoke winds thin and blue
Over pines that bend and whisper, where the
low winds rustle through.
And I hear them calling to me from the fragrance
of the loam:
“Don’t you know that it’s Thanksgiving and you
ought to be at home.”

There are ghosts beneath the maples trees and one
of them is mine;
There are shadows in the clearing beneath the
whispering pine
Of the kids that romped together underneath a
friendly sky
As they waited for the turkey and the berries and
the pie

There are phantoms in the orchard as the ancient
door swings out,
Where a mothers’ voice is calling and is answered
with a shout,
Where the little circle gathered for the feast that
waited then,
Through the golden days that vanished and will
never come again

And now from far and far away, beyond the
shadows cast,
I hear again lost voices from a day forever past;
Where the stubble by the lane the larks sang
clear and keen
The reveille of morning when the world was young
and clean

We still turn to the fragrance of the harvest and the
loam,
Where we hear the bluebirds singing in the golden
air of home,
Or the pine trees bend and whisper as the low
winds rustle through
By an old house in the clearing where the smoke
winds, thin and blue.

So we’ll give our thanks together for the dream by
land and sea
Of the shadows in the clearing from a day that use
to be
Of an old Thanksgiving morning that has followed
down the years
Where the pallid faces haunt us in a land of strife
and fears.

— Grantland Rice
Vanderbilt, 1901