A feather in Sonoma’s cap

Our town was ‘fertilized' ground for the modern-day Thanksgiving turkey|

There was a time in my life when I could not enjoy a Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

This lasted for several years following the summer of 1959 that I spent working with my lifelong schoolmate, Bob Nicholas, at his family’s Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms.

As tasty as those fat birds were when properly prepared with all the stuffing, I took a long time to get over my summer “relationship” with the fully-feathered, live version of these incredibly stupid creatures.

Bob’s dad, George Nicholas, was the father of the modern turkey that we see in our supermarkets today.

A Petaluman and graduate of U.C. Davis where he studied poultry breeding, George and his wife Johnnie, came to Sonoma Valley in 1939 to start Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms on Napa Road (where Scribe Winery is today).

In those days the big, dark-feathered “broad-breasted bronze” turkey variety was the standard of the industry.

Utilizing the genetics he learned at Davis, George improved the breed and over time, developed the “broad-breasted white” turkey that revolutionized the poultry industry. He was the world’s first major breeder of the white-feathered turkey – preferred because its nearly invisible pinfeathers made it more appealing to the eye in the marketplace.

From his ranch on Napa Road in Sonoma Valley his business expanded to other Valley locations and even out of state. At one point Nicholas provided 60 percent of the breeding behind the world’s turkeys.

In 1978, George and his shareholders sold the company to the International Basic Economy Corporation of New York for close to $10 million. It was estimated at the time that Nicholas turkey eggs were producing 140 million turkeys throughout the world.

George Nicholas didn’t raise turkeys for meat but rather as breeding stock for the development and improvement of his new white-feathered variety. In the course of this, he improved and perfected the process of artificial insemination, which in turn resulted in the turkey hens laying fertilized eggs. It is the eggs that Nicholas sold around the world to others who hatched and raised the birds for market.

Which brings me back to my summer relationship with Nicholas turkeys.

Bob and I were in between our junior and senior years at Sonoma Valley High School. We were good friends and played on the Dragon varsity football team. He was the center. I was the right guard.

We thought that summer work on his family ranch would get us into better shape for the coming season. It did. For a good part of the early summer we built fence in the hills above Lovall Valley. It was grueling work. We had to carry most of the materials, posts, wire, etc. up the hills because they were too steep for vehicles. I lost 15 pounds in the first month.

But that wasn’t the bad part.

Sometimes Bob and I were directed to assist the turkey breeding staff with artificial insemination inside the brooder houses. These were dusty, enclosed barns in which there were hundreds of birds. The air was foul with the dust, feathers and smell of fowl. Just a few days doing that and I was off turkeys for years.

Eventually I got over it.

Today, I can enjoy Thanksgiving just as George Nicholas intended when he created the broad-breasted white turkey right here in Sonoma for the whole world to savor.

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