The Daily Feather — Turkey Drop

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Arthur Carlson, WKRP Station Manager

Now that the tryptophan has worn off, allow me to insert some tasteless post-Thanksgiving levity. In the late 1950s, a food fight broke out in the parking lot of a Dallas shopping center. Local radio station KBOX was dropping turkeys off a flatbed truck as a Thanksgiving promotion. As the station manager recalled, “The public went nuts fighting over the turkeys and it was a mess.” Forever inspired, Hugh Wilson, a former ad executive turned TV producer, co-wrote “Turkeys Away” for the seventh episode of the sitcom he created – “WKRP in Cincinnati.” The TV-version plot twist, which aired on October 30, 1978, was the turkeys were dropped from a helicopter. A hapless WKRP reporter captured the live event: “They’re crashing to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! This is terrible! Everyone’s running around pushing each other. Oh my goodness! Oh, the humanity! People are running about. The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Folks, I don't know how much longer... The crowd is running for their lives.”

The infamous episode certainly merited inclusion in TV Guide’s 100 Greatest Episodes of All-Time. The same cannot be said of Wednesday’s pre-Thanksgiving trading session. Long-held narratives collapsed one by one. Despite odds of a 25-basis-point rate cut by the Fed rising to 70% from 50% earlier in the week, risky assets sold off. Isn’t easier money supposed to be a good thing? And tech stocks took it particularly hard when they’re supposed to be a beneficiary of falling bond yields, which fell hard. What if bad news is truly back to being bad news? Oh, the humanity indeed!