(
)
Two will live the life of lux ury — and 23 will get stuffed.
A group of butterballs competed in the ultimate turkey beauty pageant, born and bred to be “pardoned” by President Obama this Wednesday at the White House’s an nual Thanksgiving ges ture.
The flock — 25 hatch lings plucked from 20,000 born in July at California’s Foster Farms — rocked out to music, stretched their feathers in private quarters and learned table manners in preparation for the White House Rose Garden ritual.
“The joke this year was that their favorite song was Steve Miller’s ‘Fly like an Eagle,’ ” said Ira Brill, the ranch’s unofficial turkey historian.
The birds gobble-gobbled to an eclectic mix of music, including country, classical and rock cranked up by their handlers in their separate 700-square-foot house. The poultry playlist prepared the feisty feathered ones for the event.
Friday, the farm handpicked the two birds most well-behaved and sporting superlative white plumage. They’ll board a United Airlines flight dubbed Turkey One departing from San Francisco to Washington today.
“It’s like a beauty contest,” Brill said. “It’s poise under pressure.”
The birds — one the official turkey, the other a backup in case feathers get ruffled — were named Apple and Cider by California schoolchildren who submitted 200 suggestions to the White House.
The gobblers will check into a private room at the W Hotel in Washington — carpeted in wood chips — and will feast on room-service corn feed until National Turkey Federation CEO and Foster Farms President Yubert Envia delivers the plump 40-pounders to the Rose Garden the day before Thanksgiving.
“I’m sure they’re screened by the Secret Service,” Brill joked.
After escaping the carving knife, they’ll walk on their drumsticks for the remainder of their short, three-year lives.
Since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has bestowed live birds to sitting presidents, but the pardoning affair became an official tradition only two decades ago, when President George H.W. Bush stuck his neck out for a gobbler named Millie.
This year, the two survivors will retire to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate after the event. They’ll be on public display until Jan. 6 in an 18th century-style split-oak pen, crafted with rosehead nails fashioned by the estate blacksmith.
Past presidential pardons have whisked off to Disneyland and Disney World. Three surviving birds, Courage, Carolina and Pumpkin, roam the California park, and two, May and Flower, roast in the Florida sun, according to a spokesman
“They’re still the happiest birds on earth.”
Presidential gravy train
* George H. W. Bush was the first American president to officially pardon a turkey, in 1989.
* Legend has it that Harry Truman spared the first feathered would-be feast in 1947, but the Truman Library has never been able to verify the tale.
* Days before JFK was assassinated in 1963, he unofficially spared a gobbler. “He looked at the turkey and said maybe we should let this one grow a little more,” said turkey-pardon historian Ira Brill.
* Dwight Eisenhower liked to carve the White House bird himself. During World War II, the then-general made sure turkeys were served to the troops.
* Rotund William Howard Taft gobbled up the tubbiest White House turkey, weighing 50 pounds.