A Thanksgiving Tradition – True Story Behind WKRP Turkey Drop
If you are of a certain age or a lover of classic TV sitcoms, then you probably know where the quote “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly” comes from. Those are the iconic words uttered by Arthur Carlson, GM of WKRP radio in Cincinnati following a failed publicity stunt for the station.
Mr. Carlson is a character played by legendary actor Gordon Jump who also made the Maytag Repairman a household name before his passing in 2003. Also, WKRP was not a real radio station in Cincinnati.
But the “turkey drop” is real… sort of. It’s based on real events… in Atlanta, Georgia.
The failed PR stunt in the Thanksgiving-timed episode involved WKRP Characters Carlson and sales manager Herb Tarlek, played by Frank Bonner. The two refused to back down from the idea that they could plan a better promotion than some of the other people at the station.
The result was the horrifying, yet funny, event where station reporter Les Nessman (Richard Sanders) reports on the PR event as live turkeys are shoved from a helicopter above a shopping center. Of course, the turkeys plummeted to the ground causing damage and a small riot.
No turkeys were shown, the only camera shot was of Nessman reporting as if the Hindenburg was exploding. Younger readers may need to research that event for context. The good news is that surviving turkeys did manage to mount a counterattack!
Watch the famed ‘turkey drop’ scene below.
The Real Story behind the Radio Turkey Drop
Hugh Wilson (1943-2018) was a director known for The First Wives Club as well as the Police Academy movie franchise. He also developed and created tv shows such as WKRP which he stated was based on stories he gathered from the staff of a top-forty station in Atlanta – WQXI.
Here’s how Clarke Brown, the real person behind the character Herb Tarkeck, described the event during an interview with Classic TV History.
In the interview, Brown described Wilson as working his way up the ladder, becoming a copywriter and eventually the top-man at an advertising agency before packing up and heading to California. When Wilson was searching for WKRP story ideas he returned to Atlanta and WQXI where he came across the “turkey” legend. Wilson said it may have come from a station in Texas but Brown set the story straight on the true origins.
“The turkey drop was actually a real incident,” Brown said. “It was at a shopping center in Atlanta; I think it was Broadview Plaza, which no longer exists. It was a Thanksgiving promotion. We thought that we could throw these live turkeys out into the crowd for their Thanksgiving dinners. All of us, naïve and uneducated, thought that turkeys could fly. Of course, they went just fu—n’ splat.
People were laughing at us, not with us. But it became a legend. There were other stories of this nature that were embellished [on WRKP]; that one was really not embellished that much. Although the turkeys were thrown off the back of a truck, as opposed to how it was depicted on the [show].”
The TV Show WKRP in Cincinnati ran from 1978 to 1984 for 90 episodes and was followed by a short-lived sequel called The New WKRP in Cincinnati which ran for two seasons from 1991 to 1993. In total, there were 137 episodes between the two shows with Turkeys Away being one of the most memorable. Thanksgiving traditions seem to always include turkey. For WKRP TV show fans, they also include helicopters, and now trucks.
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