Turkey Day patriarch Gail Cissell delivered with kind heart

link Betty Williamson

Local columnist

If you’ve ever helped with or attended Turkey Day (a statement that applies to about 2,000 of us in a typical year), count yourself among those people whose lives were touched by Gail Cissell, who died Monday in Portales.

While Gail will likely be eulogized at his funeral later today as a longtime local business owner who was actively involved in many aspects of life in this community, I am not the only one who will remember him as the patriarch of the Cissell clan, a “get-er-done” family that stops everything for a week each November to oversee the biggest event on the Portales social calendar.

His daughter Shelly Atwood has worn the head turkey crown for the past several years, and his wife, Sharon, is a former head turkey, but Turkey Day is a Cissell family production, and the most common answer to hard questions lobbed out that day has long been, “Ask Gail.”

If Gail were involved in a project, he was the first one to arrive and the last one to leave, a leader who led by example, whether it was unloading turkeys from the back of a van, scraping burned crusts out of dozens of roasters, mopping kitchen floors, presiding over the Roosevelt County Chamber of Commerce, or heading up the committee that built a new Methodist church in the late 1990s.

Not only did he bring an enormous amount of talent to any project, he delivered it with a twinkle in his eye, a quick wit and a kind heart.

He was asked in a 2010 profile in the Portales News-Tribune why he did so much volunteer work.

“I do it because there are things that need to be done,” he said simply. “People need the help.”

We still do, and this good man will be missed.

Betty Williamson wishes eastern New Mexico had more Gail Cissells. You may reach her at:

[email protected]