Willis Burck asked, and Rosemary Schoblom answered.

Mr. Burck's question, which I passed along in last week's letter, was whether anybody had a photo of the big fat turkey that used to sit in the middle of a downtown Albany intersection during the Thanksgiving season in the 1930s and '40s.

Mrs. Schoblom, a longtime Albany resident, read the column in the paper that Saturday, and it rang a bell.

She went to one of her photo albums, and there it was: A photo of the turkey along with her cousin, Betty Droulard.

It was July 1940, and Betty had come out to visit Albany. Rosemary's brother, Bob Potts, showed the visitor around town, and when they dropped by the chamber of commerce, on Second Avenue at the time, Bob shot a frame of Cousin Betty posing with King Oscar.

Betty is gone now, and Bob, the businessman and photographer who documented Albany life for decades with his cameras, died last December at the age of 91.

His photo of Cousin Betty and King Oscar lives on in the pages of his sister's album - and now on this page as well.

So what about that turkey?

Russell Tripp, too, remembers it sitting in the middle of the street before Thanksgiving.

It came about because at the time, Albany and Linn County were at the center of a meat industry based at least partly on turkeys.

As Russ remembers it, turkey farming thrived around Scio and Lacomb, and Albany was at or near No. 1 in the volume of turkeys shipped to the rest of the country.

The story finds support - though it does not need it - in "The Land of Linn," the authoritative 1971 book on local history by the late Floyd C. Mullen, a lifelong mid-valley resident who became county judge, the chairman of the county board of commissioners.

"Turkey production in the United States was centered in Linn County for a number of years," Mullen tells us in his book. "During the 1930s, the years of major production, a substantial financial income was brought into the county from this industry."

Eventually during that decade, according to Mullen, Albany gained recognition as being one of the two largest shipping centers for turkeys in the United States, the other being in Texas.

His book quotes a 1960 letter by Charles Fullager of Brownsville, who listed the biggest growers in the county as being in Harrisburg, Brownsville, Lebanon, Tangent, Scio and Albany.

Mullen: "The peak of production was reached in 1936-37 with 103 carloads totaling 2,899,500 pounds of turkey shipped from Linn County."

Turkeys went downhill as a commercial product in the mid-

valley after that, and the center of that industry returned to the Midwest, according to the book.

Mullen's little volume has been a resource to the Democrat-Herald ever since it came out. So much so that the two copies we have are held together with rubber bands. But unlike Mrs. Schoblom's album, they contained no photo of Oscar the king.

You can reach the D-H editor by phone at (541) 812-6097 or by e-mailing hhering@dhonline.com.