Creating the perfect Thanksgiving meal can require spending hours in the kitchen. The dizzying amount of sides, dressings and desserts that some families prepare can force even the best cooks to forget about one of the most important staples of any Thanksgiving plate: the turkey!

But thanks to Eugene Beals, you’ll know exactly when your turkey is ready. Beals played an important role in the invention of the pop-up turkey timer, the red and white piece of plastic usually found in the thickest part of your turkey. 

Beals was born and raised in Quincy, and served in World War II as a medic in San Francisco. After the war, he remained in California and served as manager of the state’s turkey advisory board. The advisory board noted that they received an awful lot of complaints from the public that they were overcooking their turkeys. In response, the board put their heads together and came up with the idea to create an internal ‘timer’ that would alert the cook when the turkey reached the right temperature.

Beals helped test and perfect the technology for the timer, requiring countless hours of baking turkeys. In the end, Beals settled on a design that would go on to be placed in over 2 billion turkeys and counting. 

So when you open the oven door on Thursday and notice the small red button has ‘popped’ on your turkey timer, don’t forget to say a little thank you to Eugene Beals.

Learn more:
Read more about Eugene Beals here

Walt Disney was born in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood in 1901. He attended McKinley High School and the Chicago Art Institute.

As imaginer-in-chief, Disney produced more than 650 short and feature-length films. His animated works and documentaries earned him 22 Academy Awards.

The Walt Disney Company owns the production studios Pixar, Marvel and Lucas films; a media division including The Disney Channel, ABC and ESPN; 11 theme parks and 44 resorts; and a consumer products division.

Disney’s name is synonymous with entertainment and enchantment, and his legacy is generation after generation of adoring fans.

Learn more:
Click here to see IMDB’s list of movies, shorts and TV shows produced by Walt Disney. Be forewarned – it’s more than 600 items long.

The first softball game was played inside the Farragut Boat Club in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day 1887. A crowd who had gathered to learn the outcome of the annual Harvard – Yale football game via telegraph began playing with a wrapped up boxing glove, a stick for a bat and no rules.

The next week, George Hancock, one of the participants and a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, began development of a proper ball and bat while members of the Farragut Boat Club began crafting rules for the game. Soon after, the sport spread to other cities.

The game was called ‘indoor baseball,’ ‘lemon ball’ & ‘mush ball’ before 1926, when the term ‘softball’ was first used.

Today, modern 16” softball, a close variant of the original game, is still very popular in Chicago. The Chicago 16” Softball Hall of Fame was formed in 1996 and a permanent museum is now located in Forest Park.

Learn more:
To learn more about 16” softball, visit the National Softball Association website & the 16” Softball Hall of Fame website.

“Home Alone,” the family comedy starring Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci, was released on this day in 1990. The movie was filmed in locations throughout Chicagoland, including several airport scenes shot at O’Hare Airport and in neighborhoods in Winnetka where the fictional McCallister family lived.

While only costing $18 million to make, the film grossed $17 million in its opening weekend alone. The movie would go on to gross nearly $300 million in the United States and become an iconic 1990s movie to an entire generation.

Learn more:
Read more about “Home Alone” on IMDb

Some of the greatest box-office hit comedies over the past several decades have been written and/or directed by Chicago native Harold Ramis.

After graduating high school, Ramis attended Washington University, eventually returning to Chicago in 1968. After a stint writing freelance for the Chicago Daily News, Ramis boldly cold-called Playboy magazine asking for a job. His efforts weren’t in vain. He was hired on the spot as a jokes editor.  During his time at Playboy, Ramis also worked with the Second City comedy troupe, meeting eventual collaborators Bill Murray and John Belushi.

Hit films soon followed, starting with the 1978 classic “Animal House,” along with “Meatballs,” “Ghostbusters” & “Ghostbusters II,” “Caddyshack” and “Groundhog Day.” Later in his career, he helmed movies like “Multiplicity” and the seminal “Analyze This.” Often Ramis acted in his own films and was known to act in others as well.

In his own words: “My characters aren’t losers. They’re rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else’s rules.”

Learn more:
Click here to see Harold Ramis’ body of work
Click here to read an article about the making of the now-classic Ghostbusters