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Jon Voight Buys Thanksgiving Turkeys At Walmart For Kentucky Youth Home

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 13:27 PST, Nov 22, 2016

Actor Jon Voight, Angelina Jolie’s dad, struck up a conversation with a shopper at the Walmart checkout line and wound up buying six Thanksgiving turkeys for a Louisville, Kentucky, charity for at-risk, abandoned, or neglected kids.

Noticing six birds in her shopping cart, Voight wondered if Sydney Gholston, 28, had a big family. Gholston informed him that the turkeys were for the Thanksgiving meal at a local non-profit youth shelter called Home of the Innocents where she works as the director of food services.

Voight then and there decided to pay for the groceries, which will feed about 70 kids on Thursday. “After learning about the mission of the nonprofit shelter and pediatric convalescent center, he pulled out his credit card and paid for the food,” the Courier-Journal explained about the actor’s generosity.

The Home of the Innocents Facebook page highlighted the chance encounter that occurred last Friday.

“Our employee Sydney Gholston went to purchase Thanksgiving turkeys for our kids today. What a treat when she ran into Jon Voight who is in town filming a movie and he asked what the turkeys were for. Jon generously paid for the turkeys to feed our kids next week! We are so thankful for his generosity!”

“I thanked him and we took a picture. Very nice guy. He was very interested in what we did at the home. He said that was wonderful,” Gholston told ABC News about Jon Voight.

It’s obviously not an everyday occurrence that a Hollywood A-lister would be spotted shopping at Walmart.

As they were chatting, Gholston told Voight that he looked “a lot like Angelina Jolie’s dad.”

“Why would I look like that?” the actor joked at first.

Voight, 77, won an Oscar for his role as a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978) and currently stars as Liev Schreiber’s dad Mickey Donovan in the popular Showtime series Ray Donovan. With 93 IMDB acting credits, Voight is perhaps best known for his roles in Midnight Cowboy(1969) and Deliverance(1972).

Voight, who backed Donald Trump in the presidential election and sparred on Twitter with Hillary Clinton advocate Robert De Niro, cut a pro-Trump video last month called a “plea to save America.”

In March 2015, Jon Voight made a video endorsing the reelection bid of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Although supposedly behind in the polls at the time, Netanyahu and his Likud coalition won reelection.

On its website, the Louisville-based Home of the Innocents describes itself as “a private, non-profit agency that has been in operation for 135 years, served over 7,000 children and their families last year. The Home provides services to assist those who are facing severe crisis…”

After the November 8 presidential election in which Trump won an electoral college landslide despite the predictions of media pundits and pollsters, Voight told The Hollywood Reporter that “I was deeply pleased by the election, To those people who are heartsick, I felt the same way when Mitt Romney lost. Just calm down, let not your heart be troubled, this man is going to be a wonderful president. We’re going to see results very quickly. People need jobs in this country and that’s one thing he’s gonna address immediately…”

“If you listen to the propaganda about him, you never get to the real Donald,” Voight added about the president-elect.

“You have to feel heartened that this is a very, very smart man who chooses the people around him very wisely and knows how to assign responsibility.”

Jon Voight is currently promoting a new film, a fantasy written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling called Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.

[Featured Image by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Images]

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