Meatpacking - Summers of 1967 & 1968

 I had just graduated from high school, the draft was on, the Bird Dogs had scattered, and minimum wage was $1.40/hour. I was registered for college in the fall so had a draft deferment but needed dollars. My dad finally relented, thanks to Joe Stahl, and allowed me to work at Armour's where the starting salary was almost $4.00/hr. 

I think they wanted to test me, I was given the job of scraping fat off of the ceiling of the kill floor. For two weeks I laid on my back, nose just a foot away from a filthy ceiling, and scraped the goo off of the ceiling with a wire brush. I had to wear a mask and goggles and it was hot. Really, really hot. After two hours I could take a break, after two hours more I could eat lunch then another two hours another break and then finally home. For two miserable weeks I did that. 

The plant had six floors, I think but am not sure that this is how they were laid out. The top floor was the kill floor. One side of the floor was for cattle, the other for hogs. They quit killing sheep about 1960 or so. The 5th floor was mostly another "hot floor," that is, the meat from freshly killed animals would be sent to that floor. Depending what the meat was, it went to offal or the cooler. The offal floor was large, this was where all the big equipment was to extract and clean parts of the animal. For instance, the pituitary glands of the hogs were harvested, the hearts were harvested and cleaned, etc. In the middle of the offal was the condemned room. There was a huge auger at the entryway to the condemned room, any meat or animal part that was diseased or spoiled was dropped into that auger. The human door was sealed with a metal tag, during kill hours, no human could leave or enter the condemned room through the offal floor, you had to go to a special door that was on the outside of the kill areas. Inside the offal room, one or two guys monitored the equipment and kept things going. There were huge auger screws that sucked in and grinded all of the condemned meat, the screws kept getting smaller and smaller and so did the meat. Eventually the condemned meat was liquified, then dried, and was fertilizer. Half of the fifth floor was coolers. Beef halves and hogs were hung and chilled for a night. The next day they went to the cutting section where the beef was cut into quarters and the hogs were cut into many pieces. Beef quarters were then sent to the second floor where they hung in coolers for another day or so and were then shipped out in trucks and trains. Men would carry the beef quarters on their backs from the end of the cooler rails into the rail sections of the vehicles. On the third floor was the trim which was mostly if not all, hogs. Pieces of the hog were cut into smaller pieces which was bacon, neckbones, tailbones, tenderloins, loins, hams, etc. The cafeteria was also on the third floor. The second floor was mostly coolers where the boxed pork was stored until the trains and trucks showed up. The first floor was offices and coolers and loading docks. The basement was creepy pipes, storage, and places you didn't want to go. In an attached engineering building were giant machines that ran pumps and coolers and steam machines. They were open belt drives, the flywheels were 15-20 feet in diameter, the belts were huge...no protective cages, very dangerous. And there was a laundry.

After my ceiling gig I was assigned to the trim floor. My job was to box hog neck bones into 25# boxes. I stood at a large stainless steel table with 3' high stainless steel sides; overhead the table was a stainless steel chute that originated on the cutting floor. Every few minutes someone or something on the cutting floor would dump a bushel or so of neck bones into that chute and they'd land in a pile on my table. A small wheeled roller table with boxes was between me and the table so that I could scoop the bones into the box...and of course there was a scale, I had to be very close to 25#.  The boxes of course, were designed for the expert packer...there was little spare room so the neck bones had to be packed "just so" or I couldn't get them all in and I'd have to start over. That wasn't the worst part, the worst part was that every 15 minutes or so, someone would drop a load of pig tails into that chute, they'd land on my table on top of the neck bones and I'd have to pack them in 25# boxes. A "pig tail" was actually the tail with a hunk of meat that could be several inches square or rectangular. My problem was that, well, several problems, (1) I was a nail biter and even though I wore gloves, handling the neck bones caused my fingers to split at the nail, (2) I wasn't very fast and my neck bones would pile up 2 or 3 feet high so that when the pig tails were dropped, they'd mix in with the neck bones and take longer to sort. My first day it was so bad that at the lunch break, I continue to work to keep up. The union steward came up to me and told me that the union didn't allow working on breaks. Eventually someone helped me but they were merciless on me as the boss's kid.

After a couple of weeks, they moved me to the night cleanup crew where I was very happy. The cleanup crew was a group of men, each of whom had their own area of the plant for which they were responsible for cleaning after the day process was complete. Typically, starting time was between 4 and 6 in the afternoon. There was a great deal of premium wages for working on the cleanup. First, there was a premium for working at night. Second, the standard "day" was ten hours so that meant the last two hours were at least time and a half, except on Friday because at midnight it was Saturday and Saturday was double time. If the plant operated on Saturday (and they did sometimes), Sunday was triple time. And we got piecework. For instance, when I cleaned the offal floor, there were 50-60 heavy 30 gallon stainless barrels, I got five cents for cleaning each of them plus I got $1.50 for cleaning each of two flights of stairs, and another dollar for the elevator cab and more. It was hard work, high pressure steam was how we cleaned. My first few days, the guys on the other floors would bust their asses to finish early so they could help me. I found that crew the friendliest of them all, although each of us worked on our own, we looked out for one another and would help out if someone was feeling slow and low. They would switch around when someone went on vacation so that I would have either the offal or the sticking pens (hog kill). Most of the time I had the sticking pens because the piecework in the offal was relatively high.

It was all very hard work, the production line was relentless. One afternoon during my first week I came in at 4 to start working. The foreman and Joe Stahl were there. They chewed me out because I'd missed something the night before. There was a machine, the heart machine, that sliced hog hearts into workable bits. The five blade knives were circular and buried in the machine. To see them you literally had to stick your head into the machine with a flashlight and look at the blades to ensure there were no bits of blood or flesh. I hadn't known that. The government inspector looked at it, found something, and "red tagged" the machine...that meant that the entire production line couldn't start. The machine had to be cleaned and they'd have to find the inspector (who would often disappear) to remove the red tag. I'd caused a production lag of several thousand dollars. No one was happy. Lesson learned. It never happened again but I was very cautious. 

The image below is the front gate looking in to where the plant used to be. On the other side of the steel railing is where the guard shack was located.