Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/490678
ByRobertMinch Excerptedfrom "The Knocking Pen" RED BLUFF In 1975, after our meat plant, 2 miles west of town, closed its doors forever, I began writing about it for a na- tional meat magazine. This continued monthly for 17 years, and the stories therein became the basis for a book, "The Knocking Pen," that we published in 2011. Here is a chap- ter from the book that de- scribes how the plant oper- ated plus sketches of some of the people who made it run. It may explain how large enterprises can ini- tially succeed and prosper, only to eventually flame out and fade into obscu- rity. Atypicaldayatthe plant One of the horses rubbed her rear on the top board of the pasture fence the other day and broke it, which meant I needed to worm her as well as get a new board from the lumber yard. When I tied down the board on my pick-up, I used a knot Hil- man Hoy taught me back when he was boning and tying rolled roasts at our old meat plant. That was more than 50 years ago. When I used to write a monthly column for Meat & Poultry, each story would be a vignette of some employee or single activity from the old days. But what were those days really like? Were they the "good ol'," as oft remem- bered by me and members of my generation? Or were those days a lot harder, tougher, dirtier and more painful than any of us care to remember, failing mem- ories notwithstanding? What follows is a typi- cal day in our old two-bed slaughter plant. It was a time, not so long ago really, when days were lovely and all things seemed bright, when the big boxed-beef boys hadn't yet changed the face of the industry ... a time when we thought a small independent op- erator such as ourselves would last forever. I roll into the parking lot at 5:30 a.m. on an al- ready-hot July morning. In our part of northern Cali- fornia we get hot weather anytime from April on, and really hot stuff from July through September. Although the kill floor op- erates from 7 a.m. until 3:30 in the afternoon, we have to get the cattle in- ventoried and up the chute by 6:30 if everything is go- ing to go smoothly. I have to check out the loads shipped in overnight by cattle truck. Yardbird Harley Wood is busy making weigh-tickets in gangs of four. These will end up on each quarter of dressed beef. He assigns a lot number to each load from a feedlot or auction. He identifies cattle on con- signment with a red tag and a farmer's custom- kill cattle with a blue tag. If you want to catch hell in our business, you sell off a fat heifer or steer that a lo- cal farmer is planning to eat himself! Feedlot cattle, fat steers and heifers, have been special ordered for small mom-pop stores as well as the largest supermarket chains, and come our way from Nevada, Idaho and Utah as well as from up and down the West Coast. It's up to Harley to keep everything straight, and he seldom misses a thing. Harley is also preparing what saying or story he is going to spring on me that morning. He is a reposi- tory of a large collection of expressions and simi- les accumulated over the years of his stays in log- ging camps and riding the rails. But this morning he looks a little wrung out, so I inquire as to his health. "Oh, I don't know," he says. "I think I should have taken better care of myself when I was young, I drank an awful lot of bad wine and whisky, you know." "Is that right?" I say. "Got drunk a lot back then, did you?" Of course I know something's coming. "Yes, Robert," Harley says. "I figure I have stag- gered backward more than most men have walked for- ward." I laugh and he keeps stamping away, but doesn't give me any indication he is through talking. He's on a roll and it's going to be a doubleheader. "You ought to do something about the rendering plant over there (he gestures to our tallow works to the east). When I got near it yesterday it smelled so bad I had to fart to get some fresh air! Say, did I ever tell you about the little French woman in the logging camp where I was a cook years ago?" Yes, he had told me— several times, in fact. Finally leaving Harley, I head out into the cor- rals knowing I had heard yet another masterful solo from a true king of the road. After checking the pens of cattle to see if any were bruised from the previous night's haul—some driv- ers let them get down and don't stop to get them up again, and they can really get beat up in a hurry— I climb up the ramp to talk to Everett Hunt, our knocker. Everett is one of the few blacks (referred to as col- ored in my day) to work at the plant. For years it was just Everett, Un- cle Dick Hyde, and little Joe Harris. Joe was our shrouder—young, foolish, rambunctious, and naive. One time, after working a lot of overtime, Joe picked up his check, saw it was for a hundred dollars, and proclaimed for all to hear, "I quit! Ain't never gonna have to work again!" He came back a few weeks later, poorer but perhaps a little wiser. Everett was a different sort of fellow. He was a former rodeo cowboy who rode bucking horse and bulldogged. Later he was a camp cook for one of the largest cattle outfits in the West, back when cat- tle were driven on the hoof to summer in mountain meadows. In the camp, city folks came along for the work and scenery, and sporting ladies were brought along to provide their services. The cow- boys must have thought they were being extraor- dinarily egalitarian to let Everett in on the action. But whatever they paid him, or however much they bragged about his abilities as a cook and cowboy, they took it all away by tagging him with a demeaning nickname — "Shine." He had it until the day he be- gan to work for us. From the knocking pen I carefully pick my way through the bleeding pit, stopping to take a look at Keith Barham's hand; Keith always got the worst cuts of anyone in the plant because his hands were al- ways in blood from stick- ing the cattle, and he would sometimes get in a hurry and stub his knife. Worse, sometimes his palm would run right up the blade—Lord, what cuts he used to get! Skeet Flournoy rubs his knife and borrows a pinch of snoose from Ernie Kyler. Skeet is the kill-floor man- ager—big, strong, and one- legged. He lost the lower part of one of his left leg during World War II after stepping on a land mine in Italy. But he worked harder and longer than most men, slowing down only when his stump got so raw he'd have to take off the prosthesis and give himself a rest. That might give him a day or two off, which Skeet knew how to use, of course—he was a la- dies man of great experi- ence. I can almost get off the kill floor and into the chill box before being called back by Tex Keeler. He is the weighmaster. Long ago he was the night watch- man, then a yardbird, but now, white-haired and as big and powerful as ever, he runs the scales and gives everybody a hard time whenever he is in a mood to do so, which is most of the time. His greatest joy in life seems to be saying hello to me as I pass by. This has noth- ing to do with paying hom- age to me, mind you. Ev- ery day, just as I walk into the chill box, Tex calls out, "Hey! C'mere!" I dutifully walk over to hear what's on his mind, which is never much. The satisfac- tion for Tex, I finally fig- ured out, comes from call- ing the boss over to him- self rather than the other way around. As I step into the chill box I make a quick count of the soda pop, stacked in two wooden cases. Mid-moming, and again in the afternoon if over- time is on the horizon, we give the men drinks and candy bars. It was my fa- ther's idea. He felt it gave the hard-working fellows a little extra energy. When they got tired production fell off. Worse, that's when injuries occur. Skeet told me once about one of the older util- ity men who was hoard- ing his supply of candy bars. Turned out he gave them to a school girl who lived west of the plant. She walked behind the plant late every afternoon, and this fellow, working alone out back, attempted to garner her favors by giving her candy. I told Skeet to put a stop to it and he did. But the memory remains unsettling, and I've won- dered many times about that girl, who is now a wo- man, I hope, with a good family of her own. Not all of the memories of our old plant and the men who worked there are the kind we can joke about. Once in the coolers, I see Wendell Stringfellow sorting out newly graded steers and heifers. He tells me if the USDA grader is in a good mood or not. If not, we'd have a fight on our hands that day be- cause we just had to get a certain number of Choice beef to fill the Safeway or- ders. It's one of those days today as Wendell rolls his eyes as I walk past. I find the grader out- side the plant sitting on a stool in the morning sun. "Trying to get warmed up a bit?" I ask. "Yeah, but I'm not feeling so good," says John. "The doc says I must have prostate trouble be- cause I have an erection all the time." Thinking only of the beef to be graded of course, I suggest that maybe this isn't so debilitating a con- dition. But I get nowhere, so shrug and offer my hope that he gets better soon for both of our sakes. Just as I walk to the edge of ear- shot, he calls out, "Maybe those steers will show a little more marbling af- ter they set up and bloom a little." The next port of call is the boning room where George William Selvester is running his usual tight ship. Bill was manning the big bull saw and break- ing beef quarters into pri- mal cuts, then sliding them onto the moving top table to each boner at his sta- tion. At one time, all 3 of the hard working Selves- ter brothers worked at the plant. As of this writing, Bill is the last one stand- ing. He and I bonded af- ter taking a two-day hike over the mountains west of town to Forest Glen, a dis- tance of about 50 miles. We referred to it thereafter as "The Test," and it was that, all right! Somewhere in my route I will have chatted with cousins David John and Cam Minch, Uncle Stan's boys. If I had known then of the eventual demise of the plant, I should have put them into managerial posi- tions, for they were smart and hard workers and might have convinced me that taking in non-family partners was a dangerous and potentially fatal move. Before going into the of- fice to start my daily round of phone calls to cattle buy- ers and our dressed beef customers, I check out the loading dock and note that Art Goodwin has ev- erything moving smoothly. Two early-morning trucks are already on their way, and the staging of the night loads to San Francisco and Los Angeles is well under way. Before the day is over I'll talk to Carmen Rutala in the maintenance shop and Elmer Hughart in the truck shop. The last thing I do before I go home in the evening is feed the cat- tle still left over from the day's production. It's one of my most enjoyable pas- times. There are a lot of other men around who can do the feeding, of course, but I took on the job years ago when I was a kid and just never quite got ready to give it up. I need the ex- ercise; besides, I can do the job right. No animal should go hungry through the night. This morning I forgot one stop, the cut-and-wrap room. Retracing a few steps, I move back into the plant to find Hilman Hoy busy putting up some bone- less roasts. He's using his favorite knot on the ties. I watch his deft hands flip and curl the string as if he were weaving; he could do this in his sleep. It's a strong, practical knot; the meat, no matter how much it's tossed around, can't make it slip. I asked Hil- man to show me how it's done. Fifty years later, my fence-board is tied down on the rack of my pick-up with Hilman Hoy's knot. It'll hold there no mat- ter how many potholes I plunge into, no matter how many curves I bend around. Nothing can make that knot, or the memory of it, slip away. Robert Minch is a lifelong resident of Red Bluff, former columnist for the Corning Daily Observer and Meat Industry magazine and author of the "The Knocking Pen." He can be reached at rminchandmurray@ hotmail.com. HISTORY A day in the life of Minch's Wholesale Meats Minch'sWholesaleMeatsasitappearstodaywiththe author in the foreground. Minch's Wholesale Meats in 1943with all 25of the plant's employees at the time. The author, Robert Minch, is pictured in the middle to the right of his father, David Minch, both in white shirts and dark trousers. COURTESY PHOTOS Minch's Wholesale Meats in 1946a er a 1944fire destroyed the wooden structure. it's no t 's by TheShelterPetProject.org fault SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2015 REDBLUFFDAILYNEWS.COM | NEWS | 3 C