Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir by Cheri Register is a book I wouldn’t have found except for patronizing an excellent local used bookstore. They have a deal where you set an amount of money to spend, tell them your interests, and they locate books that match. I have yet to be disappointed by their choices. One of the interests I presented was in memoirs written by female authors. They likely didn’t know the story of Wilson & Company was connected to me in multiple ways.
My father worked in a hog processing facility with a kill floor and everything else mentioned in this book through to the fertilizer processing tanks. He died in a plant accident in 1969. I worked there too, for two summers while at university. I even crawled into one of the large processing tanks to help a millwright fix it, learning about lockout/tagout for the first time. The first part of the book resonates completely with my experience, even though Register is older than I am. It is useful to know this history of Wilson & Company in Albert Lea, Minnesota exists.
Register claims hesitancy about writing the memoir about Albert Lea because it was her father who worked at Wilson’s and experienced many of the issues she mentions. I don’t know who can better tell this story than such a daughter whose father worked there and was invested in the job and packing plant employee community. She did the research and the narrative is better for it. She could have gone easier on herself. Register died March 7, 2018.
I was struck by the description of people moving from farms to the city to work in meat packing. This was true of my family where my maternal great grandparents left central Illinois to live in Davenport in retirement. Four or five of their daughters worked in a defense plant making coats during World War II. My maternal grandmother did, and also worked a stint at the Oscar Mayer hog processing plant where Father and I worked. That cohort is now buried in local cemeteries. This part of the book also resonates with my experience.
An exodus from farming and rural areas continues today as agriculture has grown larger and requires fewer workers because of computer automation and changes in operations. Those who relocate, for lack of a better term, are not choosing meatpacking as a profession — or even as a job. With consolidation in the meatpacking industry and increased automation, there are simply fewer positions available. It is hard, dirty work as well. As a result, the job-driven movement from rural areas to cities no longer exists in the same way it did in Albert Lea during the period covered by this book.
I found Register’s narrative deeply resonated with my experiences. It is must reading for anyone interested in the specific history of Wilson & Company or in meat packing culture. With changes in the industry happening post-WWII era, that culture would disappear without books like this.
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