In the summer of 1966 my father (who was then General Manager of the Danish Creamery Co-op in Fresno) asked me if I wanted to fill in for a couple of weeks while one of the plant’s butter pullers was on summer vacation. I was 22, in pretty good shape, and had no idea what a “butter puller” was, even though I’d shadowed my father on a number of creamery visits and tours across the western United States while growing up. But I knew that it would probably be awkward being the college-educated boss’s son on a crew of Teamster’s Union laborers.
I had worked at several other San Joaquin Valley creameries during previous college summers and I also knew that most creamery jobs involved man-handling heavy objects like 110-pound bags of non-fat dry milk, giant cans of raw cottage cheese, and various dairy products like crates of a dozen half-gallons of soft-serve ice cream mix for use at soda shops. There were also the large “sholies,” cardboard boxes with 10 gallon bladders of milk used in restaurants and industrial kitchens. They had no built-in handles and had to be hauled in regular milk crates which they didn’t fit into properly. I had done fine with those challenging creamery tasks. So how hard could pulling butter be?
Turns out, very hard.
Butter in those days was made in a giant stainless steel horizontal cylindrical “churn” into which tons of cream and salt were pumped then spun until it turned into butter. After several hours, the spinning churn was then slowed and rotated into position over a large, long stainless steel vat so that the lengthwise churn door could be opened to allow the giant glob of butter to slo-mo fall into the vat with a loud “GLOP.”
The wheeled vat was then pushed over to us six butter pullers where it was raised with hand-operated hydraulic pistons into a slanted waist-high position so that the six butter pullers, standing shoulder to shoulder wearing chlorine-rinsed elbow-length latex gloves, thrust our hands into the thick, cold butter and pulled out handfuls of it and put them into special plastic-lined boxes that sat on scales behind us so that each box was filled to 72 pounds.
The filled boxes were then shoved on to a conveyor belt behind the scales and conveyed to the cold room for storage until it was processed and packaged in various sizes for wholesale or retail sale. Then we got another box and did it again. And again and again until the end of the six-hour shift (the rest of the shift was clean-up and short breaks).
After a day of this my arms felt like spaghetti. The other butter pullers had been doing it for years and were used to the strenuous effort involved — it was hard to even get your hands into the butter which was kinda like thick, dense, gooey jello, then harder still to pull out several pounds at a time in handfuls. Of course I had trouble keeping up with the five other experienced butter pullers who often needled me about my butter pulling deficiencies — especially since everybody in the plant knew I was the boss’s college-educated son.
After work those first few nights my arms were so worn out and sore that I had trouble even lifting a fork. Two weeks later, by the time the guy I was filling in for came back from vacation, I was starting to get the hang of it — getting stronger and learning how to attack the task (how much to grab at a time, proper standing positioning, pacing, etc.).
One of my creamery co-workers was an amazing Popeye-like guy named Frank von Flue who stood about five-feet-eight inches. Von Flue had been a competitive professional cross-country marathon runner in the 1920s where he earned money with sponsorships, prize money and race-merch and came in third in the 3,500 mile marathon race from Los Angeles to New York in 1928 running for about 500 hours in day-long legs lasting about 7 hours each day for almost three months, about 15 or so miles per day. Frank was in his mid-60s in those Fresno days and was still in perfect shape. Not only did he jog everywhere he went in the plant, but he jogged to work in Fresno from his home in a small San Joaquin Valley town called Easton every work day, about 7 miles. After he retired Frank continued to jog to the plant several times a week to enjoy a lunch with his former co-workers. Frank’s Popeye-sized forearms looked like he could crack a walnut with his bare hands. Frank was an energetic and enthusiastic guy who never seemed to slow down. He was always eager to jog over and help when he finished his own tasks elsewhere in the plant. He was like a tasmanian devil when he helped us pull butter, speeding up our overall pace, encouraging everybody to enjoy their grueling work, and reducing the time it took to finish. When he retired my father quipped, “I’ll have to hire six guys to replace him.”
After those two weeks as a butter puller I told my father he’d have to find someone else to fill in for vacationing butter pullers in his creamery. I was not pulling any more butter.
PS. Like many labor-intensive creamery jobs from that era, butter pulling as a job no longer exists. It was made obsolete by the invention of the continuous process churn where cream flows through a special spinning machine and comes out extruded in a square tube suitable for cutting and packaging.
Makes me think of my worst job: Working a day in the Borden’s Ice Cream factory when a teen. We were bundled up with huge gloves and I gotta tell ya, the farts really linger at 32 below zero…
(Hey Mark, with this format it’s like you put out a new “paper” every day. Is it more work or less than with the paper paper?”
The hardest job I had was in Wilmington Ohio where I attended college. I was very lucky that my parents paid for tuition and board but if I wanted a car, money to operate it and any spending money I had to find a job. In between two factory jobs that weren’t too bad, I signed up for work as a laborer laying down rolls of sod. I showed up one morning at dawn in downtown Wilmington to be trucked to the site with others. We hauled the heavy rolls of sod from a large flatbed truck to their appointed spot, then back and forth until the area was covered, done by early afternoon. My arms felt just like those of the “butter puller”, but that was my one and only day for that job. This was a couple of years before I graduated and ended up in the Anderson Valley from 1971 thru 1975 working at Clearwater Ranch.
Cutting asphalt with a pneumatic jackhammer (80 pounder, if I remember right). After about 15-20 minutes I’d had more than enough. Sitting down to rest I noticed that both hands were stuck in clench claws. It took painful minutes to straighten my fingers back out, and that was the end of my jackhammer career.