Packinghouse Daughter

In Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir (2000), Cheri Register focuses particularly on her recollections of a 1959 Wilson & Co. meat packer's strike that riled the small town of Albert Lea, Minnesota, where she grew up. Although Register's memoir centers her childhood memories in its retelling of the event, these are buttressed by the significant historical research she did in preparing the book. Register pulls in newspaper articles, state records, company archives, and even interviews with former Wilson & Co. workers. By examining both these historical sources and her own experiences, Register paints a nuanced portrait of a significant event in the history of American food production and unionization. Nevertheless, as its title implies, Packinghouse Daughter is also very much a coming of age story about a young working-class woman whose relationship with her socioeconomic background is strained by her academic, white-collar aspirations.

In Packinghouse Daughter, Register describes her upbringing a hundred miles south of Minneapolis, in Albert Lea. Her mother was a seamstress and sometimes store clerk, and her father worked at the local meat packing plant, Wilson & Co. Located just outside Albert Lea city limits, where its eventual owner, Thomas Wilson, could avoid both city taxes and city health codes, Wilson & Co. was, nonetheless, the heart of the nearby town. It was, in fact, one of its most important sources of employment. Register's father, Gordy, started at Wilson in 1943, working there until his retirement in 1973.

The work was hard on him: after getting home from a day at the noisy packinghouse, he would unintentionally shout at his family until he readjusted to the comparative quiet. The extremely physical nature of the job affected him as well: during his tenure, he broke both wrists and permanently damaged his spine. Wilson & Co. didn't only affect Register's father. The thirty-seven-acre plant could be felt all through town: its billows of foul-smelling smoke flavored everything, and it polluted the lake; nor was Register's father the only one to suffer injury there. However, the packinghouse also supported many families like Register's. The men and women of the factory, she emphasizes, “earned the wages that kept us clothed and fed and full of dreams.”



Many of the dreams were, ironically, dreams of escaping the small, smoke-stained town of Albert Lea, and the industrial American reality it represented. Register recounts from an early age being implicitly taught to equate success with freedom from the manual, industrial labor of “the plant.” Consequently, about two-thirds of her high school would go on to leave Albert Lea. She writes of her generation, "We belong to a generation of working-class children propelled into the middle class by postwar prosperity, higher education, and our parents' determination to spare us the spirit-wrenching disappointments they endured as the youth of the Great Depression.” Indeed, Register would go on to receive a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in Scandinavian literature and languages, becoming a professor and author. However, as Register describes early in her memoir, every time she looks at the “PhD” that follows her name, she reads it as “Packinghouse Daughter,” explaining, “I still experience the world as a working-class kid away from home.”

The climax of Packinghouse Daughter describes the tensions of the famous 1959 strike at the Wilson plant. That winter, when Register was fourteen, a strike began that divided the town of Albert Lea. On one side, strikers and their families, on the other, strikebreakers and theirs, as well as plant managers and the local news media. When tensions between the sides led to violence, the governor called in the Minnesota National Guard. Register describes the scene in town as being like a “setting for a World War II movie.” For a moment, little Albert Lea was the center of national attention. Eventually, a federal court reversed the governor's orders, the plants were reopened, and the dispute was finally resolved with arbitration. The strikers got their jobs back – but lost on most every other issue that was important to them. Over the ensuing decades, packinghouses across the country, including Wilson & Co, were changed dramatically by the introduction of automation to the packing line. Increasingly, human positions were replaced, and rival workers' unions were forced to merge, though to little effect. Wilson & Co. changed hands many times, and the pay and benefits for the remaining workers dwindled. Register captures these changes from various angles, providing a thoughtful account of the shifting landscape of American industry during this transitional phase of its development towards ever-greater reliance upon technology at the expense of traditional manual labor.

The Chicago Tribune writes, “Packinghouse Daughter deserves a wide readership, for it succeeds on many levels: as a memoir, community history, literature, and social analysis.” This quote well underscores the complexity of Register's genre-defying work: it is both public, concerning the history of a small town's meat-packing plant, and private, as a project that grew from Register's reflection on her own childhood; a childhood that at the time seemed completely normal, but which now represents an oft-overlooked episode of American history.