Dubuque Avenue, South San Francisco

How did Dubuque Avenue in South San Francisco get its name? The Dubuque Packing Company had a processing plant and distribution and sales offices there for many years.

According to The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997), in its heyday Dubuque Packing supplied over half of all of the canned hams sold in California.

From an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1959:

You’ll have the hit of the season on your hands when you serve this wonderful change of pace at Thanksgiving — Dubuque Ham! Skinned, boned and deliciously smoked, Dubuque Ham has already been vacuum-cooked . . . can be served as it comes from the can or cooked according to your favorite recipe. Carefully selected from the finest hams produced in Iowa, the Tall Corn Country, Dubuque Hams are famous for their tenderness, superb texture and excellent flavor.

9,000 Hogs Slaughtered Daily in Dubuque

Being a newcomer to town, I have trouble believing that less than ten years ago several thousand hogs were slaughtered each day in Dubuque at “The Pack” processing plant.

According to Dubuque, the Encyclopedia by Randolph W. Lyon (1991) and the Telegraph Herald (”The Pack” by M.D. Kittle, July 31, 2005), about 3,500 Dubuque Packing Company employees processed 9,000 hogs daily during peak production in the 1970s. If processing was continuous, as it must have been, 375 hogs were processed every hour, which is over 6 hogs per minute.

Even as late as 1997, between 6,000 and 7,000 hogs per day were slaughtered in Dubuque (”Meatpacker Weathers Controversy” by Kathy Bergstrom, TH, October 19, 1997).

It’s hard to imagine the logistics of such an operation, the semi-truck and railroad traffic, crowded stockyards, deafening noise of animals and machinery, nauseating stench, relentless back-breaking work, and so on.

Astonishingly, “The Pack” is rubble today, recently demolished to make way for a shopping center. After years of losing millions of dollars, severe pay and benefit cuts, thousands of layoffs, and a series of questionable sellouts, “The Pack” closed for good in 2001.

To learn more about the rise and fall of meat packing in Dubuque, this weekend I checked out a copy of The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997) from the library at the University of Dubuque. I’ll post a summary of this odd book in the next week or two.

For current information about large-scale pork processing, see this December 2006 video clip from PBS about the Smithfield Meatpacking Plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, a plant where 5,500 workers slaughter 33,000 hogs each day.

Barack Obama in Dubuque

One of the ironies of living in Dubuque, Iowa is the immediate and frequent access to presidential candidates. In recent weeks visitors to Dubuque have included Hilary Clinton, John McCain, Tommy Thompson, and Joseph Biden. John Edwards even got a haircut here.

Today, Barack Obama kicked off his national “Walk for Change” campaign at a rally at Lincoln Elementary School in Dubuque, less than ½ mile from where I live.

I myself walked three or four blocks from my house to Lincoln School, one of many ward schools in Dubuque where African Americans were denied admission in the 1870s, and watched as Senator Obama urged a meager crowd of a few hundred onlookers to mobilize.

Why did Obama choose Dubuque as the starting point for this “historic” campaign, a nationwide event reportedly involving “10,000 volunteers from New York to San Diego“?

Yes, Dubuque is a gateway to Iowa, a key state in next year’s primary elections, en route from Obama’s home in Chicago.

I prefer to believe, however, that Obama chose Dubuque because Dubuque epitomizes Middle America. Dubuque, this now-certified All America City, is where the grass roots are, for want of a better metaphor, thickest.