By Jill Jensen, staff writer

As Roger “Peanuts” Christensen rode by a burning Farmland Foods on his motorcycle, he just thought there would not be any work on Monday.

He never imagined there would never be work again.

“We went for a ride and came back a few hours later and it was further and further. Next thing I knew, it burned all night,” he said.

Christensen, who worked at the packing house for 36 years, was one of more than 500 workers who lost their jobs when Farmland Foods went up in flames on July 8, 2001.

Things turned out OK for him though.

Farmland Foods paid for him to attend a heavy-equipment class held by Freeborn Construction, which hired some of the graduates, including Christensen.

After six years, he accepted a job as a custodian at Albert Lea High School.

“It was the best move I ever made,” Christensen, who still works nights at the high school, said.

But, he said, if it were not for the fire, he would still be working at Farmland Foods, de-boning hams — something he did for over 20 years in the packing house.

The early years

He didn’t work on hams the entire 36 years he was at Wilson & Co.

Fresh out of high school in 1966, Christensen began work at the Wilson & Co. meatpacking plant — a job he would keep as the factory changed company hands.

He said work was doled out by Wilson & Co.’s employment office based on past work and time of arrival. Of the about 40 workers who lined up each morning, only nine were usually hired that day, if they accepted the job.

“There were some jobs people wouldn’t do,” Christensen said. “There are a lot of nasty jobs out in that packing house.”

He said he worked “fairly steady” for the next couple months but took a job at Streater Store Fixtures. Soon after, Wilson & Co. called him back.

“I went back because back in those days, Wilson’s was the best-paying job in Albert Lea,” Christensen said. “If you worked at Wilson’s, you did pretty well.”

Christensen said with his hourly wages and a production bonus of about 33 percent, Wilson & Co. paid him upward of $13 an hour.

“I had every toy there was at that time,” Christensen said. “Brand new boat, brand new motorcycle, brand new snowmobile.”

His initial job was to skin the side of a head of beef and break the jaw off. He said the heads came down the chute faster than the machine could handle, and they would often have to break the jaws with their hands.

“They went through a lot of people — that’s how hard it was — but I was a farm boy,” said Christensen, who once ripped the jaw in half before another worker could cut out the muscle which works the jaw.

‘It’s all I really ever knew’

Christensen continued working at the same packing house, even when wages were drastically cut after a new company took over.

In the early 1990s, another company took over, diminishing hourly earnings and eliminating the production bonus Christensen earned, he said, which took him down to about $8 an hour.

The company also started putting ham on the line. Christensen said at one point, each person only made one certain cut on the hams, instead of each worker taking the bones out of and slicing their own ham.

Despite the drastic changes, Christensen stayed the remaining 10 years before the fire occurred.

“It’s all I really ever knew,” Christensen said. “I probably did every job in the packing house at one time.”

He said working there was “actually fun,” regardless of the occasional 65-hour work weeks.

“We worked hard,” Christensen said. “We played hard. And it was fun to go to work.”

He said he and his co-workers sang and told jokes during the work day and often continued out for “a cold one” at night.

He even earned a nickname in the first few months at the packing house that has stuck with him throughout his life.

On each of his three breaks during the day, Christensen would head to the canteen and buy a Coke and a bag of peanuts, which he was eventually known as, he said.

“All the other people started saying, ‘Time for peanuts, yet?’” he said. “That meant break time.”

A big loss

Although Christensen has done well since the packing house burned, some of his co-workers have had less fortunate experiences.

Still, he said, if the burn had occurred 10 years earlier, when there were about 1,200 people employed there, it would have devastated Albert Lea.

“It didn’t hurt the town as bad as it would have if it happened 10 years earlier, but it was definitely a loss,” he said.