What a cool place to work Pops.

posted by Chuck Ayers
 
The oil refinery.
My dad told people he would meet he worked as a night supervisor at an oil refinery.  However the oil he spoke of was soy bean vegetable oil.  That and shortenings and margarines.  Most of which went to large commercial bakeries. During world war II a big portion went to the war effort.  Baking breads and such for the military.  Thus his job was protected and he was able to avoid being drafted.  None the less, he was actually by job description part of the military effort.
One Saturday he brought my brother and I to his work place.  It was located near the Vernon Avenue meatpacking district in central L A.  Oscar Meyer, Armour, Luer, and a dozen others were nearby.  The company he worked for was Swift and Company.  A meatpacker as well as a vegetable oil refining company.
Being a person wanting to know how everything is made or how it worked, I was duly impressed.  But what ten-year-old boy wouldn’t.
My dad showed us his office, the huge vats where soy and other compounds were mixed and cooked.  We rode up and down in the large freight elevator and visited the assembly line where things were packaged and shipped off.  Wow, it was all cool.
By the way, inside this large two-story structure was a small area called the ‘test kitchen.’  A place where lab coated men or women tested the baking products.  Often baked were pound cakes.  Yes, yellow crumbed pound cakes.  Made with many eggs and varying degrees of cooking flours and oils and other ingredients.  So as a side benefit to the refinery employees, numerous pound cakes were available to take home.  My dad brought home many a pound cake.  A thick slice of pound cake made the perfect strawberry shortcake.  The bottom line was we were poundcake poor.
On occasion, and without the management’s knowledge, my dad would bring to work his mixing tub and ice cream maker.  The assembly line workers liked an occasional glop of vanilla ice cream on their slice of poundcake.  But word got around and the management called in to their office my dad and asked him when could he bring back the ice cream maker to his work for the next poundcake serving.  Whew!  “Whenever you would like sir.”  Even plant managers like ice cream on their pound cake.