COMING OF
AGE AT BURY’S MEAT MARKET
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Teenage
work experiences are many and varied. Often they are eminently forgettable, and
not particularly pleasurable nor inspiring. I was fortunate to work at a place
in the 1960s that proved to be extraordinary.
I cannot remember too much of how the opportunity opened at Bury’s Meat Market, in Moodus, Connecticut. Some other teenager likely decided to move on to grander opportunities and a friend who was working there gave me a heads up. I must have gone in to interview with the Bury brothers the same day and talked my way into a provisional appointment as junior apprentice meat cutter and cleanup guy. My pal, Artie Campanelli, must have put in a good word for me.
From the
outside, Bury’s was an unremarkable place. The rambling wooden structure was
probably part of a barn complex at one time. Tucked behind a Victorian home and
bungalow, on a residential side street, you had to know it was there. Teenagers
knew it was there because it was clearly visible across an open field beyond
the high school parking lot. Also, my mother shopped there occasionally, so I
was familiar with it from the customer-counter vantage point.
The point
about Bury’s was that, somehow, you understood it was special. While working
there after school, on weekends, or during the summer, I knew that what I was
experiencing then would be the stuff of important memories in the far-off
future. I just knew, and I wasn’t wrong.
I worked
there a lot, and yet I can’t remember an occasion when I didn’t want to go in
to work, was bummed about being there, or was watching the clock. Was it the
work? Preparing meat scraps for the hamburger grinder? Cutting up a chicken for
a waiting, unseen customer? Moving things around in the freezer when the
delivery trucks arrived? No, it wasn’t the work.
Bury’s was
a living, breathing anachronism. You knew you were working with people and for
an institution that survived in a transitory niche, a rare holdout in the
encroaching world of modern commerce.
Bury’s was
about Joe and Julian, two older bachelor brothers wildly different in
appearance, worldview, tastes, and persona. Whether they even liked each other
was an open question. But month after month, year after year, they applied
their different and unique talents to maintain a thriving business. It was just
the Bury Brothers and one or two junior apprentice meat cutters. That was the
business.
Joe was
the public face of Bury’s, the man out front, attending to the very particular
needs of the endless stream of housewives with their tagalong kids. The counter
couldn’t have been more than twelve feet long, and the customer waiting area no
more than eight feet deep. So it was cozy in a crowd. This was Joe’s domain.
Every
customer was treated with a politeness that was of some bygone age in its
formality. And yet, his politeness was intensely personal, invoking the honored
customer’s name repeatedly when consulting on the size of the desired roast,
the thickness of sliced ham, the appropriateness of the chicken choice. And
always, it was “Mrs. Whomever.” I never heard Joe greet a customer with a given
name, and some customers were pretty crude and lewd. But Joe’s world was one of
courtly courtesy to all.
Certainly,
not a few customers must have suspected that Joe’s manner was some sort of
marketing affectation. Not true. Out of sight of the counter, and especially
when no customers were around, Joe was actually more fussy, more particular,
even in the back rooms where only the apprenticed proles could appreciate him.
Enlisting one of our strong backs to bring out a beef carcass, Joe was like a
surgeon sizing up his new patient. Peering through his spectacles, nose high in
the air, he would begin an exploratory inspection, prodding, picking, and
assessing various regions on the swinging hunk of meat. After some time, and
considered private mutterings, Joe would bring out his blade and begin precise
incisions. Somewhere in steer heaven, a bovine soul rested content in the
absolute reverence afforded his remains.
I must
have worked at Bury’s for a year or more before Joe, in a press of demanding
customers, allowed me to take a beef loin to the band saw and cut a steak to a
customer’s specifications. Other backroom denizens stood around watching how I
handled the awesome responsibility. Joe, of course, inspected the result,
consulted with the customer, and, with a tolerant nod, dismissed me to usual
pursuits. To this day, I can’t view a busy supermarket meat department, with
its shrink-wrapped stacks and pre-cut portions without thinking about Joe’s
first test.
The guys
in the back talked incessantly about the usual subjects: sports, women, the
meaning of life, sports, women. Joe
almost never participated in these meaningful debates. If he had a
contribution, it was far removed from popular culture or gossip of the day --
stuff like business ethics or moral decline in western civilization. It was
always a conversation stopper. We went back to our work. It wasn’t that Joe was
unfriendly or didn’t enjoy the company of others, even us high school guys. You
could always be certain of a big smile and warm greeting when you came in the
door. He just had a self-imposed isolation when the rough, gruff real world
came into the shop, as exemplified by his brother.
While Joe
was slight, gray, formal, and fussy, Julian was rotund, slicked-back black,
expansive, and down to earth. If Joe was marketing and customer relations,
Julian was production, single-handedly manufacturing homemade kielbasa, smoked
shoulders, bacon (regular and jowl), veal loaf, and other sausage kinds of
things. Julian’s world was the rear room and its mixing vats, smoke cabinets,
grinders, and carts. It was a place of
varied music or Boston Celtics radio – “Havlichek steals the ball!” -- and
apprentices sticking their heads in the doorway to cheer. Julian was a willing
participant and instigator in all topics of earnest discussion, always as an
adult, an experienced authority. Never as a vicarious teenage wannabe.
Get the
conversation going the right way with Julian, and you might get an unexpected tidbit
of information. Case in point: Just up the road from our home in Hadlyme lived
“Aunt” Flossie in a two-room shack. Well advanced in age, she fed pet raccoons
and other forest creatures, and hauled water for washing and cooking in buckets
from the brook down the steep hill. Her shack’s interior design was male
beefcake calendars on ancient peeling wallpaper, illuminated by one naked
hanging bulb. After she passed on, Julian revealed in a totally unrelated
conversation how Flossie, back in the day, could drink the young men of the
town under the table and keep on going. I had to know more and it led me to
reassess the life and identify of my grizzled but bright-eyed former neighbor.
Julian waxed large on big bands, politics, and phonies. His grumbling and
facial expressions, when next-door relatives made their demands known, or when
his and Joe’s worlds collided, were always a source of stifled amusement for
the apprentices.
The weekly
cycle of production always came to a climax on Friday nights and Saturday
afternoons. The entire complex was full of the cooking and smoking smells of
Julian’s creations. The end of the week was also top-to-bottom cleanup time,
when apprentice energies were turned loose on all the vats, pans, butcher
block, floors, and sundry other items that needed a good scrubbing. The music
got louder, the repartee got boisterous. By this time, it was usually dark
outside, and Joe was preoccupied with late customers.
With the
cleaning half done, Julian would invariably slip inside the back refrigerator
room where one or two six packs were tucked behind the pickles. With
understated camaraderie and a knowing raised eyebrow, he would slip a cold one
to each of the apprentices. If the night was warm and the mood was good, a
second round usually followed. Intentional or not, cleaning crew productivity
would soar, accompanied by intense discussions about the deeply meaningful
issue of the moment. We knew Julian was exercising a certain measure of
corporate risk in celebrating the end of the week with us underage types. We
would not have betrayed his trust even under torture.
My last
days at Bury’s were just before heading out to orientation at an Ivy League
university and, ostensibly, a different sort of life. As cleanup ended and some
task would take me outside, I would pause and stare across the valley in summer
twilight. Some far-off dog would be barking amidst the cool stillness, and I’d
ponder the moment, with regret and contentment. Regret at knowing that this
rare experience and its moments would soon end; contentment at the existential
poetry of it all, however fleeting.
It may be
hard to understand how working in a meat market can rise to that level of
meaning, emotion, or introspection. But when you take into account how severely
judgmental adolescents can be, how conscious they can be of what’s cool and
what’s not, it must be understood that humble Bury’s market engendered pride
among its lowly teenage workers. If some village lovely made her way into the
shop with her mother and I was manning the counter, my blood-splattered apron
and chicken-entrailed hands became badges of honor.
I was
proud of the institution and my role in it. It produced products with a quality
and authenticity available nowhere else, as far as I knew. The Bury brothers
were artisans in a time when artisans were the stuff of history books. One
summer night near closing, the parking lot was full and a man’s head appeared
suddenly at the screen window of the backroom where we worked filling orders.
From the darkness, a disembodied voice asked some questions of us in a tone of
wonderment and then said, “Wow, this place would do a hell of a business in New
Jersey.” Well, precisely. But New Jersey can’t have it. It’s ours. Or it was.
That was
1966, and neither the market nor the brothers still survive. Always having been
a packrat of bits of personal and family history, at about that time I resolved
that when I reached some doddering old age, I would put all the bits together
while rocking on some front porch. Actually, not “some” front porch. For decade
after decade, as the bits of history accumulated, the porch image that informed
my resolve to write it down in retirement was the porch on the house in front
of Bury’s Meat Market. So wherever you are now, Bury boys: Here’s to you,
Julian, and thank you very much indeed, Joseph.