BY JIM HANSEN
Canadian, Jim Mayne, son of Bill Mayne, visited Walnut in September. Our 60th Harlan, Iowa High School class reunion brought Jim to the area. His family had owned and operated Mayne’s Market in Walnut from the late 1940s through the early 1950s. Jim attended grade school at Walnut Community School for those years. I invited him to Walnut for dinner, a museum tour and a tour of his former community. He provided the three addresses where the family had lived. We also drove around the town in a pattern that allowed him to revive memories of long ago.
BILL MAYNE
This guy Bill Mayne is a Canadian by birth, an engineer by education and a grocer-butcher by trade.
Still regarded as an alien by the U. S. government until he receives his final citizenship papers next fall, Bill and his family came to Walnut from Edmonton, Canada, in May, 1949, when they purchased a locker plant. A short time later they added the grocery store, known as Mayne’s Market.
Bill can be found most any evening in the building behind the grocery store wielding a knife on a beef or hog for his custom butchering customers. The major portion of the killing, skinning and quartering work must be done at night and on holidays to ease the conflict with the grocery business.
Processing a hog or beef probably isn’t quite as time-consuming as one might imagine. Bill has butchered 11 hogs and four beef in an afternoon and evening, and one night after closing his market and locker plant carved seven hogs and two beef.
Bill says it isn’t much of a task to kill, skin and quarter a medium-sized beef in about 20 minutes, and he has handled the same job on a 200-pound hog in nine minutes. “It isn’t a matter of rushing the job,” Bill said, “It’s all in knowing how.”
That he knows what he’s doing is quite evident to watch the Canadian do his job. He learned the butchering trade in Edmonton in a packing house while attending night school and taking university extension courses in engineering. He spent 7 years in the packing house.
Bill studied mechanical and electric engineering and received a degree from a college in Calgary, Canada. He was in the electrical contracting business for a time in Canada before coming to the U. S., but a desire to be his own boss prompted him to give up the engineering business for his present occupation.
Bill has the build of a football player, which stands him in good stead when he wrestles with beef and hog quarters which must be lifted into the locker after being processed. An overhead rail transports the quarters from the slaughter house to the locker room, but then it’s manpower that moves them into the freezing room.
The quick-witted redhead has several knife scars on his hands and arms where the knife has gone out of control momentarily, but the only major, self-inflicted wound was a deep stab in the chest which hospitalized him a short time. “I don’t stick myself in the chest anymore,” he said, as he inspected a recently-gashed thumb. (The Walnut Bureau, June 4, 1953, p. 3)
JH