Turning Back the Hands of Time by Jeff Meiners Turning back the hands of time to 1971 would find Crest to be a pretty small company fo- cused primarily on selling dairy stabilizers and trying to make our new business of contract packaging grow. Most of our work was done out of the building on Main Street north of the railroad tracks. We had just landed a new packaging account by the name of General Mills and our first project for them was a Scandinavian themed hot drink mix packaged in glass jars that was unfortunately destined to be a very short-lived item. Our production line was in the basement of the North Plant roughly where our fitness center is today. The product smelled and our used equipment needed a lot of tender loving care…but we were brand new in the packaging business and thrilled to be working for a company of the stature of General Mills.
The stacker for that new line happened to be a 16 year old Steve Meiners since the start-up coincided with the sum- mer break from school and Jay Meiners definitely believed in keeping his kids busy if there was work available. Un- fortunately, Steve developed a bad stomach ache shortly into his new career of line stacker at Crest Foods. My dad was convinced it was nothing and he’d be fine in short order…most likely he was over reacting a bit. My mom really thought he should see the doctor and was pretty adamant about that fact. By the time the decision was made to see Doc Palumbo…Steve’s appendix had burst, his stacking career was put on hold and my mom verbally brought my dad to his knees for allowing his son to get in such a state by not taking him to the doctor when he should have. This is where the story gets interesting from my point of view. I was 13 that summer and was the next man up to be the stacker for our new customer’s line. Obviously, child labor laws did not come into play in this particular in- stance. My training was brief, but very clear…get down there and stack that line and don’t let them run out of sup- plies. No problem – what could possibly go wrong? A few impressions from my first day of work still stick in my mind. The paper hats that we wore looked ridiculous and didn’t fit my head very well, but since everybody else had to wear them it was OK. A glass production line was really loud, if I think about it hard enough…I can still hear that sound. My line operator, Lloyd Pretzch, sang a lot – he was particularly fond of yodeling. Dick Moeller, the Production Manager and my dad’s business partner, yelled a lot and I always seemed to be in his way. The younger girls working on the line wore particularly short skirts which were incredibly distracting to a 13 year old boy. In fact, that distraction lead to my first workplace accident since I drove the battery powered hand-lift and myself into the wall while keeping my eye on something other than where I was going. A bottle of pop from the vending machine cost a dime and you could hardly see across the very small breakroom because of all the smoke. An entire skid of empty glass bottles dropped down the elevator shaft while I was standing next to it…soiling one’s pants on the first day of work would have been a bad thing and fortu- nately I was able to avoid that – but just barely. Needless to say, my first day on the production line was quite eventful. Who would have believed I was getting in on the very first moments of a business relationship between companies that would still be going strong nearly fifty years later and has proven to be one of the foundations for our Contract Packaging Division. A bottle of Takk, one of the flavors, is encased on the timeline surrounding the receptionist area in the Main Plant. Oddly enough, the actual product is still in it (probably will be good for a hundred years) and just as odd...I’m still here occasionally running into walls – just in a different way and for different reasons.
14 Crest Ink January, February & March 2020
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