Pig Star: A Pork Story : When brand-name meats came of age, no one was bigger in Southern California than Farmer John.

Clougherty Packing Co. had some important decisions to make in the summer of 1964.

The family-owned firm’s main advertising vehicle, “Polka Parade,” hosted by Dick Sinclair on Channel 5, was going national, and that meant the producers would no longer accept local ads.

Wanting to aggressively promote his relatively new brand of meat products, Farmer John owner Francis Clougherty asked the station’s salesmen to “throw him a bone” if they heard of any good local advertising opportunities now that “Polka Parade” had hit the big time without him.

The ad guys came through.

A sponsorship opportunity had just opened up on the pre- and post-game shows for the Dodger radio broadcasts. The baseball team was looking for companies to advertise on the programs, and Clougherty got a chance to meet club owner Walter O’Malley.

“The two Irishmen hit it off and things just clicked,” recalled Clougherty’s son Bernard, 47, recently. “Believe me, it wasn’t anything planned.”

Whether it was serendipitous or not, every Southern California baseball fan has since heard Vin Scully and the other Dodger announcers rave about the “superior Eastern-bred, corn-fed pork that is Farmer John’s Meats.” Farmer John and the Dodgers have been together ever since.

For the last 31 years, the Cloughertys, who introduced the Farmer John brand in 1953, have used baseball--and eventually other local sports--to build the area’s No. 1-selling brand of fresh pork breakfast sausage, bacon and hot dogs, including the proprietary Dodger Dog.

“They are one of our star players,” says Barry Stockhamer, Dodger vice president of marketing. “Having a Dodger Dog is part of the whole mystique; it is truly one of the unique things about going to a Dodger game, just like being in the stadium, seeing the team play, listening to Vin Scully and watching [Tommy] Lasorda in the dugout. Probably no other company in this country has so aligned itself with a single sports franchise as has Farmer John with the Dodgers. It stands alone.”

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These days, Farmer John actually does stand nearly alone in what was once the heart of Los Angeles’ meat-packing district. As recently as 1970, there were more than 60 packing plants and 12 slaughterhouses concentrated in Vernon, an industrial hub about eight miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Today only two slaughterhouses and fewer than a dozen meat packers persist.

“Slaughter and packing plants have exited out of the nation’s metropolitan centers,” says Rosemary Mucklow, executive director of the National Meat Assn., a trade group in Oakland. “And that was the end of the stockyards in Chicago, St. Paul, San Francisco, Los Angeles and every central city.”

Most of the plants relocated to the rural Midwest trying to save money by reducing transportation costs and moving closer to the source of animals and feed grains.

A once-thriving Los Angeles stockyard for hogs, cattle and sheep is long gone. Plants that manufactured more famous national brands--Swift, Oscar Mayer, Armour--are closed.

“These streets used to be lined with packing houses,” says Joe Clougherty, president of Farmer John Meats, as he points to a vacant lot across Soto Street from his plant. “They all moved closer to the animals, and I guess we were the only dummies that stuck around.”

Although other companies have fled, Clougherty Packing’s Farmer John Meats has thrived. The company reports sales of more than $325 million annually and is the largest pork processor west of Oklahoma. It stands today as the last great meat plant in metropolitan Los Angeles, and its massive facilities on 10 prime acres prove it.

“Where would we go?” asks Bernard Clougherty, Los Angeles native and Farmer John vice president. “All our eggs are in this basket and we’re staying. By choice. No matter what.”

The Cloughertys certainly had an opportunity, or an excuse, to move as recently as 1994, when fire destroyed part of their hot dog processing plant. Instead, they stayed and rebuilt.

The company’s most important attribute is the ability to deliver a fresh product. Live hogs, on average 5 months old, are trucked to Vernon, slaughtered and processed into more than 300 products, including 36 types of hot dogs. Organ meats are processed and packaged for sale within 45 minutes after a federal inspector approves the wholesomeness of the carcass. Fresh cuts of pork enter retail channels just hours after spending the required 24 hours in refrigeration.

The Midwest-based competition cannot come close, and Farmer John intends to remind consumers of that at every opportunity. Bernard Clougherty says that future advertisements will make an issue of the fact that some pork cuts from other parts of the country can be called fresh even though they may be as much as two weeks old.

“Unlike beef--where aging the meat is prized--pork should be eaten as fresh as you can get it. The very freshest pork is in great demand in Asian markets, for one,” says the meat association’s Mucklow. “The Cloughertys are survivors of the trend that chased almost everyone else in this industry out of the cities: They have a unique market area.”

The company is as careful to cater to the region’s small wholesalers that distribute to the mom-and-pop markets in ethnic neighborhoods as it is to serve the major supermarket chains. These wholesalers, known as jobbers, have their own loading dock away from where the giant tractor-trailers arrive. Many jobbers, says Bernard Clougherty, insist on getting a daily order of offal, or organ meats, with each truck load.

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The company is in its second generation of family ownership, with brothers Bernard, Joe, and Anthony and sister Kathleen Regan holding the top executive positions.

Francis Clougherty, their father, and Barney Clougherty, their uncle, founded Clougherty Brothers Packing Co. in Norwalk in 1931.

The brothers were born of Irish parents in a house just off Figueroa Street in midtown Los Angeles. Barney, the elder, finished high school and attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga for a short time but soon went to work in the meat industry. He joined Wilson & Co. as a traveling supervisor checking on the firm’s many facilities.

After high school, Francis left to study for the priesthood at a seminary in Missouri. After two years as a seminarian, he transferred to the University of San Francisco. He left college without getting his degree and went to work for the railroads, trucking pork bellies and hocks to California from the Colorado.

The two combined their expertise and formed Clougherty Brothers. In the beginning, the brothers struggled along with only one other employee and no capital. “They were always in [financial and regulatory] trouble,” recalls Bernard Clougherty.

There was one celebrated scrape, during World War II, when the Cloughertys were charged by the federal Office of Price Administration with selling more meat than their war-time quota permitted. They were acquitted after a trial.

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Money was tight. “I remember my mother complaining that she wished my dad would bring home a paycheck instead of all these smoked hams,” Bernard Clougherty says.

Despite their rough start, the Cloughertys are credited with introducing to Southern California the advances in the curing process that reduced the time needed to produce items like ham from three weeks to two days. Previously, meats were cured by being packed in salt. The Cloughertys introduced curing by injecting the meat with a more economical liquid cure.

In 1941, the Clougherty brothers acquired pioneer Los Angeles-area meat packer Woodward-Bennett, which handled beef, pork and lamb.

At the time, there was no such thing as brand-name fresh meats: It was just generic beef, pork or lamb cut fresh by the local butcher or displayed unwrapped in meat cases. Some products were better than others, but only your butcher knew for sure.

After World War II, there was a booming Los Angeles population to feed, and sales picked up. Both processing capacity and revenue increased. And just as their business began to grow, branded processed meats became more common. That’s when the brothers realized that no one could spell or pronounce the Irish tongue twister Clougherty (correctly pronounced KLOW-er-tee).

So, in 1953 the fictitious Farmer John, a genial fellow with a farm-spun air, was born. He was part Huckleberry Finn, part American Gothic and part Farmer in the Dell. At about the same time, the Cloughertys decided to concentrate on pork, mainly because of federal regulations requiring that an entire plant be stopped and cleaned when processing moved from one species to another. This could happen several times in the course of a day and, owning only one plant, the Cloughertys stayed with their strength.

The decision to concentrate on pork turned out to be a wise one. Today, sales of pork remain steady despite keen competition from poultry (particularly from processed products like turkey hot dogs and turkey ham). Per-capita consumption of pork in 1994 was 49.9 pounds--up slightly from 48.6 pounds in 1970. For comparison, beef consumption slid 20% during the same period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.

The company logo has evolved over time, undergoing two redesigns. In the beginning, Farmer John was a simpler figure who was less prominent than the company brand name on product labels. Today, he’s more self-assured as he peers out from labels with a smile, a straw cowboy hat, bib overalls and rolled-up sleeves, holding a pitch fork.

Eve though Farmer John Meats is a major corporation and, with 1,300 workers, the largest employer in Vernon, the family doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no executive offices. The Cloughertys have regular desks in a large, sparsely decorated room, called the bullpen, with all the other sales and production staff. The company meeting room is a converted trailer near the truck loading docks.

There is nothing pretty about a hog slaughter or processing plant. But the Cloughertys have done their best to make the place look whimsical. The facility’s outside wall is painted with a mural depicting bucolic farm scenes of hogs grazing and children playing. Larger murals are on the most visible plant walls, some several stories high. The paintings, meant to appear three-dimensional when viewed from a passing car, were begun in 1957 by Hollywood movie scene artist Les Grimes. Current additions, made by Arno Jordan, are a way of humanizing or softening the mammoth operation; helping with the task are grass, trees and shrubs planted nearly four decades ago.

When running at capacity, which it usually does five days a week, the Farmer John plant processes 5,500 hogs every 24 hours. In November, the company opened a new $7-million state-of-the-art slaughter facility, which includes computers that monitor every step along the production line, discerning the problems when one area slows or stops. With animals coming in from Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Kansas, place of origin of each shipment is also recorded.

All red-meat producers are bound by the federal Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, which requires that the animals be electrically stunned before slaughter so they feel no pain. Mucklow of the meat association says packers have an economic incentive to handle the animals as calmly and humanely as possible. Meat from stressed hogs, for instance, shows high levels of enzymes which reduce its quality.

“We are constantly experimenting with ways to move the hogs with the least amount of pain and excitement,” says Bernard Clougherty.

There are still a few throwbacks to the stockyard era. Several acres of holding pens exist, designed 40 years ago when three days’ worth of animals would arrive at once by rail, an inefficient system that required additional, expensive care for the hogs. Production was based on Union Pacific’s schedule rather than on what was best for the plant. Most animals now come in tractor-trailers, 27 truckloads per day, and eventually all will be trucked. The animal deliveries are better coordinated with the plant’s capacity, and it is rare when all the massive pens are used.

Farmer John products have also changed dramatically in the last 43 years. Most noticeable is the 30% reduction in fat in fresh meats that has been achieved through advances in animal breeding.

The Cloughertys want to continue the progress. As part of its strategy, the company now owns and operates its own hog farms in California, where only lean animals are being raised. Eventually, the firm hopes to supply its plant exclusively from its own farms.

The goal will make for more economical and even fresher meat.

But it will also necessitate a change in those familiar commercials. Vin Scully and colleagues will then introduce the next generation of sports fans to “superior, California-bred, corn-fed pork that is Farmer John’s Meats.”