Well, depending on what you want to call it, they all owned the Muleshoe business that was a version of a meat locker, a meat market, a meat processing plant, or just a meat company. The businesses in question have all been housed in the same building on a corner of South Main Street since the 1940s. Four owners and four names on the same building with meat being the common denominator. But there have been some changes over the years.
It all started with Vance Wagnon and his Muleshoe Locker Plant. Vance’s daughter Dolores Wagnon Williams told me her dad started the Muleshoe Locker Plant in the 1940s, Keep in mind that many people at that time, especially those who lived in the country who would have livestock to bring in and be processed, didn’t have a freezer to put their freshly packaged meat in, let alone the electricity to power a freezer. Vance and a friend traveled to Chicago to investigate freezing methods, learned about individual freezer lockers, came home and installed them in the plant, hence the name Muleshoe Locker Plant. The Locker, as it was simply referred to by family and customers, was the only facility of that type in the area for years. People would rent a locker and be given a key. Then when their meat was processed and packaged, it was put in their locker, and they could come and take out whatever cuts of meat they wanted to cook at home. Vance also made the cold locker room available for the extra produce that needed to be cooled and protected if a housewife ran out of time and had to finish her canning operation the next day. Women would call, he would meet them at the Locker, open up for them, and then would come back the next day for them to pick up their vegetables. He also made his own brand of sausage, Vance’s Country Style Sausage, as well as pressed hamburger patties, which was delivered to area grocery stores and restaurants,
Vance also had ice brought in and then sold it in blocks. People would use it to keep their icebox cold, icebox being the pre-electric version of an actual refrigerator that later generations expect to have. I can relate to this, because while we had an electric refrigerator, I made many trips to the ice house with my daddy to buy blocks of ice which he would have crushed and put in the Igloo cooler for ice water on the job, or for ice to make homemade ice cream or chill a big watermelon before cutting.
Vance processed all livestock, including chickens, Dolores said.when he would do that, the place would smell so bad! “You can’t imagine how bad a scalded chicken in hot water smells!” she laughed. The Locker also had one of the first smoker rooms in the area. Dolores said they smoked a jillion hams and cured bacon. He took deer and other wild game until the regulations just became more than he wanted to deal with.
Then in 1975 or ’76, he fell and broke his hip. At that point he was even more disenchanted with more regulations, so he decided to sell and do other things, like travel. It was at this time that he sold the business to Larry Winkler.
Now, the business turned into Winkler Meat Company. Some of you may remember his somewhat risque motto, ” You can’t beat Winkler’s Meat!”
Larry said when he graduated high school in Dickens, Texas, he was not interested in college, but came across a program to become a meat inspector, and he took it. Turns out that’s how he met Vance as he inspected Vance’s meat locker and wound up buying the business. Ironic that the very inspections and regulations that Vance was tired of were done by Larry.
Besides taking in livestock and wild game, he made a lot of jerky and came up with a variety of seasonings. He also had a barbecue truck he parked around town, many times in front of Joe Rhodes boot store. And the big freezers were good to have when you needed the cold space for a variety of things.
Larry did custom processing of everything from livestock and wild game like bear, caribou, every wild animal you might think of. The jerky and seasoning turned out to be his ticket out of Muleshoe. But it bothered him that he left Muleshoe. “It was kind of like taking a girl to the dance. If take her to the dance, you should be the one to take her home.That’s how I felt about leaving the meat market. Muleshoe had been good to me, but it was just time to go home,” he said, ” to Spur [Texas] where I had a ranch and family,”
He had taken the lockers out by then. “Meat locker days were over; I rented very few and didn’t advertise. People just didn’t need them anymore,” he said. Eventually he did move to Spur and came up with West Texas Seasonings.
So, when Larry moved, he sold the business to JC Pearson in 2005 or 2006, who now named the business Pearson Meat Company. The lockers were gone, so people just used their own freezers. The main animals he processed were cattle and hogs. He did deer till this last couple of years when the chronic waste disease spreading in the deer population decreased deer hunting, so he didn’t process many deer. But he continued to stay busy.
Then when COVID hit in 2020, the time had come to get out of the business. He then sold it to Kevin Lujan from Portales, and Kevin named the new business Muleshoe Meat Processing. Kevin grew up in the business. His dad was a butcher and had a processing plant in Portales. By the age of 13, Kevin was doing the whole process himself. He tried the plumbing business for about eight years before deciding to come back to the family business. He has similar operations in Portales and Elida now, and is carrying on in the same tradition as the previous Muleshoe owners, but has plans for diversifying the offerings of the business. He and his partner Rancher Stofberg are working on adding two more components: the Old Fashioned Barbecue and Grill, and the Old Fashioned Butchery and Market. The grill will have a meat counter where customers can come in and pick the exact steak they want grilled and watch it being cooked. The market is for anyone creating their own cottage industry in homemade or homegrown goods to rent a space from which to sell their goods. Kevin and Rancher are hard at work and hoping for an opening of the new businesses in several weeks. People who have goods to sell can contact him about renting a space. More information will be available about the expansion and what they will have to offer.
I found no pictures of the way things used to be, but I do have this picture of what the building looks like now. The extension on the south or right end of the building has recently been added by Kevin and Ranger and will be home to the new parts of the business.
As I was touring the facility and saw the workers packing the meat, I remembered that JC said that Gilbert Triana had worked for Larry, continued to work for JC when he bought it, and was still working now for Kevin. So, three out of the four owners also have Gilbert in common. His experience over the years has been most helpful to all his employers.
So, you may not have a steer or hog or sheep or deer you want butchered and have not had reason to frequent the meat locker/ processing plant/ meat market/ but now you know the whole story.
More is to come. Stay tuned.
Thanks to Travis Bessire, Dolores Williams, JC Pearson, Larry Winkler, Kevin Lujan, Rancher Stofberg, and Bill Liles for their help with this story.
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