It was on the front page of the Marin Independent Journal, of all places, that I spotted the article lamenting that 1,800 workers are about to lose their jobs because Smithfield Foods is closing a mammoth pork processing plant in Southern California. Oh, no, I thought, not the Farmer John piggies!
Sure enough, the Virginia-based Smithfield company is about to walk away from a 426,000-square-foot pork factory, just four miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. For decades, this was home base for Farmer John products, especially their famous “Dodger Dogs”—two million a year sold at Dodger Stadium. Asked about the closure, Smithfield’s far-off executives cited (lamely) their pique with California’s voters for mandating that pork sold in the state must originate from pigs housed under humane conditions.
My interest in this goes back to the late 1970s, after our two sons had been born here in Inverness but I still had employment obligations in Southern California. For several years, we divided our time between Inverness and Santa Monica. Our sojourns to the Southland necessitated regular visits to the family home where I grew up and where my parents were still living at the time, which was exactly four miles due south from the historic Farmer John plant that Smithfield proposes to abandon.
No drive in those days from Santa Monica to South Gate with two little boys in the backseat was complete without a slightly-out-of-the-way route that took us down an industrial boulevard past the Farmer John plant. Excitement mounted from the back of the car as we exited the Santa Ana Freeway and headed south on Soto Street. Nearing the intersection of Soto and Bandini Boulevard, the soaring exterior of the Farmer John plant burst into view, all sky blue and grassy green backdropping a 30,000-square-foot folk-art mural depicting a bucolic landscape of babbling brooks and verdant pastures in which myriads of frolicking pigs, miscellaneous other farm animals, and wholesome-looking farm families enjoyed an idyllic countryside existence. Our boys were entranced—and it was a heck of a lot simpler and scads more economical than shlepping them out to Disneyland!
The mural, ranging in height from fence-high to some five stories, stretches for more than half a mile along the exterior facades of the 11-acre plant’s many buildings and fences. The mural dates to 1957, when Farmer John’s then owner commissioned Les Grimes, a retired Australian wrestler working as a Hollywood set painter, to brighten up the plant with the whimsical, pastoral scene that has come to be known as “Hog Heaven” or “Piggie Paradise.”
Grimes worked on the vast mural for 11 years, until one day he fell five stories to his death from a scaffold while painting sky.
As the years passed and the mural gained travel-guide prominence as a worth-a-detour attraction, it became more and more noticeable that the colors were fading and some scenes had all but disappeared because the paint had chipped away. The problem was that Grimes (and his successors) had used ordinary house paint. A major restoration was commissioned in the early 2000s, and it is this vivid, reconstituted mural that greets awe-struck passersby today.
The mural is now brighter and more detailed than the 1950s and 1960s original. Noteworthy scenes include a snoozing pig in a hammock, an aviator pig flying a cartoon airplane, a curious pig sniffing a can labeled “Pork Rinds,” a mad dash of pigs fleeing a barn where a “Greased Pig Contest” is underway, and an ominously puzzled porker observing a man loading hams from a smokehouse into a wheelbarrow. There’s even a pig in a Dodgers’ uniform.
The display is not without its outraged critics, and it doesn’t take long on the internet to learn that 6,000 porkers pass through this plant each day to be dispatched from a life that at no time remotely resembled the one enjoyed beguilingly by their two-dimensional counterparts on the outer walls.
Nonetheless, to generations of Angelenos and visitors, any mention of “the piggies” is sure to bring to mind the iconic Farmer John mural in the industrial city of Vernon, California (whose human population of just 222 souls is outnumbered by the census of pigs on the Farmer John mural).
My granddaughter, Holiday, who will soon be 11, has never seen the Farmer John mural, but as a toddler she had a fascination with “piggies” that I think most small children share. Her favorites were the cherubic but usually mischievous pigs that mainstay a series of children’s books authored by Sandra Boynton, especially Boynton’s classic “Perfect Piggies.” This delightful book became so popular in our multigenerational household that when we discovered the “Perfect Piggies” website, we rushed to download the “Perfect Piggies” song!
For a couple of years, Holiday would pitter-patter regularly into my study to insist, “Granddad, Perfect Piggies!” That was my cue to hit the icon that played the song.
It’s been a while since Holiday has asked to hear “Perfect Piggies,” and I doubt that she has thought about the book or the song, or of piggies in general, for some time. However, the song’s download remains on my computer, and, truth be told, Granddad has been known to occasionally click on the icon for the sake of nostalgia.
Like the second little piggy, Wade Holland stays home (in Inverness).