Sometimes an advertising playing card gives you a name, an address, a phone number, and enough information to point you in the right direction.
This Butch card does not.
Printed on the card is simply Meat Packers Equipment Co., Oakland, California. No street address. No phone number. No owner’s name. Not even an explanation of what kind of equipment the company made.
Fortunately, the name was enough.
And behind it was a company that supplied the meat-processing industry for decades—and whose name is still around today.
Meat Packers Equipment Company
Meat Packers Equipment Company began in Oakland, California, in 1932. The company became better known by the shortened name MEPACO, formed from MEat PAckers COmpany.
Despite the straightforward name, this wasn’t a neighborhood butcher-supply store.
Meat Packers Equipment Company manufactured specialized commercial equipment for companies producing sausage, ham, deli meats, smoked meats, and other processed foods.
Its equipment included loaf molds and slicers, cooking and cooling racks, smokers, brine tanks, cutting tables, workstations, mixers, and other machinery used inside commercial processing plants. One of its early products was the Buffalo Mixer, designed to help automate the sausage-making process. Early MEPACO catalogs even offered versions customized with heat jackets.
So the audience for this particular Butch card was probably quite different from the customer receiving a deck from a drugstore, insurance agent, restaurant, or neighborhood business.
This was business-to-business advertising.
Somewhere along the way, Butch went industrial.
Finding the Company in Oakland
City directories let us follow Meat Packers Equipment Company through several locations as the business developed.
By 1935, the company was listed among Oakland’s machinery dealers at 901 72nd Avenue.
By 1939, it had moved to 3223 San Leandro Street. That year’s directory described the company as supplying sausage-kitchen equipment, ham and meat-loaf molds, packing-house equipment, and “everything for the meat packer.” Richard A. Hawley was listed as president, with T. N. Rathjen as secretary.
Eventually the company moved again, this time to the address that is especially interesting for this Butch card: 1226 49th Avenue, Oakland.
That was Meat Packers Equipment Company’s home during the period that overlaps with the Butch advertising cards.
A 1957 telephone directory listed the company there under “MEPACO Meat Processing Equipment” and described it as engineers and manufacturers of meat and food-industry equipment. Its telephone number was still written in the old exchange style: KE(llogg) 2-1655.
By 1963, the listing had grown more ambitious. MEPACO advertised itself as a manufacturer of patented meat-processing equipment, including MEPACO smoke generators, and claimed more than 400 items for the food industry.
The address remained: 1226 49th Avenue and the telephone number was now printed numerically as: 532-1655.
The telephone number had not really changed. KE 2-1655 became 532-1655 as named telephone exchanges gave way to all-number dialing.
It is a small detail, but I love details like this. They take the company out of a history book and put it back into an actual place and time. In 1963, someone interested in outfitting a meat-processing plant could pick up the telephone, dial 532-1655, and reach the company represented on this little Butch card.
The Railroad Outside the Factory
The 49th Avenue location adds another piece to the story.
This was part of Oakland’s Melrose industrial district, an area shaped in part by the railroads running through East Oakland.
Long before MEPACO arrived, Oakland street directories described 49th Avenue—then also known as Calhoun Avenue—as beginning at the Southern Pacific Company main line.
So during the years MEPACO operated at 1226 49th Avenue, the company was working in an industrial neighborhood with the Southern Pacific Railroad nearby.
For a manufacturer building large pieces of commercial processing equipment, it was certainly an appropriate neighborhood. Factories, warehouses, machinery companies, and rail transportation were all part of the landscape.
I have not found evidence showing that MEPACO had its own railroad siding or that a particular machine was shipped by rail, so I don’t want to make that claim.
But the railroad itself was there.
That connection is especially fun for me because Southern Pacific also appears elsewhere in my playing-card collection. One card can lead to another collection, another company, and another piece of history.
That is exactly what I mean by a crossroads.
More Than a Few Butcher Tools
As the years passed, MEPACO’s catalog continued to grow.
Government equipment listings from the 1970s show just how specialized the company had become. Meat Packers Equipment Company was producing mixer-blenders, screw and belt conveyors, loaders, stuffers, boning conveyors, mold-cover presses, lift dumpers, loaf-mold fillers, sausage-meat trucks, soaking tanks, wrapping tables, stuffing tables, spice mixers, and other commercial equipment.
This wasn’t a company that happened to sell a few tools to butchers.
Equipment for processing meat was its business.
So When Was the Butch Card Made?
That is harder to answer.
The card itself gives us only Meat Packers Equipment Co., Oakland, California. The company remained in Oakland throughout the period when Brown & Bigelow’s Butch advertising cards were being distributed.
That means the company name and city alone can’t give us an exact year.
The 49th Avenue records are useful, however, because they place MEPACO firmly at that location during the period that most interests us. It was at 1226 49th Avenue by 1957 and was still there a decade later; a 1967 Oakland directory continued to list Richard A. Hawley as president at that address.
For now, I would place this card broadly within the Butch advertising-card era, probably the 1950s or early 1960s, but I would not assign it a specific year without another piece of evidence.
The absence of the MEPACO name on the card doesn’t solve the question either. Although MEPACO became the company’s familiar trade name, the formal Meat Packers Equipment Company name continued to appear in directories and government records for decades.
So this one remains an approximate date rather than a firm one.
From Oakland to Wisconsin
Unlike many businesses found on vintage advertising cards, the story of Meat Packers Equipment Company doesn’t end with a closed storefront or a company simply disappearing from the records.
The company evolved.
In 1993, Apache Stainless Equipment Corporation purchased MEPACO, and the company’s assets were moved from California to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Under Apache, the MEPACO product line expanded beyond its original meat-processing roots into equipment used for poultry, dairy products, prepared foods, baking, pet food, plant-based foods, and other large-scale food production.
And the story circles back to one of those early machines.
The Buffalo Mixer which MEPACO developed to help automate sausage production, is part of a lineage of mixers and processing equipment that continues within the company today. Modern MEPACO equipment is considerably more sophisticated, but mixing, cooking, and blending remain a major part of what the company does.
More than ninety years after Meat Packers Equipment Company began in Oakland, the MEPACO name is still in use.
That gives this little advertising card an unusually direct connection between past and present.
And Then There Is Butch
That is one of the things I enjoy most about collecting these cards.
At first glance, this is simply another Butch card.
Turn it over, though, and three words—Meat Packers Equipment—open an entirely different door.
Suddenly the card connects to 1930s Oakland, industrial manufacturing, sausage production, meatpacking plants, specialized machinery, an Oakland factory beside a Southern Pacific railroad corridor, an old telephone number, and a company whose descendants are still building food-processing equipment today.
I also can’t help wondering how these decks were originally distributed.
Were they handed out to customers by a MEPACO salesman?
Given to plant managers or purchasing agents?
Passed out at an industry convention?
Included with a Christmas gift to an important account?
We may never know.
But unlike a consumer advertiser trying to bring shoppers through the front door, Meat Packers Equipment Company was selling specialized industrial equipment to a very specific group of customers.
That makes a playful Butch deck an interesting choice of advertising premium—and probably exactly why it worked.
A machinery catalog might eventually be thrown away.
But give someone a deck of cards with Butch on it?
More than seventy years later, at least one of them is still here.
Summary
Advertiser: Meat Packers Equipment Company
Trade name: MEPACO
Location: Oakland, California
Known Oakland locations: 901 72nd Avenue; 3223 San Leandro Street; 1226 49th Avenue
Butch-era address: 1226 49th Avenue
Exchange telephone: KE 2-1655
Nearby railroad: Southern Pacific Railroad
Business type: Commercial meat- and food-processing equipment manufacturer
Founded: 1932
Butch card probable period: c. 1949–mid-1960s; probably 1950s–early 1960s
Historical note: Manufacturer of specialized equipment for sausage, ham, deli-meat, smoked-meat, and other commercial food processors. The MEPACO business was purchased by Apache Stainless Equipment Corporation in 1993 and continues today.
Leave a Reply