|
Every Friday after an intense week of work, John Culter heads from his Fairview office to Jackson's Meats at Granville and 11th and buys a couple of steaks from Geoff Jackson, whose family has sold meat to Culter's clan for four generations.
At home in West Point Grey, he and his wife uncork a bottle of red, sear the steaks, toss a salad and unwind.
Culter remembers visiting Jackson's Meats at Fourth and Yew in Kitsilano in the 1950s when he was a child. Back then, the senior butchers were easily identified from their junior counterparts because the most experienced men wore straw hats.
"The straw hats, the sawdust on the floor and the really amazing bacon are things that I remember from being a kid," says Culter, the president of Medinet, a medical software company.
He also remembers favoured butchers receiving a bottle of whisky or case of beer at Christmas from their appreciative clientele.
"In those days, you didn't tend to buy a week's worth of groceries at once... You were in and out of people's stores all the time. You'd see these people as often as you'd see anybody, so they became your friends," Culter says. "It's a customer relationship, but when you see people that often, you tend to pay attention to their children and their moms and dads and brothers and sisters and how're you doing and how's it going and all that stuff."
Culter remembers the clamour at Christmas.
"I remember the lineups out the door when I was a kid," he says, "because everybody wants their stuff on the 24th, it stands to reason."
The days of lines out the door at butcher shops are long gone.
After more than a century-and-a-half in the meat business, the Jackson family's last shop on South Granville will close its doors in September. It follows the closure of Jackson's on Fourth three years ago after the death of Brian Jackson, co-owner of the store and Geoff Jackson's older brother.
Today, busy and budget-conscious shoppers favour prepackaged and quick-to-prepare cuts of meat grabbed at the supermarket, and many stop by their local butchers only when they're seeking something chain stores don't carry. Butchers are disappearing, and small businesses like Jackson's Meats have a hard time making money--longtime butchers say a new shop would have a hard time succeeding.
Samosas, sausages rolls, meat pies, bacon-wrapped tenderloin, eggs and peameal bacon fill the Jackson's Meats window at 2717 Granville St. on a summer day.
One row of tiles decorated with images of animals lines the shop's worn interior. Some of the beasts are mapped with cuts of meat --shoulder, chop and shank.
A massive bowl almost large enough to curl up in hangs on the wall near the back of the shop. It's used for mixing sausage meat and haggis.
At the very back, beef roasts in a oven the door for which is propped closed--it recently fell off.
There's no office back there, so owner Geoff Jackson invites a reporter into the back lane in the secondhand SUV he recently bought to replace his 1986 Honda Civic--referred to by his friends and colleagues as his "skateboard."
The first meat shop his family owned was likely as humble. Jackson's great-great grandfather, George Jackson, opened a butcher's shop in Berkshire County, England, east of London, in 1846. A photo from 1887 shows a dense row of dangling geese, pheasants, lamb and beef, and huge hogs outside the front of the shop in the town of Maidenhead.
It's a town Jackson, 57, has never visited. He's only touched down once in the U.K. while on the way to Germany.
Jackson's grandfather, also named George Jackson, immigrated to the Lower Mainland in 1911 to become a logger. But recognizing a hungry customer base in the loggers, he also almost immediately established his own meat shop on the 2200 block of West Fourth Avenue, next to today's Simpatico Ristorante.
He stayed in the logging business for years, eventually selling his stumpage rights for West and North Vancouver to H.R. Macmillan. He owned a cabin on the mainland north of Desolation Sound where actor Gary Cooper would stay.
A photo of Jackson Bros. Ltd. on Fourth Avenue from 1928 shows at least three tiers of turkeys and lamb slung up on the left side of the original Kitsilano shop with sides of beef on the right side. The largest slab at the front is tagged: "Vancouver Winter Fair, Prime Steer, Nicola Stock Farms."
When Jackson's grandfather, renowned for his straw hat, retired in 1950, his eldest son, who was Jackson's father and also the family's third George Jackson in a row, was appointed manager of the Fourth Avenue shop. He became president of the Vancouver Retail Merchants' Association, which was founded by George Jackson Sr. The other Jackson boys, Bill, Ted and Lawrence, also worked in the shop.
A photo from Easter 1955 shows 17 family members and staff lined up behind a 50-foot counter that stretched down one side of the Kitsilano shop. Labour was cheaper back then, and the work intensive with sides of beef to be cut up. A ceiling track carried 150-pound slabs to the front window. Staff cut steaks for restaurants, made sausages and prepared delivery orders. Customers ordered their meat, received a slip and paid at the wicket while their goods were wrapped.
An article in a 1956 trade magazine calls the shop "synonymous with fine-quality meats." Its author, R.G. Spankie from Union Packing Company, stated many of Jackson's "fine-quality products" were purchased from Union Packing and that the shop had been enlarged four times.
"His volume of meat sales exceeds $500,000 annually! During the Christmas season he sells 4,000 turkeys. A minimum of 150,000 pounds of poultry is required for an average year."
A year after the article came out, Jackson, the third of four children in the family, began helping out in the business by folding boxes for Jackson's wholesale Famous Little Oxford Sausages. He was barely old enough for school.
"When I was six years old, they killed suckling pigs in the back of the Fourth Avenue store for the Christmas trade," says Jackson. "It was easier for them to do it right at the meat market. It was probably very illegal to be done. Some of the old-timers that I've met have said they used to kill calves in the back of the store, too. Somebody might be raising a calf down on Marine Drive or on the flats down there, and rather than take it all the way downtown to get one animal killed, just throw it in the back of the truck and take it to the butcher."
In its wholesaling heyday during the Second World War, Jackson's supplied Hotel Vancouver, the military base in Jericho and the air force base that is now Boundary Bay Airport in Delta.
From folding boxes, Jackson graduated to washing dishes. As soon as he got his driver's licence he made deliveries. Jackson's products were distributed to homes and businesses from Lion's Bay to Tsawwassen and Coquitlam into the 1970s.
James Beard, the famous American chef and food writer, was a loyal customer in the 1960s, and Chunky Woodward, the head of Woodward's, frequented the Fourth Avenue shop.
But a sales flyer from 1955 appeals to women to watch Ladies' First on TV for hints on "more successful meat buying." The Fourth Avenue store's Scottish butcher, Andy Pollock, appeared on a cooking show with Jackson's father and uncle on the fledgling CTV network.
Pollock was often stationed at the smaller of the two sales counters with the cheaper items: pickled tongues, corned beef, boiling fowl, inexpensive chuck roasts, oxtails. Jackson and his cousins trained under the expert salesman, who had a fondness for drinking Aqua Velva. He would conceal a bottle of the alcohol-based aftershave in his hand, swiftly suck it back and chuck the bottle under the counter.
"I remember cleaning out underneath the counter one time because it would just get full of old sawdust," Jackson says. "I swear, in one day I must have swept out about 30 bottles of Aqua Velva... He always had nice, sweet-smelling breath."
In 1964, the family bought a farm in Ladner to raise sheep for slaughter. Jackson's mother still lives on the farm.
They also opened an abattoir in Richmond in the 1960s that closed in the 1980s after Jackson's father passed away. Jackson worked on the kill floor.
As teenagers, he and his older brother Brian belonged to a 4-H club and raised steers that were auctioned off at the PNE.
"Invariably they went to our own slaughterhouse where they were killed, and we were working there," he says. That experience was "a little bit twisted."
Jackson and his brothers ran a butcher shop in Kerrisdale from 1973 to 1981, and in 1986, the family opened a smokehouse in Langley, where Jackson worked before he set up shop on Granville. They closed the smokehouse in 2000 when the family found itself spread too thin.
In the 1960s, butchers proliferated on the West Side. Three did business on two blocks in Kits, another half a dozen meat shops operated close by on Broadway and West 10th, with more in Kerrisdale and shops all over downtown.
But in the 1960s, the meat business changed. Supermarkets attracted a broad customer base, and wholesaling became less lucrative as packinghouses started making and supplying hotels and restaurants with sausages and other products. Home deliveries ceased in the 1970s as more women worked outside the home.
In the 1970s, many suppliers decided they weren't happy to be paid 30 to 45 days after delivery and instead wanted to be paid in a week, Jackson says. The era when butchers could age their meat for flavour without worrying about selling it immediately largely came to an end.
"I remember some of the cheques just for one supplier at the end of the month would be $60,000--you can see why people wanted to get paid a little bit more often," Jackson says.
Each decade, the government devised a new grading system for meat, which has raised prices for top grades, Jackson says. The best cuts now go to the "prima donna chefs."
Bill Ible, who has worked as a butcher at Windsor Meats on Main at King Edward for 20 years, has also seen the business change. He worked at Hycrest Meats from 1973 to 1987. Hycrest, which started on Granville in the 1930s, was sold to Jackson in 1990 after an animal rights group torched Hycrest and two other local meat shops.
Ible says families were larger when mothers worked solely in the home, preparing stews, pot roasts and meatloaf for their families. They stocked up their freezers, buying sides and quarters of beef. Few ate lamb, notes Ible, a 62-year-old who grew up in Edmonton, because lamb was the staple meat of Canadian soldiers serving in the Second World War.
"It's amazing the amount of lamb that we sell nowadays," he says. "During the war they were served mutton and it stunk and they didn't want anything to do with lamb when they came back. I was 20-something-years-old before I ever tasted lamb because it wasn't allowed in our house."
Wives wouldn't buy pork during the summer months in the 1950s and '60s because refrigeration was poor, he says, and people ate turkey and ham only at Easter and Christmas.
In the 1980s, South Granville and the surrounding area changed. The big houses sold, smaller families moved in and rents rose sky high.
"There's only a couple of stores over there, Canada Produce [it's moving], Mackinnon's Bakery, [it's moving], they've been there for years and years but they can't afford the rent anymore," Ible says.
While Jackson's has loyal patrons who stock up before heading to their cabins on the Gulf Islands, most of his customer base is transient. They live near South Granville until they have a child or two, then move on. Gourmands patronize Jackson's for specialty items like calf liver, quail, pheasant, boneless duck breast and foie gras--he pronounces it "grass"--items Jackson always has on hand.
"Then they kind of forget that we also sell hamburger and chicken legs," he says.
His customers are conscious about what they eat. They want to know how much fat is in each cut of meat, where the product comes from and what the animal was fed.
His young customers are more apt to buy pre-wrapped chicken breasts than pieces that must be weighed, even if they're the same price per kilogram. Jackson suspects shoppers are buying to their budgets.
The area's old-timers mostly live in seniors' homes and only buy an item like a meat pie when they're craving a change from the food they're served.
In the '50s, the same old-timers probably gave their butchers gifts for their good service.
Ible remembers his mother giving the butcher, mailman and milkman a seasonal "flat 50" tin of 50 cigarettes at Christmas.
"I can remember back in the early '60s where customers would come in Christmas Eve picking up their turkey and they'd come with a bottle and you'd have to have a drink with them," Ible says. "And by the end of the day, you were three sheets to the wind."
Alcoholism was rampant among butchers, he adds.
"It's the same with undertakers... and the same with chefs," he says. "Why, I don't know, but I can rattle off names of alcoholics, the drinking problem that went with it."
One butcher had alcoholic seizures when he hadn't drunk for a day. In the middle of serving a customer, he'd fall to the floor, leaving the shopper wondering where he'd gone. Ible and his coworkers would step over him and pick up where their colleague had left off.
Butchers are a dying breed, according to Ible. The meat cutting programs at Vancouver Community College and BCIT have been cut, leaving no training programs in the province, he says.
Ible has one customer who's been loyal to Windsor Meats for 50 years and who specifically asks for him because he remembers how beef used to be cut.
"A new meat cutter wouldn't know what a corner cut or a shellbone cut rump roast is," he says.
Jackson says there are few real butchers left.
"The true definition of a butcher would be you have to raise the animal, kill the animal and sell the animal, whereas a meat cutter just cuts meat."
Today's butchers shuffle and slice more paper, he adds.
"You have to know how to open a cardboard box without getting a paper cut, as opposed to cutting up front quarters and hindquarters of beef."
Jackson's lease expires Sept. 30, so he expects to close his doors for good the week of Sept. 15. He'll probably auction his equipment at Love's Auctioneers in Richmond, which holds a butcher, baker and restaurant sale every month.
Closing the doors will be the end of the Jackson family's long history owning butcher shops.
"I'm very sad," Jackson says. "I hate to think of me being the last one, and I shut the door. It's not what you call a good claim to fame."
Jackson will miss his customers. But he won't miss cleaning the bloodied machines and dishes. He has arthritis in his knee, and the expense of doing business has become too great.
"You work hard and you don't make very much money," he says.
Jackson has been packing cardboard in the trunk of his "office" to save a few hundred bucks a year by recycling it at a depot near his Richmond home. That way he avoids the necessity of paying the city to place a recycling bin in the lane.
He's also packing in his role with the Vancouver Fair Tax Coalition.
In a 2006 letter to the Vancouver Sun, a frustrated Jackson wrote that in 2004, he paid $15,125 in total property taxes. In 2005, he paid $19,500, an increase of almost 30 per cent.
Jackson expects to carry on working in the food business, but first, he's taking a break.
"I hope to go fishing and go hunting to put meat on the table," says Jackson, who tried being a vegetarian for two months in the late 1970s and instead found himself dreaming about White Spot Triple-O hamburgers, prime rib and Yorkshire pudding.
Jackson guesses a clothing or shoe store will take his shop's place.
Opening a new meat market would be pricey, Ible says, because the cost of equipment and government standards are so high.
Tim Rick, manager of the meat department at Stong's Market who began his career at Jackson's on Fourth Avenue, says the changes on South Granville remind him of an earlier transformation.
"Robson Street in the early '70s had lots of meat shops and fish shops, but they all closed down because clothing shops can afford to pay the rent," says Rick, 47. "There's not enough mark-up on meat compared to clothes. I would never open up my own shop because of that, because it is a hard business because things do go bad quickly."
While his busy job at Stong's pays the bills, Rick misses the customers at Jackson's.
Those customers, according to Jackson, are loyal third and fourth generation clients, and includes former premiers and lieutenant governors.
John Culter, one of Jackson's faithful, would love to see Jackson's son, Christopher Jackson, start a meat shop, but he knows it would be hard to find a suitable location.
Christopher, 27, worked with Jackson full time until, according to his father, he was "stolen away" to manage a neighbourhood pub. Now he works for a small, independent Langley greengrocer. He convinced the store to add a meat counter, which he manages.
Culter frequents the Granville shop because his family has known Jackson's for years and because, he says, "It's 30 times better quality."
He wants his friends and business associates to stop spending their money in big box stores. "And start paying attention to the people that live in their neighbourhood and maintain businesses in their neighbourhood that hire their kids after school and are there on the Saturday morning when you need five screws," he says.
"Geoff's a really good guy. He's honest as hell, he's a hard worker, he puts in enormous hours. He's sort of what you would expect from an old-fashioned shopkeeper... He's a very solid character and that's no big deal, except nowadays, sometimes you wonder if you're ever going to meet another one."
As a "small business guy" with a company of 12, Culter prefers to support other modest operations.
"The nice thing is you can go over and say OK, I've got 16 people coming for dinner, what do you think we ought to do?" Culter says. "I don't know that you can do that by standing at the counter of your local Safeway."
|
