Factory Tours Anyone?

Growing up, I got to experience something that seems to have receded from modern life, if not disappeared — the Factory Tour.

I was reminded of factory tours when Debi invited me to go see the TCHO Factory Tour on Pier 17 in San Francisco a few months back.  It was interesting to sit on some bleachers and see videos showing sources of different sorts of chocolates.  The taste tests were definitely yummy!  But the “factory” part of the tour was somewhat limited — about 10,000 square feet with a few large, stainless steel, mixing bins; some small pipes carrying warmed chocolate to a molding machine; a cooling area; a wrapping machine; and a work station where the chocolate bars were packed in boxes for shipping.

It was a neat tour, but it paled in scope and impact compared with some others I’ve seen.   BirdsEye Foods had a chicken packing plant near my childhood home in Chincoteague, Virginia.  (The Delmarva peninsula is home to LOTS of chicken farms.)

Their factory tour started at the loading docks, where flatbed farm trucks pulled up with open-slatted crates on the back, packed with squaking, flapping birds.

We kids, on a group tour, watched behind glass walls, as workers took the birds out of the crates, hung them from overhead conveyors by clips around their ankles and let the conveyor take the birds down an assembly line.

The first stop was a worker with a big, sharp knife who slit the chicken’s throats so they would bleed out.  The chickens flapped and blood flew everywhere!

Next, after the chickens were dead (I hope!), another worker gutted them.  Then the chickens went into a machine that robo-plucked them, getting even the pin-feathers off the skin.  I remember the tour guide waxing eloquent about how new and difficult this process was … that pinfeathers were extremely hard to remove without damaging the skin.

Then the birds went to butchering stations where they were carved up, sometimes into halfs or quarters, sometimes into legs, thighs and breasts separately.

The penultimate stop was the patented-by-Clarence-Birdseye-himself process of quick freezing the birds, some prior to cooking, some afterwards.

But the final stop was the company cafeteria, where all us tour-goers were treated to a hot, scrumptious …. chicken dinner!  Let’s just say, it made a real impression on me.

As a teenager, I went on a tour of the General Motors plant in Linden, NJ.   We walked through cavernous rooms, one with a giant press that would come down with tons of force, converting a piece of sheet metal into a curvaceous fender.  BANG!  The noise was deafening, the vibrations registering on my internal Richter scale.

The assembly line mechanics used compressed-air wrenches to assemble the parts of the car in moves that still seem blindingly fast to me.   The “Body By Fisher” models proceeded down the line, dipping into baths, getting baked to set the primer or the paint, being lowered onto drive trains, having the engine and electricals dropped in and being finished by a swarm of men (all men in those days, as I recall) adding the finishing touches and driving the final product away!

Now THAT was a factory tour!

I also remember going with the Boy Scouts on a tour of an automated post-office facility in Indianapolis.  The official in charge was happy to show us all the new sorting and routing equipment they just installed — it could collate a scrambled pile of mail into a nice stack of letters, all facing the right way (oooh!).  It could auto-cancel stamps (wow!) and it was enabled to add those little marks showing zip codes, which were just coming into use.  It promised to speed up our mail delivery.   Sadly, I haven’t noticed any major change in postal latency since that time!

I have a vague recollection of seeing a blast furnace in operation, either from a trip to a steel mill when our family visited Birmingham, AL (the city over-watched by a statue of Vulcan, patron saint of the rubber companies in Birmingham), or b) from a false memory induced by some TV our YouTube exposure.  It’s not really important to my point.

Earlier today, thinking about Labor Day and my youthful exposure to factories, I began assembling some “factory tours in the Bay Area” for a post on CaliforniaTouristGuide.com.  And I noticed something … that all the “factory tours” were really just food production facilities: brewery tours, jellybean ‘factory’ tours, fortune cookie bakeries, chocolate pouring plants and, of course, the winery/vineyard tours in nearby Napa.

Where can I take my granddaughters so they can see a blast furnace or a cold press?  Where can they see a massive assembly plant?  Or industrial glass being made?  Do we have to go to China?

Are the places in the US  simply not giving tours any longer — fearful of liability perhaps.  Or sabotage … or espionage?   Does anyone know?