Life in a Cheese Factory
How would you like to get up at 4:30 every morning? That’s what Casper did. He didn’t have far to go to work when he made cheese at the Coldren Cheese Factory because he and Frieda and their son, Fritz, lived above it. Their living quarters included 2 bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen.
Think about what it would be like to be a young boy or girl growing up in a cheese factory: the rattle of milk cans, the rich smells of fresh milk and of cheese being made, the sound of quiet conversation among workers as they turned milk into cheese. It was an exciting place. This was Fritz’s world when he was a boy.
Frieda holding Fritz. For the first few years of his life, Fritz lived with his parents right upstairs from the cheese factory where his father, Casper, worked.
Casper with a truck filled with his Swiss cheese. What is the name for the round objects at the right? Why does Casper have them outdoors?
When Casper loaded a truck to haul cheese to market, Fritz would put stones in his wagon to pretend he was delivering cheese, too. But kids were expected to help out as they got older. Fritz began working in the cheese factory when he was just 6 or 7 years old. He was about the age Casper was when Casper started to learn cheese making from his father in Switzerland.
“One of the first jobs I had,” Fritz said, “was watching the thermometer near the copper cheese kettle as the cheese was cooking. If the temperature in the copper cheese kettle went over 40 degrees C [104 degrees F] the cheese would burn. The result would be a low-grade cheese that sold at a lesser price.”
As a little boy, Fritz washed lots of cheese equipment just as Casper had done for his father. It all had to be cleaned every day. Fritz took the milk cans and whey pumps apart and washed them until they sparkled. He helped clean the stainless-steel pipes and the machine that washed the 10-gallon milk cans.
Everything had to be spotlessly clean in a cheese factory. State inspectors would come by without warning to make sure everything was in tip-top shape. Casper was proud of his factory. He called it a “100 percent plant.” This was because he always passed state inspections with a 100 percent perfect score for cleanliness.
These freshly washed milk cans would be returned to the farmers for refilling when Casper’s 6 trucks went out to pick up more milk. How many cans can you count in this picture?
As Fritz got older and stronger, he had the job of “intake” man. This meant he dumped the cans of milk into the scale tank as the milk hauler unloaded them.
A gallon of milk weighed about 8.6 pounds. So 10 gallons of milk weighed 86 pounds. Add the weight of the metal milk can (15 pounds or so), and a can of fresh milk weighed a total of more than 100 pounds! Can you lift 100 pounds? It’s not easy. When the milk cans were empty, Fritz pushed them into the can washer to get them ready to be sent back to the farmer. Then the farmer could fill them once again.
Dumping cans of milk, one after the other, day after day doesn’t sound very exciting. But interesting things happened at the cheese factory. For instance, one farmer had been complaining to Casper that his milk’s butterfat content was testing low.
Casper asked the farmer, “Is your wife taking cream out of your milk cans to use for baking?”
“No, no,” the farmer answered. “She wouldn’t do that.”
Fritz had noticed something of interest while dumping the milk from the farmer’s cans into the cheese factory’s scale tank. “Come inside for a minute,” Fritz said to the farmer. “I want to show you something.”
The farmer walked into the factory intake room.
“Does this coffee cup look familiar?” Fritz asked. “Would this coffee cup belong to your wife’s china set?”
“Well, this cup does look familiar,” the farmer said with a sheepish grin on his face.
“It came out of your milk can!” Fritz said. “Your wife must have dropped it in the can when she was skimming cream.”
That answered the question of why the farmer’s milk had so little butterfat!
Many farmers’ wives skimmed cream from the milk, especially on holidays and weekends when they wanted fresh cream. Casper decided not to test his farmers’ milk on holidays and weekends because he knew the results would be lower than the rest of the week.
Casper’s milk haulers picked up milk from 145 farmers. Each truck left the cheese factory by 7:00 a.m. to make its rounds. When Fritz was old enough to get a driver’s license, he drove one of his father’s milk trucks.
Fritz usually returned to the factory with his last load of milk by 11:00 a.m. Once a worker finished his second milk run, he helped with the cheese making. The sooner the milk arrived at the factory, the quicker it could be made into cheese, and the sooner the men could go home.
Winter could be difficult for the milk truck drivers. Snowplows did not keep the highways clear back in the 1940s and 1950s as they do today. The milk truck drivers working for Casper took along a second man with a shovel.
Fritz remembers one time when a milk truck ran out of gas. He took 5 gallons of gasoline out to the truck and poured the fuel into the truck’s gasoline tank. Then he tossed the empty gasoline can into the back of the truck with the cans of fresh milk.
“I found out that you don’t do that,” Fritz said. “We had to throw away 50 cans of milk because they had picked up the gasoline smell.”
Young Fritz was not above pulling pranks at the cheese factory. Around the Fourth of July one year, he lit a firecracker that rolled underneath one of the tanks. It was a big firecracker, and when it went off, the shaking knocked a ceiling light into a cheese kettle. Glass shattered in the near-empty kettle. Fritz didn’t toss firecrackers into the cheese factory again.
Frieda took Fritz and Annabelle to church every Sunday morning. Casper stayed behind at the cheese factory because he had no days off. Sometimes on Sundays, when the cheese making was finished a little early, the Jaggi family would visit relatives or head to New Glarus for Swiss entertainment. When he had free time, Casper also liked to play the accordion. In winter, when things weren’t quite as busy as in summer, he went bowling with friends. But there was not much time for doing things other than work at the factory. Casper and his workers even made cheese on Christmas Day, since cows needed to be milked on holidays, too!
Fritz and his sister, Annabelle. He wore traditional Swiss clothing to attend a local festival.
Working in the cheese factory was a series of activities that went on day after day. The milk trucks made the rounds of the farms, picking up the milk and delivering it to the cheese factory. Workers dumped cans of fresh milk into a scale tank until there was enough to fill one kettle. Casper would supervise the making of the milk into Swiss cheese. By midafternoon, the crew had completed the day’s work except for cleanup. They’d wash equipment and get things ready for the next day’s operation. They’d crawl out of bed by 4:30 the next morning to repeat it all once more.
Thousands of pounds of Swiss cheese resulted from all the hard work. People across the country enjoyed the cheese Casper and workers like Fritz made at the Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory. These customers liked its fresh, nutty taste and the holes that made it distinctive. Although Fritz did not continue as a cheese maker when Casper retired, he enjoyed learning the craft of cheese making from his father.
