Dominic Pacyga hired on as a livestock handler at the Union Stockyards in 1969. His mother and both his grandfathers had worked at the “Wall Street of meat”–which covered the square mile between 39th and 47th streets and Ashland and Halsted–and although Chicago’s meatpacking industry was slowing down, Pacyga, who was a UIC student at the time, was enthralled. “I remember being in a hog house with five or six thousand head of hogs,” he says. “For a city kid it was kind of amazing–even for someone who grew up around the corner.”
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After two years Pacyga had moved up to assistant head of security. Then, in 1971, the stockyards shut down. “They were closing and dumping their material,” says Pacyga, now a Columbia College history professor whose specialty is Packingtown. “I was already a history major and planning to go to graduate school, so I went through the Dumpsters.”
He points out that the very first industrial films were made in Chicago in response to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, which created an uproar about sanitation and working conditions in the meatpacking industry. “After the book came out, meatpackers did a series of films that would be run in movie houses to prove that the process of meatpacking was actually quite sanitary.”
Chicago Stories: The Union Stockyards, with some of Ullman’s interview with Pacyga and segments of Meyer’s film–including “poetic” slowed-down footage of the cowboys–airs Monday, April 30, at 7:30 PM on Channel 11.
