Meat&Poultry - April 2012 - 24

HENRY MORRIS

that I can say, ‘well, if it’s about this long, it will be good enough,’” he laughs. “It was a totally different mindset.” He cherished the opportunity to work with Owens back in the days when CB Owens was still alive, Jerry Owens was working with the company and a young man named Stewart Owens was paying his dues and working his way up the ranks. In his new career, while perhaps not as precise as building airplanes, Morris was challenged by the prospect of being responsible for the entire op-

The Smithfield eras
After working in the sausage business at Owens for nearly a decade, Morris was approached by a recruiter “asking if I’d ever be interested in living in Virginia,” where Smithfield Foods is based. Initially, he dismissed the opportunity. “I said ‘No, I love Dallas and I’m going to live here the rest of my life.’” But the recruiter talked Morris into “just visiting” Smithfi eld. “Come see what you think,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, and he did. Three days later, Morris was shaking hands on a deal made with Joe Luter and George Hamilton Jr. that he couldn’t refuse; working for a company he thought had an incredible future. “They certainly had a need for an engineer with my abilities, so I went to work for them,” he says. He joined Smithfield as vice president of engineering at Smithfield Packing, back when ITT Gwaltney was across the street and Smithfield was not at all the acquisition machine it has become in the past decade. Eventually Smithfield would acquire Gwaltney and when an operations position at that plant became available, one of the applicants was Henry L. Morris. Given his experience up to that point, Morris was confident he could handle the position easily. He underestimated the scope of the position, however. “There are a lot of elements involved in the nuances of running a pork operation. It was a daunting task and a lot to learn for an engineer.” Morris remembers well, the next, even bigger challenge a few years later. “I picked up the phone one day and it was Joe Luter,” he says. Luter told Morris he wanted him to spend two months in Tar Heel, NC, starting up

“One Christmas we didn’t have enough workers and I ended up driving hogs. That was the way you ran a family owned business.”
GD contract expire and not renewed as part of the incoming Nixon Administration. Surviving a massive job cut, Morris decided to seek a more secure position and considered working in industries outside of avionics. Enter: Robert Langford at Owens Country Sausage. “He needed a plant engineer. That was my fi rst introduction to the processing floor,” in the early 1970s, he says. Reflecting on his impression when he walked into the processing plant for the fi rst time, near Dallas, Morris says he was more than a little struck by the sights, sounds, aromas and the complexity of the many moving parts. It was quite a contrast to his previous career. “I had been working on airplanes that were built to tolerances of a thousandth of an inch,” he says. “And now I’m going to be designing a conveyor

eration, from the moment hogs came through the door to the particulars of the wastewater treatment. Back in those days, the Owens plant was processing about 60 hogs per hour, “and you had to get meat to the chub machines; you had to get meat in the box and you had deliveries you had to make and schedules to meet.” The enormity of the responsibility was a career elixir for Morris. “It was really what I had longed for when I thought about being an engineer.” The family owned mentality was alive and well at Owens and Morris was proud to be a part of the extended family, which often meant rolling up his sleeves and working in the trenches. “I remember one Christmas we didn’t have enough workers,” he grins, “and I ended up driving hogs. That was the way you ran a family owned business. People did what they had to do to get the job done.” This was a far cry from the prevailing mindset at his previous job where people had a component piece of building and testing an airplane. “You didn’t really understand if you were designing a nose landing gear that there was an entire airplane on top of it.”

• Meat&Poultry • April 2012 • www.MeatPoultry.com

http://www.MeatPoultry.com

Meat&Poultry - April 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meat&Poultry - April 2012