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RIMERTOWN - At Cruse Meat Processing, customers can buy everything from pork chops to fatback, ground beef to liver mush.
But it’s the sausage made here that draws ’em from near and far.
“We try to make a good product, and the word just gets out,” said Max Cruse, who built and operates the cinder-block business located in this rural, northeastern Cabarrus County community. “We don’t do any advertising.”
Whatever the key to Cruse’s operation, it’s served him well. He said it’s not unusual for customers to drive for miles to buy sausage or steaks.
One such customer who visited the shop on a recent weekday afternoon was Concord’s Robert Washington. He stopped by before heading back to visit his family in Charleston, S.C., where he was born and raised.
“A lot of my brothers and friends tell me to pick them up sausage from here whenever I go home,” said Washington, a retired teacher. “The sausage ... it’s very delicious.”
Cruse, 64, blushes ever so slightly when his customers pay him such compliments.
“The sausage is special for us,” he said of the product that comes in both regular and hot varieties. “I always have some for breakfast the morning after we make it. We’ve never had any trouble with it.”
Cruse grew up in the meat processing business and has seen the industry change dramatically over the years.
He said that decades ago, his father, the late O.O. Cruse, and other farmers like him used to butcher cattle and hogs under a tree in some lonesome backwoods pasture.
That’s how Max Cruse got his start in the business. He was 12 years old, he said, when he butchered his first steer.
“We got it into pieces,” Cruse said, chuckling as he recalled the struggle he had with the endeavor. “I don’t know how pretty it was.”
From 1961 until 1973, Cruse worked for Frank Corriher Beef and Sausage in Landis. In 1973, Cruse founded his own business, and about 10 years ago he added a retail shop.
In 1993, Cruse purchased the Farmer’s Livestock Barn, just down Rimer Road from his shop. At the barn, Mondays are auction days.
Many of the buyers take their steers or hogs home to fatten them up, then return to Cruse’s months later to have the animals slaughtered, dressed and cut into steaks.
The lion’s share of business at his processing plant, Cruse said, comes from people who bring their own cattle or hogs (and an occasional deer) to be slaughtered and dressed.
Cruse doesn’t operate a slaughterhouse, so he has the animals taken to such a facility in North Wilkesboro. Then they’re returned to Cruse’s, where they’re prepared as individual customers request.
“Max is a good man,” said Dwight Martin, owner of Wink’s Barbecue & Seafood in Salisbury, where a goodly portion of the restaurant’s sausage and hamburger comes from Cruse’s.
“He has very good products,” Martin said. “And he gives very good service.”
Cruse said the volume of business at his place depends largely on the price of cattle.
In the 1970s, that price was often as low as 25 to 30 cents a pound. Back then, it wasn’t unusual for Cruse’s to slaughter 40 to 60 heads of cattle a week.
“When cattle is cheap, we’re covered up,” Cruse said.
Nowadays, beef cattle sell on the auction block for as much as $1.07 a pound, and only about 25 a week are dressed at Cruse’s.
Regardless of the price of steer, Cruse said his shop is particularly busy from October through the end of December.
“For some reason, people just want to have their meat in the freezer by Christmas,” he said.
The operation is primarily a family one, with Cruse’s sons, Eddie and Mark, and his wife, Ruth, working with him. Besides the four of them, the other employees consist solely of a handful of retired people who work part time.
Long days are more the norm than the exception for Cruse and his family. He said 13-hour workdays —
from before dawn until after dark — aren’t unusual.
Cruse said the meat processing business has come a long way since he was a boy slaughtering cattle under some distant tree. These days, he said, meat processing plants are sterile businesses frequented daily by state inspectors.
Cruse said he worries the days of meat processing plants such as his might be trailing off. After all, he noted, fewer and fewer young people are getting into the farming industry, choosing instead to work for large corporations that offer greater pay and shorter hours. And he sees fewer customers in his future.
“A lot of our customers are dying out,” Cruse said. “And I don’t see many young people getting into it.”
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