For Fishers, it’s all in family

This is a story about love.
About family.
And about meat.
John Fisher sits in his wife Janice’s office upstairs at Fisher Packing Co. in Portland and says this: “I would probably have been a better student in school, but I knew what I wanted to do. You don’t have to have a college degree to kill cows.”
Retired now for three years, with two replacement knees still giving him a little trouble after decades of carrying sides of beef on his shoulders, Fisher is delighting in the transition to a new generation.
Four sons — Michael, Greg, Brad and Daniel — now run the family’s butchering operation.
“They’ve all got their own little parts of the business they run,” says John.
Janice theoretically retired this spring, but John kids her that she’s still working full-time.
“I’d like to get down to three days a week,” she says.
Founded in May 1945 when John’s father Leon purchased a slaughterhouse from the Ehrhart family, Fisher Packing has become a staple of the local business community, winning the Business of the Year Award in January from Jay County Chamber of Commerce.
Leon Fisher had an arrangement with a Portland market as the supplier of its freshly cut meat in the era before modern supermarkets.
“Actually his mother used to go up to the meat market there, and that’s where she met his dad,” says Janice.
For John, the family business was a natural fit.
“My dad stood me on a box and gave a crappy old knife that wouldn’t cut anything and put me up to the table and put an apron on me and a hat,” John recalls.
He was about 8 years old at the time, and his course was set.
He was just as decisive when he set eyes on Janice for the first time. She had moved to Jay County after attending school in Hartford Center Township of Adams County and was “the new girl” as a sophomore at Portland High School.
“I can still see her walking down the hall upstairs at the high school,” says John. “She had a black skirt on and a pink sweater.”
John, a senior, knew he had to meet her.
“He tried to sell me insurance. That was his pick-up line,” Janice remembers. “He told me if I gave him a nickel that if anybody’d beat up on me he’d take care of them.”
The two still laugh about it.
“It worked,” says Janice.
He graduated in 1964 and went on to the U.S. Marine Corps. Janice graduated in 1966, and they married in 1969 after John had rejoined the family business.
They were a young couple in a business that was quickly being transformed. The rules were changing.
“Inspection came in and that was a nightmare,” recalls Janice. “They (state inspectors) didn’t really know what (they were doing). … That one freezer I think we put that floor in four times.”
“Each time we put in what they (inspectors) told us to put in,” says John. “All the inspection people were new. It wasn’t that they were trying to harm you.”
Still, it was a struggle at times.
And they knew they had a lot to learn.
“Meat’s a funny thing,” says John. “You might fumble-bum along and hit a winner. But all in all, you’ve got to have the education.”
And the key to that education was joining the Indiana Meatpackers Association.
“I wouldn’t go. I was too backward,” John recalls. “I told Janice, ‘We don’t have nothing in common with those people.’ … Then one day she told me we were going. It was the best thing that ever happened.”
Janice adds, “He found out that everybody’s just people like us.”
Ideas were exchanged, new things were tried, new techniques were attempted.
“I went to a lot of schools, a lot of classes,” says John. “You sit here in your own little world, just bumping along, same old same old. We went to (conventions). You’ve got to get the knowledge.”
“You have to learn why (meat) does what it does,” explains Janice. “You have to learn what binds the meat. What different temperature does.”
And as they learned, the company started picking up awards, honored for products such as their lunch meats and summer sausage.
Today, there are as many Fisher Packing Company awards not on the wall as there are on the wall. Some may soon be hanging in the company’s Muncie location, since the Portland shop has no more room to spare.
Expansion into Muncie is one of the steps initiated by the latest Fisher family generation. The other is the development of Fisher’s role as a supplier to regional supermarkets. A map of Indiana hanging in Portland has dozens of push-pins marking the locations of the company’s expanding customer base.
Though the business is now led by the four Fisher sons, all of the couple’s seven children have worked there at one time or another, usually beginning about eighth grade.
“That was the rule, when you got old enough, you went to work,” says John.
Now, with retirement ahead, the couple just wants to enjoy their kids and their 22 grandchildren.
“I think (John’s father Leon) would be so proud,” says Janice.