Growing Up with Houdini

Part Three: The Mullers Move to Niagara Falls

By 1948, Ferdinand saw that the retail part of the business showed the most promise for expansion. In that year, he bought the former Finlay Fish building at 1019 Centre Street in Niagara Falls and converted it into a retail meat store.

After graduating high school, Henry intended to go to university. At the local high school he had won a prize as Best Air Cadet, which would have enabled him to go to Air Cadet School in British Columbia. But Ferdinand told him that he needed him in the business. Like the dutiful son he was, Henry entered the business with his father.

In 1952, Henry married Bella Zucker from Hamilton. Bella had graduated first in her high school class at Westdale Secondary School in Hamilton and she intended to go to university and then medical school. However, when she and Henry got married, it was decided that she was needed in the meat business. She first went to work for another meat business, F. W. Fearman, to learn something about the industry. She worked as a secretarial assistant to the president.

The second floor, above the meat store, was renovated and made into two apartments. Henry and Bella lived in one apartment. The second was inhabited by Ferdinand’s in-laws Jacob and Lilly Herzog, who had survived work camps in the Holocaust and moved to Canada after the war.

Ferdinand and Henry worked in the retail meat store along with Ferdinand’s wife Magda, who took care of the cash register. After Bella started working there, she took care of the bookkeeping. At one point, however, Bella was needed to help in the store and was operating the veal tenderizer when she got her hand stuck in the machine. She and had to be rushed to the Niagara General Hospital (along with the machine) to get her hand out. She recovered fully, but to this day she has marks on that hand from the machine’s knives.

Over time, the Mullers started selling meat wholesale to local restaurants as well. Henry went to the restaurants in the morning and took orders before returning to the store, where he and Stu Lowry (the first non-family employee) would prepare the orders. They would make the deliveries in the afternoon.

Ferdinand drove to Toronto several times a week in an empty refrigerated panel truck and purchased beef carcasses from Canada Packers, the beef slaughterhouse located adjacent to the Ontario Stock Yards. Ferdinand would then drive these carcasses (cut into four: two fronts and two hinds) back to Niagara Falls, where Henry and Stu unloaded them onto a rail at Muller’s Meats.

Over the years, the restaurant business became bigger than the retail business. Some important customers at this time were Ontario Hydro, Prudhomme’s, and the Niagara Parks Commission restaurants. Muller’s Meats began to outgrow the original premises. Ferdinand and Henry started buying adjoining properties on Centre Street in order to expand. A former dry goods store became the meat freezer. The billiards parlor on the other side became a storage room for folded cardboard boxes.

Muller’s then applied for and received Federal Government Inspection which allowed them to sell beef to large companies like Gerber Foods, Campbell Soup, Chef Boyardee, and H. J. Heinz Co. as well as supermarkets such as Dominion Stores and Steinberg’s. By the mid-1960s, the business had about forty employees, deboning cattle as well as making sausages, hamburger patties, and the like. Muller’s also successfully provided other food products to restaurants. Muller’s became distributors of Bridgford Bread and McCain French Fries. And importantly, over time, they bought and sold truckloads of food products as diverse as apricots and tomato paste.

By 1967, the premises were far too small for the growing business. In 1967, Ferdinand and Henry bought the former N. C. Joseph Ltd. factory at 5340 Portage Road on the 420 Highway and moved the business there. N. C. Joseph Ltd. made items like aluminum pots and kettles, and the manufacturing process had turned all the walls black. It took an enormous effort to convert the Portage Road building from a plant making aluminum items to a Federally Inspected beef processing facility.

The move to the new factory allowed for a dramatic expansion because the meat was cut on mechanical disassembly lines rather than by hand on stationary tables as was done on Centre Street. However, as more and more meat moved down the assembly line, all of it had to get sold, and thus the work load for Ferdinand and Henry increased even more, if that were possible.