Tyson Foods Prepares to Abandon My Hometown.

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

When I was ten-years-old in 1958 my family moved to the small town of Noel, Missouri, which was, at that time, a summer tourist destination located on the banks of the beautiful Elk River.  Noel had an abundance of "resorts," motels, and cabin courts that catered to summer tourists from places like Tulsa and Kansas City.  My parents had purchased and eight-unit cabin court on the Elk River about four miles north of Noel, and it was an enterprise that kept everyone in the family busy during the summer months.  To supplement our income in the winter, my Dad leased a DX service station in Noel where he sold gas and did engine repairs.  (DX was a brand of gasoline.)

Living, working, and playing on the Elk River in the late 1950's and early 1960's was an idyllic existence, and I have many wonderful memories of those years.

But tourism in southern Missouri began to change in the 1960's as tourist enterprises started springing up around large manmade lakes that offered more in the way of boating experiences than the area's small rivers ever could.  The city fathers of Noel saw the writing-on-the-wall as to the future of tourism, and decided to start preparing for a post-tourism era for their town.  Unfortunately, their first foray into industrial development resulted in a very large poultry plant being built on the edge of town.

The new facility was built by the Ralston Purina Company out of St. Louis.  It provided many jobs  in the production of processed chicken ready for market, and the production of pet food from the waste by-products of the chicken.  The new plant was also an environmental disaster that quickly fouled the air of the entire community and polluted Noel's primary natural asset, the Elk River.

But the "chicken plant" brought jobs and money into the community, and for that nice benefit, the locals could tolerate the rotten air quality and occasional chicken guts found floating in the river.

Sometime in the 1970's Ralston Purina managed to unload the Noel chicken plant onto Hudson Foods.  Red Hudson, the head of the company, had married into the Danforth family, the owners of Ralston Purina.   Hudson ran the plant into the ground, and in the 1990's it was snapped up by Tyson Foods out of northwest Arkansas - the current owner.

The Noel chicken plant began drawing in large numbers of immigrant workers during the 1990's, at first from Mexico and south Texas, and later from places as far-flung as Somalia, Sudan, and Micronesia.  Many came to America due to dangerous situations in their homelands such as armed conflicts, and many did not speak English.  Their presence in rural Missouri - and in rural communities across America - placed burdens on local schools and public assistance agencies that many were unable to adequately meet.

It has been a very rough situation, and is now suddenly on the verge of becoming much worse, at least in Noel (current population 2,124) and five other communities which are largely dependent on Tyson Foods for their very survival.  

Tyson has recently announced that it will be closing six poultry processing plants in four states.  Two of those plants are in Missouri, and one of the two Missouri plants that will be shut down is the one in Noel.   That plant is scheduled to close its doors for the final time on October 20th.  A representative of the McDonald County Commission (the governing body of the county where Noel is located) said that this move by Tyson Foods will eliminate one-fourth of the entire county's jobs.  That substantial loss of income and revenue will ripple through the town's and the county's other businesses.

Tyson will be laying off a total of 4,600 working individuals with its plant closures.

The community of Noel suffered another crippling blow two years ago when the town's only bank, Arvest, part of a midwestern chain of banks owned by the Walmart Walton family, closed.  Today the town's "bank" is an Arvest ATM.

I feel extremely sad for my hometown, but I suspect that as long as the Elk River runs through it, there is always hope for a reincarnation of that joyous place along the riverbank that I remember so well - a place beyond the greedy grasp of the Tyson and Walton families.

Noel, Pa Rock has wonderful memories from a long, long time ago, and he wishes you well.