Sight seen

Update 1/7/2020 11:07 pm CST - in the Comments below, Stanley mentioned that he had once met Little Oscar.  I admit I was not familiar with the character - it must have been a promotion that was before my time (or maybe I've just forgotten it).  But I subsequently ran across an obituary of one of the men who played the Little Oscar character.  I've added, at the bottom of the post, a photo with several of the Little Oscars in it.

Update 1/6/2020 8:57 pm CST - I see I managed to misspell "Mayer" consistently throughout the post, despite having it written out for me in the photo below.  I've corrected all of them, I think.
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This is what was waiting for me outside the entrance to the grocery store on Saturday morning:

I've seen the Wienermobile tooling along the local interstates a few times over the years but had never seen it close up and at rest before. I had assumed there was only one and it was just a Chicago thing, but the Oscar Mayer website indicates there is a fleet of them and they drive all over the country.

Oscar Mayer was, along with Swift, Armour, and perhaps others, a big player in Chicago's meat packing industry.  The industry was one of the drivers for the growth of the city during the 19th and into the 20th century.  The spread of railroads westward allowed beef, pork and other meat producers (i.e. ranchers and farmers) to ship their livestock to Chicago.  Chicago's stockyard operation, the Union Stock Yards, so-called because various railroads collaborated to create a unified operation, was on the South Side of Chicago, where the animals were slaughtered, butchered, packed and sold to companies like Oscar Mayer who turned the meat into consumer and other products.

Carl Sandburg wrote a poem in which he referred to Chicago as "hog butcher for the world."   I am told that tourists could tour the stockyards, but that children weren't allowed to visit the area where the lambs were slaughtered.  My wife Therese, who is a South Sider herself, believes that her father may have worked in the stockyards as a young man; she definitely had other male relatives who worked in the yards.  These were immigrants or the generation after the immigrants - in her family's case, German and Slovak immigrants.  These were among the immigrants who filled Catholic churches during this period, which in retrospect may have been the time when Chicago peaked.  The men worked in the stockyards or the packing operations, the moms worked in retail shops or offices, or stayed home with kids.  The parents saved nickels and dimes and sent their kids to parish schools, and also sent some of them on to colleges like Loyola and DePaul.

By the time I came to Chicago in the fall of 1979, I believe the stockyards already were gone.  There is still a South Side neighborhood called Back of the Yards.

My first job out of college was doing back-office computer work for a commodities trading firm that bought and sold futures contracts in the open-outcry trading pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ("the Merc", today known as CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade, as well as other exchanges in New York, London and elsewhere.  The meat contracts, for delivery of live hogs, live cattle, and a number of other livestock and meat products, were traded at the Merc - I believe they still are today.  I found a website that provides product details for the Lean Hogs which are traded:

Hogs are ready for slaughter at about 254 pounds, producing a dressed carcass weight of around 190 pounds and an average 88.6 pounds of lean meat. The lean meat consists of 21% ham, 20% loin, 14% belly, 3% spareribs, 7% Boston butt roast and blade steaks, and 10% picnic, with the remaining 25% going into jowl, lean trim, fat, miscellaneous cuts, and trimmings. 

Enough about the meat: what I found most interesting this morning was the vehicle itself.  The body below the passenger section looked to me like it might be an old Cadillac design or something similar.  But this information on a sign posted near the Wienermobile seems to indicate that it's a unique design.

I'd give the copy writers a B+ for funning and punning.

When I saw the vehicle, I had hoped that giving away free hot dogs would be part of the promotion, but alas, the only things available where coloring books for the kids.  Well, to be honest, I wasn't hoping too much for a free hot dog; despite their famous catchy jingle, I'm not actually a huge fan of Oscar Mayer hot dogs.   I've become a bit of a hot dog snob.  There are many hot dog stands in Chicago, but they don't sell Oscar Mayer, Ekrich or any of the mass-produced cheap super market brands.  They sell Vienna Beef hot dogs.  These are 100% beef (albeit not kosher).  I also buy Hebrew National, whose roots are in New York and whose product also is 100% beef.  I pay $5-$6 per package (when not on sale), which is a bit steep, but worth it.  We did buy Oscar Mayer brand hot dogs for the kids when they were younger, but now they've become hot dog snobs, too.

Your intrepid reporter, a self-confessed hot dog snob

Update: A photo of several Little Oscars: