THE FAYETTEVILLE OBSERVER, Thursday, April 7, 1983

Country-Style Cured Ham Is Family Affair

By Tom Lawton

GOLDSBORO - Back in the '40s and '50s, before Wayne Cold Storage became the Wayco Corporation, curing ham was just a sideline. The company's main business was renting out freezer lockers.

But when more and more people started buying their own freezers, the company's sideline became more and more important. In 1960, 14 years after the company was founded, it changed its name, and in 1953 it changed its principal product. Cured ham has been the name of the game ever since.

"We started curing on the side and people liked it and it grew," says Tony Worrell, who became Wayco's president-treasurer when his father, Waitus Worrell, passed away in 1978. One of the company's founders back in 1946, Waitus Worrell became plant manager in 1956 and bought the company in 1963. Worrell's mother, Marjorie D. Worrell, is still vice president and secretary of the board of directors.

Wayco makes country cured hams, the richly salty kind, and they try to do it just the way the old timers used to.

Soon after they arrive at Wayco, freshly slaughtered hams are cut, trimmed and then rolled and rubbed with a curing mix - salt, sugar and what Worrell smilingly calls "secret ingredients." Worrell remembers the days when his father used to chase everybody out of the room so he could mix up a batch of curing mix. The formula's nothing too special, he says, "just something that's been worked on for a while," and he'd rather not have it public knowledge.

After a short stay in a refrigerated curing room, the hams are rubbed once again with the curing mix, and taken back to the curing room where they'll stay for a total of about 40 to 45 days. By that time, the salt should be absorbed throughout the ham.

Then the hams are washed, placed in nets and hung for about 15 days in a drying room. The Department of Agriculture says hams must lose a minimum of 17 percent of their weight during the curing process before they can legally advertised as "country hams" - Worrell says his hams will lose as much as 25 percent of their original weight, and most of that weight loss takes place in the drying room.

The final step in the curing process is the aging room, where the air is an aromatic 80 degrees year round. The longer the ham hangs here, the stronger the flavor. Old Waynesboro Hams, which Wayco wholesales to food service chains, grocery stores and restaurants, age for at least 30 days. The entire curing process for Old Waynesboro Hams takes 85 to 90 days.

Old Southern Wayco Hams, on the other hand, spend five days in a smoke room, then another four to seven months in the aging room, and are sold by mail to those who like their hams high caliber. Worrell says the curing process for these hams is six to nine months long.

Wayco lets no part of the fresh hams they receive go to waste. The trimmings are packaged and sold as fatback or "country pork side meat." Other hams are cooked and sliced after curing, and sold in smaller packages. In the fall, they cure, smoke and cook turkeys as well.

But the hams are the main event. Worrell leafs through a scrapbook of orders and complimentary letters from famous people. "The delicious ham which you sent the president and me brought so much pleasure to us during the Christmas season," wrote Mamie Eisenhower on December 31, 1955. There are also letters from actor James Arness, former N.C. governor Luther Hodges, a former Air Force chief of staff and a former speaker of the South Carolina legislature.

Adorning a corner of the office are honors from the company's peers in the American Association of Meat Packers, which has sponsored cured meat competitions for 42 years. In 1955 Wayne Cold Storage won first price for the third year in a row, and returned a huge trophy topped with a metal pig.

"We quit entering a few years later and I'm not really sure why," says Worrell, "but I started again back in '78 and we've done pretty well." Wayco's hams have won grand champion, reserve grand champion or champion awards each year since.

Worrell doesn't want to give out just how many hams Wayco cures and sells in any given time; he says the competition would be too interested. "A lot," he says with a smile. "I'm happy."