When he was just a child, Theotis Cason didn’t know that a broken gumball machine would lead to his life’s calling.
Cason said when he was just a 9-year-old, he and his brother went to the neighborhood store where his family got their breakfast sausage, just as the gumball machine broke and gumballs went everywhere.
The store owner offered to pay the boys to clean up the mess, which led to a job offers to them both. His brother wasn’t interested for very long and quit, but Cason started as a bottle boy and sweeping up.
But what interested the young Cason most was the store’s butcher shop.
“Eugene Mitchell, the head meat cutter, let me watch,” Cason said, and his career path was set.
Eventually, he got a job at Safeway cutting meat and in high school decided that’s what he wanted to do as a career.
“We made the best sausage in own, we’d butcher the hogs and deliver (the meat) to Safeway and Albertsons,” he said. “I worked every day before and after school.”
After that, the Urban League started an apprenticeship program, helping him learn his craft at Safeway, with his eventually taking over the meat market in his 20s.
In the following years, Cason got married and raised a family while working for various employers before opening his own shop, Cason’s Fine Meats, in the Kenton neighborhood for several years before opening his current location at Alberta Street and Martin Luther King Blvd.
Business has had its up and downs, Cason said, and many of his old customers have moved to lower rent districts because gentrification has raised rents in Northeast Portland.
But Cason prides himself in the products he offers, including more than 20 cuts of beef, from porterhouse steaks to rib eyes, T-bones and even ox tails; more than a dozen cuts of pork, including spare and baby back ribs, sausage, loin chops, pork steak and chitterlings; chicken selections from whole fryers to chicken apple sausage; and marinated items that include New York T-bone and top sirloin steaks, pork country style ribs and spare ribs, and a dozen offerings of smoked meat items; as well as meat packs with a variety of offerings.
But after 35 years of meat-cutting experience, quality is Theotis Cason’s main criterion for his products. His beef comes from a ranch in Colorado, pork from Carlton Farms and chicken from Draper Valley, all raised without added hormones, chemicals or additives.
Cason grew up in a big family in the Albina neighborhood, is a “proud graduate of Benson High.” His father, who was from Arkansas and his mother from Mississippi both experienced racism growing up but taught their children not to hate, but to learn tolerance.
“There’s good white folks and there’s bad white folks,” he said he learned, but more than anything at this point in his life, Cason, 68, wants to mentor young people, and has trained many young people his trade.
“My plan is to keep on going and teach the grandkids to cook, the get back to gardening and grow their own food,” he said. “I want them to be active and healthy.”
But Cason is a realist and understands that racism still abounds in this country and we still have a long way to go for everyone to love their neighbors.
In 2021, the year following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cason told KGW8 News that it’s time for the country to come together, just as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hoped for.
“That's what King was all about and we want this nation to be healed. We don't want this nation to be divided, any longer,” Cason said. “I grew up as a little boy running up and down the streets and watching it grow and watching it change. Some change was for the better. Some change, not so good.”
But Cason said he hopes that good change will come.
“Let's keep driving, let's go forward,” Cason said. “But let's pick the ones up that’s down. Let's give them a chance.”