THE MAKING OF : A Sausage Maker

Surrounded by corrugated aluminum buildings and barbed wire, the setting of the North Hollywood sausage factory is a far cry from the Alpine foothills of northwestern Austria where Fredrick Thaller got his start as a master sausage maker.

But inside the factory’s cement walls, Thaller and his partner Willy Dieng begin at 5 a.m., six days a week, to fashion such ethnic specialties as liver sausages and Black Forest ham--many from secret recipes Thaller picked up during his extensive training in Austria and Germany.

It took Thaller, 56, eight years of formal training to become an accomplished sausage maker, nearly the 10 years required to become a brain surgeon.

Long before he opened the Alpena factory in the 5300 block of Craner Avenue in 1968, Thaller was helping his mother run the family meat and sausage business in Austria while his father fought in World War II. That was back in the days when they prepared meats in brick smokehouses over open fires laden with hickory or birch chips, he said.

Then, when he was 14, Thaller became an apprentice to a man he calls “Herr Chef,” rising at 4 a.m. for three years to learn “it all, from the kill to the commerce side” of making such products as Polish sausages and salami, he says.

He then roved Austria and Germany for years, learning the closely guarded recipes for regional specialties from his various employers. But he still had to pass four days of exams before the Austrian government certified him a master sausage maker.

The whole time, he secretly wished he was a jazz musician, an ambition that has waned in the face of his relative lack of talent, he said Friday as he conducted a tour past enormous freezers and gleaming metal sausage stuffers, steamers and boilers. One reason he came to the United States, he said, was because he enjoyed American music.

“There was no choice, though; back then you learned the family trade,” he said, pointing out that unlike butchers in Austria and Germany, who learn only to kill livestock and section the meat, sausage makers are required also to learn to cure, smoke and make sausages out of meat, and must train in business skills.

Thaller is obviously proud of mastering the traditional craft. He boasts that celebrities, such as the late Orson Welles, have patronized his retail stores in Burbank and North Hollywood.

And above the entryway to the factory he had a mural painted, copied from a 17th-Century illustration, depicting an old-fashioned sausage shop. Thaller translated the German saying on the mural: “You all who come here who can’t stay away from meat, if you show me some cash I’ll give you a good deal.”