Arroyo July 2018

A CUT
ABOVE
Schreiner’s Fine Sausages in Glendale has
been crafting fresh meats for 60 years.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY MICHAEL CERVIN
My recollections of walking into Schreiner’s Fine Sausages in Glendale as
a young boy are still crystal clear. A silver-haired woman with a German
accent standing behind an impressive display case of meats and cheeses
would come over to hand me a slice of bologna wrapped in white paper. That
happened every time I went with my mom to Schreiner’s, and that is exactly why I
accompanied her on Saturday morning shopping trips. Free meat.
The gray-haired woman was Maria Schreiner, originally from Stuttgart, Germany.
She married Walter Schreiner and, while living in New York City, they started
making sausages. “Walter was from New York, though he pretended he was from
Germany,” Walter’s grandson Wally Schreiner, the shop’s current owner, tells me
as I visit my childhood haunt on a warm spring day. Walter and Maria came out
from the East Coast in 1952 and originally settled at 4th Street and Broadway in
downtown Los Angeles. Why then did they move to what was then a desolate area in
the northern reaches of Glendale? “Probably cheap property,” Wally surmises. That,
and there was a small German-American community already established there. The
reasons may be irrelevant. What are important are the sausages: bratwurst, frankfurters,
Polish, bangers, Italian, Swedish potato and breakfast sausages, among a slew of
other types of meats stuffed into a casing. “Maria and Walter were totally hands-on,”
Wally says. “Sausage-making is in our blood.”
–continued on page 30
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