COLUMBUS -- Thanksgiving was still more than a week away, but the holiday rush was in full swing Monday at Rhodes Bake-N-Serv on Highway 16.

Rhodes Bake-N-Serve, one of only two Rhodes plants in the United States (the other is in Caldwell, Idaho), was making dinner rolls Monday.

Small, round lumps of white dough that will grace holiday tables across the country as the familiar 1-1/3 ounce dinner rolls floated by at the rate of 12,000 pounds of dough per hour, a total of roughly 144,000 rolls per hour.

The factory floor -- an assortment of polished steel machines -- smelled of flour and uncooked dough. A thin white film of flour coated almost everything, from portions of the floor to a mobile blue latter.

"We basically do the same thing a house wife would do to make her dough," said factory manager Darry Campbell. "Where a normal wife would make maybe five pounds of dough in a batch, we make 550 pounds." ...

... Among the people working in shifts 24 hours a day, six days a week to get the dinner rolls, many are work-study workers, pupils from the Wisconsin Academy, a Seventh-Day Adventist-run school located across State Highway 16 from the plant. The pairing of Rhode's factories with Seventh-Day Adventist educational institutions is nothing new. According to the company's Web site, company founder Herb Rhodes -- himself a Seventh-Day Adventist -- saw the pairing as a natural way to increase the pool of ready workers when he founded the company in 1958.