Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607) Read online

  No one, it seemed, was minding the back room of this new global store.

  My first memory: Riding with an older sister to pick up my mom from work at Grimes, the aircraft-lighting factory in Urbana, Ohio. Mom worked the graveyard shift when the economy was good. When it wasn’t, she waitressed—badly, she said—and watched other people’s kids. At Grimes, she sat with other women at long tables in a cavernous, dimly lit rooms, tucked into a row of Quonset huts. They soldered strobe lights for airplanes. When she got home, she used to pay me a quarter to rub her throbbing neck.

  I remember pointing to airplanes passing by overhead and saying to my friends, “See that light? My mom made that.” So what if the lights Mom soldered were fixed to military transport planes, not those passenger jets I pointed out. My mom’s handiwork was stellar. You could see it up there, right near the stars.

  The Vietnam War ended, and it would be a long economic slog in Urbana before the aircraft lighting workers benefited from a thirteen-million-dollar contract to make searchlights for Black Hawk helicopters, in 2012, some fifteen years after the heirs of inventor Warren “Old Man” Grimes cashed out. Honeywell International now runs Urbana’s aerospace lighting operations in modern facilities staffed by about half the number of assembly workers it once employed. The company that used to be the town’s sugar daddy now employs about 650, down from 1,300 at its peak, with much of the production accomplished via circuit cards and high-tech machinery rather then hand labor. One of my high-school buddies helps manage the outsourced engineers—via video teleconferencing—in Bangalore, India, where they’re paid one quarter of what their American counterparts earn.

  Throughout my childhood, my dad nursed his psychological wounds from World War II in VFW and American Legion halls. He was a housepainter by trade, but in my shame, I saw him as the serially unemployed town drunk. He didn’t attend my band concerts or my softball games or even my high-school graduation—lapses that seem almost criminal to me now that I have kids. But that’s the way it was, and since I didn’t know any different, it didn’t keep me awake at night. The best thing he provided was access to a doting grandmother: his mom, who lived next door, taught me to read when I was four, and kept a roof over our heads (she owned our house).

  We weren’t victims of globalization. But, like the blue-collar folks I interviewed in Bassett and Galax who followed their parents and grandparents to the assembly lines, we didn’t have a lot of options beyond high school. I managed to get to college thanks to the nudging of wonderful teachers and friends (and friends’ parents), federally funded Pell Grants, work-study jobs, and scholarships. My older brother edged his way into the middle class through grit and brains. A high-school dropout with moderate epilepsy, he progressed through a series of car-safety jobs until he landed at a major automotive research-and-development center in Raymond, Ohio, where he designs crash-test fixtures. By the time I graduated from college and got my first newspaper job, he was making more than twice my salary.

  A few years back, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia invited him to share the details of his work. My brother, with his GED and a few community college courses under his belt, was summoned to Mr. Jefferson’s University to tell those PhDs what he’d put together by way of experience and elbow grease. Not long ago his company gave him a bonus for inventing a new process that saved it thousands of dollars. He’s been lucky to get to use his innate intelligence despite his lack of a formal degree. “It’s no big deal,” he tells me when I brag about his ability to make or fix not just cars but anything. “Mostly it’s just common sense.”

  The moment I heard there was a company owner who had actually taken on big business and the People’s Republic of China, I knew I had to find out who John Bassett was. He had not only kept his small factory going but somehow managed to turn it into the largest wooden-bedroom-furniture factory in America.

  I got on the highway to Galax to meet the Southern patriarch, then seventy-four, at his Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. I’d already mapped out his insanely twisted family tree at the Virginia Room of the Roanoke City Library, already called around to get the real scoop about his long-simmering family feud. I’d already interviewed several Henry County textile and furniture workers who were laid off not long after Taiwanese managers showed up to take pictures of the Virginia assembly lines so they could copy them back home.

  One woman described her mom hobbling home from work, her knees shot from decades of standing on concrete floors, and wondering aloud, “What were all them little people doing at work today?”

  I already knew that JBIII (as I began to refer to him) was grooming his middle-aged sons, Wyatt and Doug, to take over. Both had returned home after business school to help save the family company. I’d heard, too, that he’d cut their salaries when the recession hit rather than lay off more line workers, and he personally stopped pulling a paycheck during the leanest years.

  One rainy afternoon, a furniture-store owner in nearby Collinsville described for me how globalization had taken a 70 percent bite out of his business, a store that used to be frequented by people who worked in the Henry County textile and furniture plants. Delano Thomasson’s father had worked down the road from Bassett at Stanley Furniture, in Stanleytown, and his mother down another road at Fieldcrest, a sprawling textile plant started by Chicago-based Marshall Field’s—and now the site of a weekly community food bank. (In the ladies’ room of the Fieldale Café, a meat-and-three diner frequented by retirees, a framed photograph proudly displays what put this town on the map: a stack of Fieldcrest towels.)

  Bassett Furniture was no longer made in Bassett, Delano explained in his Southern drawl as rain plinked into metal buckets set down to protect the sofas and bedroom suites (pronounced “suits” in Southern furniture lingo). “With his determination, John Bassett probably would have kept some of Bassett Furniture factories going if he could’ve kept the company.”

  I should have made up a shorthand for that statement the first time I heard it. I’ve interviewed scores of people since then who’ve said essentially the same thing.

  Delano knew all about JBIII’s covert mission to Dalian, China, and he had his own version of the evil-brother-in-law yarn—the story of the man who’d elbowed JBIII out of the CEO job at Bassett Furniture, the company John Bassett III had been reared to run. But would any of the Bassetts open up to me about those things? Would JBIII reveal what it felt like to be the family black sheep with a dresser-size chip on his shoulder? Would he tell me the real story of how he’d fought the Chinese? If he wouldn’t, would the people who grew up under the thumb of the family that ran the company town be bold enough to spill the beans?

  “You don’t even realize what kind of spiderweb you’ve got going,” said Bassett Furniture’s longtime corporate pilot, a man who worked for years under John Bassett’s brother-in-law and nemesis, Bob Spilman. “War and Peace will seem like a ten-cent novel compared to your spiderweb. But lucky for you, the scorpion is already dead,” he added, referring to Spilman, the Bassett CEO who could be equally brilliant and biting.

  JBIII comes from an imposing family of multimillionaires whose ancestors signed the Magna Carta and who maintain a persistent but unspoken code that, no matter what, one should always keep the family secrets where they belong: in the family closet. What secrets would he tell me, the daughter of a former factory worker?

  I relate better to people like Octavia Witcher, a fifty-five-year-old displaced Stanley Furniture worker who gave me her elderly mother’s phone number as a contact, because her own phone was about to be turned off. And to people like divorced former Tultex worker Mary Redd, who described trying to raise her fourteen-year-old daughter alone, working the only job she could find—as a thirty-hour-a-week receptionist, with no benefits. When she told me that, I recalled receiving full financial aid for college because my mom, widowed by that time, made just eight thousand dollars a year test-driving cars for a Honda subcontractor.

  When M
ary recounted running into the former Tultex CEO at a party she was helping cater for Martinsville’s elite, what she said to him literally made me gasp: “If Tultex were to open back up today and the only way I could get there would be to crawl on my belly like a snake, I would do it.”

  John Bassett grew up with chauffeurs, vacation homes, and prep schools. I was the longshot and the underdog, but fortunately for me, John Bassett was too, whether he was ready to admit it to a reporter or not.

  With any luck at all, he would help me explain this circuitous piece of American history, from its hardwood forests to its executive boardrooms; from handsaws and planing tools to smartphones and Skype; from the oak logs that sailed from the port of Norfolk, Virginia, to Asia and then returned, months later, in the form of dressers and beds.

  2

  The Original Outsourcer

  Someday I’ll buy and sell you.

  —J.D. BASSETT SR. TO HIS FATHER, JOHN HENRY BASSETT

  To understand JBIII, you have to understand where he comes from, a place where everywhere he looked, he saw his name: on the WELCOME TO BASSETT sign, the bank, the library, the school, and the myriad company smokestacks that rose high above the town. Born into a family of brash, industrious people who weren’t afraid of hard work—as long as their pockets were getting lined—he was named for his grandfather John David Bassett Sr., or J.D., as the town’s founder and patriarch was known. If you worked for him, and most people did, you called him “Mr. J.D.”

  But before there was a company called Bassett, there was a place called Bassett, and before it was called that, it was just red clay and foothills, a nowhere spot from a time when people named things for exactly what they were.

  Horsepasture is where this story begins.

  To the families who lived in Horsepasture, the Smith River dominated everything. It floated tobacco to market on bateaux. Its floods made soil-enriching silt, grist for fertile bottomland, and bumper crops of corn and tobacco. With its flat, low, and deceptively slow current, it would become one of Virginia’s best trout-fishing streams. It froze in winter, gave cooling relief in summer, and by and by, it unleashed its might.

  And on the day of JBIII’s birth, the Smith River nearly ruined everything.

  John Bassett III was born during the epic flood of 1937. Town Creek, from the county to the north, had spilled over its banks, and the Smith soon followed suit. It had been a good summer. The future Yankees’ star Phil Rizzuto had just pounded out eighty-eight hits and turned nearly as many double plays, leading his minor-league team, the Bassett Furnituremakers, to the Bi-State League title. People were feeling good about the bustling little company town, and JBIII’s grandfather Mr. J.D. felt especially good. He liked to buy ice cream and peanuts for kids at baseball games, and he could afford to, with six humming factories that sent freight cars laden with Bassett furniture all over the country.

  Then, overnight, everything changed. After several hours of rain, Mr. J.D. saw the river rushing. His chauffeur ran him from one end of town to the other while he barked orders and warned people to seek higher ground. In the worst flood to hit in a century, the Smith steeped the railroad tracks and made kindling out of the town’s swinging suspension bridges, which were owned by Bassett Furniture, like most everything else.

  Water flowed through the first-floor windows of the town’s Riverside Hotel. Drenched phone lines and highways were rendered useless. The people who worked in the Bassett Furniture plants climbed the hills and watched everything that wasn’t fastened down float away, even the cows.

  It was a dramatic backdrop for the entrance of the third John Bassett, a flood of near biblical proportions that had people wondering, decades later, if it prophesied his exit from the town. His parents already had three girls, and the entire family had been praying for a boy. An heir. Someone who would one day run the growing furniture dynasty.

  Days before John Bassett III was due to enter the world, a different chauffeur had driven his mother sixty miles south to a hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Labor had come so swiftly with her last baby that the girl had been born at home. With this birth, the parents wanted to be cautious, especially with the river rising.

  The flood was so bad that the Red Cross pitched tents on the hills. People sat atop railroad cars to inspect the rising waters as silt poured into their company-owned homes. Yet another Bassett family chauffeur was dispatched to pick up Mr. J.D.’s son, John D. Bassett Jr.—or Mr. Doug, as he was known—so he could check on the drenched factories while his wife was away giving birth. Despite the devastation—it took the factory equipment days to dry out—Mr. J.D. could at least take some comfort in the arrival of a third-generation heir.

  Along with Mr. J.D., the Smith River ruled Bassett, Virginia, or at least the ten-mile stretch of it that bisected the smoky little unincorporated town. In a grainy photograph of the flood, four young men standing in knee-deep water pose for the camera, two of them clad in bib overalls, the typical factory worker’s uniform. The three white men in the picture are playful, clearly enjoying the rare day off. The lone black man is standing slightly apart, straight as a pine, his arms folded and one hand clutching a hat. Very likely he was descended from Henry County slaves. Most black people there were.

  “Race is entwined with everything down there,” a Roanoke historian and race scholar warned me repeatedly as I set out to understand the Henry County of JBIII’s youth.

  “You’ll run up against some raw truths,” said the Virginia folklorist Joe Wilson, named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress for his study of Appalachian history and culture. Wilson reminded me that relationships between the races, and the complexities of one dominating the other, have been an evolving part of American history for four centuries and counting.

  In a county known for a tobacco industry propped up by nearly five thousand slaves—it was said you could walk the thirty miles from Danville to Martinsville and never leave plantation land owned by the Samuel Hairston family—there are 486 Hairston descendants currently listed in the Martinsville–Henry County phone book, and nearly all are black. (The white Hairstons pronounce the name “Haawr-ston,” Gladys Hairston, a young African American, told me, chuckling.)

  Slavery may have been long past by the time the furniture makers hit the scene, but its Jim Crow legacy was very much intact. The plantation mind-set was palpable in the factories and in the homes of the well-to-do, and it was key in the development of Bassett Furniture.

  My friend Joel, the furniture retailer, has a copy of his family’s land grant framed on the wall of his country home in Rocky Mount; next to it is the last will and testament of the home’s original owner designating which family member would inherit which slaves. In Joel’s backyard, there’s a family cemetery with granite headstones. At the edge of the property sits a cemetery for the family’s slaves, marked by periwinkle and fieldstones.

  Henry County lies just over the next ridge. It’s named for the Revolutionary War orator Patrick Henry, Virginia’s first governor after the country won its independence and the owner of Henry County’s Leatherwood, a ten-thousand-acre tobacco plantation flanked by the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and the North Carolina foothills to the south. The region was settled by frontier folk and wealthy planters who were sent west to nab land, much of it courtesy of grants from King George III. The red-clay soil was perfect for tobacco growing, especially if one owned slaves to work the labor-intensive crop.

  Topography drove demographics; tobacco stopped at the foot of the mountains, so that’s largely where black migration stopped, too. An hour away, in mountainous Roanoke, the much younger city where I live, today’s black population is 28 percent. But in the Henry County seat of Martinsville, African Americans make up nearly half the population.

  When the great migration drove six million Southern blacks to work in cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, many in Virginia’s Piedmont chose not to leave home. Thanks to people like the Bassetts, there was plenty of
work to be had in mill towns across the South. Tobacco, textile, and furniture plants in the Virginia and North Carolina Piedmont helped the descendants of slaves avoid the hopelessness of the sharecropping system embedded farther South. Then, as now, there were few unions to protect them in these Southern right-to-work states, but at least they finally had paying jobs.

  Long before he built his empire, J.D. Bassett knew his fortunes rested outside the family farm, which had to be cultivated by hired help or by the owners’ hands. He was born in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended, descended from a long line of prominent Bassetts. William Bassett sailed from the Isle of Wight aboard the Fortune in 1621, built one of the original forts at Jamestown, and filled it with books he’d carted from his English home. His descendants included Revolutionary War captains and westward pioneers.

  The first Bassett to stake a claim in Henry County was Nathaniel Bassett, a Revolutionary War captain who’d had the good luck to be deeded a 791-acre land grant from King George III in 1773. That property begat more wealth and property, and his son, Burwell, bought land from war hero Colonel George Hairston, Burwell’s wife’s uncle, a member of the county’s most prominent family, and the largest slaveholder in Virginia, which was the largest slaveholding state in the Union.

  In the official family narrative, the furniture founder claimed his father, John Henry Bassett, owned eighty-eight slaves before the war. He “had lived the life of Reilly just like the other young gentlemen of his time, visiting around among the neighbors,” J.D. told an interviewer in 1939. But 1860 census records show that was not the case; Alexander Bassett, Nathaniel’s grandson and John Henry’s father, was a tobacco farmer with real estate and personal property valued at $14,300, but he had only twenty slaves, ages six months to thirty-nine years.

  “Even the myth of how many slaves they had wasn’t right!” the historian John Kern ranted, warning me to check and double-check everything I got from the family and corporate archives.