Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To the memories of:
Thomas Alexander
immigrant, master tool and die maker
Cleveland, Ohio
Edward “E. B.” Stern
office boy/sales manager, McKee Glass/Thatcher Glass
Jeannette, Pennsylvania
Robert Alexander
salesman/vice president, Lancaster Glass, independent manufacturers’ representative
Lancaster, Ohio
Agnes “Bobby” Alexander
Fairfield Heritage Association, Fairfield County Hospital Twig 3, Miller for Congress co-chairwoman, League of Women Voters, poll worker
Lancaster, Ohio
“The nation-state at best is based on the social contract that is also an emotional contract, stamped by the charisma of the past.”
—SVETLANA BOYM, The Future of Nostalgia
PREFACE
The Cop
Eric Brown’s chin trembled. He stopped talking, because if he kept going he was going to cry, and, by God, he wasn’t going to cry. But then he did—a little—and then I found myself tearing up, too. So there we were, two middle-aged men, a cop and a reporter, sitting in a booth inside the Cherry Street Pub, clearing our throats, dabbing the backs of our fingers to our eyes, hoping nobody would notice.
By now I was used to people fighting the urge to cry. At first I was surprised: The Lancaster, Ohio, I remembered was not a teary sort of place. But in the months before Brown and I sat down together, I’d frequently had to pause to let people gather themselves.
A gnarly old union man was the first, when he told me a story about a toolbox his mentor in Anchor Hocking Plant 1 presented to him on the day the senior glassmaker retired. The older man had fashioned the toolbox out of steel, used it for over thirty years, and was now passing it on.
Most others choked up when they struggled to properly explain how much they loved their town. Getting the explanation right was important to them because they felt obliged to defend that love to an outsider—which was what I was now—in the face of so many seemingly obvious reasons to leave.
I didn’t expect it from Brown, though. Maybe because he was a cop. He said, “I felt I carried the weight of this community on my shoulders.” Ostensibly, he was referring to his efforts to rid the community of heroin—which, he was quick to point out, plagued not only Lancaster but every small city from the east side of the Appalachians through Indiana, though Lancaster had somehow gotten the reputation of being heroin heaven, a reputation Brown tended to blame on the reporters who popped down U.S. 33—“Heroin Highway,” as many called it—from Columbus on slow news days to do ninety-second stand-ups in front of police headquarters.
Brown had run the Fairfield-Hocking Major Crimes Unit. About 90 percent of “major crimes” in the two counties were somehow connected to drugs. And so, he continued, “when you look around our community, all the bad things that are happening seem to be centered around drugs. Man, that’s a lotta weight to carry.”
For years Brown carried that weight like a Trojan. Well-known by his fellow task force officers and administrators around the state of Ohio, he had earned a reputation for being smart and sophisticated. His peers selected him to go to Washington, D.C., to plead for funding. Yet he sensed he’d become cynical.
Cynicism wasn’t a natural fit for Brown. Born and raised in Lancaster, he made a name for himself as a star football player at Lancaster High, and he was still a solid guy with a palimpsest of golden-boy looks under the tempering that decades of policing had laid down. After trying big-time college ball, Brown returned to become a local policeman because he wanted to help protect his town. Coming from anybody else, that would sound corny. But for Brown, who could swear if he needed to, “Gosh!” and “My goodness!” were the natural defaults. Eventually, he married a Hajost, and so into a prominent local family. (As a teenager, I’d suffered through an unrequited crush on another Hajost girl.)
But it was these very hometown bonds that nurtured his cynicism. He’d come to the conclusion that he and his fellow cops could arrest drug users and dealers all day, every day, without making much of a dent in the problems that nagged Lancaster. He wasn’t unique in this. After forty years of drug warring, police all over the country were chanting “We can’t arrest ourselves out of this.” Unlike many of his fellow officers, though, Brown understood that the bad things that had so altered his town from the days of his childhood weren’t really grounded in drugs.
Some in Lancaster didn’t notice (or they chose not to notice or refused to accept) just how much the foundation of the town they once knew had crumbled. The few with money could leave to play golf at the Greenbrier, go to the beach on Hilton Head, winter-hibernate in Florida, and still see their town as charming and full of history and nice people. They didn’t have to venture across Memorial Drive and into the west side or cross the railroad tracks to the south side. Often, when people did talk about it, heroin and the “outsiders” who showed up to take advantage of social services provided conveniently simple explanations. Lancaster would go back to normal if only those two problems would go away.
Brown didn’t have the luxury of blinders. He saw too clearly that whatever was going on was so much bigger—and so much more mysterious—than anything he could possibly control. It had to do with the economy, of course—with the decimation of downtown, with the fact that, every morning, Route 33 was packed with cars making the hour commute to Columbus because there weren’t any good jobs in Lancaster. Sometimes it seemed like the only adult males left during the day were heavily tattooed and skinny, hoodies drawn up over their heads, riding little girls’ bikes with pink banana seats or walking down Main Street, tugging at their jeans and often accompanied by girlfriends dressed in Hello Kitty pajama pants who pushed strollers. There were so many girls dragging dirty flannel hems across the sidewalks that local cops called Lancaster “the pajama pants capital of Ohio.” What was he supposed to do about them? There was something in the culture, too—not just of Lancaster, but of America. The parks, a source of local pride, never seemed to have any kids in them. Who was he supposed to arrest for that? And yet, people expected him to do something.
“The people from here, roots here: I’m arresting them and dealing not only with them, but a distraught parent, distraught grandparents, sister, aunt, uncle.” They were not outsiders, but people he knew—people he grew up with, played football with, saw right then in Cherry Street Pub. They’d call him up and plead with him to be not just a cop but a counselor, a corrections officer, a judge.
“The weight of it, the pressure, wanting to make things right, wanting Lancaster…” And that’s when the chin started. He paused. “My mom and dad are still here. My son’s here. He’s raising his son here, him and his wife…”
People can become so frustrated, so discouraged, so mystified about what happened to the communities they love and about what they can do about them, they can’t help but cry. Even a c
op.
INTRODUCTION
The CEO
Sam Solomon drove his rental car through the west side, pulled into the rutted parking lot across the street from the offices on Pierce Avenue, opened his door, and heard air compressors whooshing, machines clanking, furnaces roaring. The factory adjacent to the offices groaned and heaved like an old man getting up out of his Barcalounger.
This was the heart and soul of EveryWare Global, a company with a name of pretend grandiosity that managed to be both redundant and generic. Solomon was about to start his first day as interim CEO.
He’d signed his new employment contract a few days before, on February 21, 2014: a Friday. That Sunday, he flew in from Chicago to EveryWare’s headquarters in Lancaster, Ohio, because he wanted to get an early Monday morning start. But upon arriving in Ohio, Solomon received a call waving him off: Don’t come in Monday. Officials from Monomoy Capital Partners, the New York private equity outfit that owned most of EveryWare’s stock, told Solomon that the CEO they’d just fired, John Sheppard, wasn’t quite fired yet. Certain documents and deals and signings were yet to be obtained.
The Monomoy guys were Manhattan finance pros for whom attention to detail is a creed. Solomon thought flubbing the transition to a new CEO was a strange bit of corporate statecraft.
Naturally, Solomon had done some due diligence before taking the job. He knew that EveryWare Global was the mash-up of two old, unrelated companies—the glassmaker Anchor Hocking and the flatware company Oneida, of Sherrill, New York.
Anchor Hocking was the much bigger operation. Founded in Lancaster in 1905, the Hocking Glass Company merged with New York-based Anchor Cap and Closure in 1937. By the late 1960s, it was the world’s leading manufacturer of glass tableware, the second-largest maker of glass containers—beer bottles, baby food jars, coffee jars, liquor bottles—and employed more than five thousand people in Lancaster, a town of about twenty-nine thousand back then. Now it employed about one thousand people in Lancaster and about four hundred in a second plant in Monaca, Pennsylvania. Nobody in town called it EveryWare Global. To do so felt vaguely like betrayal. Back when the PE firm Cerberus Capital Management owned Anchor Hocking and tried to meld it with a couple of other, smaller companies, Cerberus called it Global Home Products, another dumbass name imposed by interlopers, that nobody in Lancaster ever used. Lancaster always was slow to change. Into the 1970s, some old-timers stubbornly called it “the Hockin’,” partly out of loyalty to the Hocking River, which coursed nearby, and partly because the “Anchor” was new and alien. Now most people referred to it simply as “Anchor.”
EveryWare was “distressed,” a finance euphemism that evokes the delicacy of a blushing Victorian ingénue but could mean anything from “about to collapse” to “needs a shot of cash.” EveryWare was a public company, so Solomon read what he could before accepting the job. But the numbers in annual reports, prospectuses, and Securities and Exchange Commission filings don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes not anything like a real story.
Solomon was born in 1959, at North Carolina’s Warren County Hospital, into an extended family of black farmhands who worked tobacco fields. He’d come a very long way since then by using his brains. But as smart as he was, he did not know—and could not know—how intertwined Anchor Hocking and Lancaster had been for more than a century. And while Solomon was used to being the only black man in a roomful of whites, he didn’t know he was now the CEO of the biggest private employer in Fairfield County, and that Lancaster, at one time proudly, and now with chagrin, was reputed to be “the whitest town in America” and had a complicated racial history.
Finally, on the following Tuesday, Solomon was cleared to enter the offices and assume his duties. He could not have foreseen what awaited him as he walked across Pierce Avenue that morning toward the modest, low-slung one-story building. His new working home was a windowless, concrete cell of a room. Big photos of Anchor Hocking glasses and cake dishes and Oneida forks and knives didn’t help much, nor did the agitated group of people who greeted him.
John Stewart, a Monomoy managing director, stood at a whiteboard, where he juggled some numbers on a chart with a couple of consultants from Alvarez & Marsal—an international “professional services” firm that deploys a gaggle of fix-its and charges enormous sums of money to tell companies how to get out of whatever swamp they’ve steered themselves into.
Solomon was a corporate gypsy with brands like Procter & Gamble, Coleman, and Sears on his résumé. He knew his way around a chart. So, within minutes of entering the room, he understood that EveryWare was in deeper trouble than he’d expected. Solomon came to find challenges: He was a challenges guy. This, though, was a shit storm.
Solomon could have turned around and walked out. The mess he found wasn’t his mess. Besides, by any reasonable measure, he was rich. He could afford to go back to Illinois and wait for the inevitable—and probably better—next job offer.
But Anchor Hocking was an old brand, and Solomon had an affinity for old brands. An ambition to become the world’s greatest brand manager drove him through Duke University’s business school. The fact that anybody still recognized the anchor at the bottom of an Anchor Hocking measuring cup meant that generations of people had laid down geological layers of value. Anchor Hocking had survived two world wars, a depression, and a recession just short of another depression. Solomon wasn’t sentimental about companies, and especially not about Anchor Hocking: His own corporate counsel would later call him Machiavellian, and would mean it as a compliment. Anchor Hocking appealed to his business aesthetic.
Flash was easy. No matter how useless a product, any bozo could make it flashy and fast and sexy, so that some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley would give you millions. It would trend on Twitter. And a year later—maybe two—when the product tanked? You’d still be rich. How hard could it really be to sell the Apple Watch? But a measuring cup? A pie dish? As a marketing guy, Solomon believed he could take a boring old industrial company, one still imbued with brand value, and get consumers, as well as businesses like restaurants and cruise ships and hotels, to flock to it again. If he could pull that off, he’d be a hero. Much more than a company depended on his success.
Solomon wasn’t responsible for or to Lancaster. He was responsible to shareholders. At the moment, the majority shareholder was Monomoy Capital Partners. But as was true in a hundred other towns across the nation, Lancaster was a web of a community. Like it or not, the anchor thread in Lancaster was Anchor Hocking.
ONE
Glass House
December 2014
Brian Gossett worked the late shift, running an H-28 job: football-size vases, about the most difficult ware he made. A 2,400-degree lava-like ribbon of glass flowed out of Tank 3, a refractory furnace, and down a steel sluice to a pair of opposing automated blades shaped like prone V’s. The two V’s sliced together to pinch off a gob of glass from the ribbon. The gob dropped into a mold. Brian wore heat-resistant overalls, steel-toed boots, safety glasses over his own retro horn-rims, earplugs, and ear cups over the earplugs. Even with the hearing protection, his head filled with the hiss of air compressors and the rhythmic clanging rotation of the H-28 as it presented one mold after another to the gob feeder. Ka-chunk plop, ka-chunk plop, ka-chunk plop, each mold closed. A plunger forced the gob against the sides. Air blew into the mold so the glass was both pressed and blown. The combination made it look more polished than, say, a pressed-glass baking dish. Then the molds opened, each in its turn, to regurgitate the still-glowing ware onto a steel conveyor line.
Brian walked along a narrow platform that ringed the machine at about a foot off the concrete floor. Operators like Brian prepared new molds, reached into the moving merry-go-round, grabbed a mold from its spindle, and replaced it with the fresh one. They tried to do all this quickly, without losing a finger or a hand or burning an arm. The glass in a mold was about 1,600 degrees, and the H-28 wouldn’t stop unless Brian fumbled and took too much
time, walked too far around that platform, and hit an emergency body gate.
Stopping an H-28 by hitting a body gate was not a trivial matter. It meant you’d screwed up and that everybody would know it. And just because the machine stopped didn’t mean the glass would. It kept flowing down the sluice, then diverted into the basement. Restarting the machine was a hassle, because some of the ware coming out of the molds for the first few rotations was sure to be flawed. Producing good ware required constant temperature and timing, along with exact gob weight, so if you had your ware running well, an emergency stop was the last thing you wanted.
Brian was the fourth generation of his family to work at Anchor Hocking. He was twenty-six years old. Some guys had a Flint Glass journeyman card by twenty-six, but Brian didn’t. Technically, he was an apprentice, but there really wasn’t much of an apprenticeship program—not anymore. An older man named Brant had taken Brian under his wing and helped out now and then, but Brian operated the H-28 on his own most of the time.
Like most operators, Brian started as a floor boy, the worker ant of a glass plant. Armed with a custom-made steel rake, a shovel, and a broom, floor boys collected all the broken ware that accumulated under machines during the course of a shift. They scouted for spilled fluids. They helped clean the machines. Brian hadn’t been a floor boy for long when he was called to help scrape a burned man’s skin from a machine.
On his first day in the plant, Brian was awed by what he saw. Giant refractory-brick-lined furnace tanks measuring roughly forty feet long by twenty feet wide and filled to a depth of about four feet with molten glass blazed a story above the machine shops at the head of the hot end. Each tank fed several shops. Each shop consisted of a machine and operators. Shop 3-3—Tank 3, Shop 3—could be an H-28 making a tumbler. Shop 1-5—Tank 1, Shop 5—might be a press to make a pie dish. In just twenty-four hours, more than 170 tons of glass could flow out of one tank. The plant could produce more than 600,000 pieces of ware every day.
Glass House Page 1