Both Jason and Jessica were taken to county jail. Jessica tried to smuggle some dope into jail inside a body cavity, so she was slapped with a conveyance charge.
The detective told Jason that if he really could help, he might get only two years in prison and rehab. He’d probably lose the Mustang, and the cash police found inside his house, but he could keep the SUV—but only if the police successfully dismantled a significant dope-sales operation.
They’d already been frustrated the day Jason was arrested. They found nothing but $8,000 in cash inside the Country Club Road house. “I’m saying when I do the lick [arrest], I better get keys,” Jason’s would-be handler told him, meaning kilos.
If Jason wanted an easy ride, he’d have to perform. “If you can help yourself, then that’s what’s gonna happen,” a detective told Jason. “It’s just like a business.”
* * *
Anchor Hocking was in the middle of an eleven-day shutdown when Jason was busted. This time, though, the shutdown was good news. The annual July 4 washout, when the factory closed for a cleaning, had been extended to allow for the most comprehensive cleanse and maintenance schedule in nearly fifteen years. Big projects would go unrepaired—there wasn’t enough cash or time—but a list of nearly four hundred smaller projects had been compiled.
Equipment would be steam-washed, the plant floor cleaned, mechanical systems checked for worn parts. Anchor Hocking was “trying to put the baby back together,” Solomon said. No doubt there would be unforeseen glitches when the process was complete and Plant 1 started back up. That was to be expected. But after those were worked out, Solomon looked forward to a long period of smooth operations and high efficiency—something he’d not experienced in the eighteen months since he arrived.
One hope was that the work inside the plant might improve quality. Both longtime workers and operations managers had been complaining about quality for a while. Line operators blamed the old machinery.
“I see it firsthand,” Mike Shook said. “They pull product out of inventory to bring it into the decorating department to have it silk-screened” with images for customers, such as a brewer’s logo. “You should see some of the crap that supposedly is classified as good product, that they can’t even decorate. It’s supposed to be round, and they look like eggs. It’s sad.”
Solomon knew there had been quality problems in the past, but he didn’t seem to be aware of the depth of the issue, nor that it remained. He insisted the ware placed in inventory was good, though he was disappointed that only about 70 percent of what came off the lines passed inspection. The rest was tossed for cullet. Shook said he brought such problems to the attention of the next level of management, the plant manager. “I said, ‘Hey, help me out here, man. These guys are dying down there. They have a standard. We quoted this thing with a cost of so much to screen-print, but we’re throwing 20 percent away because it won’t even fit on the machine.’”
The rest of the glass industry was not waiting for Anchor Hocking to clean up its house. Libbey announced a $30 million investment in a new “plant within a plant” in Shreveport, Louisiana. The new equipment would produce ware like wineglasses with long stems and a flat base. The “Perfect Signature” ware would be made using a proprietary glass formula created by Libbey’s R&D.
Anchor Hocking couldn’t compete in stemware, because Plant 1 had been so abused over the years. Anchor had once made it—Anchor Hocking once made scores of items it no longer made—but now wineglasses were simply too delicate for Lancaster, and EveryWare didn’t have the money to make an investment like Libbey had. Instead, EveryWare distributed imported stemware made by Stölzle, a German company.
Solomon argued that Libbey’s financial results proved that his strategy of focusing on what Anchor was good at making—“heavy” glass like bakeware—was the right one. Libbey’s sales had risen during the Anchor Hocking shutdown of the previous summer, with some of Anchor’s customers migrating to Libbey. But since then, Anchor was showing signs of winning a few of them back, and Libbey’s sales were being hit. Second-quarter net sales at Libbey fell by more than 4 percent. Solomon was convinced that the decline was at least partly attributable to Anchor’s halting rejuvenation.
But Anchor remained vulnerable because of its reliance on manufacturing ware for World Kitchen. World Kitchen–branded items like Pyrex constituted such a large percentage of Anchor Hocking’s overall production that Plant 1 earned more money producing World Kitchen ware than it did by making its own. But World Kitchen was not necessarily any more stable than EveryWare had been, because it, too, was a product of private equity financial engineering.
World Kitchen had gestated under Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). In 1989, KKR led the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the tobacco/snack food giant, in a $25 billion boondoggle immortalized in the book Barbarians at the Gate. The deal proved disastrous. KKR was soon forced to begin dismantling RJR to pay the interest on the debts. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. The episode so tainted the leveraged-buyout landscape—already plagued by spectacular failures and economic havoc—that it supposedly signaled the end of the era. But LBO shops simply rebranded themselves under the “private equity” moniker.
In 1994, KKR used RJR Nabisco stock to buy Columbus-based Borden, a food company that included dairy products and Cracker Jack, for about $2 billion. Then, in 1998, KKR and Borden bought Corning’s consumer products division, which included Pyrex, in a $603 million leveraged buyout, followed by yet another purchase, of Ekco Housewares and General Housewares (Chicago Cutlery), in 1999. KKR combined all these to create World Kitchen, much as Cerberus would later do to form Global Home Products.
Such names were no coincidence. The business gurus who dreamed up these combinations preferred words like “world” and “global” to names that were attached to any real place, person, history: Rootless and meaningless, their labels floated on vapor. It was all about a “platform” to “leverage brands”—though, increasingly, the brands stood for nothing. A lot of World Kitchen’s product, after all, wasn’t made by World Kitchen but by Anchor Hocking.
Like Global Home Products, World Kitchen, saddled with $812 million of debt, quickly declared bankruptcy, in 2002. By the mid-2000s, Oaktree Capital Management and W Capital Partners owned it. Suffering from declining sales, they’d been looking for a buyer since at least 2013. World Kitchen could pull the OEM work from Anchor Hocking at any time.
For now, Solomon was banking on keeping the World Kitchen OEM business, with the improvements he foresaw coming with the cleanup. As the washout began, both were being factored into bottom-line projections. All month, he and the other top executives would pore over computer screens, nag underlings for data, and add up numbers to prepare for the first formal, comprehensive board meeting since the bankruptcy. The meeting, scheduled for early August, could well determine the future of both the company and its management.
* * *
There was no rain on the Fourth of July. Normally that wouldn’t be news, but it was this year because the spring and early summer seemed like one long storm. The morning parade passed under a blue sky. The Soap Box Derby queen rode behind a Ford SUV that towed the champion derby car. A troupe of little girls in pink danced their way east on Main Street toward Broad Street. The Lancaster High School Golden Gales marching band played Sousa. People lined the sidewalks, waving tiny American flags.
Yet despite the good weather and the holiday, Lancaster remained eerily quiet all day. Miller Pool was nearly empty. Fewer than twenty children swam at Tiki.
Better-off Lancastrians weren’t any more visible. The country club had tried to hold a July 4 pool-deck party, with barbecue and music and drinks. Until the Great Recession, such holiday parties were well attended—during the 1990s, they were packed with families—but only six reservations had been made, so the club canceled. At about 6:00 p.m., Eleanor and Henry Hood sat alone on the patio overlooking an empty swimming pool, eating hamburgers with a couple of young rel
atives. Only one group sat inside the clubhouse bar: four or five middle-aged people, who spent the early evening talking about Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, who, they decided, had turned transsexual just for the money.
The bartender blamed demographics for the low turnout. The older generation had mostly died off, she said, and people with families “are pretty into organized sports with their kids.” On the occasion of America’s birthday party, the all-American town’s quietude seemed symptomatic of the slow-motion, but disturbing, change.
Two weeks before the Fourth, the United Way of Fairfield County held a Day of Action in front of Fountain Square, across the street from the old Anchor headquarters. The purpose of the Saturday event was to teach children how to play outside.
Every neighborhood in central Lancaster was within easy walking distance of a park—the city was famous for them. Several streams, as well as the Hocking River, ran through the middle of town. Lancaster was surrounded by fields, hills, and woods. I. J. Collins was right to marvel over the county’s name: Old Ebenezer Zane had staked out Lancaster in a beautiful setting.
But just about the only outdoor “playing” took place by way of organized, competitive sports teams. Many older people complained that young parents had succumbed to the fantasy allure of Big Sports, in the hope that their kid would win a soccer, football, or baseball scholarship. Otherwise they’d never be able to afford college. There were more grown men riding bikes around town than young children. The idea of a neighborhood tribe of kids running wild outside with no particular purpose seemed simultaneously exotic, marvelous, and scary—as old-fashioned as the apocryphal stories about Great Grandpa walking five miles to school in a blizzard. All over town, the few kids who did venture outside seemed to go no farther than a front porch, where they constructed invisible protective bubbles with their smartphone screens.
Thinking this pattern might be both physically and mentally unhealthy, the United Way and adult volunteers from partner organizations assembled to show children that playing outside could be fun—though some of the activities, like kids’ art and making balloon animals, weren’t exactly capture the flag. The Glass Museum showed off Lance McClellan, who’d won the boys’ division of the county marbles tournament (his stepsister had won the girls’ division), qualifying to go to the nationals in New Jersey. Hutchinson’s Company Wrench donated forty bicycles, most of which were given away.
In the summer, many of Lancaster’s children spent Monday through Friday in all-day childcare, because their parents—whether they were single, married, or, in fact, the grandparents—worked. Kids who weren’t in childcare were often watched over by an older sibling. Few jobs paid enough to allow any income earner to stay home with young children. For many parents, summer was a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to let children roam.
But there was another reason why so few children ventured outdoors: a gut-deep anxiety that somebody or something lurked somewhere in the shadows, ready to do harm. But for all of its problems—incidents, for instance, like the shots fired at the house on Maple Street—Lancaster was still a safe town.
“We have very courteous drug dealers in Lancaster,” Municipal Court judge Patrick Harris told me with a laugh. The fear, he agreed, was “unreasonable.”
Nonetheless, the changes of the past thirty years had created a constant low-level, nagging anxiety in Lancaster. It was vague—as if the earth’s magnetic field had shifted one degree—but powerful enough to instill gloomy suspicion. “Our whole society is just falling apart,” Brad Hutchinson told me, echoing Judge Trimmer.
That was why he mowed his lawn with a pistol on his hip, and why John Oatney had a loaded gun at hand when he heard that family trying to navigate a way to the park behind his house. Since 2004, when Ohio passed a law permitting gun owners to carry concealed weapons, more than fifteen thousand people in the county had been granted licenses, most citing a need for personal protection.
Handguns were once rare in Lancaster. In the previous century, lots of men, and a few teenage boys, had owned rifles for deer hunting, or shotguns for bird hunting, or old, rusty souvenir pistols from one war or another. Nobody could imagine why they’d want to haul a gun around. The idea would have seemed ridiculous.
“We issue a lot of carry-and-conceal firearm permits,” Sheriff Dave Phalen told me. “When we started, it was predominantly male, and today it’s about half and half, men and women.” Phalen believed carrying a gun was “comforting.” “I think it gives people a sense of security. Plus, I think there’s people who think it’s a right: ‘I’m gonna be able to exercise a right to be able to carry a firearm.’”
Phalen, an outspoken conservative Christian, favored concealed carry, but he also worried. The night of our conversation, he was scheduled to hold a gun training session for about two hundred local churchgoers. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to be armed with people in the church,” he said. “It’s like the airplane: Airplanes go down, but we’re not afraid to be on an airplane.” But on June 17, a white racist named Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, sat down, prayed with some of its members, and then shot and killed nine of them.
“The chances of an incident at your church is, like, almost none,” Phalen said. Media coverage, he believed, had inflamed the worry. “So what we’re getting is, because on the national news you see this overblown, you’re thinking, ‘My golly,’ you know? And that becomes a reality to people.” The mere presence of guns ignited the desire to display them and, if necessary, to use them. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, we got our CCW permits. We got these guns. We’re gonna put ’em in the church. If something happens, we’ll be locked and loaded.’ I’m thinking, ‘You’ll get somebody killed.’”
Many stores and bars displayed the universal red-circle-with-a-slash NO GUNS sign. They had to: If they didn’t, any CCW holder could legally walk in with a pistol. The signs themselves, though, only made danger seem more possible—a perpetual-motion machine of anxiety.
While many used incidents like the Charleston shooting as a reason to strap on a weapon, opposition to unrestricted gun ownership was equally motivating. Having convinced themselves, or been convinced, that guns were necessary, gun-loving Lancastrians feared that if liberal urban elites had their way, federal forces would come for their weapons. More provocative than even that fear, though, were anti-gun lectures from the metropolitan classes, who didn’t know people like Lancastrians, who had proven over and over again for thirty years that they didn’t care a whit about them, who sneered at them as bumpkins. Toting a gun was a middle finger in the face of the smarty-pants set.
“I had not been around guns growing up,” Jon Hale, the city councilman who commuted to Columbus, told the Eagle-Gazette. “My dad didn’t hunt, and I wasn’t a gun guy. But with the direction our country is going with the talk of ‘We’re going to get the guns,’ we decided to invest in a piece to protect our home.”
Confederate flags had sprouted in William T. Sherman’s hometown. In the wake of Roof’s murderous rampage, and of photos of him exulting in the flag, pressure mounted across the country to stigmatize the stars and bars. In reply, some Lancastrians raised those flags on their houses and in the beds of their pickups. They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.
Sometimes the fear and defiance turned to racism. The Mexicans who came to town to work at Plant 1 had been welcomed, for the most part. Glassworkers who otherwise might have looked upon them with suspicion viewed them instead as fellow factory men trying to make a living. The locals may not have liked the influx of “illegal aliens,” but they didn’t see it as the Mexicans’ fault. As for Sam Solomon, some Anchor Hocking employees liked him and some didn’t, but not one, hourly or salaried, ever mentioned his race to me.
Many in Lancaster w
ere well aware of its racial history, and rejected it. Kellie Ailes, the director of Community Action, told a story about a conference she’d attended during which groups of social service administrators were tasked with solving a math problem about finance. Worried that a black man in her group would be unable to solve the problem, she offered her help. But he’d already solved it. A minor misunderstanding rooted in good intention, one might think. But though the conference had taken place long before, she broke down in tears, sobbing, when recalling the incident, shamed by her assumption and dreading even the possibility that she harbored unrecognized prejudice.
Raised to be midwestern-neighborly, good-hearted, and fair-dealing—but in a near-all-white town that had once been the master of its own fate (or at least seemingly so), Lancastrians were navigating a much more diverse and uncertain world. The town, Mayor Dave Smith told me during a break in a city council meeting, was “growing up.”
But the old Copperhead strain that had popularized the Klan a hundred years before still existed. There was the skinny, scruffy-faced man in a sleeveless Lynrd Skynrd T-shirt who’d sidled up to the barstool next to mine at Old Bill Bailey’s. It was about four in the afternoon on a Saturday. “I been drinkin’ all day,” he said, and I believed him. An unlit cigarette held in a gap where three missing teeth used to be bounced like Toscanini’s baton as he spoke. He told me he was partying with his roommate, who was about to move out of their shabby apartment nearby. Then, after an awkward silence, he turned to me and said, “Did you hear they wanted Michelle Obama to pose for one of them centerfolds?”
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