Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  The kids in the West After School Program were more rambunctious than usual, thanks to the changed schools and the distraction of the fair. They were making Dawn Shonk a little crazy at Tarhe Trails, but she was an old pro and would get them settled down soon. Michele Ritchlin and the board of the program had grown more confident they’d make it through the school year, despite losing out on the state grants. In September, the board had created a new fund-raising committee, but nobody was kidding themselves that the few thousands of dollars they’d raise would plug the gap left by the lost grants. Ritchlin increased the program’s after-school childcare business. By October, 223 kids across the city were in childcare with the program. The idea had never really been to run childcare centers—the purpose had been to tutor and teach—but childcare helped pay the bills. She was still afraid of the future. Lancaster’s Head Start program had once occupied the same building she now occupied. Head Start had lost its grants, too, and closed up. A good heart and the best intentions hadn’t kept the lights on.

  * * *

  By the time the fair ended, trees blazed gold, red, and purple. Farmers had rolled hay into giant spools scattered over their fields. There’d be no more warm days until spring.

  Six days later, Joe Piccolo resigned from his post as the Lancaster Festival’s executive director. He’d already left town and turned off his cell phone. The board president called the resignation sudden and surprising, but expressed the usual best wishes and job-well-dones. Piccolo left a similar statement behind.

  He’d had enough. He loved the festival and was sincere in his wish that it succeed, but he was tired of the resistance to change he found in Lancaster. “I cannot justify spending the future pushing against an immovable object,” he said. For example, when he’d tried to shift dates for certain 2016 events to make it easier for people to attend more of them, the board had rejected the idea. “The response I received was as if I was suggesting that we sell marijuana at Rising Park Day,” he said. He wanted to increase the festival’s appeal to young people. “My biggest issue was trying to combat the desire to hold on for dear life to the past.” The festival wanted to believe it was living in a 1990s world, he said. A native or near-native Lancastrian who could serve as a figurehead to carry out board decisions should take over his old job, he believed. Piccolo moved back to northern Ohio, where he’d pursue an M.B.A. He still hoped to make a career of arts management.

  Until it could find a permanent replacement, Dave Gallimore, the old Chief of Lancaster Glass, would serve as an interim director. Lancaster had made a habit of calling on Gallimore: He’d done the same the year before, when the board fired Piccolo’s predecessor, and he’d also once served as temporary economic development director. There weren’t many of Gallimore’s ilk left in Lancaster.

  * * *

  Brian didn’t go to the fair. He spent the time working and going on an unsuccessful hunt at Hilltop with Brant. They didn’t get a deer. They’d risen well before dawn and were sitting high up in the tree stands by sunrise. But it was a freezing morning, and Brian spent about three hours shivering while trying to sit still with his crossbow. “Then my ADD kicked in,” he said, and he and Brant gave up. They’d try again in a couple of weeks.

  That night, Brian and some friends did some drinking and poker playing at Colfax. He and his buddy Chris spent the next morning nursing hangovers by watching TV preachers. They switched channels between one speaking in English and one speaking in Spanish, both begging viewers for money. Brian and Chris mocked the preachers like drunken hecklers at a comedy club.

  When I left them, I needled Brian. “Keep opening those boxes!” I said, referring to his work at Drew. “I think a little of Brian just died when you said that,” Chris said. “Yeah, dude,” Brian said. “A piece of my heart just fell on the floor.”

  * * *

  Judge Patrick Harris stepped down from the Municipal Court bench the day after Joe Piccolo resigned from the festival. He’d decided to move to Florida to be with the woman he loved. His friends threw him a little send-off at the Ale House 1890.

  Eric Brown was there, dressed in his black leather motorcycle jacket. He’d ridden his Harley-Davidson—one last ride before he put the bike away until spring. He was just back from Atlanta, and was about to leave for Chicago to attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention, where he’d have to schmooze with law enforcement officials from all over the world. The traveling and glad-handing were big parts of his new job, and he was having trouble getting used to them. He’d been required to play politician at the MCU in order to attract funding and to juggle the concerns of the MCU’s member agencies. The stakes and the playing field were both bigger now, though, and they weren’t balanced by time in the field. He was a cop turned bureaucrat, and the shift chafed. Lately, he’d been trying to defeat a ballot measure that would legalize medical marijuana in Ohio. Brown didn’t have strong moral objections to marijuana, but he foresaw thousands of people who already had a tough time finding a job toking their way into unemployment by failing employer drug screenings.

  I mentioned that I’d been spending time with Lloyd. Brown was already gone from the MCU when Lloyd was arrested in July, but of course he knew Lloyd from his many years in local policing. He smiled, bowed his head, chuckled, and, with a mix of amusement and sympathy, said, “Oh, Lloyd. Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd. Dumber than a post.”

  “You went to the fair, I hope,” he said. “You had to go to the fair.” My going seemed important to him. I assured him I’d gone, that no self-respecting former Lancastrian would fail to go. Then I told him about the girl and her cow. He smiled, as if reassured. “See?” he said. “That’s pure. That’s something that’s so pure.”

  FIFTEEN

  The Future in Play

  January 2016

  A couple Brian knew walked into the Cherry Street Pub and sat on the barstools next to him. “Hey, man,” Brian said. They talked for a minute about a house out in a county village the couple was thinking of buying and fixing up. Russ, the bartender, placed a short glass of whiskey in front of Brian, then greeted another customer by name.

  The backbar behind Russ, a giant floor-to-ceiling wooden structure with a mirror in the middle and half-pillars on either end, was crowded with bottles and knickknacks that would seem thematically disconnected if you weren’t from Lancaster. It had functioned as a backbar since the 1920s, when it began its life in a nearby tavern. There was a time when glassworkers walking home several miles from the old Black Cat or Lancaster Lens would stop in that tavern for a rest and a rye. One night, a man with a bellyful of booze continued his journey in a blizzard so fierce he became lost in the snow, only to serendipitously wind up back at the tavern, where he spent the night sleeping it off on the bar. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. No matter. The spirit was true. After the tavern closed, the backbar was stored in a barn. Then a man named Johnny Johnson opened his eponymously named restaurant—a diner, really—in the building now occupied by the Cherry Street Pub. Johnson rescued the backbar by installing it in his new place. Now Brian, glassman turned warehouseman, sipped his whiskey and looked at the same enormous hunk of oak.

  Kevin “Max” McGee posed, tough-chinned and squinty-eyed in a three-inch-high cutout picture mounted on a wooden stand. He stood guard over the booze in his green-and-white (Go Irish!) 1973 William V. Fisher Catholic High School football uniform. McGee had been friends with Cherry Street owner Billy Smith since they were kids. They’d been part of an east-side Fifth Avenue troop that used to shoot hoops up against each other’s garages, drink a little beer, make a little trouble.

  The old JOHNSON’S neon sign shone over a row of booths. Black-and-white photos of Lancaster scenes and people, and a carved portrait of Sherman, reminded everybody what a long history they all shared. A picture of McGee’s dad in his World War II infantry uniform hung by a corner. He had installed a phone system for Anchor Hocking in the 1960s. An old Anchor Hocking logo sign—an antique, two-arm
ed anchor overlaid by an ornate serif-font “H”—occupied a center space on the back wall.

  * * *

  Over on Pierce Avenue, Sean Gumbs, three months into his sojourn as temporary CEO, had finished his listening tour and his quick study of the American glass industry. He was now convinced that EveryWare—that is, Anchor Hocking and, to a lesser degree, Oneida—shouldn’t be in the shape it was in. These were viable businesses, and always had been.

  But only now were the debt-to-equity owners seeing what Gumbs, and Solomon before him, saw. They had turned $250 million of debt into equity during the bankruptcy in May and now were just “getting a sense of it,” Gumbs said. “Then, in the next breath, it’s, ‘Well, what’s the potential of what I have?’ I think the current equity holders—and the largest equity holders are on the board—they got it. There is potential in this business.”

  Gumbs—short, slight, in glasses and a pile vest over an open-collar shirt—was a twenty-first-century wandering samurai of capitalism. Smartphones and Ivy-covered degrees were his weapons. “I have a particular set of skills,” he told me.

  “Like Liam Neeson?” I offered, laughing. “As in Taken? The movies?”

  “I literally don’t watch movies,” he said flatly before picking up where he left off. “So I think that those skill sets can be applied in lots of places.”

  He had applied them in many companies in many industries, but his work was never about the product or the company or the place. It was about the game. Through intense focus on the game, he’d mastered it. That’s why he earned the kinds of fees outfits like FTI and A&M charged. Everything he’d learned over the past three months convinced him that Anchor Hocking had survived decades of blows for a reason. Despite the depredations, Plant 1 and Monaca kept rising from the mat because “if people could have figured out a way to do this overseas in a cost-effective way, they would have done it. It’s not necessarily like other forms of manufacturing in the U.S. that have gone away.”

  There was no lack of interest in exploiting low-cost foreign labor. Libbey, for example, owned manufacturing plants in Monterrey, Mexico, and Langfang, China. Libbey used a $40.9 million low-interest loan from the China Construction Bank to build the new Langfang factory, which produced tableware both for the Chinese domestic market and for export outside of China. By one estimate, there were four hundred glass furnaces in Asia. As little as the Anchor Plant 1 employees were paid, there were people around the world willing to do similar work for much less. As a result, margins on the kinds of glass Anchor Hocking made were still falling as producers raced each other to the bottom.

  The power of American big-box retailers like Walmart exacerbated the situation. The American flag on Anchor Hocking packaging was nice, but Americans wanted cheap stuff—and the harder they shopped for the cheapest stuff, the more they helped drive down the wages of people who made stuff. And the lower those wages dropped, the more a desire for cheap morphed into the self-fulfilling necessity of cheap.

  Even so, Gumbs couldn’t be shaken from his belief that EveryWare, led by Anchor Hocking, could book profits and grow its value. That didn’t mean the equity owners wouldn’t sell it. They would. Anchor Hocking had been in play since Carl Icahn greenmailed it, and it would continue to be in play. But the board seemed convinced that investing some capital in repairs, safety, and a small amount of new technology was the smart way to grow back to at least a $250 million valuation, and maybe a little more. Spending, improving customer and supplier relationships, and making better margins on sales would take a while. So owners of the majority of the stake were likely to hold on for at least a year. Of course, if U.S. Glass or Arc, for example, were to back a truck packed with $300 million up to the door on Pierce Avenue, they’d sell. But Gumbs believed that selling out now would be a losing move.

  He sounded a lot like Solomon. But Solomon had a bias toward growing through acquisition. Now, nobody talked about acquisitions, or a billion-dollar future. The goal was to get the place cleaned up, make it profitable, then sell.

  Solomon had lost the safety argument. Now Gumbs was charged by the board with making safety a top priority. Gumbs said the board obsessed over safety because keeping workers safe was the right thing to do. But its desire to move faster on safety than it perceived Solomon to have been moving may also have been motivated by a desire to sell—few investors want to buy a hazardous plant. In the three months since Gumbs had arrived, the safety consultants Solomon had hoped to avoid hiring had held employee training sessions.

  Swink sat through one of them, but he mostly tuned out. The way he saw it, the whole plant was a safety hazard. Everybody knew that. So there wasn’t any point in talking about all sorts of scientific procedures to create a safety culture. He just wanted to get back to work, to operating his press.

  The company had installed a fire alarm just above Swink’s machine. With his ear protection on, he couldn’t hear the alarm. But it also strobed, so at least he could see it. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do if he saw the flashing light, but now he’d know something was on fire that wasn’t supposed to be.

  As much as they bitched about the hazards, safety was not the top priority for the workers. Joe Boyer, for instance, was still nursing his knees. They creaked like two rusty gate hinges. Especially the right knee. It zinged him with every step he took. When he was a teenager, he’d gone night-fishing by the Hocking River. While pumping up a Coleman lantern, he slipped and ripped something in there. He didn’t know what, exactly. After a while, the knee seemed to heal up and it didn’t bother him for years. Then, at the end of last summer, he’d spent part of a shift working up on a machine. He stepped off it, kept supervising his shops, went home. In the middle of the night, his throbbing knee woke him up. “It just give out on me,” he said.

  On his days off, he liked to spend a few hours out in his garage working on his blue ’71 Plymouth Barracuda. He’d raced the car at amateur tracks around central Ohio, but gave it up a few years ago because he never seemed to have time. Like a lot of Plant 1 workers, Boyer was often “forced”—held over after a shift to work another two or three hours of overtime because the plant was shorthanded. He was exhausted all the time. When he wasn’t working, he wanted to sleep. He didn’t even have time to keep his yard in shape, to say nothing of the ’Cuda. But he so missed working on it, he took the opportunity during the 2014 shutdown to pull off the cover and turn wrenches. He’d put a 430-cubic-inch engine under the hood and a bottle of nitrous oxide in the back. After his knee flared up, he couldn’t spend more than an hour at a time in the garage. He had to save himself for the plant. Also, his back was killing him.

  Boyer thought about seeing a doctor for the knees, but because of the high deductible on the company health insurance, he already owed too much in medical bills. He’d been in the hospital for the gastric reflux check. His premiums for the company health insurance were rising, too, because the company had just raised them. He figured it took about $254 per paycheck, about $500 a month, or about one week’s worth of take-home wages to pay his share of the monthly payment. He marveled that the young rookies Anchor was trying to hire could afford the premiums at all on the wages they made. Some didn’t. They opted out of the company plan and paid the penalty under the Affordable Care Act for not having health insurance.

  Boyer took a Vicodin for the knees and it helped a little, but he hated swallowing those damn things. They were dangerous. He’d seen too many guys in Plant 1 on Vicodin or Percocet or OxyContin practically sleepwalking through a shift. Boyer took aspirin instead, but they were pretty worthless. He worked in pain all through the autumn and into the winter.

  The knees were a little better now. He finally did call a doctor, who suggested he try some NSAID cream on his back. And as his back started feeling better, the knees improved, so he figured they were connected somehow. One of these days, he’d go see a specialist. But he couldn’t afford it yet.

  On October 13, the day Sam Solomon was fired, t
he unions filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board accusing EveryWare of “unilaterally implement[ing] new health insurance benefits for bargaining unit employees without bargaining in good faith with the Union as the parties never agreed to the changes nor reached impasse.” The grievance was only the most recent in a long string of complaints to the NLRB that had accelerated during Monomoy’s ownership.

  The new health insurance costs mixed with the still-raw anger over the 2014 concessions in a fermenting pool of grudges that drowned any safety concerns. Morale was as low as it had ever been. Some employees had stopped caring. “You’d have to be a fuckin’ idiot to get fired over there,” Swink said.

  As Boyer suggested, drug use in the plant was common. Some guys, misjudging Swink—a solid six-foot-tall rock ’n’ roller with steel gauges in his earlobes, a steel spike through his bottom lip, a wispy beard on his chin, and an Iron Cross inked in the crook between his left thumb and forefinger—would invite him to snort Percs or Oxys behind the machines. He always refused. His own father drank himself to death, and he hated most drugs.

  “I actually think we’ll strike this year,” Chris Nagle said. “Unless we get something substantial back, with the insurance costs and everything goin’ on, I think we will go on the street.”

  He’d sent that message to Gumbs. “He thinks we can’t do anything,” Nagle said of Gumbs’s reply. “I said, ‘Okay, contract comes, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.’” Nagle hadn’t seen such a mean mood in decades. “He’s got the people pissed off now to where they don’t care. They can’t afford the insurance and to live, too, so you might as well strike, you know? They don’t have any money comin’ in anyway.”