by Macy, Beth
But those strategies were of little concern to the young furniture heir during his first days on the planet, which he spent in another state, far removed from the whining planers and hissing steam of the factory, everything now quieted by the flood. Soon enough, the Smith River would recede to its proper place. The chauffeur would deliver mother and son to their sprawling brick home, enveloped by oaks and perched high on a hill. He’d meet his daddy, his sisters, and the family’s faithful servants, Willie and Augusta, who lived above the garage.
The sisters were loved and they knew it. But when Little John finally arrived, it was the happiest day of their father’s life. The prince had arrived. Doug Bassett called Mr. J.D. and shouted into the phone, “Papa, I’ve got a son and he’s a boy!” Mr. J.D. was so happy, he offered to pay the hospital bill on the spot. He sent a check for $1,000, along with this letter, written on Bassett Furniture Industries stationery:
My dear Boy:
Grandpop is writing you this letter so you will see it when you are a man. I will not be living when you are grown, but I want to say to you that I am hoping you will do big things, following the pace set by your grandpop and your dad. We are going to expect much bigger things of you than we are able to do, as you are living in a more progressive age.… I want you to know that I love you and always will, and expect you to be a great man some day.
Yours,
Grand Daddy
J.D. Bassett
The letter was framed, along with the check, and when the dear boy grew up and entered the family business, he hung it front and center on his office wall.
3
The Town the Daddy Rabbits Built
I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and I had no intention of taking it out.
—JOHN BASSETT III
JBIII’s first memory: It was a Saturday morning in 1943, and his father, Doug, took him to several Bassett factories to check on operations. W.M. Bassett, the boy’s uncle Bill, was now overseeing Bassett Furniture and, with Doug, had come up with the notion of contracting with the Yellow Cab and Coach Company to make wooden truck bodies that would carry weapons for the armed forces. The factories had limped through the Depression without laying anyone off, though salaries and hours were severely cut, and one year, the N&W train car brought employees Virginia hams instead of bonuses. Mr. J.D. had personally surveyed his employees, counting the number of dependents each man had, and he assigned shifts accordingly, making sure each man had enough work to support his family.
But now Bassett was back to running full blast. Six at the time of this visit, towheaded Little John (as the entire town called him) promptly got lost in the maze of whirring routers and band saws. The confident factory-man stride was still decades away, and scared of the noise and unable to find his dad, Little John burst into tears. He was so upset when he was found that a chauffeur was dispatched to drive him back to his family’s house on the hill.
It may have taken him a few years to conquer his fear of loud machinery, but the silver spoon fit perfectly from the start. Richmond lawyer Tom Word recalled meeting JBIII at a Boy Scout Jamboree when they were both twelve. “He was the rich man’s kid, the person everybody liked to talk about. And he was spoiled beyond belief,” Word said. He had the kind of unwavering confidence you get when you live in a town named after and run by your family. And Little John had the same name as his grandpop, who controlled everything for miles around—the cops, the area politicians, the factory workers, the household help.
The Bassetts and the families who owned Martinsville’s textile mills were known as the Families—the people who ran things, with tentacles stretching to the state capital, Richmond, and beyond. Since J.D. Bassett owned the land the community was built on, he chose not to incorporate the town of Bassett, preventing the formation of a town council.
Bassett Furniture Industries ran the town of Bassett. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that.
Mr. J.D. even owned a piece of Stanleytown. The unincorporated town just south of Bassett was home to Stanley Furniture, which was founded in 1924 with seed money from Mr. J.D. Here’s how the family tree is intertwined with Southern furniture-making: Thomas Bahnson Stanley was an early Bassett Furniture manager who married J.D.’s daughter Anne Pocahontas Bassett. A former bank teller, Stanley had set his sights on marrying well, carving out a piece of the growing furniture pie, and ascending the political ranks, in that order. He’d tried to court C.C. Bassett’s daughter Avis, and when that didn’t work out, he took up with her cousin Anne.
Besides, it was Mr. J.D. who ruled the company, not his brother C.C., who was more comfortable at home, in the store, and on the farm. Their roles were clearly delineated as far back as 1926. In a social-club charter I found at the Bassett Historical Center, C.C. listed his occupation as farmer, even though he was a co-owner of the furniture business, while Mr. J.D. asserted much broader authority, writing down capitalist.
“T. B. Stanley was the consummate politician,” fellow in-law Spencer Morten recalled. In 1929, Stanley built a sprawling Tudor stone mansion on the hillside overlooking his furniture plant, and it was hands-down the grandest structure for miles. He called it Stoneleigh, to reflect the family’s connection to British nobility and because it (sort of) echoed his surname. He’d wanted to name his town Stanley, but that name was already taken by another Virginia community. “He didn’t like that they had to put town on the end of it when Bassett was just Bassett, not Bassett-town or Bassett-ville,” said Ward Armstrong, a lawyer whose father ran a veneer-making subsidiary of Stanley.
Uncle Bonce, as the Bassett children called Thomas Stanley, was a U.S. congressman from 1947 to 1953 and the governor of Virginia for four years after that. When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Virginia in 1957 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Governor Stanley—who had already sent the queen miniature sets of Stanley Furniture for her children—held a reception in her honor. It was a watershed moment for the former bank teller.
Bonce Stanley would be best remembered not for his royal connections but for his allegiance to U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., the powerful Democrat who controlled Virginia politics for the first half of the twentieth century. On Uncle Bonce’s watch, Virginia closed many of its public schools rather than desegregating them as mandated by the Supreme Court, robbing the black children of Prince Edward County of five years of schooling. As Stanley put it during a 1956 press conference, “No public elementary or secondary schools, in which white and colored children are mixed and taught, shall be entitled to and received any funds from the state treasure.” The purpose of this, he insisted, was to protect “the health and welfare of the people.”
Uncle Bonce is just one looping branch of the sprawling family/corporate tree. He lived a half mile down a winding road from Mr. J.D.’s oldest son, William McKinley Bassett (Mr. W.M., in company-town parlance), who ran Bassett Furniture after the old man stepped down. Mr. W.M.’s home was somewhat more modest than his brother-in-law’s, though still stunning; the brick house, called Eltham, recalled a slightly smaller version of Jefferson’s Monticello and had been named for the Bassett ancestral manor near Greenwich, England, called Eltham Palace. The men of the family competed fiercely over everything, from furniture sales to furniture workers. They were even known to argue over the best parking spot in the company lot.
But on weekends, the whole lot of them quail hunted, fished, and golfed together, often inviting along Uncle Clyde, who married into furniture royalty when he wed C.C. Bassett’s daughter Mabel.
Confused? So were people in Henry County, who learned not to say anything about the Bassetts to strangers because there was a good chance the person they were gossiping to was somehow related to the extended clan.
J. Clyde Hooker was another early Bassett manager whose later business was helped along by the old man, who lent the Bassett name to the enterprise. In exchange, J. Clyde located his Hooker-Furniture plant in Martinsville, far enoug
h away from Bassett that the companies wouldn’t have to compete for labor, which might have forced wage increases. (The “Bassett” part of the name was later dropped.) Four other early Bassett managers were granted seed money for furniture plants extending from Galax, Virginia, to Lexington, North Carolina—also a safe distance away.
By the time Little John came along, Grandpop was the majority stockholder of seven plants in Bassett and Martinsville and was a major stockholder in six others. He had his own FDIC-insured bank. With three thousand people now living in his namesake town—most of them in company-owned shotgun homes—he was putting a serious dent in the business of his Northern competitors.
He created his own competition, yes. But by intertwining his corporate babies with the family tree, he was also spawning generations of family fortune.
His secret weapon was his succession plan, his reliance on those relentless Bassett genes. As one Bassett competitor, Pulaski Furniture president Bernard “Bunny” Wampler (now retired), told me: “He wasn’t a brilliant person, but he was absolutely a genius at picking people who were.” Especially from his family.
Mr. W.M. Bassett, his oldest son, turned out to be quieter than he was but just as tenacious. In 1927, W.M. was running the Bassett factories that J.D. had built and named for himself, plants that are still known in town as J.D. No. 1 and J.D. No. 2. His father encouraged rivalries among his plants as well as his children, and there were times when the designer of one company would sneak into the workroom of another in the dead of night to find out what his competitor’s new line would be.
The atmosphere was cutthroat, and it gave W.M. ulcers. He was also mad that his father had made Bonce Stanley a company vice president when here he was, Mr. J.D.’s own son, still toiling as a plant manager. So W.M. quit, retreated to the family’s enclave in Florida, and plotted his next move.
Within a few months he had secretly joined forces with a Martinsville real estate magnate. Heck Ford knew Craig Furniture in Martinsville was about to go belly-up, and he told W.M. there was a fortune to be made. W.M. was game, but he didn’t want the Bassett name associated with the deal, knowing it would drive up the price. So Heck put the deal together in his name and was given 10 percent ownership in the brand-new W.M. Bassett Furniture Company as thanks.
In 1928, W.M. premiered his first line of furniture at a trade show in Chicago—and sold out on the spot. At that point, Mr. J.D. decided to make things right with his oldest son. He was sixty-three years old and finally ready to hand over the reins. If his son would let him buy the profitable W.M. factory and bring it into the fold, Mr. J.D. would put W.M. in charge of a new umbrella corporation called Bassett Furniture Industries, which would allow the company to get better deals on bulk supplies and advertising. By 1929, his son’s lone act of revolution, the W.M. Bassett plant, was shipping out $1.5 million in furniture a year.
Whether the old man ever apologized for causing the ulcers isn’t known, but W.M. had demonstrated his bona fides in a way that earned his father’s respect. To assure that the assets were divvied up fairly, the family hired the accounting firm of Ernst and Ernst to make a certified inventory of each factory’s holdings. “Daddy Bill was very sharp,” said Spencer Morten, W.M.’s son-in-law and a longtime Bassett Furniture board member. “But the whole thing, all of it, was just rife with nepotism and infighting. If you crossed one of them, you’d better look out.”
The umbrella company mushroomed to cover all the furniture basics, including a factory dedicated solely to making chairs. As one local writer boasted, “When demand cannot be met by present facilities, why, just build another plant somewhere along the winding course of the Smith River, equip it with the best procurable machinery, hire additional hundreds of workers, and there you are—without a break in your daily routine.”
A few years later, it came to Mr. J.D.’s attention that another competitor was about to go belly-up. That day, he left the bank and met up with W.M. near the railroad tracks. They were going to lunch in the family mansion; Miss Pokey and the maids usually had a four-course lunch prepared, and the sons often talked shop and debated business strategies with Mr. J.D. while they ate.
If Miss Pokey agreed with her sons’ business plans, she offered her husband an after-lunch “nap,” following which he was generally persuaded to adopt his sons’ position. (JBIII told me that story proudly the first time we met, as an example of both male Bassett virility and female Bassett cunning. It was not long before I realized it was also a fine illustration of his two favorite subjects, the first being furniture, the second being sex.)
“Bill, what happens when your liabilities exceed your assets?” Mr. J.D. said en route to lunch that day, fingering his unlit cigar.
“You go broke,” W.M. said.
That was what was happening at Ramsey Furniture down the road, a fact Mr. J.D. had just determined inside his bank. So it went that in 1934, Bassett Furniture paid $117,000 for the three-story brick Ramsey plant at auction and then renamed it Bassett Superior Lines, a move that for decades would cement the company’s position as the low-cost producer in the lower-priced, promotional range of bedroom furniture.
With W.M. at the helm, Bassett Superior Lines would become one of the most profitable furniture factories in the history of the industry. During World War II, when W.M. got himself named to the War Production Board, he brokered a deal for Bassett to make wooden truck bodies for the military. Fellow board member “Engine Charlie” Wilson, chairman of General Motors, schooled him on the wonders of conveyor belts.
The old Ramsey plant was soon running so fast that folks in Bassett still call it Bassett Speed Lines. “We were making so much furniture so damn fast, I’m telling you, we were printin’ money,” Joe Philpott, Superior’s longtime plant manager, told me. By August of 1955, Bassett Superior broke a company record by shipping out more than $1 million in furniture in a single month.
If you had to put your money on one of the many smokestacks proliferating like dandelions throughout the Southern mill towns, Bassett Superior Lines seemed like the best bet.
Bassett Superior Lines. If you said it fast, it sounded like Bassett Spear Lines. Which, for decades after, is exactly what it did to nearly every rival in its category.
From their veranda, J.D. and Miss Pokey kept a careful watch on the smokestacks below, and almost everything else. On the next hillside over sat a mirror image of J.D. and Pokey’s house, the home of J.D.’s brother C.C. and his wife, Roxie, who happened to be Miss Pokey’s sister. The cofounder brothers each had a private set of cement stairs that gave them direct access to the factories.
All the better to keep an eye on the booming town. Miss Pokey had started out attending a Baptist church in the area, but when the hard-line minister frowned upon her bridge playing—and the fact that the couple liked to drink, in moderation—the Bassetts built a bigger church on a hill next to their Victorian home and hired a more progressive minister to run it.
There’s a photograph of the foursome dressed to the nines aboard a Florida fishing boat, the women clutching pocketbooks and fishing poles. In it, J.D. looks nothing like that young man on horseback.
Cigar in mouth and clad in a three-piece suit—while fishing on a boat!—his aspirational phase had long since passed, as had his horse. He could go anywhere he wanted now.
In 1938, Bassett replaced its initial Early American designs with a look that would become its signature: the waterfall. Sharp edges were replaced by curves that were said to spill from the top of a dresser like a waterfall streaming from a high cliff, usually topped off by an ornate circular mirror. Beds had thick posts, and armoires came with decorative, hand-carved flourishes that echoed the waterfall’s rolled top. A ten-piece bedroom suite sold for $110.75, and everybody wanted one, it seemed.
To the masses it looked expensive, but it wasn’t, especially when veneer construction, aided by Mr. W.M.’s machinery, replaced the finickier and more expensive solid oak. Immigrants landing in New York and New Jers
ey especially loved the stuff, which taught the Bassetts the importance of keeping up with the buying habits of the public—and hiring the right designers.
The Bassetts’ premier designer was the Princeton-educated son of a Prague-born furniture designer. A Renaissance man who spoke three languages and played the cello, Leo Jiranek lived in New York but spent weeks at a stretch camped out in Bassett with his sketchbook and pen. He could knock off a piece of furniture after seeing it just one time, and knocking off furniture was something Bassett and the other moderately priced furniture companies did—and still do—right and left.
The knockoff game went like this: If a higher-end Henredon item sold out, the Bassetts would try to offer a spot-on copy of it for sale—at half the cost—by the next season’s furniture trade show. Known simply as Market, the semiannual show was (and still is) the major industry event: manufacturers set up elaborate showrooms to display their latest samples, and retailers walk in, assess the offerings, and decide what to buy for their stores. (The Market eventually migrated from Chicago to High Point, North Carolina, where it remains, though competing trade shows have cropped up in Las Vegas and elsewhere.)
Jiranek also knew exactly how to fend off a patent-infringement lawsuit, which Lane Furniture learned when it sued Bassett in the late 1960s. The lawsuit was ultimately dropped when Jiranek found a near identical copy of the piece in a Philadelphia furniture museum—proving the design had been around for centuries.
For decades, Jiranek figured largely in the company’s success, with magazine ads in Life and Look that proudly touted his designer name. But he would end his career with mixed feelings about the Bassett clan. “They were a group of unsophisticated people who worked hard and made money,” Leo’s son Bob Jiranek said. “They needed somebody up in New York who could tell them how to market furniture.”