by Macy, Beth
None of this would matter except for the fact that decades later, JBIII and his distant cousin Patricia revived another custom of their noble European ancestors—they married each other.
“That’s not a marriage, that’s a merger,” some people said. It was meant to be a joke, but, like the circumstances of the boy’s dramatic birth, the barb proved prescient.
In one of the old pictures, Little John stands with hands on hips, sporting a cowlick and saddle shoes. He’s looking directly at his future wife, whose little-girl panties stick out from under her dress. Later he would joke, “I’m thinking, I better put her in my little black book for twenty years from now.” The future governor of Virginia is in the photo, along with Virginia’s other furniture-making royalty and most of their offspring, the whole lot flanked by sprawling boxwood shrubs.
Everyone is smiling in the picture—especially the young woman standing directly behind her grandpop Mr. J.D.
Big sister Jane had witnessed the princely reception of her little brother. Before he came along, she was the one who toured the factories on weekends with her daddy. After church at Pocahontas Bassett Baptist, the two of them went next door, kissed the grandparents, and then walked through the plants. She pointed out things that looked amiss, and her dad wrote them down on his steno pad. If dirty rags were left on the finishing-room floor, the fire hazard would be noted on his list. If the lumber was stacked haphazardly, that went on the list too, and come Monday morning, someone would pay.
Her father remarked on it. Her uncles noticed it. Her teachers commented on it too.
“If Jane were a boy, she would be the one.”
“Jane has the mind of a man.”
“If only Jane wore pants…”
Jane was quick-witted, a brainiac, a force to be reckoned with. The whole town knew it. Little John was a firecracker at math, but he struggled with reading and was only average in school. Born a generation later, he might have been labeled learning-disabled. To this day, he reads very slowly. “But even at twelve, thirteen years old, you saw the intensity in him,” said Bassett native John McGhee. “He was very cocky, and whatever it was [that kept him from excelling in school], he still worked twice as hard as everybody else.”
Jane was more interested in factory operations than any of her male cousins were, and she loved talking shop with her father at the family dinner table. “He used to call me his conscience,” she said. Her father, John D. Bassett Jr. (who went by Doug, or—you guessed it—Mr. Doug), preferred banking over manufacturing. When her uncle Bill, W.M. Bassett, passed away, it fell to Mr. Doug to run the entire company, not just the bank.
He confided in daughter Jane, then in her twenties, that he was going to appoint someone else to manage the bank, even though it was his favorite part of the job. To which she replied, “I’m very disappointed in you.”
Her face lit up as she recalled the event, and when I asked if she was her father’s favorite, she chuckled girlishly and continued the story. “The next morning he called me and said he was sitting in the bank president’s office.”
It was among her first of many quiet triumphs where the family business was concerned.
PART II
5
The Cousin Company
When I went to work last morning, well, the temperature was nice
By the afternoon, oh Lord, you could boil a pot of rice
I had the blues… the furniture factory blues.
—EDDIE BOND (FIDDLER AND FORMER GALAX FURNITURE WORKER), “FURNITURE FACTORY BLUES”
In Henry County, they used to joke that after you graduated from high school, you went to the University of Bassett. In the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Galax, Virginia, sixty-seven winding miles west of Bassett, the path between the school and the furniture factories was equally direct. Rodney Poe, a third-generation furniture man, remembered Galax High School teachers pointing to the smokestacks from the windows and admonishing, “If you don’t turn your homework in, that’s where you’ll end up.”
Furniture-making was tough work everywhere; just ask world-renowned old-time fiddler Eddie Bond, who thought he’d earn a little pocket change one summer at Vaughan Furniture, where his mother worked so long fastening panels onto dresser drawers that her staple-gun finger became permanently arced from it. A coworker on the finishing line perished right in front of his mother after a spark ignited the glaze the woman had inadvertently spilled on her clothes. “Instead of dropping to the floor and rolling over, she ran through the factory,” Eddie said, adding that his mother still had nightmares about the death.
Eddie’s summer-long stint at Vaughan, sans air-conditioning, convinced him to go to community college to learn how to be a machinist, and that’s what he does now, between fiddling gigs, at a Pepsi bottling plant in nearby Wytheville. “I tell you, the furniture factories, they were a blessing and they were a curse. They did provide jobs, which kept food on our table, but you just barely eked out an existence.”
As a teenager, he settled for the dollar-store variety of tennis shoes when Nikes became popular; there was no need to even ask for the ones with the swoosh. When his mom, Brenda Faye, finally quit her job in the cabinet room, in 1989, she was making $5.10 an hour. (Federal minimum wage was then $3.35.) She had threatened to quit if they didn’t give her a raise, at which point her managers shrugged and let her go.
“Fifteen years, and she hadn’t missed a single day of work. And they didn’t tell her bye or nothing,” Eddie said. “But it’s always been hard times here in the mountains for poor people, and you just kinda got used to it.”
For generations, the men who ran Bassett and Galax counted on that.
Galax (pronounced “Gay-lax”) was named not for a founding father of the town but for the evergreen herb that grows in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. To make extra money, mountain folks used to go “galacking,” gathering up the shiny evergreen leaves to sell for use in floral arrangements. Some still do, even though it’s now considered poaching. Which should tell you something about the independent spirit of the moonshiners, galackers, and sangers (ginseng poachers) who roam these Appalachian hills.
With an elevation of twenty-five hundred feet, the town is surrounded by rolling hills and an ample supply of timber, especially white pine, a band of which runs atop the Blue Ridge. Some of the first Scots-Irish settlers brought fiddles and banjos, and they sang the high lonesome ballads they’d learned from their ancestors in a loud, nasally tone that carried from ridge to ridge.
So Galax became synonymous with furniture and mountain music, drawing people from across the globe to its annual Old Fiddlers’ Convention, still going strong today after nearly eighty years. In the 1920s, a quartet named the Hill-Billies got its start in a Galax barbershop, launching a distinctive new sound that swept the nation and came to be called hillbilly music. For decades, furniture workers and textile-mill hands in the region taught one another songs and picked up extra money playing weekend gigs. Both sides of Bond’s family worked as mill hands and musicians, and one of his great-uncles played for a string band called the Zero Defects, named as a hat-tip to the cotton mill where they all worked.
Well, if you’re young and fancy free, let me give you some advice
You better get your education, don’t you ever think twice
Or you’ll have the blues… the furniture factory blues.
Galax was not a monument to a single man or company, but its manufacturing roots reach back to Bassett. When Bunyan Vaughan showed up to launch Vaughan-Bassett Furniture in 1919, he was doing it the Bassett way—in another labor market, a butt-numbing carriage ride away from Mr. J.D.’s plants, and with $50,000 in start-up capital from the old man. The enterprise was yet another family affair, the Bassett company’s first factory outside Henry County. Bunyan had gotten his start as a Bassett Furniture bookkeeper and worked his way up to plant manager of Bassett’s Old Town while his brother, Taylor, went on the road selling Bassett Furniture from western Pennsylva
nia to Michigan. Taylor was about to do his brother the favor of marrying J.D.’s daughter Blanche, tying the two families together for good.
The old man liked Bunyan. He’d advanced at Bassett through hard work: ten to twelve hours a day during the week and six hours on Saturdays. Bunyan’s parents died when he was young, and he’d put himself through National Business College in Roanoke by working summers in the Bassett plant. Mr. J.D.’s son Doug had gone to the same business trade school after his lackluster performance at Washington and Lee University, then an all-male bastion of the Southern elite.
“My father never graduated from W and L because when he came home to visit, my grandfather asked him some questions he couldn’t answer,” JBIII recalled. “He couldn’t add figures fast enough.” So Mr. J.D. jerked Mr. Doug out of W&L and sent him to NBC, underscoring an early Bassett code: Coddle neither your employees nor your kids (even if the babies had emerged from the womb with a silver spoon).
When Mr. J.D. heard there was a small cabinet plant for sale in Galax, he and Bunyan went there to negotiate the deal. Bunyan sold his brother one-fifth of his share of the company and hired him on as sales manager. Together, in the backwater boomtown of Galax, they set out to replicate Mr. J.D.’s success.
Vaughan-Bassett Furniture was a minor affair compared to Bassett, with little hope of becoming a household name in the United States, much less in China. It started out making wooden bedroom furniture for the same reason Mr. J.D. had: those items were the easiest. Within four years, Taylor Vaughan had set up his own factory near the railroad tracks down the street and named it Vaughan Furniture, specializing in dining-room furniture. (It was Taylor’s son John who was in charge of the company years later when Eddie Bond’s mother was allowed to quit rather than given a five-cent bump in pay.)
“They didn’t fight for labor back then because the area was growing so fast,” said town historian John Nunn, whose grandfather started a mirror plant to supply the furniture makers. The Vaughan brothers chose Galax because the town fathers, a group of prominent landowners who’d formed a real estate company, gave them a deal on the land. As an early Galax promoter wrote: “The town has a very liberal policy and sympathetic attitude to new industries, and will give all possible cooperation and assistance to investors and home seekers.”
Unlike Bassett’s creators, Galax’s founders hired an engineer from Lynchburg to lay out the town, with downtown corner lots selling for $100 to $250 apiece. The region’s first settlers weren’t plantation operators, as in Henry County. They were small-time farmers, some of whom were Quakers and staunch abolitionists. Unlike Henry County, mountain-ringed Galax never claimed plantations, which is one reason its black population is comparatively small.
From Galax’s very inception, there was a tad more to the town than sawdust and smokestacks. Carnation would build a milk plant and Coca-Cola a bottling company, and from its founding in 1905, the small city had its share of maverick cowboys, including Thomas L. Felts, a gun-toting lawyer who dabbled in a whole lot of things, eventually owning a bank and a huge Ford dealership. He was best known for his partnership in the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a crime-busting alliance that grew into one of the South’s best-known bandit chasers and union busters.
Most important for the Vaughan brothers and their patriarch sponsor, Galax harbored the three keys to Southern furniture-making: plentiful lumber, railroad tracks to carry the finished beds and chifforobes away, and desperate people eager to join the new industrial economy.
Unlike Bassett, Galax had an elected government, a mayor, and a city council. Scots-Irish settlers set up groceries, hardware stores, and newsstands in the booming town, often living above their stores.
When people migrated to new places, they had to build homes and furnish rooms. So it went that a market for furniture was born, albeit a modest one at first. The furniture factories kept the men busy, and the hosiery plants employed their wives. It was happening in small towns across the Southern Piedmont, from Altavista, Virginia, on down to the North Carolina towns of Lexington, Hickory, and Lenoir. As Southern Lumberman magazine recalled of the early 1900s, “There have been thousands of families in the Southern States that have not had a new bedstead, bureau, or set of chairs since the close of the War Between the States.”
Because the Southern furniture makers didn’t produce high-end furniture like their counterparts in Grand Rapids, they didn’t have as much to lose when the Great Depression hit. At the end of World War I, Grand Rapids had claimed seventy-one furniture factories, employing nearly half of that city’s workers. But by the 1940s, furniture workers made up just one-sixth of the workforce.
The Southerners helped kill their competition, which was already struggling. The Michigan woods were becoming depleted, for one thing, and unions in the North forced factories to pay higher wages, especially after the automobile industry took off. The original industry pioneers were dying out, a phenomenon encapsulated in a saying I heard often throughout my reporting for this book: “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” As the theory goes, the third generation of business innovators, the ones who grow up teething on silver spoons, typically turn out to be slackers who fritter the family fortunes away.
In The City Built on Wood, Frank E. Ransom argued that J.D. Bassett and his Southern ilk had the Northern manufacturers’ high standards—and maybe their snobbery—to thank for their own roaring success. “The making of furniture is a creative art, and one which has not yet been debased in Grand Rapids by wholesale production lines and mechanization,” he wrote. “In a period when the principal strategy and tactics of American industry have been concentration and combination, mass production and standardization, the furniture industry of Grand Rapids has remained virtually aloof from this pattern.”
In other words, the city that had the audacity to crown itself “the Paris of Furniture Design” chose to bow out gracefully rather than demean itself by employing machinery. In clinging to their craft, the Michigan furniture makers folded like cheap lawn chairs, while the Southern furniture makers kept on working, a film of machine-flung sawdust coating their glasses.
Mr. J.D.’s business concerns in Galax and Bassett weathered the Depression not through layoffs and plant closings but via meticulous management, staggered shifts with reduced hours, and continuous adaptation to change. Mr. J.D. cut salaries across the board, a fact that sent Naomi Hodge-Muse’s proud grandfather George Finney back home to his small Koehler Hollow farm, where he remained for the rest of his life. (“A man don’t work for less than a dollar a day,” he told his family.)
Bassett Furniture retiree Howard White recalled his family moving to Bassett in 1930, after his father had been laid off from a Statesville, North Carolina, furniture plant, where he’d operated a motorized spindle carver. “Plants in Hickory and Lenoir were closing during the Depression, so a lot of people came up to Bassett because Bassett was still running. Bassett was always careful with its money, not extravagant,” said White, who worked for the company from 1939 until he retired, in 1986. “If you bought a load of lumber, you counted and made sure you got exactly what you paid for. You looked after things.”
Over in Galax, Bunyan Vaughan was adopting the same strategies. He may have started out as a Bassett Furniture bookkeeper, but he developed what people in the industry call having “sawdust in his veins.” When his brother died unexpectedly, in 1940, Bunyan continued to run Vaughan-Bassett and took over Vaughan Furniture too. He sent his daughters off to boarding school, just as the other first-generation furniture makers had done. When his daughter Frances married U.S. Army Air Corps pilot Wyatt Exum, he set his son-in-law up in business, following the familiar model of Mr. J.D.
Wyatt was a natural at sales and had a photographic memory for numbers. He had movie-star good looks and a death-defying war tale that became the basis for a 1948 film featuring Robert Stack. In September 1944, his squadron was tasked with destroying the Nazi rail lines in Hungary. A fellow fighter pilo
t’s blast backfired, knocking out the cooling system of his plane, and the man was forced to make a belly landing deep in enemy territory. From the air, Wyatt watched it unfold in his single-seat plane, prompting a radio discussion among the pilots about what to do. Above all, their commanders had instructed them, they should not let any of the American planes, with their brand-new radar and communications technology, fall into enemy hands.
Pilot be damned, the protocol went. Blow the sucker up.
“We gotta go get that boy,” Wyatt told the other pilots in the air, in defiance of the protocol.
“Ex, I don’t know, wait a minute,” a major said.
By the time the major looked back, Ex was gone. Braving heavy ground fire, he landed his single-seater P-51, scooped up his buddy, threw him over his shoulders, and carried him piggyback on the return ride to Allied territory. The mission was taught in subsequent P-51 pilot-training classes, and Ex, although unsure at first whether he was going to be court-martialed or acclaimed a hero, was awarded a Silver Star.
Ex found a hero’s welcome awaiting him in Galax, along with a sales job at Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, his father-in-law’s plant. When the second generation became old enough to take over the Galax plants, Bunyan’s other son-in-law, Buck Higgins, became president of the company, and Bunyan retired to his farm, where he raised purebred Herefords and spent afternoons with his beloved granddaughter, Ex’s little girl, Pat. Unlike Mr. J.D., he did not spend his retirement stopping in at the factories every day to make sure the lumber was collated and counted just so.
Belonging to both branches of the furniture dynasty, that little girl was often asked over the years to compare Bassett and Galax. When I brought up the topic not long ago, Pat Bassett’s answer seemed rehearsed but genuine. “In Bassett, business was an end unto itself. The people in Bassett were obsessed, almost manic about making furniture. But in Galax, the furniture business was a means to an end. It gave you a nice life. It gave people jobs. But you didn’t let it take over the whole world.”