Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607)

by Macy, Beth

  By the time Ex and his buddies returned from the war, Grand Rapids was no longer the Paris of furniture design—or of anything else. The baby boom was starting, setting Bassett up to become the largest furniture maker in the world, a feat the smaller, laid-back Galax factories could only dream of.

  On the other side of the globe, America’s former ally China would soon fall under the spell of Mao Tse-tung, making few rural peasants think of sending their children into the cities to work. Capitalism was his enemy; private farming was prohibited, and counterrevolutionaries who opposed collectivization were persecuted as Mao attempted to end dependence on agriculture and make China a world power, no matter the human costs. In Shanghai, some residents avoided the sidewalks so they wouldn’t be hit by people committing suicide by jumping from tall buildings.

  Little John read about it in the mornings as he delivered the Roanoke Times—his first nonfactory job—to his neighbors. Soon after, he started sorting lumber and learning the intricacies of factory work, and when his supervisor gave him a raise, he bragged about it during a family lunch. His father didn’t say a word but headed directly to the boy’s foreman after lunch and had him rescind the raise.

  “Mr. Doug wanted him to know: He wasn’t gonna get any preferential treatment because of his last name,” said Bassett native John McGhee, who later worked for Mr. Doug. “He was gonna have to earn every inch of what he got. And Bassett beat the hell outta you no matter who you were or department you worked in. Nobody was coddled.”

  The young heir dreamed of the adventures awaiting him and longed to leave the stifling confines of his family’s town. In 1952, he finally got his wish. His parents sent him away to Riverside Military Academy, where he would learn to be disciplined—yes, sir; no, sir—and to never ever let things slide. He no longer had servants to pick up his clothes or polish his shoes, and he got his first taste of living someplace where his name—and his family—didn’t dominate everything. He loved it.

  His sisters began discussing the woman he might one day marry, and his father had his rise to the throne of Bassett Furniture all plotted out.

  The Smith River was even tamed, thanks to a fourteen-million-dollar dam-building project funded by the federal government and secured by none other than J.D. Bassett’s son-in-law T.B. Stanley (Uncle Bonce), then a congressman.

  There was plenty of time for Bassett’s youngest heir to rise up and, as his grandpop hoped, do big things. Little John followed in Mr. Doug’s footsteps to Washington and Lee University, where he became a popular member of the Kappa Alpha fraternity. He was known for being wild, loud, and competitive, at times insufferably so. Fortunately for his frat brothers, he was also handy with machinery. Having spent most of his teenage summers measuring lumber and tinkering with equipment at the J.D. plant, JBIII knew how to repurpose the Kappa Alpha house’s basement soda machine so that it sold beer instead of Coca-Cola, and at the same markup as furniture—double the wholesale price.

  “He took the spinning wheel out and just stacked the beer in there, and from then on he was keeper of the beer,” recalled fraternity brother and family friend Nelson Teague, now a retired Roanoke urologist. “He didn’t need the money; he was obviously not on scholarship at W and L. But he has always been shrewd and innovative—it’s in his Bassett genes.”

  His connections came in handy freshman year when Uncle Bonce, then the governor of Virginia, was called upon to introduce the current Kentucky senator and former vice president Alben Barkley at W&L’s mock presidential convention. A quadrennial campaign-season event, the convention is a long-standing W&L tradition that simulates a presidential nominating convention, and it attracts national attention because of its uncanny track record for correctly predicting who a party’s presidential nominee will be.

  In the sweltering college gym that day, JBIII sat in the front row next to his aunt as Barkley delivered an impassioned speech. “I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty,” Barkley said to loud applause.

  Then he had a heart attack, collapsed, and, almost immediately, died.

  It was a sobering moment that drew national press. It came on the heels of several days of convention festivities, including a parade in which states and territories were represented by floats. Some of JBIII’s classmates had drawn the Virgin Islands dominion, which they chose to illustrate not by building a float but by borrowing a pair of convertibles from a local Chevy dealer and filling them with students from nearby women’s colleges.

  VIRGIN read a large sign on the first car, followed by a tiny ISLANDS sign on the second.

  Barkley had roared when the float passed him, but the convention merriment was now jarringly halted. Barkley’s wife asked Uncle Bonce to make arrangements to have the senator’s body transported to Washington from the local mortuary where it had been taken. And the governor asked his nephew to get him to that funeral home.

  “Uncle Bonce, I can tell you where the ABC [liquor] store is. But I have no idea where the undertaker is,” JBIII said. With a state trooper escort, they found their way, finally, to the funeral home, where the governor banged repeatedly on its locked door. “Whoever’s in there, this is Thomas B. Stanley, the governor of Virginia, and I need to speak to you,” he barked.

  The undertaker did his best to appear lugubrious, JBIII remembered. “But in his wildest imagination he never thought he’d have the vice president of the United States in his shop. He was trying not to smile because, after all, this was a very sad time.”

  In the limousine on the way back to W&L, Bonce looked at his nephew and, with a half grin, said, “That man enjoys his work, doesn’t he?”

  I accompanied JBIII on a February 2013 visit to address a W&L business-journalism class. It was an important moment to him, a chance to show the academics that he was no longer the wild man he had been decades before—though he did wear a pink tie embossed with tiny hula dancers (they were visible only when you saw them up close). He pointed out his old fraternity house, the field where he’d gone parking with girls visiting from Hollins College and Sweet Briar, and—of course—the liquor store. He brought along his executive assistant, Sheila Key, and a young IT employee who advanced the slides on his PowerPoint presentation. “I don’t iPad! I have people who iPad!” he told me once, discarding technology in favor of his grandfather’s favorite activity: thinking up new ways for his company to make cash.

  At W&L, Little John had majored in business administration, excelled in partying, and gotten grades just good enough to avoid having his father yank him out of his collegiate reverie the way Mr. Doug’s own father had done to him. (One semester, though, Mr. Doug did take away John’s car as punishment until his grades improved.)

  “I can assure you I was not Phi Beta Kappa. I got out, okay?” He still reads slowly—waking up before five a.m. so he has time to scan five newspapers for international and business news in front of his kitchen fireplace. But what he reads, he remembers, especially numbers. And especially those numbers that represent cash, such as figures from long-ago balance sheets I heard him recite to the dollar, with astonishing accuracy, time and time again. He forgot many conversations we had, frequently repeated himself, and several times told me to read business books or articles that I had initially recommended to him. But when dollars were involved, he gave the same figures every time, and his numbers always checked out.

  When he graduated from Washington and Lee, in 1959, the headstrong heir did something nobody expected: He went as far away from Bassett, Virginia, as he could. He imagined it would be his last chance. He joined the army and relished the opportunity to have his butt chewed out by someone whose name wasn’t Bassett. In fact, chances were good that his commanding officers didn’t even know what Bassett Furniture was. Or care!

  He took a page from the cowboys in Galax, and for the next three years he found his own work, finally, on top of an army tank. The factories, the town, and the family squabbles—all that would be waitin
g for him.

  Far away in Europe, “Nobody could get their arms around me,” he recalled.

  6

  Company Man

  They used to say of Mr. J.D., “The old fool dyes his hair.”

  People in Bassett were tough. The long knives were usually out.

  —SPENCER MORTEN

  Alot happened while Little John was away guarding the German border and proving to himself that he was a fighter and a patriot, a person who could rise to the rank of first lieutenant by merit rather than by his name. Mr. W.M., his CEO uncle, had just spent seven million dollars to modernize Bassett Furniture Industries, doubling the size of many of the plants. When his competitors copied him and added conveyor systems of their own, W.M. went a step further to lower his overhead: Using leftover sawdust and coal, he made his own power for the factories and the five hundred Bassett-owned homes. Then he sold the excess power he made back to the power company and used the profits to pay the street sweeper and town police.

  “Gentlemen, get out your smelling salts,” W.M. told his regional salesmen gathered for the Chicago Furniture Market, beaming beneath his trademark fedora. The salesmen had brought him pictures of what the competitors were selling, thanks to intelligence gathered by friends from a third-party retailing organization. Designer Leo Jiranek was there with his sketchbook and Bassett’s sample man, the person who turned the drawings into wooden prototypes. W.M. would build the same suite his competitors were selling, and, with Bassett Speed Lines operating at full tilt, he would do it at a price that could not be matched by competitors in the twenty thousand retail stores where Bassett furniture was sold.

  With his ulcers long since healed, W.M. was a relentless patriarch—insiders called him the number one Daddy Rabbit of the industry—but he was also gentlemanly and fair. If he asked a question but didn’t like the answer an employee gave, he’d cock his head and say, “How’s that again?” rather than chew him out on the spot. According to Junior Thomas, he was “real proper-like”—by which he meant, Mr. W.M. did not terrorize the maids.

  “We wanted for nothing,” recalled Betty Shelton, whose parents worked as W.M.’s chauffeur and cook and who grew up in a house down the hill from Eltham that was owned by W.M.’s family. “They bought our school clothes and things. We ate breakfast at their house every Christmas and were just loaded up with presents. When my brother went to prom the first year, [W.M.’s wife, Gladys] let him take her big crystal punch bowl to Carver School,” she said, of the segregation-era high school for blacks.

  W.M. Bassett carried a small ledger book in his suit pocket in which he kept up-to-the-minute balances of the factories’ accounts, all held at the Bassett bank. “He’d pull out his little book and go, ‘Let’s see, there’s eight over at Bassett Mirror, twelve at Bassett Furniture, and four over at Superior,’ and what he was talking about was millions,” retired Roanoke banker Warner Dalhouse told me.

  W.M. could price a piece of furniture in an instant, calculating material costs, the overhead, and the profit margin in his head. He knew almost every BFI employee by name, and he knew the names of many of their children too. Reared in the Mr. J.D. mold, he wore a suit every day, as well as a pair of severe, black-framed glasses. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and frequently strode around the factories with his left hand tucked in the pocket of his suit jacket.

  “He had absolutely no personal ego,” said Jerome Neff, a sales representative who worked alongside his father, also a Bassett salesman, the first twenty years of his career. “W.M.’s greatest joy was at the close of the day in the showrooms at Market in New York or Chicago.

  “He’d break out a bottle, and the old salesmen would have a few drinks, and he loved that because they were his boys.”

  Having learned the industry from the bottom up starting on day one, W.M. had sorted his share of lumber as a child, and he is included in the first known picture of the sawmillers turned Bassett Furniture workers, taken in 1902, sporting holey knickers and crooked bangs. A wide-eyed eight-year-old perched on a jumble of boards, he’s surrounded by a cast of characters who look like they could have tumbled out of the reels of Bonnie and Clyde. He learned deal-making from the same wily sawmillers who’d taken that railroad lumber buyer for a ride.

  When the Teamsters threatened to unionize Bassett Trucking in 1945, it was W.M. who engineered an end run designed to keep them as far away from his furniture workers as possible. He organized a merger of Bassett’s trucking operations, housed near the J.D. plants, with another trucking company owned by an ambitious and stubborn entrepreneur named Roy Stone, then moved the whole setup to Collinsville—eight miles away from the nearest Bassett plant.

  A strike threatened to halt Stone’s business, but for weeks on end, Stone and his sons personally drove their own trucks rather than give in to the strikers’ demands—until the Teamsters grew frustrated and eventually left the region. “He knew the Teamsters would be so distracted in Collinsville they’d leave Bassett alone,” Spencer Morten, W.M.’s son-in-law, told me. “It was a strategic move on Daddy Bill’s part… very subtle and very quietly handled.

  “He didn’t want them unionizing the woodworkers. So he distracted them, and when they left, he was tickled.”

  W.M. worked ten-hour days well into his sixties despite having high blood pressure, which he refused medication for (he called it “dope”). That and the Lucky Strikes were a dangerous combination. While driving back to his Eltham mansion from a weekend getaway in Roanoke in 1960, he blacked out, crashed the car, and died. He was sixty-five.

  On the day of W.M.’s funeral, the community closed the stores, factories, and the Henry County Circuit Court. “He was the man who made Bassett what it was, a salesman from the word go and a great financier,” said longtime Bassett sales manager Bob Merriman.

  With W.M.’s passing, the chairmanship fell to Little John’s father, Mr. Doug, who appointed his cousin Ed Bassett (C.C.’s son) to be his number two. By all accounts, he made Mr. Ed feel subordinate, never relinquishing his preferred parking space or the head boardroom chair. “Mr. Doug Bassett used to treat Mr. Ed Bassett like a piece of dog poop, and I don’t think Mr. Ed ever forgot it,” one Bassett manager told me.

  Months after Spencer Morten learned of Clay Barbour’s lineage, he told me he’d developed another theory explaining Doug Bassett’s shoddy treatment of his cousin Ed. He remembered Ed, his close friend and fishing companion, telling him once in Florida, “Our family’s had some chapters we’re not proud of, and Doug used it against us.” You mean Doug looked down on Mr. Ed because of his black half brother and used that knowledge to his advantage? I asked Spencer. “I think Ed wanted that information kept away from the rest of his family,” he said.

  Whatever the motivation, that tension was the genesis of a cutthroat succession battle that would play out over decades. Which branch of the family would run the show?

  This is the Bassett Furniture Industries that First Lieutenant John Bassett III came home to in 1962, after three years of keeping Western Europe safe from the threat of communism by day and having the time of his life by night. He spoke enough German to get along with the girls, and it had cost him just sixteen cents a gallon to fill up his new favorite toy: a Porsche. “You’d go ski in the Alps and stay in a beautiful room and pay maybe a dollar fifty a day,” he recalled. “The Danes were really good-looking. The Swedes were even better-looking, but they’re cold.”

  He was having such a good time that Mr. Doug worried he would reenlist after his tour was over, so he sent Jane and her new husband, Bob Spilman, to Germany to convince him not to.

  “Ya gotta come back!” his brother-in-law bellowed, pounding his fist on the table where they sat.

  Before the couple returned to Bassett, Jane pulled her brother aside and said, “I don’t blame you. I’d stay here too.”

  He may have missed being part of the Greatest Generation, but JBIII credits everything he knows about leadership to his three years of active duty. Which i
s why he quotes Churchill at every opportunity. And Patton, especially the line “When in doubt, attack.”

  “There are certain principles of leadership that people respect,” he said. “You can’t buy it either. You have to earn it.”

  When he returned to Bassett Furniture, there was no buying respect from his family, even if his name was John Bassett III. In fact, he would spend the rest of his life trying to earn it.

  “You could tell he was loved in the family, but he was in no way revered,” said a household servant who watched the succession battle unfold.

  The executive offices were on the third floor of the new $1.8 million corporate headquarters in the center of Bassett, a four-story building the locals still call the Taj Mahal, only half jokingly. Mr. Doug had the primo CEO suite in the Taj, JBIII’s office was next door, and Mr. Ed’s was third in line.

  From the very beginning, it was clear: the older guys could dismiss Little John all they wanted, but as far as Mr. Doug was concerned, John Bassett III would one day run the show at Bassett Furniture. The young heir hung the framed letter from Grandpop behind his desk, making the succession a virtual slam dunk; it was not far from a picture of himself astride an army tank.

  The army picture was okay with his old man, but a few things JBIII picked up in the army weren’t. One was the Porsche he had shipped backed from Germany, a cream-colored convertible with a red interior. It struck his father as showy and un-American. “Doug made him trade it in for a clunky Chevy,” Spencer Morten said. The car was so rarefied in 1962 Henry County that the day it went up for sale, three doctors from Martinsville had a bidding war over it.