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

by Macy, Beth

  The couple honeymooned in Hawaii, then set up house in the modest Bassett apartment within hollering distance of the factories. The windows rattled when the trains passed.

  They were a long way from their golf-course mansion in a gated Florida community, decades from claiming Tiger Woods as a neighbor. It was 1963, and the young couple had little concern for China, where Mao Tse-tung was declaring, “Communism is not love! Communism is a hammer we use to destroy our enemies!”

  Mr. and Mrs. John Bassett III had also yet to hear of a Chinese force of nature named Larry Moh, a Wharton School grad who had just launched a parquet-flooring company in Hong Kong and whose ideas—heaven help the Southern furniture makers toiling away in the Taj Mahal—would one day threaten to transform the South’s humming factories into stagnant piles of bricks.

  Pat Vaughan Exum Bassett settled into the hilltop hierarchy, where moneymaking was the rule and her in-laws called the shots. At the Taj Mahal, her father-in-law, Mr. Doug, delegated most of the factory details to Bob Spilman and Mr. Ed—especially during the winter, when he usually retreated to Hobe Sound. He was more consumed with finance and furniture design than manufacturing. Mr. Doug phoned his nephew-in-law Spencer Morten at home late one night, announced himself as J.D. Bassett Jr., and barked that he wanted a complete report on Bassett Mirror’s finances by nine thirty the next morning. Spencer stayed up till midnight compiling it—only to have Doug brush it off with a cursory “Looks like you guys are doing well.”

  Doug had been drinking when he phoned, Spencer explained, and he’d forgotten all about his call. By the next morning he was preoccupied with arranging his afternoon tee time at the Bassett Country Club, where he took an avid interest in the maintenance of the course, regularly dispatching a truckload of factory workers to the club to help—a habit that still inspires fury in several long-retired plant managers when they think about it.

  Underlings could tell how their mornings would go by how loudly Mr. Doug’s foot sounded when it landed on the wooden step outside his office. If a manager spent too long in the bathroom, he might counsel him to take the Wall Street Journal into the stall. If the manager was going to waste company time, he should at least be thinking while he did it. If supervisors wanted to change a supplier for their sandpaper, they had to run it by Mr. Doug first, or risk infuriating him by souring some long-standing backroom deal the family had made.

  Doug’s best friend and confidant was his next-door neighbor and cocktail-hour buddy Whit Sales, the man who ran the Bassett-owned Blue Ridge Hardware. Whit and his wife, Virginia, couldn’t have children, and they treated Doug Bassett’s four as their own. The relationship was complicated and symbiotic, like a lot of things in Bassett, with Sales proving himself a reliable surrogate—and an extra set of company eyes—but always deferring to Doug.

  This extended to hiring decisions, from the corporate office right on down to the person sweeping up at night. When Henry County native Joe Philpott returned home after college in 1955, he landed a job working for Sales—only to have Sales rescind the offer after discovering that Mr. Doug wanted Joe to learn the management ropes at Bassett instead. (Doug was incensed when he found out during one happy hour that Sales had nabbed him first, and Sales quickly set about undoing the deed.) The furniture job paid Joe considerably less than what Sales had offered. So, to make up for it, Doug dropped by the plants every couple of months, tapped Joe on the shoulder, and told him his salary had just been upped.

  That the Bassett rule was arbitrary, completely at the whim of whichever Bassett was calling the shots, was both the best thing and the worst thing about working in a company town. Since there was no town council, churches and service clubs were left to organize civic projects. Mr. Doug ran the school board and the country club, while Mr. Ed was keeper of the Kiwanis. Doug’s branch of the family held the reins of Pocahontas Bassett Baptist, while Ed’s controlled the Methodist church. Nobody passed Go without the family’s blessing.

  To outsiders, the extended-family hierarchy seemed equally fraught. When cousin Bonce Stanley was governor, Mr. Ed used to call ahead before church on Sundays to see if the governor was in town. If Bonce was in Richmond, Ed went to church. If the governor was in Henry County, Ed stayed home. He resented the idea of having to stand when the governor—who was not only his cousin by marriage but also his furniture competitor—entered the sanctuary.

  Like most newcomers, John D. Bassett High football coach Colbert “Mick” Micklem did not receive a memo on the way things worked when he moved to Bassett, in 1961. Mick had planned to put the proceeds from the season’s first football game toward new equipment, but he quickly learned the Kiwanis Club had dibs on the money. Mr. Ed made sure the game sold out by requiring his furniture salesmen to buy tickets by mail, despite the fact that they were scattered across the United States and couldn’t have attended the game even if they’d wanted to. Tackle dummies for the team had to be ordered through the family-owned Blue Ridge Hardware too—or neighbor Sales might complain to Mr. Doug.

  “The county owned the school, but the family owned everything from one foot around it. Everything, even the sports fields, belonged to Bassett Furniture Industries,” Mick told me. The exception was the smattering of independently owned stores, including a furniture store—which sold Bassett Furniture, of course.

  But paternalism could also be beneficial, as it was when Mick and his wife went to the First National Bank of Bassett to apply for a seven-thousand-dollar loan to buy their first home. The bank manager he met with said he’d have to talk to the board and would get back to him, at which point chairman Doug Bassett popped in the bank doors, and he happened to be in a good mood. “Hello, Coach! What do these fine folks want?” he asked his manager.

  “They want a loan.”

  “Well, give it to ’em. They’re good folks!” He didn’t even ask how much the loan was for. When a Bassett deemed you fine folks, the deal was done.

  Mr. Doug kept the tightest rein on Little John, whom he considered brilliant but undisciplined. It was okay that Little John wasn’t the humblest of people, but he should have the courtesy to at least act like he was.

  “Motivation by intimidation,” Mick told me. “That was the motto back in those days.” The most important thing was always, Are the factories running full-time? Are we selling more furniture now than we did last month?

  That relentlessness became an enduring legacy of Mr. J.D., who lived to be ninety-eight years old. He was seventeen months shy of the century mark and $17 million shy of hitting $100 million in sales at the time of his death, in February 1965. He died in his room at the Martinsville General Hospital, where his family had moved him, not just because they wanted to put some space between the old man and the nurse-girlfriend but also because he’d let his Victorian house on the hill fall into disrepair. “Miss Pokey said J.D. was too stingy and wouldn’t let her spend the money, so it was just never fixed up,” said a neighbor whose grandparents were close friends and original investors in the company.

  Barber Coy Young recalled seeing the old man being chauffeured around town in his black Cadillac, and he remembered with great clarity meeting the man when he was a teenager. Coy was playing baseball with his friends near Mr. J.D.’s home, when he tiptoed into his garden to fetch an errant ball, nearly running into Mr. J.D., who’d stopped by his house to pick vegetables.

  “Come here, boy, and help me.” He beckoned to Coy, then tapped his cane on the cucumber he wanted him to pick. He wore bedroom slippers and pajamas, and he carried his trademark unlit cigar. And even though Coy was scared of the ghostly-seeming grump, he thought it was a little bit pitiful when the old man said, “They tell me I’m a millionaire, and I don’t even have a suit of clothes!”

  In her pressed uniform and stiff white shoes, his last nurse—not the amorous one—just about killed herself looking out for him at the hospital and on his daily outings, Young said. “He was one of those who got meaner the older he got. He thought he was stayin
g at the hospital for free because he’d donated a lot of money to it earlier. But the family was paying for it.” (Mr. Doug was a hospital trustee.)

  According to the inventory of his estate, at the time of his death he had $6.3 million in assets (about $48 million in today’s dollars), including sizable stock holdings in the myriad furniture companies he’d founded and in tobacco, coal, railroads, oil, and automobile companies. His children inherited it all, except for some bequests. He left sixteen thousand dollars to his longtime maid Gracie Wade, the one who succeeded Mary Hunter. He also left ten thousand dollars to his personal secretary, who’d told a reporter once that she’d been too busy working for the industries to ever get married.

  His nurse got three thousand dollars. According to a handwritten note he filed with his will documents, Mr. J.D. had originally promised to leave her eight thousand but he wanted the money he’d lent her in 1959—to pay for her husband’s hospital costs and burial expenses—to be deducted from the initial promised gift.

  He left his personal home and surrounding land to the Pocahontas Bassett Baptist Church. If the building ever ceased to be a church, he noted in wobbly cursive, then it should be given over to the “benefit of the white citizens of the Bassett community” to become a community center and a “playground for white youth.”

  Area journalists poured on the love in numerous newspaper editorials, like this sweeping tribute:

  Unlocked and still free of the shrouds of the casket and tightly secured walls of the burial vault, the heritage of an indomitable will hovered, as it will through the ages, along the factory-lined banks of the Smith River; the products of a spirit of conquest and great strength rumble by train and truck into every corner of the nation and to marketplaces throughout the world.

  A little more than a year after Mr. J.D.’s death, Mr. Doug was diagnosed with end-stage spine and neck cancer. The announcement was a total shocker, and it heralded a succession issue that would haunt Mr. Doug’s only son and threaten to sever both business and family ties for decades.

  Few people understood why, at the age of sixty-five, Mr. Doug had a major change of heart. Few could explain why, on his deathbed in the hospital, he called in some members of the Bassett Furniture board to announce a change in succession: now, upon Mr. Doug’s death, cousin Ed would move up to chairman of the board, and Bob Spilman, the hotshot son-in-law, would become Ed Bassett’s number two.

  “But what about John?” asked Spencer Morten, board member and in-law.

  “John will be handling my estate,” Doug said.

  Mary Elizabeth Morten, one of the largest Bassett stockholders at the time, said she never understood why Doug chose his son-in-law over his own son. But Spencer has a memory of his uncle’s final hour: As Spencer walked into Mr. Doug’s room, he passed Jane Bassett Spilman walking out. The favorite child. The one Doug called his conscience. The daughter who had arranged her brother’s marriage.

  The one with the mind of a man, as her father liked to brag.

  After Spencer offered that missing piece of the family saga, I remembered the furniture store I visited when I began chasing this tale. Amid the bucketfuls of plunking rain, owner Delano Thomasson had shared a critical piece of information that few members of the Bassett family were willing to reveal. It resulted in both the worst thing that ever happened to John Bassett III and, though it would take him decades to understand it, the best.

  The last-minute double-cross stung him and it humbled him and ultimately, it made one helluva fighter out of Little John.

  “It’s real simple,” Delano told me. “Jane hugged Papa and got her man the job.”

  PART III

  8

  Navigating the New Landscape

  We used to wonder why she spent so much time at the college picking out bathroom fixtures.

  —ANNA LOGAN LAWSON ON JANE BASSETT SPILMAN

  While Mr. Ed managed the town’s affairs via the company and the Kiwanis Club, which he ruled with an iron fist, Bob Spilman stuck to business and rarely mixed with the townspeople. He frequently asked barber Coy Young to cut his hair early in the morning, before the shop opened, so he wouldn’t be seen. He joined neither the church started by C.C. Bassett (Methodist) nor the one started by J.D. (Baptist). Though he was originally from North Carolina, the nephew of a prominent textile manufacturer, Spilman had arrived in Bassett by way of the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. He thought that, socially, Bassett was Death Valley—and he said so, loudly, more than once.

  Though Jane may have secured his future as company president, Spilman thought it would look wimpy to have his wife conspicuously involved in company affairs. In the corporate world of the 1960s, that just wasn’t done. Company officers suggested he appoint Jane to the Bassett board, but “I knew it would be a cold day in hell before that happened,” Jane said.

  I knew Jane had relished talking about the factories with her father so I asked whether her husband at least shared what was happening at the Taj Mahal with her over dinner. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that question,” she said, and she seemed genuinely stung. “But the answer is no. And it used to break… my… heart.”

  Jane exerted her power in other ways. She had a new clubhouse built for the Bassett Country Club and appointed herself head of town beautification, concerning herself with such details as the color of paint on the company homes and store facades and how frequently the streets were cleaned and the grass along the highways mowed. She became the first woman to chair the board of her alma mater, Hollins College, where she’s remembered as a driven, but cheerful, powerhouse.

  A diminutive blonde with stick-straight posture, she wore navy blue suits with brass buttons to board meetings and ran roughshod over fund-raising protocols, faculty input, and presidential search committees. Her phone conversations were purposeful and direct, always ending with a breezy “Do be of good cheer!”

  The gorgeous new Wyndham Robertson Library on campus? She nailed the ask for that one, charming Wyndham’s billionaire brother, Julian Robertson, and securing three million dollars toward the fourteen-million-dollar project in a single visit. She even chose the architect for the project, all the better to ensure it matched the other traditional brick squares on campus and suited her vision to a tee.

  Bill Young, Bassett’s retired corporate communications director, recalled Jane sealing the deal on a two-million-dollar donation to Hollins from a Bassett board member—during a single fifteen-minute car ride. She was efficient, if imperious, in her role, once discarding a lesbian board-member nominee for the Hollins board because “she’s not our kind,” according to fellow board member Anna Logan Lawson, and concerning herself with every detail of an alumni-quarters renovation, down to picking out the faucets.

  “But when the students met with her, she really spoke to them as a powerful woman who could get stuff done,” added Lawson, an anthropologist and Roanoke-area civic leader. “She was strong and she looked good, and she was in their corner. I admired her and everything she did for Hollins, but I would not want to be her.”

  Jane had already proven—to the world—that she was not afraid to ruffle feathers. An otolaryngologist friend had recognized Jane’s firebrand qualities after she’d founded a residential facility for juvenile offenders as an alternative to jail in Martinsville, a feat that garnered statewide press in the 1970s. The doctor encouraged her to join the board of Gallaudet University, and within four years, she had risen to chair. But at the federally funded liberal arts college for the deaf in Washington, DC, her leadership style was viewed as “unenlightened” and autocratic. Some professors criticized her “plantation mentality” and described the entire board as a bastion of paternalism toward the hearing-impaired. Asked why she had not bothered to learn sign language in her six years of serving on the board, Jane explained that “my efforts and my time would be best directed in areas where others couldn’t perform, like the budget.”

  In 1988, when the board hired a hearing president over two
deaf finalists, the students shut down the college, took to the streets, and marched with signs that said SPILMAN, LEARN TO SIGN: “I RESIGN!” They burned Jane and the president she’d hired in effigy and called for their immediate resignations.

  For eight days, Jane refused to bow to their demands and was quoted as saying, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.” That quote became the spark that mobilized the international deaf community, which called the protest the “Selma of the deaf.”

  Though she said later she’d been misunderstood by an interpreter and, consequently, misquoted, Jane did resign the following week, conceding that her presence on the board had become “an obstacle to healing.”

  Back in Bassett, she told a Roanoke Times reporter that just a few weeks earlier, she had been fund-raising for Gallaudet in New York, where a potential donor told her the university suffered from not being well-known.

  “Lord knows, there’s nobody who hasn’t heard of Gallaudet University” now, she said. Wistfully, she swore that she had not uttered the offending quote—though “it probably will be on my gravestone.” She held her head high and kept her cheerfulness in check.

  Had Jane been born a decade later, Lawson said, “I think she would have had a much different, probably much happier, life. She would have run Bassett Industries. There’s no question in my mind.”

  Though she never said it directly, Jane described herself in a way that implied she was a victim of the Southern patriarchy. But behind the scenes, according to dozens of people I interviewed, an entirely different narrative emerged. She had claimed that there were no discussions of the factory at the dinner table, but most people I talked to insisted that Jane maintained a firm grip on the company tiller throughout her husband’s tenure. “Jane was Bob’s personal board of directors,” a former Bassett vice president, Howard Altizer, said.