by Macy, Beth
Observers could tell they were fond of each other. “But you could also tell there was an ongoing tension about who’s the final word here,” Warner Dalhouse, the banker, recalled. “Jane wasn’t gonna let Bob totally use up her authority as a Bassett.
“All the Bassetts were tough, but Bob Spilman was more Bassett than the Bassetts,” he added. Perhaps even more Bassett than Jane.
Although barber Coy Young has his doubts about that. “Kiss my foot that she was wounded!” he said when I told him how she described being cut out of business discussions. “Listen, when she went into the barbershop or the bank, you knew she was there. She’d go into a beauty parlor and order lobster on the phone in front of everybody, showing you she had the capability.”
Young remembered counseling a distraught Bassett shipping supervisor named Cosmo after watching Bob Spilman cuss him out publicly in the barbershop one morning. Cosmo had been put in the middle of an argument between Bob and Jane having to do with furniture they’d collected to give to their children. It was a disagreement about which kid got which piece, and Cosmo had sided with Jane.
Coy tried not to react as Bob cursed Cosmo, but he felt the display was childish and inappropriate. Then Cosmo dragged Coy into the dispute, asking him, in front of Spilman, to weigh in.
“Cosmo, when Bob gets through cussing you out, it’s over,” Coy told him. “But if you had crossed Jane, it would never be over. You did what you had to do.”
After which Spilman grumped, “Coy, cut my goddamn hair.”
Spilman was the one who hung a sign behind his desk proclaiming himself THE MEANEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY. When he needed a ride to High Point for Market business, he called up the Henry County sheriff and told him to send over a deputy to drive him there.
Spilman was also the one who stood by the elevators of the Taj Mahal and said “Good afternoon” to people who dared to show up for work at 8:02 a.m., just two minutes late. And Spilman was the one who sent the company jet to fetch plant manager Joe Philpott from his family vacation at the beach when personnel issues arose that called for a deft, diplomatic touch Spilman wasn’t capable of providing. Twice.
But behind the scenes, according to most people I spoke to, Jane was the mover of the family chess pieces, knighting her husband and later her son, Rob, and relegating her brother, Little John, to pawn. “John was on the board, but from the very beginning after their father’s death, he was cut out of all decision-making,” said Altizer, who worked for the company from 1965 to 1980. When John suggested ideas for improving plant efficiency, he was openly brushed off by Spilman, who didn’t believe in spending money on expensive new machinery. “Do the best with what you have,” he was fond of telling plant managers—and if you could cut costs by 5 percent, even better.
In the community at large, the little people had to walk a tightrope, recalled industry veteran John McGhee. “You couldn’t show too much love and affection for Bob and Jane because that would piss off” the C.C. Bassett side. “And if you were like me, you probably felt like John Bassett would be the heir apparent when Bob relinquished the board chairman or the presidency.” And yet there seemed to be no love lost between Spilman and Little John, so who knew?
Not long after Spilman became president of Bassett, conglomerates such as Mead and Burlington Industries decided the furniture industry was ripe for diversification, and, seeing profits in furniture, they started buying up companies.
Bassett’s balance sheet was the envy of the industry, and the company was still the largest single-name-brand furniture company in the United States. It was averaging a 17 percent return on invested capital and more than 8 percent on sales, and by the mid-1980s, it had $65 million in cash and almost no debt, which gave Spilman the flexibility to make big acquisitions. The company was publicly held but tightly controlled by managers and relatives—that is, the appointees of Spilman and Jane.
Rather than modernize the Bassett factories, Spilman began acquiring others to beef up sales. As he told an interviewer in 2005, “We bought so many damn plants it takes a long time to remember them all.”
“Bob was a good pitchman behind the scenes,” said Colbert Micklem, a Bassett salesman of that era. “He loved to handle the money and look for ways to purchase things and grow his industry. But he did nothing to improve the efficiency of the plants.”
A reporter for Fortune had visited the town in 1967, and the resulting article chided Bassett and the other Southern furniture makers for their “Rube Goldberg assembly-line techniques,” calling their mass-produced furniture “uniformly uninspired and often downright ugly.”
But when Little John suggested a design change, it was usually dismissed outright. More than once, Spilman prohibited John from flying on the company airplane, even after John’s suitcase was packed and he was ready to board. Mr. Ed griped that “Little John is just plain smart”—and not in a good way. In fact, several people told me that Spilman, Jane, and Ed quietly promulgated the notion throughout the industry that John Bassett wasn’t smart or “sophisticated” enough to become CEO of a furniture company as large as Bassett. As Bunny Wampler put it, “John was always trying to tell Spilman what to do, but Spilman was a lot smarter and wouldn’t listen to him. So he just wanted to get John out of his hair.”
John was, after all, ten years younger than Spilman, who was already a vice president when John returned to Bassett. Just twenty-eight when his father died, John knew he didn’t have the management experience to run the company. But he believed that if he held tight and learned the ropes, playing the good soldier and biding his time, the presidency would one day be his.
When he returned home from Germany and repeatedly went over Mr. Ed’s head, he had no idea he was playing into the Spilmans’ hands. “John should’ve respected Ed more than he did,” Spencer Morten said. He alienated Morten, too, when he brought a furniture buyer from Norfolk into Dominion Ornamental, the plant Mr. Doug had set up to make the boys play nice. John was running the J.D. plants at the time and thought nothing of taking the furniture buyer to Dominion, run by Morten, and committing the ultimate sin: shutting it down (temporarily) to show the visitor how it worked. He was doing something worse than showing off; he was slowing the production line. JBIII disputes that account and says that shutting down an operating assembly line is anathema to him, then and now.
Several Spilman friends, relatives, and industry insiders who asked not to be named said Mr. Ed and Spilman cut a secret deal within minutes of Doug Bassett’s funeral. If Spilman promised never to fire Ed Bassett’s manager sons, Eddie and Charles, Ed would retain his spot as chairman of the board, but Spilman would run the daily operations—and do whatever he wanted with the brassy young heir. “Ed could not stand Little John Bassett,” one family friend said. “And Spilman sucked up to Ed because he had to.”
“It was all about survival,” one relative told me. “If John’s father had lived longer, Uncle Ed would have never had a shot at running the whole thing.” John surely would have been promoted over Spilman, the relative added. “But Ed mucked everything up.”
In the 1967 Fortune magazine photo spread, John is already on the periphery. CEO Ed stands in the middle of his management team, his foot perched casually on the railroad track that intersects the company town. He’s flanked by his son Charles and his confidant Bob Spilman—while John grins at the photo’s edge.
The article called Ed a blunt advocate of paternalism, describing the $1.5 million the company had just spent to build two recreation centers, one for blacks and one for whites. “We have to keep the people happy, although I must say it was easier to do in the days before television and cheap transportation,” Ed told the magazine, which described the family’s style of living and management as belonging to a “bygone day.”
And Fortune didn’t know the half of it.
At Jane Spilman’s home in central Virginia, horse country, on the Charlottesville side of Richmond, photographs of children and grandchildren were a
rranged neatly on bureaus. Bob Spilman was present in a few of them, but most of the photos he was in featured his prize possession, a sport-fishing yacht he named Sawdust.
Sure, he had a woodworking shop in all three of his homes, and once he used his shop to construct a nineteen-foot dory (with the help of a company sample maker), which he launched at a party—in his swimming pool. But if you asked any of the thousands of people who worked the Bassett assembly lines, they would tell you: He did not have sawdust in his veins.
I visited eighty-two-year-old Howard Hodges at the Fork Mountain Rest Home to talk about the thirty-eight years he’d worked at Bassett, and Hodges said Spilman rarely toured the plants. But when employees had problems with their managers, they were encouraged to snitch on them by writing directly to Spilman via a form the company referred to as the hotline.
“Most people were scared of Mr. Spilman, but he was always good to me,” said Hodges, wearing a robe, undershirt tank, and sweatpants. He sat on the side of his twin bed, which dwarfed the tiny room, with its worn linoleum floors and cinder-block walls. His wife, Myrtle, died in 1973 in a car wreck; they were carpooling to work at the Bassett Chair plant with some other employees to save gas money, and the driver hit a pothole, lost control, and crashed into an embankment. “Lord, I have missed that woman,” he said.
His goal had been to work until he turned eighty, but his doctor made him retire in 2000 at age seventy. Twelve years earlier, he’d had a heart attack at work but refused to leave his planing machine until his foreman forced him to see the company nurse—twenty minutes into his attack.
He has fond memories of working for JBIII in the J.D. plants, John’s first plant-manager job. He stopped by Howard’s machine regularly to check on the planer, telling him to keep up the good work. Like his father and his uncle Bill before him, John knew most of his employees by name. His workplace philosophy was that direct communication was preferable to snitching: “If you want to find out how a machine is doing, don’t go to the foreman. Go to the man who’s running it,” Hodges recalled John telling him.
Decades later, John Bassett III will say very little about how his relatives treated him in the family business. More than once, he bit my head off for asking. After my three-hour interview with Jane, though, he wanted to find out everything she’d said. A newspaper article I had written about him a few months earlier prompted him to thank me because it led to the first honest discussion the two had had in decades. Now he was curious. “What else did Jane say? What did she say about me?”
I was surprised to be dragged into the family drama, with John pressing me to tell him exactly what his sister said, and Jane implying to me that they’d both been the victims of her husband’s domineering personality. “Robert was terrible to John. Terrible!” she said.
Their relationship seemed devoid of the affection I’d witnessed in Junior and Mary Thomas’s modest trailer, watching them interact with their grandson and hearing them tell departing visitors, “Have a blessed day!”
When I told JBIII that Jane claimed she’d stood up for him with Spilman—that “John was unaware of how far I went to bat for him”—he nodded and admitted, “That’s probably true.” He hadn’t known Spilman withheld details about the factories from Jane and refused to put her on the board. It was also news that Jane felt she’d had to choose her husband over her brother if she wanted her marriage to last.
“Bob was very pedantic,” John said in a rare unguarded moment. “He’d give you a job and then he’d try to micromanage how you did it. He’d tell you to go to New York, then call back to ask what plane you were taking, what airport you were leaving from. He wanted to control every little thing.”
And that’s all he would divulge at that point about the man who would dominate the narrative of his career and, ultimately, his family. Nearly three years after Spilman’s death, John Bassett told me I could interview anyone I wanted to. But if I was looking for more on his brother-in-law—and the humiliation John suffered at his hands—he was not going to be the one to give it to me.
9
Sweet Ole Bob (SOB)
He got a lot of enjoyment out of people being afraid of him.
—BILL YOUNG, RETIRED BASSETT FURNITURE CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR
In 1972, the company hired Frank Snyder to be its first in-house lawyer. Like Spilman, a former army paratrooper and ROTC student at NC State, Snyder was an ex-military guy who was vigilant about workplace punctuality and impeccably shined shoes. During Snyder’s first decade on the job at Bassett, the two tough-guy veterans bonded like glue to plywood.
Snyder was initially tasked with handling a delicate legal case. Some workers had complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that blacks and women weren’t getting a fair shake at Bassett, resulting in a lawsuit. In fact, eight years after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required employers to halt discrimination, Bassett Furniture’s thirteen plants, now operating in several Southern states, were still largely segregated.
Sanding- and cabinet-room employees were all white, but the spray rooms—the dirtiest part of furniture-making—were operated entirely by black men. Black women handled the rub rooms, where workers wiped off the excess spray by hand. It wasn’t dangerous as long as there was proper ventilation, and workers wore masks and gloves. Women weren’t allowed to run machines, which put them at an unfair wage differential since machine operators typically earned more than those working the line.
Before Snyder came on board, Bassett’s legal affairs had always been handled by lawyer and top Virginia legislator A.L. Philpott, with his Main Street office just down the street from the Taj Mahal and his entwined Henry County family connections weaving several generations back. Having aligned himself with Bonce Stanley and the other Virginia segregationists, Philpott had been in no hurry to see the Civil Rights Act followed to the letter at Bassett. One of the first stories I heard about racial tension in the region, in fact, involved a brief run-in between A.L. Philpott and Doretha’s husband, William “Pork Chop” Estes, the chauffeur of Ruby Bassett, Mr. Ed’s wife.
Estes was out with his stepdaughter Naomi Hodge-Muse, a chemistry major home visiting her folks from historically black Virginia Union College, when they ran into the legendary state legislator, whom Estes knew through the Bassetts. Estes politely stopped Philpott on the street to introduce him to Naomi but was cut off with a stern “Boy, I don’t have time for you today.”
“All he wanted was to introduce me and say, ‘This my li’l girl. She in college,’ ” said Naomi, slipping into Pork Chop’s dialect. She’s in her early sixties now, retired from a management job at Miller Brewing in nearby Eden, North Carolina, and likes to joke that she was the first in her family to make alcohol and “do it legal!” The widow of the banker who ran Martinsville’s first black-owned savings and loan, she lives comfortably in Chatmoss, the upper-middle-class community named for one of the largest tobacco plantations in the area—not far from where her great-great-grandmother Amy Finney once toiled as a slave. She organized the Christmas parade float for her local branch of the NAACP in 2011—and shook her head when the city of Martinsville bestowed the honor of best float on the Sons of the Confederacy. “And they don’t understand why people stay mad!” she fumed.
The memory of her stepfather being dismissed by A.L. Philpott still brings tears to her eyes. He was so ashamed by the incident that he never spoke of it again. The following year, when the family fell short on tuition, Naomi dropped out for a semester to work at a competing furniture factory in the region. The man who fed the ripsaw spit tobacco juice on her feet to intimidate her, and a manager threatened daily to rape her during lunch. She knew if she told her stepfather, a World War II combat veteran, he’d do something about it that would end in his arrest. She confided in her grandmother instead. A maid for the Bassetts—the one who wore two girdles at once—Dollie Finney had sparked young Naomi’s interest in chemistry when she bought a science-fair kit for her o
n layaway in 1964. That was the beginning of a string of science-fair projects that eventually earned Naomi a college scholarship. She was the first in her family to go.
“I ain’t never let no man put his hands on me, save [when] I wanted him to,” her grandmother told her. “You take care of your business.”
The next day, the ninety-seven-pound firebrand tucked a switchblade into the back of her jeans on her way to work. This time when the supervisor cornered her and threatened to take her out behind the lumber stack, Naomi whipped out her knife. She demonstrated the movement for me at a quiet sidewalk café in Martinsville on a crisp fall day in 2011, the anger still palpable some four decades later. Her hand shook, and her eyes were blazing. The foreman had backed down immediately, swearing that he’d only been kidding. “That’s when I learned that being timid didn’t get you a damn thing,” she said.
But Naomi still shudders to think how her life would have played out had her blade pierced his white skin.
Her grandmother’s double-girdling may have been more prudent. But Naomi started working in the 1970s, when the great changes sweeping the nation were finally reaching this remote corner of smokestacks and red-clay earth.
It was race relations and the war in Vietnam that consumed most Americans when President Richard Nixon made the bold, historic move of meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-tung in 1972, thawing relations with the People’s Republic of China for the first time in twenty-five years. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon declared after leaving behind an American redwood sapling as a symbol of mutual peace, prosperity, and international trade.
Spilman had more immediate concerns than China on his mind. Up in his office at the Taj Mahal, he ordered Frank Snyder to bring the company into EEOC compliance and make the lawsuit go away, echoing the mandate of Mr. Ed Bassett, who didn’t want to experience the indignity of being chewed out by a federal judge again. Decades earlier, Ed had borne the brunt of a legal lashing when Bassett was found to have sixteen-year-olds on its payroll, a violation of child-labor laws. (Like his relatives before him, Ed had started working in the factories at fourteen and didn’t understand what the big deal was—but the federal government felt differently.)