by Macy, Beth
Ed didn’t like the idea of paying a full-time staff lawyer, though, and Snyder recalled arriving at his office at 7:20 a.m.—long before most corporate lawyers were on duty—just to show Ed that he could keep up with any Bassett. One morning, Ed appeared at Snyder’s door, stretched his arms authoritatively against both sides of his door frame, and sighed. “Tell me again, what is it you do?” he asked.
Mr. Ed was the originator of the great Henry County adage that John Bassett would go on to adopt: “When you see a snake’s head, hit it.” Ed was also the subject of an even more colorful regional phrase: “Mr. Ed didn’t cull up and down the Smith River.” The first time I heard it—from a group of Vaughan-Bassett salesmen who worked for Bassett in the 1960s—I had to get them to spell the word to be clear.
C-u-l-l. In the furniture industry, it’s a term that refers to sorting—culling—the bad lumber from the good. Only in Mr. Ed’s case, the reference was not to wood but to women—secretaries and other companions whom he met with at his private retreat, a cabin in the Henry County woods. Several retired Bassett office workers I interviewed could still quote from the sex-talk-laden “business letters” Ed dictated to his company secretary (and mistress). The men routinely swiped the tapes from her desk and passed them around for a laugh. Once, in fact, W.M.’s secretary volunteered to type up the letters for Mr. Ed’s secretary when she was out sick, and when she discovered the content covered a lot more than baby-crib sales, she transcribed them and then forwarded the transcriptions, word for word, to W.M. “He was going to fire Ed, but they were reorganizing the sales force at the time, and he couldn’t afford to do it without him,” said Reuben “Scotty” Scott, longtime manager of the J.D. plants.
According to several industry insiders, “Mr. Ed didn’t cull up and down the Smith River” meant that when it came to women, he didn’t sort the bad from the good. He’d cavort with anyone. They also said he wasn’t the only higher-up to act like that either, adding that several managers routinely cheated on their wives.
It was Mad Men in the mountains.
With moonshine instead of martinis.
Some managers competed to see who could bang the new company nurse or the new hire in advertising first, and at least one senior manager contracted gonorrhea. (He quietly arranged for his wife to get treatment after making the family doctor promise not to disclose the real reason she had to be on the antibiotic.)
Spilman didn’t participate in it, multiple people told me. But he was eager to hear every lascivious detail. In 2005, he lamented in an American Furniture Hall of Fame oral-history interview that he missed the old ways of doing business: “You’ve got so many things you can do and can’t do legally—age restrictions, sexual remarks. Techniques are entirely different than they were in my really active years,” he said.
Managers were so brazen that a female buyer from J.C. Penney once turned the corner during a tour of a Bassett factory to see two people going at it during their lunch break.
The buyer deadpanned to a colleague, “Are they doing a cutting?”—the production term for a single order of a particular suite.
“The joke at Bassett was, you had to stand in line on the Smith River banks sometimes to get a spot at lunch,” Bob Merriman told me.
One out-of-town supplier was so shocked by the language and lewdness that he joked that all men in Bassett were afflicted with the Smith River Twitch.
But Mr. Ed was all business when it came to sales, arriving at work before seven every morning to run the prior day’s numbers. He encouraged sales managers to hound the salesmen working under them. “Send them a telegram or write a letter or call, or do all three!” sales manager Mick Micklem recalled him shouting. “Keep the pressure on these guys every single day. We’ve got thousands of people depending on us in these factories for their livelihoods, and we’ve gotta keep ’em working.”
Mr. Ed was so tenacious, JBIII said, that he once dispatched the company’s lumber buyer to the Mississippi Delta to buy lumber during an industrywide shortage, and when the man returned empty-handed, Mr. Ed was steamed.
“Did you get my lumber, Charlie?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Because the sawmillers would’ve had to wade out chest-high into the swamps to cut it,” Charlie explained.
“Charlie, there’s no water in the swamp,” Mr. Ed persisted, squinting his already deep-set eyes.
“But there is, sir,” Charlie said.
“Charlie,” Mr. Ed repeated, enunciating each syllable, “there’s no water in the swamp.”
So Charlie went back to the Delta with Mr. Ed’s permission to beg, borrow, or overpay the sawmillers—whatever it took—to bring some lumber back.
If Mr. Ed needed wood, then there was simply no water in the swamp.
Snyder said it took him one week to figure out the corporate/family hierarchy: “Doug Bassett had given Ed Bassett a beating, and when Ed took over, he passed the beatings on to Bob Spilman, who passed all the static on to John.”
The truth was, Spilman was an equal-opportunity beater—tough on everyone who worked for him, from his company pilot to, eventually, his own son. He was honest, loyal to the people who mattered to him, and he culled, which meant he was faithful, if not exactly tender, to his wife.
“He’d sit at the table on Christmas Day, and I could strangle him, but he’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I heard the factory whistles blow,’ ” Jane said.
“He thought Christmas was a great waste of time,” his son, Rob, told me.
It was Jane, in fact, who came up with the pointedly ironic nickname Sweet Ole Bob. SOB for short.
If Mr. Ed was leery of going in front of a federal judge again, then Spilman would see to it that Snyder set things right in the factories. The blacks could have their civil rights for all he cared, as long as the unions steered clear of Bassett. Spilman’s allegiance was to his pact with Mr. Ed and their mutual goal to keep Little John marginalized.
Snyder toured each of the company’s plants, explaining how they all were going to adhere to the Civil Rights Act and the new EEOC rules. In the two J.D. plants John managed, the sanding room was staffed by white men, most of them relatives of two extended families who had been laboring for generations in that department. The families sent their elders into John’s office to throw down the gauntlet: they weren’t going to tolerate working with “any goddamn niggers,” as Snyder recalled them saying.
To which John calmly replied, “If that’s your feeling, then you can leave right now because this is the way it’s gonna be.”
“I always respected John after that,” Snyder said.
On the surface John seemed impervious to the bullying of his uncle and brother-in-law, an attitude that gradually earned him the respect of those who used to discount him as an entitled spoiled brat. When Spilman showed up at his desk in the factory, he made John stand up and give him his chair. Then he’d sit down in his tailor-made suit and put his feet up on John’s desk—while John stood and listened.
He paid no attention when Spilman told his inner circle, “My brother-in-law is still a child. He’s the most immature person I’ve ever seen.”
John didn’t complain either when Spilman refused to pay for production-incentive bonuses. John simply paid for them himself, ordering lobsters flown in from Maine and steaks brought in from Kansas City; throwing three-thousand-dollar parties (featuring pigs roasting on spits) to reward his factory supervisors for upping the company’s profits; and handing out gold #1 tiepins he’d had commissioned and Swiss army knives. One retiree told me that John once took the supervisors to a strip club in Roanoke as a reward.
“Bob should have offered [the incentives] to the other plant managers,” John said. “I could afford it, but the others couldn’t.” Besides, what JBIII paid out was pocket change compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of pure profit the company made when it produced a hundred and twenty dressers an hour instead of a hundred.
/> He used his money as a motivator again when he couldn’t convince his plant foremen to keep the factory as clean as he wanted. He called up a chocolate manufacturer an hour away and asked if the company could deliver an order the same day he placed it. Then he wrote a letter to the wife of each supervisor saying, If your husband’s department is clean by the time we shut down for Christmas, he will bring you home a box of chocolates made fresh that very morning. “The next Friday, you could eat off the floor of any department!” he told me, beaming at the memory. Chocolate—and the promise of what came after it at home later, if the guys were lucky—was a better motivator than intimidation.
Once, when he surpassed the allotted budget on a screwdriver order, Spilman had the money docked from his pay. “You didn’t get my permission!” he barked. Weeks later, Bill Brammer, the company’s chief financial officer and an old family friend, reimbursed John without Spilman’s knowledge.
It was a lonely spot to be in, with his father gone and Mr. Ed and Spilman eager to shove him aside. “When others only want their sons to do well, it hardens you,” he said. “But at some point you quit feeling sorry for yourself and say, How am I gonna get this job done?”
Publicly, he handled Spilman’s treatment well. “But privately I think it was always in his craw,” said Howard Altizer, a vice president who rented a house on the Spilman property that was equidistant from the couple’s elegant Dutch Colonial home and the mother-in-law cottage they built for Jane and John’s mother, Lucy, after Mr. Doug’s death.
It was a great perch from which to observe the family members, and observe them he did, noting the way Bob and Jane rarely socialized with others in the family except Jane’s mother, whose affections “they seemed to claim at the expense of John,” Altizer said. “In a small community like that, you’d think all the Bassetts and their relatives running the [competitor] factories would be thick as thieves, but they were not.”
While John didn’t seem to be revered in the family, he was admired in the greater community, said Carolyn Blue, who babysat for Pat and John Bassett’s three children in the late 1960s. Carolyn’s father and grandfather had worked in the Bassett plants, and from her perspective—spending hours inside the young couple’s grand house on Riverside Drive, the one they bought when the apartment became too small—John and Pat Bassett reminded her of a young JFK and Jackie, going to parties and staying out late and calling the Bassett taxi driver, Roy Martin, to take the babysitter home.
Pat was adventurous and fun, not blinking when she had to drive her Jeep up the steep back road to pick up Carolyn, the rocks flying in her wake, and not caring when Franny, her youngest, drew on the walls. Pat complained when Carolyn called her Mrs. Bassett, insisting that Carolyn call her the less formal Miss Pat.
“Can I be candid?” Carolyn asked me. “I just didn’t like that.… Why not just [let me] call her Pat? But I liked her and respected her immensely. She was lighthearted and very generous with me. She gave me tons of very nice clothes and jewelry.”
One time during a party at Pat and John’s house, Carolyn was glued to Star Trek and didn’t notice when little Fran made a paste of laundry powder and slathered it all over her face.
“Oh God, your parents are gonna kill me!” Carolyn shrieked.
“It’ll be all right, Care-non,” the toddler reassured her. And it was.
JBIII experienced no such warmth at work—and neither did anyone else. Spilman ruled the growing corporation as if he were a general, the kind who flies into a rage at the sight of a private’s dirty shoes. He controlled every aspect of the business, down to deciding who rode which elevator. No one in the corporate office was permitted to spend more than three hundred dollars (it was later upped to five hundred) unless Spilman personally approved the purchase. He chose the furniture suites the company would premiere every six months at Market. He decided which factories made which suites. He gathered his inner circle in his office after lunch every day to play gin rummy and poker—and so he could gather intel on what was going on elsewhere in the company. Without, of course, inviting his brother-in-law.
“They were throwing hundred-dollar bills around!” Snyder said of the games, which continued on the corporate jet during business trips.
“We used to say, all the decisions made in this company are made in that damn poker game,” recalled former Bassett sales manager Bob Merriman. “If you got rid of the poker game, the company might really take off!” If they were on the plane and still playing poker or gin rummy just before the landing, Spilman would order his pilot to circle around the city until the game was over—especially if he was winning.
Junior Thomas, the retired mirror-plant worker, nearly spit when I brought up Bob Spilman’s name, calling him a “wicked, wicked man!” Thomas had business on the third floor of the Taj Mahal one day when Spilman was in charge, and he couldn’t help hear him berating employees from down the hall. “He cussing them folks around there like he owned ’em,” he said. Spilman once threatened to remove W.M. Bassett’s name from the town community center sign when Bassett Mirror, run by W.M.’s son-in-law, reduced its annual donation to the center during an economic downturn.
No one was spared his fevered scoldings, longtime managers said. His closest confidant was the longtime Superior Lines plant manager Joe Philpott, whose factory churned out $600,000 to $1.2 million in furniture profits—a month—during the company’s heyday. Philpott got so mad at Spilman once that he threw his keys, accidentally piercing the company oil portrait of Mr. Doug. “I called him Sweet Ole Bob… and he’d call me one too. God, we’d go at it,” Philpott said, grinning.
The feisty, expletive-dropping plant boss was one of the few managers who did battle with Spilman on a daily basis. He not only lived to tell the tale but actually liked the man, warts and all. Spilman even sent him to Harvard once, a semester-long executive-training program run by Harvard Business School. “He was trying to refine me a little, but it didn’t take,” Philpott said.
One time, showing off a new product at High Point, Philpott pointed out the piece’s “bifocal doors,” at which Spilman erupted: “Goddamn! I spent all this money sending him to Harvard, and he can’t even pronounce bifold!”
But when Philpott’s mother-in-law died while he was at Harvard, Spilman dispatched the corporate jet to ferry him home for the funeral. When Spilman heard about a Martinsville woman who needed lifesaving surgery that was available only in New Haven, Connecticut, he quietly had the plane fly her up there and bring her home. He ordered the company treasurer to donate twenty-five thousand dollars in company funds for the renovation of a rural black church, though he was infuriated later when he learned the minister, a Bassett Mirror Company employee, had given it away to “some sisters who’d fallen on hard times,” Philpott recalled, chuckling at his boss’s fury.
Joe Philpott was among the handful of Bassett bigwigs I visited who actually deigned to have Bassett Furniture in their homes. Built on family land a stone’s throw from the center of his own family’s even older company town, the once-thriving sawmill community of Philpott, his brick house featured a dining-room suite and various other pieces made at Bassett during his career.
His family had not fared as well as the Bassetts financially, but they were equally entwined in the region’s good-old-boy network, especially when it came to Joe’s cousin A.L. Philpott, the powerful legislator. “I loved every one of them, but I have never known a Bassett who couldn’t give you a good ass-chewing,” he said.
When Joe and I met in the summer of 2012, he had just returned from a vacation in France and had garden produce spilling from his kitchen counters, so much that he sent me home with a bag of cucumbers and a to-go cup of iced tea. In an accent that was more Johnny Cash twang than Andy Griffith gentleman—and speech peppered with the word damn, which he used like a comma—Joe Philpott described midcentury furniture-making as cutthroat and fun, and so all-consuming that he once calculated that, given all the time he spent there, his sal
ary came to about sixty-five cents an hour.
Stanley Furniture may have paid more than Bassett, as did the Hooker and American plants in Martinsville. But Bassett gave a bonus twice a year, at Christmas and on the Fourth of July. (At Christmas in 1970, the top bonus for line workers with at least twenty years of service was $490.) As the barber Coy Young put it, “It was the old sharecropper mentality, like you were being paid four hundred one-dollar bills, and you’d never seen that much money in your life.”
Bassett managers understood the factory-man mentality to a tee. And the higher-ups got hefty bonuses, Philpott said, adding that his last semiannual bonus before he retired, in 1999, came to $65,000. He was supervising thirteen Bassett factories at the time, including two in Georgia and five in North Carolina.
Spilman and Philpott sometimes went on factory-buying excursions together, once drinking an entire bottle of scotch while the company’s teetotaling financial officer did the driving. Spilman relished competing with other furniture companies, especially Stanley, though he was happy to team up with the cousin competitors when it came to keeping wages down. “We had a secret pact,” whispered Philpott, who worked for Bassett from 1955 to 1999. They tried not to hire each other’s workers—meaning a Bassett employee wouldn’t be able to leave and work for a slightly higher wage at Stanley, and vice versa. Back then, unemployment was low, and it was hard to find and keep good labor. Several dozen former mill workers from Henry County told me that, as late as the mid-1990s, it was possible to quit one job in the morning and have another one lined up by noon.