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

by Macy, Beth

  His own salespeople were competent, he said. “But there’s nothing that can replace somebody with the name Bassett sitting in front of you.”

  Some, like Keith Koenig of City Furniture, placed orders for the first time in years. Some met with him but held firm. “We’re just not gonna buy from him,” Jake Jabs told me after JBIII’s visit. “I like him. He’s a personable guy. But we’re still mad.”

  Others were nudged by necessity more than sales pitch. A New York retailer declined to place a rush order with VBX in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, saying a cheaper product was already on its way from Asia. When that container load arrived, all twenty bedroom suites were adorned with black mold (it’s the tropics in Indonesia, after all), and an order for ninety Cottage Collection suites was then placed.

  “I can put ’em on a truck tomorrow for you,” JBIII told the retailer. “We have a lot of things in Galax, Virginia. But we don’t have black mold.”

  As for that five-point poster he used to trot around with him, the one mashed in a backroom closet next to an old cardboard cutout of Elvis? It’s now on PowerPoint, operated by a young IT employee at Vaughan-Bassett whenever he gives one of his talks—by one of the “people who iPad” so he can spend his time thinking about making money instead.

  The five points can be culled down to five simple words: Fight harder than everybody else.

  The sales pitch always begins with a little soft sex because, in his words, “Soft sex always sells.”

  Thus begins the retelling of the go-to tale for the retailers: Imagine you’re the only woman stranded on a desert island, and you’re surrounded by a dozen men…

  He’s told that story so often now that eliciting laughs from the listener is like breathing to him. It’s like that one nightly cocktail he allows himself as he and Pat watch Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News at top-decibel level (because his ears are shot from all those decades of grouse hunting and all that tinkering on furniture-factory floors).

  The desert-island pitch is classic John Bassett because it’s folksy and dumb-like-a-fox. As one of the salesmen he calls regularly on Saturday afternoons put it, “His real gift is his uncanny ability to make you believe you’re an idiot if you don’t see things the way he does.”

  “When you’re the only girl left standing on an island with twelve men, you don’t have to be good-looking, somebody’s gonna fall in love with you!

  The desert-island pitch is usually a slam dunk with retailers, as solid a beginning as being born in the middle of an epic flood with a silver spoon in your mouth, a chauffeur on standby, and the hospital bill already paid by your millionaire grandpop.

  Not only is Vaughan-Bassett the last girl left standing on the island, she just happens to be good-looking too. That girl can put a wrinkle in a blouse.

  Though he’d never say it to a retailer, he added another flourish when he told me the story, yet again, a few days before the Vaughan-Bassett II press conference. Five hours away, President Barack Obama could talk all he wanted about bringing manufacturing back from Asia. He could even pluck the North Carolina furniture maker Bruce Cochrane from the crowd and sit him next to the First Lady—not knowing that Cochrane’s efforts to reboot his family’s furniture-making efforts would fail a year later, alas.

  “But when you never went cheap with some other woman down the street,” he told me, peering over dusty glasses, “you don’t have to come drag-assin’ back.”

  At the start of my research for this book, I pictured tagging along as John Bassett III went grouse hunting. That didn’t happen; his bad back prevents hunting. Besides, as he put it, trash-talking, even if he could still hunt, he doubted I was fit enough to keep up with him.

  Golfing was also out of the question because he knew and I knew that a nongolfer wouldn’t dream of taking a swing at any of the exclusive clubs to which he belongs.

  The closest I got to one of his golf courses was the stroll I took along the Roaring Gap course one autumn day with Pat and their rescued beagle mutt, Elvis. Most of the magnates had already retreated to their warmer-climate homes for the winter, but Pat, then seventy, stuck around because her best friend lives next door. And because John drives everyone crazy when he’s away from the factory more than a few weeks.

  Asked how she puts up with his sharp tongue and relentless focus on work, she said, “Well, I just am crazy about him. And when I can’t stand it anymore, I turn around and go to Florida.” With Elvis in the passenger seat, his snoot on the console, she makes the eleven-hour drive solo in her Mercedes with only one bathroom stop.

  She pointed to a stand of pines where she and John regularly crouch during evening strolls around the golf course, playing hide-and-seek. “It does feel kind of silly, hiding from a dog,” she admitted drolly.

  They share an earthy, borderline randy sense of humor, joking repeatedly about the erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey—which Pat devoured and liked so much that she even bought the cookbook parody, Fifty Shades of Chicken.

  The factory man and I were friendly, but our exchanges were often fraught. During one heated fact-checking session, he argued so vociferously against the inclusion of some wealth-related facts that I felt like the line worker in Mount Airy who’d just had the stool kicked out from under him.

  Within forty-eight hours of the argument, though, he’d sent flowers and apologized for berating me. He did assist greatly in the reporting of this book, pulling strings to help me land several hard-to-get interviews, including with several people he knew might not say positive things about him.

  His wife was quick-witted and warm, inviting me twice to stay at the family’s Roaring Gap estate. Pat Bassett cooked while I sparred with her husband in the kitchen, the place where he builds a fire at five every morning and then sits to read newspapers from around the globe. She listened in on some of our interviews, interrupting to translate his long-winded business lectures, intuiting when I was confused and offering a better explanation.

  My requests to sit in on Vaughan-Bassett board meetings and sales calls were met with a curt no. It would make people uneasy; it was gauche of me even to have asked. When I inquired about the new furniture designs two months prior to their unveiling at the spring Market, JBIII acted like I meant to expose the company’s trade secrets, even though my book wouldn’t be published until a year after the 2013 trade show.

  Mostly, he called me on the phone, never once saying hello when I picked up. Sometimes he yelled at me; other times he made me laugh. Every now and then I asked a question and he answered it with no spin or emotion attached.

  He called whenever he felt like it. Weeknights and weekends. During my last day of Christmas vacation (“Well, if I’m talkin’ to you, then I’m workin’ too!”). During early-evening hikes up Mill Mountain with my husband and my dog (“Why you breathin’ so hard?”). While he was thick-tongued and on postoperative painkillers two days after having surgery on his back (“I’m already bored”).

  One Monday morning, I’d left my cell phone in another room of my house and didn’t hear it ring—only to return to four missed calls from his Hobe Sound home and a message, left at 8:14 a.m. “Well, I see yo’ sleepin’ in today” began the scolding, booming voice.

  But in all the calls, not once did he break the time-honored code: Not once did he speak ill of his lifelong nemesis, the brother-in-law who pushed him into doing the big things his grandpop had hoped he would—only not at Bassett Furniture. When Bob Spilman died in 2009 at eighty-two, his family organized two funerals, one in Martinsville and one in Richmond. John was one of the few people who attended both—but not, he insisted, “to make sure he was really dead,” as some industry watchers have suggested. He went to support his sister.

  It was up to me to notice that, during a spring 2012 High Point Market dinner lauding JBIII as a pillar of the industry, his immediate family milled around with the three hundred guests, including folks from competing furniture companies, industry analysts, and some retailers who�
��d dumped him (“They acted like I had BO!”). But no one else from the Families came to pay tribute. (Rob Spilman and Jeb Bassett did attend his 2013 induction into the American Furniture Hall of Fame, which is considered the pinnacle of industry achievement.)

  There are people in the industry, including some members of his extended family, who believe he took China to the mat because he loves fighting more than he loves his Galax factory workers. The most cynical among them say he’s fueled by regret that he missed his chance to cash out in the mid-1990s—when he could have taken the company public, before the domestic industry tanked. (JBIII vehemently denies that claim.)

  “We haven’t used his tactics,” said Roxann Dillon, the eighty-year-old granddaughter of C.C. Bassett, speaking about Bassett Furniture and referring, dismissively, to the antidumping case, even though the company joined the coalition and walked away with $17.5 million in duties. “John Bassett didn’t have all these stockholders to keep happy; his was a family-owned thing with very few shareholders.

  “Get your facts right,” she snapped.

  There are others who just as vehemently believe he saved a factory and a town not only because it was good business but also because it was the right thing to do. Members of both camps were in the room that night.

  The event emcee was Marc Schewel, the retailer who’d cut his Vaughan-Bassett orders drastically when imports became available at a better price. He began by calling JBIII an “entrepreneur, survivor, independent thinker, unstoppable barn burner; the signature domestic furniture manufacturer for whom made in America is not a slogan, it’s a credo.

  “But I did a little behind-the-scenes investigation,” Schewel continued. “And I found out that John’s suit was made in India, his shirt in Sri Lanka, his tie in Thailand, his shoes in China, his television set in Korea, his watch in Switzerland, his eyeglasses in Germany…”

  Ba-dah-bum. The event began with Schewel’s barbs and ended with John Bassett describing a stranger approaching him at a Galax gas station a week earlier and thanking him for keeping the town afloat. “There’s a snap again in people’s steps,” he said of the community. “It’s their confidence coming back. People actually believe there’s a place for them again in the global environment.”

  His sons may not have inherited his fiery charisma, but when John Bassett dies, most people in Galax believe they’ll carry his legacy forward. They wouldn’t dare close the factory, one former manager said. “They’re afraid Daddy’ll come back and haunt ’em!”

  He’ll be buried in the graveyard next to the church at Roaring Gap, he told me on the day of our hometown tour. We had stopped at the Martinsville cemetery to see his parents’ graves. On one side were the headstones of his parents’ best friends, the childless couple next door. In a far corner of the family plot stood the tombstone of a woman named Mazie Opal Sizemore Lawson. John didn’t know who Mazie was—someone whose family apparently lacked a plot to bury her. But, like Mr. J.D. before her, his mother had told the woman’s family, Sure, put her there under the dogwood tree.

  Approaching the other side of his parents’ graves, I spotted the headstone of Robert Henkel Spilman. “He’s right beside your parents?” I marveled.

  “Right,” he said. We stood there in silence for a few seconds. Birds chirped. Squirrels darted about.

  Then he told me the story of another awards ceremony, one held in 2008 to honor his nephew Rob. John had written a letter in support of Rob’s nomination for the American Furniture Manufacturers Association’s Distinguished Service Award. The extended family had gathered to support him, including his father, Bob Spilman, who was ailing but not disabled at the time.

  “Bob was very nice to me, and I thanked him, and then he started to talk about what could have been, and I said, ‘Bob, let’s not get into this. It was probably my fault as much as it was yours.’ ”

  It was too late for apologies, too late for what-ifs. It was the last time they saw each other, and if John Bassett had had no intention of hashing out the past with his brother-in-law, he certainly wasn’t going to hash it out four years later with me.

  EPILOGUE

  The Smith River Twitch

  I had crossed a line into a region where the past was still felt to be alive and where the ghosts of the past still governed events.

  —HENRY WIENCEK, THE HAIRSTONS

  During one of my last trips to Bassett, I finally went on a tour with Bassett Historical Center librarian Pat Ross, whose family had landed in town shortly after Mr. J.D. got his start. Her grandfather was the one who made all the lights in town blink when he flipped the switch on his power hog of a boiler.

  More than anyone I interviewed for this book, Pat wanted me to get the story exactly right, to honor the workers as well as the pioneer owners. “It’s history,” she said every time I banged up against an uncomfortable truth. “If you dig it up and it’s true, it’s your job to tell it.”

  Pat was seventy years old and still ran the center as a volunteer, even though she’d officially retired a year before. Volunteers bring in chocolate most days, and whenever anyone makes the forty-minute trip to Danville to shop, they stop at the Midtown Market, a store known for its chicken salad (the key being fresh chicken, minimal mayo, no eggs). Tubs of chicken salad appear in the center’s kitchen like manna, gifted by volunteers for hungry researchers and reporters alike.

  It was Pat’s daughter, Anne Marie, who wrote the history of Mary Hunter, Mr. J.D.’s maid and the namesake of Mary Hunter Elementary School, when she was in the seventh grade. Anne Marie had interviewed Gracie Wade, Mary Hunter’s successor as the family maid, for the project. Nearing ninety at the time, Gracie was still serving the Spilmans’ Christmas dinners, still gardening her little patch of Carver Lane. She liked to place the walker her grandchildren insisted she use inside her wheelbarrow, then wheel the contraption over to her vegetable plot. That way, if the kids paid a surprise visit, she could grab it and pretend to have been using it all along.

  John Bassett caught Gracie doing that once shortly before her death. During his infrequent trips to Bassett, usually for Bassett Mirror board meetings, he never failed to stop by Gracie’s house to hug her, and he never failed to leave without handing her “a little piece of money,” as he called it.

  “Listen,” he told me, “when I go up to the pearly gates and Saint Peter says to me, ‘Who do you know here?’ the first person I’m gonna tell him is Gracie because I know she’ll put in a good word for me.”

  A place like Bassett takes time to pin down. It’s a welter of geography and history, of barbed wire and blue heron, of crumbling brick behemoths and tiny hillside trailers that, astonishingly, somehow still stand.

  It takes patience to pinpoint the soul of any community, and if one is very lucky, the benefit of someone like Pat Ross, who, month after month and layer after layer, helped me really see the effects of globalization on her beloved hometown, down to the streetlight that illuminates the center at night. Ever since Bassett Furniture stopped providing the town’s communal lighting, residents have solicited donations to pay for it—at a cost of $720 per pole per year—though some businesses gave up and had their lights removed from the poles.

  When I finally got around to asking Pat for a tour of Bassett, I’d already seen it from a disparate set of passenger seats. I’d been chauffeured around town in Spencer Morten’s phlegmy-sounding Mercedes diesel and in my own Subaru with Junior Thomas behind the wheel—he still prefers driving over riding after all these years. I’d stood atop the roof of my car while seventy-year-old barber Coy Young clutched my ankle to keep me from falling with my camera onto the railroad tracks, all to re-create the ghost-town version of a downtown Bassett postcard from the bustling 1930s.

  It was May 2013, and Pat had something she wanted me to see near her home. As she drove, we passed her alma mater, John D. Bassett High (class of 1960), now a medical-records storage facility owned by an old classmate who opens the former gym to senior-citizen walkers two
mornings a week. (He also runs food and clothing banks out of the school.) We passed the little company homes, some now rented out to visiting trout fishermen or NASCAR fans flocking to see the Martinsville Speedway race. The winner of Martinsville, as it’s known, still leaves with a coveted regional symbol: a Ridgeway grandfather clock. The clocks, though, are no longer made in the Henry County hamlet of Ridgeway.

  They’re made in China, like most everything else.

  Halfway to our destination, Pat drove to an African American cemetery behind a black church next to a recycling center that was once Mary Hunter Elementary. I’d been wanting to see Mary Hunter’s grave for months. Pat waited in her car while I walked along the weed-choked rows and fallen-down headstones. I found plenty of Hairstons, Finneys, and Barbours, but no Mary Hunter, alas.

  Rosella Johnson had not been quite three years old when she died in 1920. Gone but not forgotten, read her headstone, which was lying on its back, covered in vinca vine and sticks.

  Seeing the grave of Reverend Moses E. Moore (1866–1929), I thought of the solace so many Reconstruction-era furniture workers must have taken in their churches and in the promise of the afterlife. The reverend’s parents had grown up enslaved on Henry County plantations, his mother’s last owner being George DeShazo, his father’s, Betsy Moore. By 1920, he was a fifty-six-year-old mulatto furniture worker living in Horsepasture who ministered on the side and lived in a rented farmhouse with a wife and six kids.

  I got goose bumps when I realized I’d probably already seen his photo in the early Old Town picture (it was the only area furniture factory then operating in the region). He was likely one of the lighter-skinned black men standing in the back row, wearing overalls and holding a hat.