Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  “The stuff’s wore out,” Boyer concluded, referring to the fire safety valves. “They don’t do anything, maintenance or anything, that they’re supposed to do over there.” The plant had to be shut down most of the night.

  They were still mopping up Plant 1 the next evening when Lancaster’s elite pulled into the long driveway leading to Brad and Penny Hutchinson’s restored and modernized 1835 redbrick farmhouse, close to the OU Lancaster campus. The Hutchinsons were hosting a festival benefit—though they seemed mysteriously absent.

  Every spring, Cameo League, a volunteer group that supported the Lancaster Festival, organized a preview of the upcoming event. In return for a donation, the price of admission, attendees were served drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and a helping of festival PR, including a sneak peek at the attractions. At this year’s party, most were also getting their first real look at Joe Piccolo, though some were even more interested in the Hutchinsons.

  The party wasn’t Piccolo’s first public event. He’d held a Q&A and open-mic poetry reading the week before, but that had proved to be an awkward bust—one in a series of incidents that made him privately question his decision to come to Lancaster.

  He hadn’t been in town a week when a woman pulled him aside and said, “You know, your job’s more important than the mayor’s.” She was partly joking, but he thought that was an odd thing to say. He’d since learned what she meant. So many people seemed to be counting on the festival—and on Piccolo—to elevate the entire town that he was starting to get twitchy with worry over what he’d walked into.

  Piccolo had had several careers already: a classical musician, a logistics-and-staging manager in Aspen, a laborer in a northern Ohio foundry that made wheels for railroad cars. He had just interviewed for a sales manager job when he saw an ad for the Lancaster Festival position. He’d never run an entire two-week production, but he had hoped Lancaster might prove to be the start of a new career in arts management.

  He had come to put on a small-town festival, only to find that he was expected to help save the place. People kept talking to him about economic impacts, and town promotion, and the development role the festival was expected to play, but that was a responsibility he didn’t want, and one he didn’t think the festival—or any festival anywhere—should have to bear. The pressure to piece together this first edition under his leadership, with its constrained budget and thirty years of set-in-stone tradition in a town where everybody seemed to know everybody else, was plenty enough for him.

  He kept these concerns to himself. After all, he was new to Lancaster, and Lancaster was new to him. Maybe both sides just had the jitters.

  The Q&A should have been easy. The setting was Art & Clay on Main, an interactive art studio where people, especially those with physical or intellectual challenges, could come and make clay mugs, or glass earrings, or paint. For decades, Len Hajost, Rosemary’s husband, had operated the local office supply store out of the space—until there were no more offices to supply. Becky Hajost, Eric Brown’s wife, then turned it into Art & Clay and had since allowed the Fairfield County Board of Developmental Disabilities to run it. A coffee shop, Square Seven, opened inside the studio. You could hear live acoustic music on some weekend evenings during the spring and summer. So the mise-en-scène was ideal for promoting both an arts fest and Lancaster’s new identity as a leisure destination. And Piccolo didn’t have to do much other than answer a few questions, then turn the stage over to Lancaster’s literary set.

  But Piccolo was nervous, and it showed. Portly before he came to town, he’d since packed on a few more pounds, thanks to an overworked bachelor’s diet. The buttons of his shirt strained against his belly, and though the evening wasn’t particularly warm, damp continents of perspiration migrated through it. His forehead glistened.

  Perhaps if more people had showed, he would have been a little more relaxed. He’d pictured a crowd, vibrant poetry readings, lots of espresso drinking. But only eight of us sat on the wooden chairs that faced a small alcove at the front of the gallery. There wasn’t going to be much poetry reading. Piccolo would have to carry the evening.

  The master of ceremonies, a diminutive man somewhat challenged by a speech impediment, who sometimes submitted freebie reviews of local arts events to the paper, began by turning to Piccolo and, playing the role of Lancaster’s Walter Winchell, saying, “I can make you in this town, or I can break you.” He was joking, too, but the comment slotted easily into the pattern of wary judgment Piccolo had already experienced from many Lancastrians. He squeezed out a thin smile.

  Piccolo took the mic—an unnecessary prop, given the small space and its small group—and hit most of his talking points. “My goal for the festival is to create excitement about the city.” He talked up the headliner acts: Blues Traveler, Mo Pitney, Thompson Square. Anybody who followed the festival knew there were budget concerns—though few understood just how fragile the money situation was—so Piccolo promised that “this year, we have a good, solid budget.” He stressed that the budget had been set before he was hired, but quickly transitioned to his dreams beyond 2015, for what might be possible in three years, maybe five. He had visions of building a bigger stage, of attracting Harry Connick, Jr., or Sheryl Crow—performers who could straddle a generational divide.

  The festival had to grow, he said, and he had some exciting plans to make it grow: more gallery space for art shows, more opportunities to exploit the Lancaster Festival Orchestra, expanding free events like the Rising Park Day for the kids. He embraced his assigned mandate by saying the festival should advertise to bigger media markets like Cleveland and Cincinnati, to draw new people to town who just might look around and say to themselves, “Hey, maybe I should move my business to Lancaster.” But residents had to show a little patience. Meanwhile, he said, pray for good weather.

  The emcee then kicked off the poetry segment by reading a composition of his own. About halfway through, overexcited by his rhythm, he spit his upper denture plate out of his mouth. Everyone pretended not to notice.

  Jeff Barron, a reporter for the Eagle-Gazette, took the next, and last, turn at the mic. He read some well-crafted verse, ostensibly about Asbury Park, New Jersey. Asbury Park was “a town that fell apart,” Barron recited. “Surely those fools must know that a Lost Paradise is forever gone.”

  The party at the Hutchinsons’ home was cheerier, despite a persistent sprinkle. (Every time I ran into festival cofounder Eleanor Hood, she looked to the skies as if in prayer.) About a hundred people came. A local folk singer entertained, the gin and tonics were plentiful. Gary Sheldon, the orchestra director, flew in from Miami, taking the spotlight off Piccolo. Joe only had to introduce himself, express his excitement about Lancaster and the program for the coming event, and turn the microphone over to Sheldon. Sheldon, revered in Lancaster, lent Piccolo a warm public endorsement. He made a pitch for Blues Traveler, assuring his listeners that he was not at all offended by the band’s refusal to play with the orchestra, and that Piccolo was doing a fine job.

  Whatever interest the festival news and Piccolo’s brief debut may have held for the partygoers, they were secondary to the warm-weather coming out of Lancaster society. People stood, their hands gripping highball glasses, napkins wrapped around the bases, and exchanged tales of winter trips to Florida. They debated whether Donald Trump could be a savior after the perfidy of Obama, and whether Ohio governor John Kasich, the presidential preference of most, stood a chance against Jeb Bush, who seemed a sure bet to win the nomination.

  Pretty girls in yellow spring dresses, their hair curled so it wouldn’t look curled, their makeup applied so their faces wouldn’t look made up, chatted easily with their mothers’ friends, who asked polite questions about the just-ended college semester back east, or out west, or down south, while their fathers’ friends tried to suppress the wistful sighs of late-middle-aged men. It was a scene that could have taken place forty years before, down to the dialogue.

  The party also
represented the coming out of the Hutchinsons, though they were nowhere to be found. Their absence only made them seem more exotic.

  “Have you seen her yet?” one woman asked another, referring to Penny Hutchinson as if Penny were Garbo.

  “No, have you?” answered her friend.

  “No, but I’ve heard she’s nice.”

  “Well, the house sure is.”

  Lancaster’s pooh-bahs had no idea what to make of the Hutchinsons. They were discomfiting forty-one-year-old arrivistes whose own amplified light illuminated how much the brightness of the old gentry had dimmed. For two generations, young people who left town for school rarely returned to live in Lancaster, and after Newell wiped away so many young executives who would have taken the place of the soon to retire, a gulf had opened. The elite around town consisted largely of the sixty-something sons and daughters of former high-ranking industrialists, a few doctors, some lawyers. Some of them didn’t even live in Lancaster. They drove in from Granville or from Columbus suburbs.

  Forty years before, the party would have been hosted by an Anchor wife or an executive with Diamond Power or Lancaster Glass. They would have had excellent university pedigrees and low handicaps. Brad Hutchinson, though, was a west-side boy whose mother had died of a drug overdose, whose father had served time, whose siblings were either dead from drug and alcohol abuse, in jail, or addicted. He spoke with the accent and grammar of Lancaster and rode his lawn tractor with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic strapped on his hip as if he were expecting a mower hijacking. His formal education had stopped after high school. That he happened to have built a company with revenues of about $80 million per year made him one of the richest people in town. But he was as uncomfortable with the status his bank account and grand house conferred on him as Lancaster’s old guard was mystified as to what it should make of him. So the Hutchinsons stayed hidden, self-consciously and deliberately—because they “didn’t fit” with the crowd they’d invited.

  Brad had never seen the Lancaster Festival and had no desire to see it. “We don’t go because we don’t like to,” he told me. “I don’t like to be in big crowds of people, and, quite frankly, most of those people act like they’re better than you are. They feel like they’ve reached some stature level. I just don’t ever wanna be that guy who the people think, ‘Well, he thinks he’s better ’n everybody ’cause he’s got a little bit of money.’ I’ve told people, ‘If I ever get to that point, I want someone to kick my ass.’”

  Hutchinson had a chip on his shoulder, but he wasn’t alone. The perception that the festival was “just for rich people”—a table in front of the stage cost $500—was common around town, though the founders created it specifically to bring the arts to the whole community.

  Even if Hutchinson perceived more snobbery than there was, it was at least true that scenes like the one inside the Pink Cricket with Ben Martin, the well-to-do former international executive, and the Hochs, the retired glassworker and the painting contractor, had become the exception. There were no more Ellwoods at Old Bill Bailey’s, no more local executives walking through plants and asking working men and women about their families, very few lodges or other organizations where the banker and the glassworker served on a committee together and drank beer together. The rich even shopped out of town, because there were no more department stores carrying fashionable items. A high-end men’s haberdashery that once drew customers from Columbus had closed. Now the moneyed drove to Columbus or Cincinnati, or shopped during trips to New York or Florida. Ironically, the festival Hutchinson avoided was one of the few environments in town where volunteers from the upper crust and the hoi polloi seemed to work together for a common goal.

  Otherwise, many people on each side of the class divide retreated into their own lives and their own prejudices. Behind these invisible walls, they no longer learned from, or empathized with, the other. The Hutchinsons weren’t sure just where they belonged. On one hand, Brad wanted to retain his self-made pride and to never be seen looking down on anybody by associating too closely with town society. On the other, he and Penny bemoaned the Lancaster “mentality” they found among the class they’d left behind.

  “It’s always been a rough town for me,” Penny said. “The people are rough. The people have just a mentality that’s just, like, a baser mentality.” She was born and raised around Granville and Newark, on the north side of Route 40, the unofficial but long-standing border between the perceived jerkwater towns to the south and east and the progressive, educated burgs to the north. “You know, Gap couldn’t make it here. Gap clothing store in the mall couldn’t make it, ’cause it was a higher-end clothing. The Gap! The Gap was a higher-end clothing store.” Her eyes widened. “That’s the people’s mind-set in Lancaster. The Gap! I go to visit other places, like Savannah, and Providence, Rhode Island, and think, ‘Ah, civilization.’”

  Brad was rooted in Lancaster, though, and he refused to budge, so Penny determined to make the best of it. After building their business, they both decided to start giving back to the town by planting their stake in civic life. For years, they’d lived in a country village outside Lancaster. Transforming the old farmhouse and moving in, taking on the Mithoff rebuilding project downtown, and hosting the Cameo League party were announcements that, however reluctant they were, they intended to play a part in Lancaster’s future.

  Penny had just become involved with the board of the Heritage Association, and it was her idea to host the Cameo League party. “Some of the people I’ve really embraced—there’s a lot of people that are, like, down-to-earth, and they’re real wholesome and conservative, and they love their country, they love their guns. I love that. But then there are other things that are just that attitude of me-first, and I’m gonna take care of me, and nobody else matters. And people around here are just oblivious to everybody else, just oblivious.”

  If nothing else, Lancaster’s civic-minded upper class needed the Hutchinsons because there were so few with both the means and the drive to do what Nancy Frick’s generation had done. But it was going to be an uncomfortable fit. Many were skeptical of the Mithoff project, for example. They didn’t begrudge Brad Hutchinson the effort—it was his money, and he could do what he wanted—but some wondered why he wouldn’t just mow the wreck down and start over, maybe make a federal-style building, but with all the modern innards a business might want. After all, there wasn’t anything special about the Mithoff, either architecturally or historically. It had once been a whorehouse. But Hutchinson believed his background was the bigger obstacle. “Most of ’em know that I come from a very rough family,” Brad said. “My father worked for the city, at the water department, so most of them know of my history.”

  Brad Hutchinson’s family lived on Van Buren Avenue, two blocks behind the northeast side of Plant 1. As a little boy, he liked the west side. Kids rode bikes for fun, and once in a while some boy would give another boy a bloody lip. That’s what passed for “rough” in those days.

  A lot changed in the 1980s. The Hutchinsons moved to a newer, low-income tract development built not far away from Van Buren by Leonard Gorsuch, Jennifer Walters’s father. Carl Icahn made trouble, Plant 2 closed, the 1986 strike turned violent, Newell took over. Fewer west-side men worked.

  His mother didn’t start abusing diet pills because of any of those Lancaster convulsions: She was swallowing them by the fistful when Brad was six or seven. But by the early 1990s, the tremors of those events had helped loosen the strings that tied a culture of sociable work and responsibility to future aspirations, creating in its place a subculture of immediate, if temporary, pleasure. Drug trafficking joined drinking. Hutchinson’s mother succumbed, and his father supported his wife’s habit by selling and buying. More than once, Hutchinson watched police raid his home.

  When the Oxy found its way into Lancaster, his mother turned to it, working her way up to eight or ten pills a day. She moved on to “cancer patches,” fentanyl patches prescribed to cancer patients to dull
their pain. His mother would cut them up for quicker release, placing the pieces under her tongue. Fentanyl is vastly more powerful than heroin. She overdosed, but quick action by his father saved her life. Then one night when his father was out playing cards, his mother used another patch under her tongue. She died on the kitchen floor. She was fifty-nine.

  Drugs and the crime associated with them became an extended-family affair. In addition to his own siblings, his cousins had records. Yet Brad Hutchinson escaped. At first, he said he simply decided to avoid the mistakes of his family, taking their trauma as a life lesson on what not to do. That’s why he couldn’t understand what was wrong with so many younger people around town. They didn’t want to work, at least not work hard, like he did. They smoked marijuana and injected dope. They got themselves tatted up, even on their faces, which was like saying, “I will always be unemployed.” And the babies. All those young women pushing charity-store strollers around town, playing mix-and-match paternity. They had no discipline, no drive. They made bad choices. When he was little, west-side men “didn’t mind doing an eight-or ten-hour day in a 150-degree factory. That was their life. That’s what they done.”

  Hutchinson, on the other hand, had ambition. After his high school graduation, he became a carpenter. By nineteen he owned his own small contracting company. In 1999, he founded Company Wrench, now a heavy-equipment sales and rental business with ten locations east of the Mississippi.

  “We have a great life at forty-one years old,” he said. “I don’t think anybody could have a better life than I have. For my age, to do what I’ve done, coming from where I’ve come from? To me, I’m like the biggest man in the world.”

  He wasn’t boasting. He meant that in comparison with what he’d expected out of life, he felt like a king—inviting contrast to Lloyd Romine, who was just one year younger than Hutchinson. But as it happened, Hutchinson had one advantage Lloyd never did.