Furniture making in the Piedmont was even older than textiles. In 2002, Bassett Furniture celebrated its hundredth anniversary by constructing out of solid ash a chair more than twenty feet high and weighing three tons. The chair toured the country for seven years, going wherever Bassett Furniture stores were opened, before returning to Martinsville and being installed in a parking lot on Main Street. But by then, low-cost Chinese competition had wiped out most of the local furniture industry. Companies that couldn’t convert to smaller, high-end domestic markets were doomed. The giant chair became a memorial.
* * *
In 1997, the Piedmont was still in the early stages of the plague. Brick factories stretching block after block were still alive, though starting to weaken. Miles of acreage didn’t yet lie fallow, though some tobacco farmers were already getting out. Most people still worked—it was rare to find employable locals on disability—and the crack and meth scourge hadn’t yet made it to Rockingham County. In the center of Madison, McFall Drug was still open with its lunch counter, alongside a men’s clothing store, two furniture shops, a shoe store, and a couple of banks. Kmart had brought the first big-box store to the area back in the 1980s, but there was not yet a single Wal-Mart in Rockingham County. Still, most people knew that large forces were bearing down and the area might be left behind. Dean always said that ambition wasn’t in the DNA down here, but those who had a little and were still young didn’t stay around. The return of a native with a college degree who had started a family and career up north was rare enough to be noted. To people who didn’t know Dean Price well, it might have looked like defeat.
He saw it as just the opposite. He came home to free himself from the grip of the past, the poverty thinking. His father had tried to get away from it but he’d been pulled back down, for those chains were strong. But Dean thought he could break them.
His mother was living alone in the house on Route 220, having finally kicked his father out and divorced him. Dean’s father had moved to Burlington and married a woman there and was living on a disability check from the government. Dean’s mother worked as a nurse and worshipped at an ultraconservative Pentecostal church that was too much for Dean. He moved into his late grandmother’s apartment at the back of the house.
In the early nineties, Route 220 had been widened into a four-lane highway starting less than a mile south of the house and going all the way north to Roanoke, Virginia. That was the family’s one saving grace, because land values multiplied as the road became a long-haul trucking route. It also gave Dean a plan. From Greensboro to Roanoke there were only one or two truck stops. Dean’s house stood on the roadside with nothing much for several miles in either direction except a church with talking murals. He decided to build a convenience store, fast-food restaurant, and gas station right next to the house, on a couple of acres of land that he’d inherited from his grandmother. And he came up with a marketing plan that reflected the sum total of his life experience to that point.
In Pennsylvania he had learned about guerrilla marketing from a local chain of gas stations and convenience stores called Sheetz. Dean had never seen anything like Sheetz. In the South, you opened up a business and hoped people came in. But in Pennsylvania, Sheetz grabbed the customers and brought them in, by lowballing the price of gas by a few pennies. When Sheetz came into your area, you knew they were coming after your business. Dean admired its success and decided to introduce discount fuel to the Southeast. He bought a Tastee Freez franchise, which charged a low fee because the profit margins on ice cream were also low. And to reach out and pull more local people in, he styled his convenience store after a country market, with a front porch and old farm vehicles parked outside. He drove around antique shops and flea markets looking for vintage cola signs and ads for bread and grain painted on wood. His dream was to grow produce on the Price tobacco farm—melons, strawberries, tomatoes, corn—and sell it fresh at the store and teach his boys about farming. He came up with a name that caught on fast: Red Birch Country Market. Birch for his maternal grandfather, red for the Redeemer’s sacrifice. The company’s slogan was “A family business covered in the blood of Christ.” His minority partners were his oldest sister and her husband. He imagined a chain of Red Birch truck stops across the Southeast.
Dean opened for business on October 2, 1997. The price of gas was eighty-nine cents a gallon.
The house stood just fifty feet from the store—too close, with the floodlights and noise of trucks at all hours. His mother wanted to tear the house down and build a new one farther from the road. Dean had a different idea. The house contained three generations of family history, good and bad, and he didn’t want to lose that. So, three days after opening the store, he undertook the monumental task of moving the house away from the road down the grassy slope toward the tobacco fields and fishpond on the Neal family land. First, he removed every brick from the outside walls and chimney. He chainsawed the apartment off from the main house. Then he bolted six-by-sixes underneath the house, jacked it up, laid other six-by-sixes on the ground, placed six-inch metal poles between the two sets of six-by-sixes, and attached the house to his front-end loader. It was something that he’d seen the Amish do in Pennsylvania. Dean began rolling the house downhill on the metal pipes a few feet at a time. El Niño slowed things down—there were four straight months of rain and mud—but by Thanksgiving 1998 the house was standing on a new foundation several hundred feet from Route 220, now with white clapboard siding and a stone chimney, like a nineteenth-century farmhouse. That whole year, Dean ran like a madman between the house and the store, keeping both projects going. There had been plenty of skeptics, but when it was over, he knew that he could do just about whatever he set his mind to.
The truck stop did well enough that in the summer of 2000, Dean opened another, forty-five minutes’ drive north on 220 in Virginia, near the NASCAR speedway outside Martinsville. Along with the store and gas station he opened a Bojangles’ franchise—the fried chicken, biscuits, and pinto beans appealed to southern taste, and the margins were higher than with Tastee Freez. His profits came from the Bojangles’—gas paid him just pennies on the gallon. As for the country market, people loved the idea, but there was little interest in fresh melons and vegetables. His customers wanted the convenience and taste of fast food. Anyway, Food Lion could sell packaged produce trucked halfway across the country for cheaper than what Dean grew on his grandpa Norfleet’s farm. “Something changed in our country where quality doesn’t matter like it used to,” Dean said. “I got to the point where I would lose money on the produce just to give it that country image so people would come in for other things, such as Bojangles’. Cantaloupes were a loss leader.”
Soon after opening the store in Virginia, Dean learned that Sheetz was coming to Martinsville—one mile south of him on 220, all the way from Pennsylvania. He never thought there was a chance in the world he’d have to compete with Sheetz, and for months after getting the news he was worried sick, as if he were the prey and Sheetz the predator stalking him. One day, while driving back from an antiquing trip to Mount Airy with the woman who had become his second, and shortest-lived, wife, Dean had an epiphany: the only thing Sheetz had on him was the price of fuel. But that was everything, since there was no loyalty in this business and customers would leave you over two cents. Somehow he hadn’t understood the importance of gas prices until that moment. The next week he got on the phone with his jobber, the middleman who sold him his fuel. “We’ve got ’em on the food, we’ve got ’em on the location. When they open up they’re going to drop the price of their fuel and try to take our business. Why don’t we try to be the aggressor and drop our price now and gain volume when they open six months from now?”
Instead of pumping a hundred thousand gallons a month and making fifteen cents a gallon, he would pump two hundred fifty thousand gallons and make five cents a gallon. The jobber would get half of that, and most of Dean’s half would go to the credit card companies—with the new
business model Dean would barely break even on gas. But it was the only way to survive. After Sheetz opened, his margins went down, but he kept his price right at theirs and stayed in business. What he learned later was that Exxon Mobil was selling gas to Sheetz for three or four cents a gallon less than he had to pay. That was the difference between two hundred fifty Sheetz stores and two Red Birches. That was life as an entrepreneur.
Dean continued to pursue his goal of owning a chain of stores across the region, because it was the closest he had ever come to freedom. He opened a third truck stop, with a Bojangles’ and a Red Birch Country Market, a few miles north up 220 from the second one, in a little furniture town called Bassett, and then a stand-alone Bojangles’ restaurant on the 220 Business strip heading out of Martinsville. So Route 220 became his chain, linked all along that thirty-five-mile stretch of highway between two states, the chain that he lived on. But the epiphany on the road from Mount Airy stayed with him. Dean had a word for it: the oil companies had him hog-tied.
* * *
One day in the late nineties, shortly before he opened his second truck stop, Dean was at an antiques store in Reidsville, a town between Stokesdale and Danville, and he found himself reading a self-help book. Its message was: decide what you want to do, believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can do it, then act on it. With one part of his mind he was thinking, “I’ve got to be doing something else,” because he was always antsy about wasting time, and he knew he was in that antiques store to avoid going to his truck stop, which was already losing its appeal—the monotony of day-to-day operations. But another part of him thought: “This is an investment in you and your mind. You can’t be doing anything better than improving yourself.” So he sat in the store all day and finished the book. He was aware of something stirring within, a hunger to learn awakened—or reawakened, since he’d had it as a boy before losing it out in the world of work.
Soon afterward, Dean made a discovery that changed his life. An electrician who had done some work for him when he was moving the house asked what plans he had for his business. Dean said, “I’d really like to go to Martinsville and build another convenience store up there on the corner at the race track. But I’ll need about a million dollars. Do you know anybody who’s got a million dollars?”
“I sure do,” the electrician said. “Rocky Carter.”
“You got his telephone number?”
“I’ll call him.” And the electrician called Rocky Carter on the spot.
Carter was a commercial builder in Kernersville, a little tobacco auction town between Greensboro and Winston-Salem. After meeting Dean, he agreed to build the truck stop in Martinsville. But Carter was also one of the most spiritual people Dean had ever met, always seeking after the things that you couldn’t see. He gave Dean a book called Think and Grow Rich, written by a man named Napoleon Hill and published in 1937. Dean must have read it twenty-five times without putting it down.
Napoleon Hill was born in 1883, in a one-room cabin in the Appalachians of southwestern Virginia. As a young man he became a reporter, and in 1908 he went to Pittsburgh to interview Andrew Carnegie on assignment for Success magazine. The interview was supposed to last three hours, but Carnegie kept Hill at his house for three days, talking about the principles of life that had made him the richest man in the world and about the need for a new economic philosophy that would allow other men to become successful. On the third day, Carnegie said, “If I commission you to become the author of this philosophy, give you letters of introduction to men whose experiences you will need”—he mentioned titans of industry such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller—“are you willing to put in twenty years of research, because that’s how long it will take, and pay your own way as you go along, without any subsidy from me? Yes or no?” Hill thought about it for twenty-nine seconds and said yes. Carnegie was timing him with a pocket watch under his desk, and if Hill’s answer had taken more than a minute, Carnegie would have withdrawn the offer.
For the next two decades, drawing on Carnegie’s contacts, Napoleon Hill interviewed more than five hundred of the most successful men of his age—not just industrialists like Ford and Rockefeller, but politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the inventor Wilbur Wright, the department store magnate F. W. Woolworth, the trial lawyer Clarence Darrow. “He went from one adversity to the next,” Dean said. “His son was born with no ears, and Napoleon refused to believe that his son would not be able to hear. Every night, he would go in before his son went to bed, he would talk to him like for an hour, and he would tell him, ‘You will hear, one day in your life you’re going to hear, you’ve got to believe you’re going to hear.’ When his son was older, he came to hear. He willed it.”
In 1928, Hill published his findings in several volumes under the title The Law of Success. A decade later, after a stint advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he gathered its sixteen lessons in the single volume Think and Grow Rich. What Hill called the Philosophy of Achievement began and ended with the mind. Getting rich was a matter of wanting to be rich, wanting it with “a white heat of desire,” teaching yourself to imagine wealth as specifically as possible, learning to concentrate your mind on the desired goal and the means, and to eliminate besetting fears and other negative thoughts. These were lessons that Americans, living under a system of capitalism and democracy, were uniquely equipped to apply in their lives. More than half a century later, Napoleon Hill’s message reached Dean Price and became an invisible but powerful force in his life, like gravity or love.
“When I was growing up and there was ever a problem,” Dean said, “Mom and Dad would say, ‘Well, just pray about it.’ I couldn’t buy into that. There had to be something more. What Napoleon Hill taught me was there’s magical power in your mind that probably one in a million even fathom that they have. Napoleon’s famous quote is ‘If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.’ If your imagination can come up with it, then that means it’s possible. That’s the way nature works. Whether you have the persistence, determination, dedication to see it through—that’s a different story.”
Dean absorbed Think and Grow Rich so completely that he began referring to it as often and as naturally as a minister quotes the Bible. For every situation he encountered, the book articulated a truth. “Napoleon once said the best thing that a leader can give the people is hope.” “Napoleon Hill talks about men wanting to prey on other men financially. If they can’t do it physically, then they prey on each other financially, and it’s innate, it’s in our genes—instead of being our brother’s keeper.” “Napoleon Hill, he has a saying—for every adversity that comes into your life, there is a seed of equal benefit to it.” “Napoleon Hill wrote that sometimes your subconscious is a few years ahead.”
Hill explained to his readers how to train the subconscious mind with “auto-suggestion” by concentrating their thoughts before they went to sleep. Every night they should repeat aloud, like an incantation, a written statement of the amount of money they wanted to make, the date by which they wanted to have it, and the work they intended to do to make it. Night after night, Dean lay in bed and faithfully followed Hill’s instructions before falling asleep.
Hill also warned against the six basic fears. First and strongest of them was the fear of poverty, which had most of the country in its grip during the years leading up to the publication of Think and Grow Rich. “The people of America began to think of poverty, following the Wall Street crash of 1929,” Hill wrote. “Slowly but surely that mass thought was crystallized into its physical equivalent, which was known as a ‘depression.’ This had to happen, it is in conformity with the laws of Nature.” Some people attributed to Hill one of the most famous lines in American history, from FDR’s inaugural address in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Dean knew all about that first fear. He searched himself and recognized the power of his father’s poverty thinking. But here was an author who could explain how t
o master it: “You either control your mind or it controls you.”
Anyone peddling the secrets of success might turn out to be a snake oil salesman. Glenn W. Turner, the cosmetics emperor, claimed to have read Napoleon Hill in 1966 and taken him as an inspiration, but all Turner had done was con Dean’s parents by perverting Hill’s message into “Dare to Be Great.” Spiritual and material thirsting were always mingled in Americans, leaving them easy prey to hucksters of the cloth, the book, the screen. What Hill did was to take the limitless native belief in the powers of the self and organize it into a system that sounded like a practical philosophy. He taught Dean to believe that he was the author of his own destiny.
It was around the time Dean found Napoleon Hill that he had the dream about walking down an old wagon road.
TAMMY THOMAS
The job wasn’t that hard once she got used to it, but starting out on the assembly line she had to remember where all the freaking wires went and all the parts, and the line was moving, that thing was rotating at eye level, and if you weren’t paying attention it would get away from you. They were making wiring harnesses for GM electrical components, and the assembly table was oblong, fifty feet or so, eight or ten stations per aisle, the women standing at their stations in safety glasses and gloves. The wiring harness started out blank, and then the first station would put on connectors and a couple of wires, and then the next station would have eight or ten wires to plug in, and it would get built as it went around, and the last person would take it off the line, grease it if it needed greasing, and pack it. They pulled a harness off every two or three minutes, which might seem like plenty of time unless you fell behind.
The Unwinding Page 10
