Dean was looking for that benefit.
He felt useless around the refinery. His shares in Red Birch Energy had been diluted to almost nothing, and Gary and Flo were running the place. Dean told Gary that his whole approach was wrong—Gary was trying to make a lot of money fast instead of building up the business. They were losing potential customers for licensing the Red Birch model because Gary was quoting exorbitant prices—it had happened with a businessman up in New Jersey. “A pig gets fat,” Dean told Gary, “and a hog gets slaughtered.”
“What did you say?” snapped Gary, who was quite overweight. He was now on the hook for the entire debt of the company, nearly a million dollars, which obliged him to sign over the deed to his house and boat as collateral. As far as Gary was concerned, Dean was always willing to spend anybody’s money but his own. The third partner, Rocky Carter, wanted to be bought out because his construction business had taken a big hit with the housing bust, but Gary couldn’t afford to pay him off. Debt had all three of them entangled like snakes.
Gary and Dean argued constantly. “I don’t like you anymore,” Gary told Dean one day. “You’re not the person I started with.” He began to question whether Dean was mentally stable, insinuated that Dean might end up like his father. That pissed Dean off more than anything else. He was down and his partner was undermining him.
In the winter of 2011 everything started to unravel at once.
First came the tax case. Henry County, Virginia, had indicted Dean the previous September for failing to remit almost ten thousand dollars in meals taxes. On January 27, 2011, he was found guilty of a misdemeanor and ordered to pay a twenty-five-hundred-dollar fine and a hundred dollars in court costs on top of the outstanding taxes. That same winter, Red Birch was audited by the IRS. Because Dean was on the board, with his tax liability, the company’s permit to make fuel was pulled, and Red Birch went out of business for seven weeks.
In March, Dean resigned his office, relinquished his remaining stock in exchange for ten dollars, and gave up his paycheck. The IRS lifted its hold, and the refinery started up again without him. That was the end for Dean Price and the biodiesel company that had taken from him its name and inspiration. Not long after his departure, a notice appeared on the Red Birch Energy website. It said, “Recent change in ownership and management,” which linked to a “press release” that announced: “Dean Price, a former co-owner of Red Birch Energy, Incorporated, is no longer associated with Red Birch Energy and has not been a part of the company since April 2011 in any way.”
Yet Gary continued to get wind that Dean was talking about Red Birch and about himself as part of it. In July, Gary sent him a letter.
Dean,
It is really difficult for me to get to this point in our relationship and write this letter to you, but you have chosen this path for me to take and leave me with no choice. I have made several attempts to get you to communicate with me to no avail.
I realize your life is upside down right now and I really hate adding to that burden but again, I have no other choice but to come to the following conclusion.
The conclusion is that you are out there representing RBE as you see fit and that will not work for us … I’m truly sorry, but I have to insist that you cease from representing Red Birch Energy in any way going forward.
Dean, as you know, we have been providing Health Care Insurance for you and your family. As you will not be involved with us any more, we will have to cease providing that coverage to you effective September 1, 2011.
Dean, on a very personal note, I’m very disappointed it has come to this. I really wish it hadn’t. When we first started, you were a great partner, but when the truck stop started to fail, you changed. Yes, you are still a nice person, but you have avoided all responsibilities to the company, cut off all communication with any of us, lied to us on many occasions … I could go on, but I won’t. All I can say is I wish you well and hope you find a way to get your life back in order.
Sincerely,
Gary N. Sink
President
Dean never replied. “They kicked me when I was down,” he said, “and they ran me off.”
Meanwhile, the liquidation of his business had not resolved the problem of his debts. One of his creditors at the truck stop had been his fuel supplier, Eden Oil, a small company out of Rockingham County. Dean had considered the owner, a man named Reid Teague, to be a friend, but once Eden Oil got a judgment on Dean for $325,000 in unpaid fuel bills, Teague became his nemesis. First he cut off the fuel supply to the truck stop, which was what had forced it into Chapter 7. But the liquidation of Red Birch of Martinsville couldn’t protect Dean, for Teague was coming after his personal assets, too. In February 2011 Dean learned that his house—the house his grandfather Birch Neal had built in 1934 on land he won in a poker game, where his mother had grown up and the Neals had raised tobacco for decades, where his father had slapped him down the last night they lived together under the same roof, where he had returned from Pennsylvania in 1997, the house that he had spent a year moving down the hill from the highway and rebuilding on a new foundation, the house that he had made into a home for Ryan when his son came to live with him, that was also his mother’s house and that they jointly owned—his house was scheduled to be auctioned off on the Rockingham County Courthouse steps, in Wentworth, on May 15. He didn’t tell his mother, but a notice appeared in the local paper. A cousin once removed dropped by the Sunday before the auction on the pretext of reminiscing, but as she was leaving she told Dean that she was there to check out the house for its sale value.
Dean had been thinking about declaring personal bankruptcy ever since the end of 2009, but for one reason or another—he was concentrating on biodiesel; his lawyer had stopped returning his calls after collecting his fifteen-hundred-dollar fee; no one wanted to face ruin—he hadn’t done it. But on Monday, May 9, six days ahead of the scheduled auction, Dean filed under Chapter 7 as a “self-employed entrepreneur” in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, in Greensboro. He did it to save his house. Twenty-six other debtors appeared in court with him that day. Across the country, over the course of the year, there were 1,410,653 bankruptcies.
Dean’s debts totaled a million dollars. His assets—his half of the house in Stokesdale, his quarter share of the forty-four acres that was the remnant of the Price tobacco farm, his furniture, tractor, clothes, books, and shotguns, his vintage signs, his 1988 Ford pickup truck, and the used Jeep Wrangler that he had bought for Ryan’s sixteenth birthday—all fell within the exemptions allowed in North Carolina, so he was able to hang on to them. He had to undergo credit counseling and take a financial management course.
On July 25, he went to the courthouse in Greensboro for the meeting of creditors. It was held in a room on the first floor, and instead of creditors, who seldom attended a hearing, Dean found himself surrounded by his fellow debtors, old people, people sitting in wheelchairs or walking on canes, breathing through respirators, waiting for their name to be called by the bankruptcy trustee, and they reminded him of his father and how he had been broken by failure. He had never felt his father’s shadow on him like that. The crease in his britches.
While he was in bankruptcy he actually thought a few times about ending it. But he could never do that to his boys—it would be the easy way out. And, in a way, bankruptcy was a wonderful thing because it allowed a fresh start. Thank God he didn’t live in a country where they cut off your head if you fell into debt.
On August 30, Dean’s case was closed. He had felt the Lord’s hand on him the whole time.
By then he already saw the right way forward. After getting thrown out by Gary and them he came very close to quitting biodiesel, but it turned out to be one of the best things in his life. Otherwise, he never would have come up with the new idea. He would have stayed at Red Birch until he died trying.
There was a Henry Ford quote that he’d read somewhere: “Failure is simply the opportu
nity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
TAMMY THOMAS
Tammy loved doing actions. She loved the bigger stage, the larger movement. Public speaking freaked her out, but in 2009, when the organization joined unions and other groups in rallies for health care reform and other causes all over Ohio and in Washington, Tammy would be at the front of the bus leading the songs and chants. She had a sense of the drama, and how to keep it alive when it was fading. Once, outside a Chase Bank in Columbus, an organizer with a bullhorn kept trying to get a chant of “Si se puede” started, the Spanish version of Obama’s “Yes we can,” but there were hardly any Hispanics in the crowd. Tammy finally grabbed the bullhorn and got everyone singing. Another “Si se puede” and the action would have ground to a halt.
In Mason, Ohio, a conservative white town, they stormed the lobby of United Healthcare singing and chanting. In Washington, Tammy and others from Youngstown—local people she had recruited, like Miss Hattie—joined a national progressive group on K Street and shut down a whole intersection, and from there they marched to Bank of America to denounce Wall Street, then protested on the front lawns of bank executives. It was pouring and Tammy got soaking wet in spite of the trash bag she had turned into a poncho. She got sick afterward, but it was exhilarating. It made her feel, “Hey, take that! You’ve been giving it to us and everyone else forever. Take a little bit of it back.” She was standing up and saying—whether it was true or not—“I’m not going to take this anymore.” She thought about all the foreclosures she knew, and the redlining in black neighborhoods like the east side, and the payday lending abuses. “I just get sick of when people take advantage of other people. And you take advantage of the people who have less already? Isn’t that America? That is the nature of the beast and it seems like we are getting so deeper into it.” She thought about being forced to retire from Packard, and the CEO and upper-level staff getting their bonuses while leaving all these people without jobs, decimating a community, and some of the banks getting bailed out with her tax dollars, and she still couldn’t get a loan from them while she had to pay her mortgage every month. “That makes me want to say, ‘What the F?’ It’s the injustice of it.”
The actions put her leaders on a stage they had never dreamed of. Miss Sybil, just retired from hauling cement at the Ohio Lamp factory, went to Washington and met with Shaun Donovan, Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development. She told him that some of the stimulus dollars to distressed cities should go for demolitions. She brought out MVOC’s map and explained that the problem in Youngstown wasn’t gentrification, like New York or Chicago—Youngstown didn’t need low-income housing to be built, it needed vacant houses to be torn down. After three meetings the secretary got it, and he also remembered her name.
Miss Hattie became a local celebrity. Tammy had her speaking all over town, about health care, vacant houses, what the banks were doing to the neighborhood, until people would walk up to her at the store and say, “You don’t know me but I know you, I seen you on TV. You speak for all of us that can’t speak.” Then Tammy took her to Washington, and Miss Hattie nearly died of nervousness getting up in front of what looked to her like thousands of people on Capitol Hill. When she started stuttering and said some things wrong, Tim Ryan, Youngstown’s congressman after Traficant, hugged her. “You are a dynamic speaker,” he said, “you need to introduce me every time.” It was like her mother patting her on the back and saying, “It’s going to be all right.” After that she hit the ground running. Miss Hattie said later, “Tammy molded me into the leader that I am.”
Across the street from her cut-down-flower garden, in another vacant lot Miss Hattie started the Fairmont Girls and Vicinity Community Garden. She put up a white picket fence, like in the suburbs, and built raised beds out of scavenged wood and chipboard, and compost bins from factory pallets. Georgine’s restaurant loaded thirty pounds of compost in her truck every day, and her doctor gave her horse manure from his farm. Tammy wrote a grant application to the Wean Foundation and Miss Hattie received thirty-seven hundred dollars to get started. She was trying to beautify the neighborhood and teach the kids something nobody could take away from them. “You might hate it at first, but you can cook with greens and you don’t have to eat meat all the time. You can eat for cheap or nothing as long as you work hard. Hard work is the key to everything. I didn’t know that when I was young, but I guess I got wisdom with age.” The garden was a serene thing—it reminded Miss Hattie of her father’s garden. But the kids in the neighborhood were all teenagers now, and it was hard to get them interested. It didn’t help when the house next door to her garden had an attic fire because a seven-year-old boy was playing with matches, and the owner immediately began stripping off the aluminum siding to sell for scrap.
Miss Sybil started a community garden on her block of the east side as well. It was an urban garden, black soil and green vegetable waste on top of concrete. “We all go back to dirt,” she said, “everything goes back to dirt.” She knew nothing about gardening, just eating, but she and her neighbors grew everything edible to man. The policy was come at will and pick what you want, just don’t tear up the garden. Only the groundhogs and deer didn’t abide by it.
Tammy and MVOC did a second survey of Youngstown, this time of grocery stores. Their map showed that Youngstown was a food desert—there were hardly any decent stores in the whole city. From certain parts of the east side it took a four-hour round-trip on the bus to buy fresh groceries, and it made a big difference when a Bottom Dollar opened up on the south side. A good corner store might carry a few potatoes, a few onions, and heads of lettuce starting to turn black, but most were like the F&N Food Market next to Vickie’s demolished house on Shehy Street, selling fast food, liquor, and cigarettes. The organization pressured corner store owners to sign an agreement to stock fresh, nutritious food and keep their stores from becoming hangouts for dealers.
The food campaign put Tammy in touch with a white evangelical church south of Youngstown, where the minister, Steve Fortenberry, had started a cooperative farm on thirty-one acres. His congregation had some older and more conservative members who were skeptical of anything having to do with environmentalism, so he pitched the project as feeding the hungry, which was easier to sell. Teenagers, disabled people, and ex-cons from Youngstown worked on the church’s farm over the summer, and Tammy and Fortenberry arranged to bring the food by truck to community centers and farmer’s markets around Youngstown.
In her earlier life, Tammy never would have met someone like Steve Fortenberry. She wouldn’t have met Kirk Noden. She didn’t know there were people like Noden with such a passion for the underdog. She called him “the blackest white guy I know.” The work was taking over her life. It stole time away from her family, she didn’t go to church as often as before, she didn’t get around to spring cleaning. But MVOC also opened her up to different people and experiences, even different cuisines (Kirk challenged her to eat octopus, and she learned to love Indian food). She used to look at white people wearing dreads and think, “Why are they trying to lock their hair like a black person?” That didn’t faze her anymore, and neither did the peculiarities of the Unitarian Church—a woman opening up a meeting with a chant and a gong—or any other religion. It was all part of a cultural experience. After her divorce, when she got so deep into the House of the Lord, she’d stopped drinking, but now she and the other organizers held long strategy sessions over food and drinks, and they always ended up telling war stories, comparing victories and scars. She had never been around people who were so passionate about their work. There was so much more to life than she had known. And nothing burned her up more than when certain people she knew said that Kirk was trying to take advantage of black people, or that he was racist. “Are you kidding me? Do you know what he has done for me and my family? He didn’t have to hire me. I didn’t have any experience, I had no degree. He saw something needed to be done here and he had a couple answers. If you want
to fix it and make it better, you haven’t in the past twenty years. What are you waiting for?”
* * *
When Tammy left Delphi, her buyout was worth about a hundred forty thousand dollars. It sounded like a lot of money, until you figured that it was two and a half years of pay with no guarantee of another job. She lost more than half of her pension, but she ended up among the lucky ones with a good job. Her best friend, Karen, who was ten years older, took the buyout but didn’t find another job, and she and her husband went through hard times, like just about everyone else Tammy knew at the plant. The company did too good a job of scaring workers into leaving, and so many took the buyout that Delphi had to bring a few hundred back to the Warren factory as temps to get up to six hundred fifty. Tammy knew some people who went back to work in the high-speed press area, running three or four machines for thirteen dollars an hour—double the work for half the pay.
The media predicted strikes over the threatened cuts, but the unions went quietly as they negotiated their members’ steep loss of pay and benefits. Delphi emerged from bankruptcy in 2009 with most of its operations sold off to GM, the company that had owned it from 1932 to 1999 (in 2009 GM was also reorganized under Chapter 11, with a $50 billion investment from the U.S. government). Delphi’s remaining assets were owned by a group of private investors, which gave a new name to the company that had once been Packard Electric, then Delphi Automotive Systems, then Delphi Corporation: it was now DLPH Holdings Corp. The hedge fund manager John Paulson, who had made almost $4 billion by selling subprime mortgages short in 2007, unloaded 20.5 million shares in the new entity and made a $439 million profit on a $14 million investment. By then, the company employed fewer than twenty thousand people in the United States, out of a global workforce of almost a hundred fifty thousand.
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