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

by Macy, Beth

  Labor was such a premium in the 1970s that Bassett actually trucked in work-release convicts from a prison in Rustburg every day. They were paid the same rate as the regular workers, though part of the money went to the state for their room and board. “About the middle of the 1990s, the godsend happened with Mexicans,” Spilman recounted to an interviewer in 2005. At a Bassett-owned upholstery plant in Los Angeles, there was a concentration of Hispanics, and they didn’t get along as well with black workers as Hispanics did in Henry County. “Every family had a patriot,” Spilman said, probably meaning a patriarch or patron. “If you needed someone in the sewing room, you’d tell this patriot and hire who he brought in the next day. We didn’t know if they were legal or illegal. But now, you better have them legal,” he added, referring to growing enforcement of immigration laws.

  Competing furniture makers protected their mutual interests too. Coy Young recalled that during a short-lived union presence at Stanley in the early 1970s, when workers were striking for higher wages, Stanley surreptitiously trucked the lumber out to be made into furniture three miles down the road at Bassett. “Don’t believe a word about the rivalry between the two,” he told me. “When it came to unions, Bassett was in there helping them any way they could because they didn’t want the unions anywhere near their plants.” Spilman confirmed that scenario himself in the same 2005 interview.

  Under Spilman, the bottom line ruled, with furniture designed and churned out at a breakneck pace. Though his degree and training had been in textiles, Spilman learned the ins and outs of furniture-making “faster than anybody I’ve ever known,” said Reuben Scott, who worked for Bassett from 1937 to 1986. “He’d make you feel worthless as a plug nickel, but the truth is, the man was a genius.”

  His forte was always sales, said James Riddle, a former Bassett regional sales manager who’s now CEO of Lifestyle, an importing company. “Bob could walk down Main Street of High Point or Main Street of New York, and he could either be selling Bibles or popcorn or Tootsie Rolls, and everybody that would walk by would wanna buy it,” Riddle said. “John Bassett always wants to give you his reply before you complete your sentence, which is a talent in itself. But Bob was truly the born salesman of the two.”

  At times, he was even humble about it. When strangers asked Spilman how he got into the furniture business, he liked to deadpan: “Married a Bassett.”

  The humor extended—sort of—to his competitors, whom he sliced verbally, like a band saw through hearts of pine. Sales manager Joe Meadors, another member of Spilman’s inner circle, recalled copying a suite made by Dixie Furniture, based in Lexington, North Carolina, down to its brass-detailed corners. Spilman and Dixie’s CEO, Smith Young, were archrivals. People in the industry called Young the “Spilman of North Carolina,” and not in a complimentary way. Once, when Young was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, Spilman sent him a telegram saying Please don’t die because then I’ll be the biggest son of a bitch in the furniture industry. After which another competitor wired: By a vote of 7 to 5, your directors have just voted they hope you make it.

  Spilman had designer Leo Jiranek copy one of Young’s suites, called Arrival, while Philpott was left to figure out how the company could produce it and sell it for sixty dollars less than Dixie was charging but still make a profit. “We knocked it off, cold as hell!” Meadors told me.

  As an added tweak, Bassett named its suite Departure—then mailed a copy of the suite price list to rival Young, who wrote back: Thanks for the publicity you’ve given my new suite. Since this photograph went out, my sales have really picked up.

  Of all the people I interviewed about Bob Spilman—including his own wife and son—no one stood up for him more than his top sales executive, Joe Meadors. Spilman had hired him not long after buying a car from him at the dealership where Meadors worked in the early 1960s. Under Spilman’s tenure, Bassett became so profitable that when Meadors retired, he was able to build a spacious lakefront home in the affluent bedroom community of Smith Mountain Lake (it’s also furnished with Bassett Furniture). He still owns property in Bassett, but with its long-standing double-digit unemployment rates since the factories began shutting down, he’s had trouble renting it out.

  The first time I spoke to Meadors, when I called to set up an interview, he started defending Spilman, praising him as a loyal boss. Asked for examples, he said he’d have to think about it. When I arrived at his house a few days later, he held a list of points he wanted to make about Spilman, including two stories about his loyalty. One involved a Bassett employee whose wife, also an employee, was convicted of embezzling from the company. After the story hit the newspaper, the man went to Spilman’s office to announce he was turning in his resignation.

  “Why are you quitting?” Spilman barked.

  “You know, my wife took that money.”

  “Yeah, did you take any of it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you know she was taking it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, get your ass back downstairs and go to work,” Spilman told him, and that was the last that was said about his wife.

  Loyalty example number two was equally telling, even though it eventually backfired. Maury Hammack, the corporate pilot, was practicing his landings at the airport one day when he forgot to put his landing gear down, badly scraping the belly of the plane.

  “You what?” Spilman boomed into the phone when Hammack reported what he’d done. The other managers had been begging Spilman to fire him for months, calling his flying methods risky and unorthodox. As head of sales, Meadors thought it was important to coddle the company’s top-dog customers such as Sears, J.C. Penney, and Levitz Furniture, not risk their executives’ lives. Meadors also wanted him fired.

  Maury took unnecessary risks with the retail executives on board, Meadors argued, landing in the fog, for instance. Once he’d inexplicably picked up a snake on a Georgia runway and carted it back to Virginia in a paper sack, unbeknownst to all but Spilman, who spotted the bag moving—not far from his head.

  “Old Bob chewed his ass out for that one. But you have to admit, Maury was a strange guy,” another Bassett executive, Sherwood Robertson, said.

  Still, Meadors pointed out proudly, out of a sense of loyalty, Spilman refused to fire Hammack even after he’d done twenty thousand dollars’ worth of damage by skid-landing the company’s $1.2 million, thirteen-seater King Air prop jet.

  Now in his eighties, Hammack is retired from flying and spends a lot of time organizing reunions for his air force buddies from Korea and Vietnam. Spilman was so irritated with Hammack after the belly scrape that eventually he had him evaluated by a psychiatrist, who determined, after five sessions, that he suffered from—surprise!—an abusive boss, according to Hammack. He said he was eventually forced to choose between quitting and being fired.

  The incident that led the psychiatrist to the diagnosis? A few years before, Hammack was landing in Palwaukee, a small airport outside Chicago, in a snowstorm. Spilman had six or seven other executives on board, including one who was an amateur pilot. It was midnight, and the runways were icy. Hammack elected to land on a short runway into the wind, and he brought the plane to a stop seconds before he would have run out of runway and into forest. Spilman decided that it had been a risky move, and just before boarding for the return flight, after several drinks, he lit into Hammack.

  “You were trying to kill me!” Spilman barked.

  Hammack then made the mistake of asking the obvious. “Have you been drinking, Bob?”

  Spilman’s face turned instantly red, and before Hammack could register what was happening, he felt a sharp pain in his thigh, “like someone took a baseball bat and hit me with it,” he said. Spilman had hauled off and kicked him, full force, in the leg.

  Hammack was so stunned, he walked away.

  He thought about getting a taxi to O’Hare and walking out on the men, the job, his bully of a boss. But with a wife and five childr
en at home, and jobs scarce during the mid-1970s recession, he stayed—and has regretted that choice ever since. “Spilman could do anything to me from then on because he’d already proven he’d broken me.”

  Hammack said he didn’t feel safe for the rest of his tenure at Bassett. Spilman continued berating him, though he never touched him again. “Bob was a chameleon,” Hammack said. “He had charisma and a very brilliant mind. But he could change his color anytime.”

  At one trade show, Bassett was doing the annual courtesy of bestowing upon the reigning Miss Virginia a complimentary bedroom suite, and Spilman greeted the beauty queen with warmth and graciousness. But the second Miss Virginia, her chaperone, and the cameras left, the affability ended.

  He turned to his public relations man Bill Young and harrumphed: “Are we gonna give that bitch another free bedroom suite?” Young chuckled at the memory. He said he enjoyed driving his boss places, even though the second Spilman got out of the car, he complained loudly to anyone within earshot about Young’s driving. “It’s like he couldn’t help himself,” Young said. Being mean was part of his shtick.

  “I have no idea what made him like that, whether it was his childhood or what,” Young told me. “But I don’t think he was as tough as he pretended to be.”

  Spilman’s parents divorced when he was young—after his father abandoned the family for another woman—and Spilman grew up with a wealthy uncle, C.V. Henkel, who sent him away to military school. “He had a tough deal growing up,” his son, Rob, said. “His dad was a jerk. And I think that affected him. Dad was just always a ‘Don’t tread on me’ kinda guy. Growing up, we went at it, hammer and tong, for a number of years.”

  Henkel called his nephew Bob “Sonny,” a childhood nickname that grated on him as an adult. Spencer Morten recalled traveling to Newton, North Carolina, with Spilman and other board members. They had invited the county supervisors and other dignitaries to dinner to convince them to close a road they wanted to use for Prestige, Bassett’s upholstery plant. Henkel, a former state senator, had gone to the trouble of inviting North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, who attended the event at Henkel’s request. (Not long after, Ervin went on to chair the Senate Watergate Committee.)

  “Sonny, you made a big mistake tonight,” Henkel told his nephew. “Senator Ervin turns down three hundred speaking engagements a year, and you didn’t even acknowledge him in your remarks tonight.”

  After Morten and the other board members returned to their hotel rooms, they could hear Spilman berating his uncle—at a fevered screech—for criticizing him in front of his board. It was embarrassing to everyone within earshot, and Morten recalled feeling a mixture of pity and dread for all involved, including himself. “I think he probably felt abandoned by his dad,” he said. “But he was so conniving and so clever. It really was a shame he married into the family.”

  By the early 1970s, the post–World War II economic boom was officially kaput. The recession of 1973 to 1975 was characterized as stagflation, a double whammy of high unemployment and high inflation. An oil crisis loomed, with filling-station lines and OPEC headlines. In the winter of 1977, Jimmy Carter urged Americans to turn their thermostats down.

  Spilman was still acquiring new properties—a case-goods plant in Dublin, Georgia; a kids’ furniture plant in Hickory, North Carolina—and spending millions on national advertising, including a prime-time television show hosted by E. G. Marshall that featured grand estates across the country, from Jefferson’s Monticello to FDR’s Hyde Park to the Hearst Castle. With thirty-four plants in thirteen states, the company now had more than six thousand employees. One 1970 commercial featured Vicki Lawrence from The Carol Burnett Show as Goldilocks shopping with the three bears at a store filled with Bassett Furniture, the message being that Bassett was affordable for all, from sophisticated city dwellers to suburban families to rugged mountaineers.

  The company still had loads of cash in the bank, as was the Bassett way—upwards of $100 million—and Spilman aggressively managed every penny of it. “He’d get the plant managers to reduce costs by five percent in a month, and then they’d come back and report how hard it was, how they were down to skin and bones,” Snyder, the company lawyer, said. They weren’t laying people off, but they were working the employees faster and the equipment harder and longer.

  It was frustrating for everybody, especially JBIII, who pestered his brother-in-law boss constantly for new equipment. “He would wear the shit out of Spilman till he got what he wanted approved,” recalled Reuben Scott, who was JBIII’s number two at the J.D. plants. “He’d wear him down.”

  Spilman’s goal at that point was to get himself placed squarely among the captains of industry by adding more plants, with the hope of snagging Bassett a slot in the Fortune 500. As an added bonus to himself, he hatched a new plan for the troublesome Little John.

  By 1972, he had acquired two aging furniture plants in Mount Airy, North Carolina. The factories were small, inefficient, and located in a floodplain, so Spilman tapped into the cash reserves to construct a brand-new, four-hundred-thousand-square-foot plant, and he sent JBIII down to check on the progress every week.

  It dawned on him how nice it was having his brother-in-law gone. None of his nagging him for new equipment. No more challenging his authority with end runs around the spending cap.

  Spilman merged the two companies into one and named it National Mount Airy Furniture Company. It would specialize in high-end furniture, something Bassett had never made. Just to break even, the company would have to increase its annual output from the $5 million the two smaller companies had been producing to $15 million.

  Spencer Morten told me that some of Spilman’s fellow board members gave him a hard time about the money he spent building the mega-plant. According to Morten, Spilman called John Bassett into his office and said, “Someday you’ll be sitting in this chair as president, and I need you to go down there and turn this thing around, get it profitable. We’re taking gas from the directors.”

  Throughout his career at Bassett, JBIII referred to this Spilman tactic as the “sunshine pump.” The technique commenced with disingenuous praise that made it seem as if a manager was getting a raise or a promotion when really Spilman was just asking him to do more with less. “He’d pump yo’ ass full of sunshine, but in about two months all the sunshine would leak out and you were no different than you were before,” JBIII said.

  The high-end-furniture niche was on the upswing, and Spilman wanted to prove his company could play ball with the likes of Henredon, Baker, and Bernhardt. Or so the story went.

  “On one hand, Bob gave his brother-in-law a wonderful opportunity to show what he could do,” said furniture-industry analyst Jerry Epperson. “But several of the [Bassett] board members I knew were saying, ‘On the surface it sounded great—until we got into it.’

  “I remember thinking, you’re patting a guy on his back with a knife. And you’ve done it in such a way that you’ve made it look like a favor.”

  Little John would be down in Mount Airy for at least two years. And chances were good, the way Sweet Ole Bob saw it, that the sunshine would all leak out.

  10

  The Mount Airy Ploy

  Bob thought John would hang himself.

  And he just about did.

  —REUBEN “SCOTTY” SCOTT, BASSETT PLANT MANAGER

  The first time I traveled to Mount Airy, North Carolina, the hometown of actor Andy Griffith and the place that inspired his popular television show, I felt like a big-city outsider—a reporter from Raleigh, say, traveling to profile the good people of Mayberry and trying to steer clear of Sheriff Andy’s jail. Goober and Gomer were long gone from the town immortalized by its native son, but every other storefront on the picturesque Mount Airy Main Street was an homage to them and the other characters from the show, which still ranks among the most widely watched TV programs in syndication. The furniture factories closed long before my 2012 visit, but the business of being the real May
berry was still very much intact.

  Deejay Brent Carrick had asked me to do a call-in radio show at the offices of WPAQ, the one-story brick AM radio station known the world over as the tiny titan of Appalachian string-band music. Carrick played scratchy old vinyl recordings made by the textile and furniture hands who came together on weekends to create some of the nation’s first country music. I’d discuss the research I was doing for this book and, with any luck, listeners would call in to talk about what it had been like to work at the brand-new National Mount Airy plant in 1974.

  People didn’t just call; they actually drove up to see me at the little station on the kudzu-covered hill, two of them bringing gifts. They said hello to the WPAQ secretary, then sauntered across creaky wood floors, past piles of old radio equipment from the 1940s, and straight into the studio—while we were on air.

  “Hey, Russ!” Brent called out in the middle of introducing one song. Old-time music fans, some as far away as Scotland, listened in via WPAQ740.com; my husband listened in from Roanoke and couldn’t wait to tease me about my clipped Midwestern accent turning as thick and sugary as Aunt Bea’s sweet tea.

  Ruth Phillips called to tell me that her husband, Crawford, had worked in the cabinet room of National Mount Airy (and its predecessor, Mount Airy Furniture) for forty-five years, earning six dollars an hour by the time he retired in 1985. Her father, Doc Reece, had worked at the Mount Airy Chair Company and National Desk plants ahead of him, including a stint with a very young Andy Griffith, with whom he traded knives during sack lunches of butter beans and ham-stuffed biscuits. “Daddy said he made out better on the knife swap, but then again, Andy went to college and came out a whole lot better in the long run.”

  That’s a fact. Halfway through the show, unemployed singer-songwriter Russ Ashburn drove up to give me a copy of the song he wrote not long after Bassett closed its National Mount Airy plant in 2005. Called “RFD Parade,” the CD cover featured a picture of Russ standing in front of an American flag and holding a handwritten sign that said NAFTA IS NOT NICE.