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

by Macy, Beth

  Like his grandfather before him, John knew the money wasn’t made in the office; it was made in the factory. Occasionally, an ass had to be chewed to drive home that point. “He was really sweating the labor,” Spencer Morten, a former board member of Vaughan-Bassett, told me. “John Bassett stayed on top of everything, including how many screws they needed to be putting in per minute.”

  To really get the factory humming, John knew, Vaughan-Bassett needed to recruit his old superintendent from National Mount Airy to the team. Duke Taylor could be difficult—higher-ups at Bassett had thought about firing Duke for years, but they feared he might actually hurt someone if they did. “The best thing I can say about Duke is, he may have been a curmudgeon, but the man could not make a bad piece of furniture,” Merriman said. “He could make it out of Popsicle sticks if he had to and still make money.”

  Duke was downright fanatical about accuracy, and as far as John Bassett was concerned, that made him the prize bird dog of furniture-making.

  The 1983 Vaughan-Bassett annual report tells the story. Orders were so slow that the factory was operating only half-time. The company was competing with its cousins at the other end of Chestnut Creek, Vaughan Furniture Company, almost double the size of Vaughan-Bassett. The plant was bleeding money.

  And damn if John didn’t leave Bassett after two decades of family infighting and land in the center of more family drama, some of it courtesy of Spilman. Spilman had gone to college with John Vaughan, and he’d been badmouthing Little John to Vaughan and his friends in Galax for years. “Look, John Vaughan and John Bassett were first cousins, and yet when John Bassett moved to Galax and John Vaughan had parties, Pat and John were never invited,” Bunny Wampler explained, even though Pat was closely related to the Vaughans. (Pat’s mother was the daughter of Vaughan-Bassett founder Bunyan Vaughan, and the two companies’ boards had long been interconnected.) “Does that tell you something?”

  When Pat and John declined to buy a home in Galax, with John commuting forty minutes across the state line from Roaring Gap, word filtered down that the Bassetts thought they were too good to live in Galax—a charge Pat and John vehemently deny. As one industry insider put it: “In the old days, the furniture families had been very, very reserved and modest and community-oriented. They lived in mansions, but they did not portray themselves as being above the people. The criticism you always heard of John Bassett was that he was full of himself, that he was too self-promoting.”

  John Bassett may have come across as arrogant to the power-wielding families in Galax, but he was too busy working to notice. Though the couple initially rented a house in town to see if they might want to buy in Galax, the absence of invitations from the extended family made it clear that blood was not thicker than water as far as Galax furniture-making was concerned. “They weren’t that nice to us,” Pat said, referring to their Higgins and Vaughan cousins.

  Another Galax executive blamed faulty cocktail chatter for the rift: A false rumor had spread featuring John Bassett declaring that he “would rule Galax someday,” offending the Vaughan cousins to no end, although it was actually a Martinsville stockbroker who’d made the prediction.

  So Pat and John retreated to their home in Roaring Gap, where they were already entrenched in the supper-club circuit and there was no need to call friends on Wednesday to set up a Saturday golf game. At the Roaring Gap clubhouse, built by Hanes Corporation magnates in the early 1900s, there was a standing game every Saturday afternoon, a match in which John Bassett frequently excelled. And nary a player referred to him as Little John.

  The Vaughans had visions of one day buying Vaughan-Bassett themselves, and more than one industry exec told me that John Bassett’s arrival in Galax destroyed their dream of running the whole town. Just as he was not asked to join the gin-rummy fests on the Bassett corporate jet, John Bassett was not invited to be part of the Galax “knothole gang,” the phrase for chummy furniture execs who liked to golf, hunt, and party together.

  When one of the first things John Bassett did was raise wages on his factory floor, Morten recalled, Vaughan president George Vaughan sped over to the factory in his Cadillac Fleetwood and shouted at him, “Boy, you are in Vaughan country now! You can’t go raising wages without checking with me first!”

  Vaughan sales executive John McGhee recalled warning George and John Vaughan, “This guy’s gonna be a powerhouse,” when John Bassett moved to town. But like many in the industry, the Vaughans underestimated him at every turn. A few years younger than JBIII, McGhee had grown up in Bassett and had watched John navigate every challenge thrown his way. He’d watched his father chew him out on the sidewalk and jerk away his raise. He’d watched him compete on the golf course and in the classroom, and he knew that what John lacked in natural talent, he made up for in resolve:

  Flood or not, there was never any water in the swamp.

  “From the time we were twelve, thirteen years old, I just saw the intensity. Whatever it was, he worked twice as hard as anybody else,” said McGhee, who shared that insight with his bosses at Vaughan.

  “They got mad at me for even saying it,” McGhee said.

  Galax natives speak warmly—but carefully, as if still intimidated—about the Vaughan family’s influence on the town. The family contributed generously to major community projects, including the hospital and library, and George Vaughan successfully lobbied for the construction of a four-lane highway, which buttressed development by connecting Galax to the nearby interstate and allowing trucks easy passage to and from the factories.

  He got the road approved by inviting members of the state highway commission, of which he was a member, to meet in Galax while the Old Fiddlers’ Convention was going on—when traffic congestion was at its peak. “He brought them up here and wined them and dined them out at his house, and every afternoon, when the factories let out, he managed to have them there on that [old] road between here and the convention,” George’s brother, John Vaughan, recalled.

  After three days of battling the fiddlers and factory workers in their cars, the commission voted for the funds to build the highway.

  George’s younger brother and the CEO after him, John Vaughan “was a good man who looked after the town,” said police chief Rick Clark. When one longtime employee at Vaughan was going to lose his health insurance because he couldn’t work, John Vaughan couldn’t convince the insurance company to see things his way. But he did allow the man to sit in a lawn chair in the factory and punch in and out, extending both his salary and his benefits.

  “People here are extremely loyal and want to work hard,” said Jill Burcham, a Galax minister and social worker whose family ran a textile factory in nearby Independence. “But that spirit was sometimes taken advantage of. When John Bassett arrived, it was time for the monopoly of a few controlling the town to change.”

  While the Vaughans were dreaming of expansion and Spilman was busy forgetting who’d brought him to the dance, John Bassett set out to do in Galax what he’d witnessed in Bassett: get the best equipment and the best workers and run the hell out of them.

  There was just one problem with nabbing Duke Taylor, the headstrong plant manager who was a work-flow fanatic: Taylor still worked for Spilman. When another of John Bassett’s first moves was putting Vaughan-Bassett’s own longtime plant superintendent on a short leash, word reached the higher-ups at Bassett that the Vaughan-Bassett superintendent was looking for work, and they invited him to Bassett for an interview.

  John was just about to fire him, and it turned out Bassett Furniture didn’t want him either. Call it what it was—ethical hairsplitting—but John Bassett viewed the superintendent’s interview in Bassett as the opening salvo in what would become a decades-long battle for the region’s best furniture workers and managers.

  His allegiance to the smokestacks that bore his name was now officially ended. He hired Duke.

  As Meadors, the longtime Bassett sales executive, remembered it: “He picked us like a chicken
!”

  As he was packing up his things on his last day of work at Bassett, Duke recalled manager Joe Philpott warning him: “John Bassett’s crazy. He’ll never make it.”

  “You watch him,” Duke shot back. “He knows more than all y’all.”

  So Duke came to Vaughan-Bassett and, eventually, so did many of National Mount Airy’s finest workers. For a time, John loaned Duke a company car, a Cadillac he could fill with employees for the forty-five-minute commute. “We hired all the good people I had trained in Mount Airy,” Duke said. “Spilman got so mad that he threatened to sue us. But that was like an elephant jumping on a peanut. John died laughing and said, ‘Let him sue.’ ”

  The jockeying went on for years. At least two of Joe Philpott’s family vacations were interrupted by a furious Spilman ordering him to fly home on the company plane to lure back an employee John had poached. Once, Philpott spotted John Bassett grinning in front of the Bassett bank, like a bad penny whose circulation could not be stopped.

  That time, he’d swiped a manager from the Bassett Chair plant for the Vaughan-Bassett plant in Elkin. When Philpott upped the ante by offering the man more money, it turned out John had already sealed the deal by arranging a second job—for the man’s wife.

  If only John could nab Linda McMillian, the Mount Airy product engineer they’d discovered years earlier with popcorn butter up to her elbows in the middle of a Rose’s five-and-dime. John had been in Galax a week before he realized he needed Duke Taylor to get the factory humming. “I had to get Duke, then Duke had to get Linda. That was the key to everything,” he said.

  Buck Higgins told him the struggling factory had no business hiring a product engineer. Drawing out the parts had always been the job of the superintendent. Schematics for furniture components were maintained as actual wooden patterns rather than drawings, and they were stacked willy-nilly around the plant. “There were pieces of board everywhere,” Linda recalled.

  Buck was hesitant to believe that some never-married ninety-pound eccentric was the answer to the company’s quality issues. Linda didn’t really like people or computers, keeping to herself in the upstairs of the plant with her schematics and advanced math. “She don’t get along with people too good; she’s got a temper,” Duke said. “But she has a photographic memory, and there is honestly no mistake on the factory floor she can’t correct if you just leave her alone to do it.”

  She set her own schedule, arriving at four thirty every morning and leaving by two thirty in the afternoon—to avoid working with others, yes, and also to be home for her mentally handicapped sister, Diddy, before the sitter had to leave.

  To prove to Buck that Linda was worth her salary, John and Duke paid her out of their own pockets for several weeks. They reconfigured the finishing room carefully, changing it, but not so much that they lost all the important grandfathered EPA permits. They bulldozed the old lumberyard that was always turning to mush when it rained and rebuilt it with a sturdier shale base. John worked Duke so hard—calling him at all hours of the night and on weekends—that Duke had his home telephone number changed and refused to give him the new one.

  Buck Higgins finally relented when he understood how good Linda was, and he put her on the payroll. Linda was the only employee allowed to smoke in her office, in a facility chock-full of flammable materials that forbids cigarette smoking inside and out.

  Buck told Duke, “John goes by the golden rule.”

  “What’s that, Buck?”

  “John’s got the gold, and John wants to rule!”

  14

  Selling the Masses

  Sell to the classes, eat with the masses.

  Sell to the masses, eat with the classes.

  —HENRY FORD

  They were making progress, albeit too slowly for JBIII. If he really wanted to see the company take off, he needed to bird-dog a new venture into being. He’d create new gold by opening a factory he’d start from scratch in Sumter, South Carolina, with a plant he could run without interference from his wife’s uncle as a subsidiary of Vaughan-Bassett. And he’d do it the cheapest way he could—by gluing paper designs onto pressboard.

  The Asians had yet to venture into paper-on-particleboard bedroom furniture, which would be popular with Heilig-Meyers, then on the cusp of becoming the nation’s largest furniture retailer.

  Some people in the industry called it glit, a combination of glue and hold it together.

  Others mocked the word, calling it an amalgam of what the product really was: glue and shit.

  JBIII practically stole the old Williams Furniture Company in Sumter, a one-million-square-foot facility, and here’s how he did it: The conglomerates had finally realized they couldn’t make furniture using the same principles they used to make paper or bathroom faucets. It was time for Georgia Pacific and the like to cut and run. In 1983, Wall Street investment banker Webb Turner had decided he wanted a change from the frenetic pace of New York, and he developed a fondness for furniture, thinking that if everyone else was cashing out, maybe he could profit by stepping in. Turner paid Georgia Pacific an estimated $16 million for the old Williams plant in 1983, then made the critical mistake of bringing in managers from up north—in a deeply Southern town known for its Civil War heritage. He acquired plants in Jamestown, New York, and Batesville, Indiana, then shelled out $60 million for the Burlington Furniture Division. It went bankrupt within the year, and the old Williams factory followed suit.

  John Bassett’s assault on Sumter was not one of a Yankee interloper but of a lone black sheep with deep pockets. He paid $4 million for the factory in 1987, one-quarter of what Turner had paid just four years before, and he assembled the deal as a three-way venture, calling it V-B/Williams. He used his own family money to buy a third of the company under the name Fivemost Corporation, shorthand for “the five most important people”: Pat and John and their children, Doug, Wyatt, and Fran.

  Vaughan-Bassett bought another third (partially with money he loaned it), and he sweet-talked a group of local patrons, who were loyal to the town and duly impressed by John’s promise to put four hundred unemployed furniture workers back on the payroll, into paying the rest. They included a finishing-supply-company manager, a propane-company owner, and a lawyer, as well as some heirs of the original Williams company founders.

  “He knew that coming into a different town in a different state, you can have all kinds of issues,” said Sumter plant superintendent Garet Bosiger. “But if you have local people with ownership, all of a sudden people are more willing to work with you.”

  John Bassett knew it was good business to be courteous in Sumter—at least in public—especially after the carpetbagger treatment the town had experienced with Turner. He charmed the locals with his country-club etiquette and knowledge of Southern history, especially the Civil War. “He comes across as a very earnest person,” said ninety-seven-year-old Ross McKenzie, a Sumter native who put $25,000 into the venture. “Not only was he a good businessman, he was very well-mannered.”

  JBIII? The man who had once interrogated Garet Bosiger so fiercely—because he thought Garet was looking for work elsewhere (he wasn’t)—that Garet could no longer bear to maintain eye contact, which only fueled JBIII’s fury?

  “I like a man to look me in the eye!” JBIII barked.

  “Sometimes I look away because I can’t take it anymore,” Garet replied. “Just tell me what you want me to do. But don’t talk to me like a dog.”

  He’d lured Garet to Sumter from a competitor with the promise of company stock options. Now among the legions of JBIII managers who consider him a mentor and father figure, Garet later started his own furniture-supply factory with ample advice from John as well as a low-interest loan from him. The two of them cobbled together a mutually rewarding deal for Vaughan-Bassett to buy drawer sides from Garet’s Appomattox River Manufacturing Company, based in Keysville, Virginia.

  Like many of John’s loyal lieutenants, Garet would take a bullet for the man. But h
e would not wish to be his son.

  Launching a factory from scratch with just three security guards and a personnel manager made for the loneliest time of John Bassett’s career. In Mount Airy, he may have had to dodge Spilman, but at least he had upper-level managers in the company’s finance and legal departments on call. “In Sumter, I had to be everything,” he said. “The banks weren’t loaning me another dime, and I had invested millions such that I could easily go broke if this thing didn’t fly.

  “This wasn’t some hypothetical case at Harvard Business School. My feet were in the stirrups!”

  Garet Bosiger’s wife, Martha, predicted V-B/Williams would be a moneymaking venture, and true enough, within sixty days of producing its first glit-furniture piece, the company was profitable. Martha predicted it, just as the spouse of every other manager reporting to John Bassett grew to intimately understand that there is still no one in the industry who works harder or longer hours.

  They know it with every peal of his signature refrain: the telephone ring.

  He calls on Christmas morning. Make sure the dry kiln is turned on so we don’t ruin that stack of wood.

  He calls at 1:30 a.m. That cabinet-room foreman giving us trouble all these months? Well, I’ve just decided. He’s got to go.

  He calls on your vacation, and if you dare object, he reasons: If I’m calling you, then I’m working too!

  He calls on Saturday when you’re mowing the lawn—and if you can’t get to the phone in time, he’ll accuse you later of screening your calls.

  At precisely 9:15 every New Year’s Day, he calls the previous year’s top salesperson and asks, What have you sold for me this year?

  He calls occasionally to share a dirty joke; nothing too bawdy, just something a frat guy from the 1950s would tell.

  He calls from the phone next to the toilet in one of the bathrooms of his Roaring Gap home.