7

Lineage and Love

There is nobody in the world that can take care of a woman like another woman.

—JBIII

The women in the family waited until they reached the Galax city limits to give Little John the news: he was about to meet the woman of his dreams. It was September 1962. The occasion was the funeral of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company founder Bunyan Vaughan, and the entire Bassett clan was paying its respects to a fellow industry leader. Bunyan Vaughan was related by marriage to the Bassetts, and his company was related to them, too, having been started with Bassett money.

The women had ample experience in matters of love and money. Mr. J.D. was a nonagenarian widower now, with steady companionship provided by his chauffeur and his full-time nurse, who was in her sixties. The daughters and granddaughters had had a lot to say about that, having called a family meeting to share the news that someone had found Grandpop very happily sleeping with his nurse. The women were aghast, worried she would lay claim to the family fortune, though there was scant evidence to suggest that the nurse had anything other than caretaking and companionship in mind.

The Bassett men, however, had an entirely different response than their wives. The two were fooling around. It was mutual, nobody was getting hurt.

“You women be quiet,” Mr. J.D.’s Galax grandson George Vaughan snapped. “What we need to do is find out how the hell he’s pulling it off!”

Ultimately, the women prevailed, moving Mr. J.D. to the hospital in Martinsville, where he spent his final years. With more eyes on him, the theory went, the hanky-panky would stop, and the fortune would be safe. “There is nobody in the world that can take care of a woman like another woman,” JBIII recalled, shaking his head. “Men who don’t understand that are stupid.”

The women were now immersed in finding Little John a mate. Every sister was in charge of picking somebody, and Pat Vaughan Exum had gotten letters from Jane about him. Pat was a student at Jane’s alma mater, Hollins College, an old liberal arts finishing school for the elite daughters of the South—the Hollie Collies, they were nicknamed. It was the kind of college to which young women were (and still are) encouraged to bring their horses. (Back in the antebellum era, they were even invited to bring their slaves.)

Pat was related to Miss Pokey—her great-grandmother was the matriarch’s sister, making her a fourth cousin to Little John. She was also the granddaughter of Bunyan Vaughan, a position that entwined her lineage as well as her stock holdings with the Bassett corporate/family tree.

“Put on your lipstick,” Pat’s mother told her at the start of the funeral reception, held at the Vaughan family estate. “They have brought John Bassett up here to meet you.”

John stood silent as Jane asked Pat all the questions, firing-line-style, without missing a beat. What year was she at Hollins? What was her phone number? What were the rules these days on leaving campus for a date? “She was all over it,” Pat recalled.

Mourners lined the room, and they all fell silent as people strained to listen in when the two finally spoke. JBIII told Pat he was sorry about her grandfather and got her number, and then everyone commenced talking again. Years later, he would recall of his future wife’s figure, “That girl could put some wrinkles in a blouse.”

Two weeks later, they went on their first date. He didn’t want to risk asking her for a weekend date, in case she was already busy, so he proposed a Wednesday-night dinner instead. They courted twice a week for nearly a year, dining regularly at an exclusive Roanoke club where his parents were members.

And though Wyatt Exum wished his daughter would stay and finish college, Pat said her mother could see how much they were in love, and she urged the couple on. Pat earned her “Mrs.” degree instead and never looked back, she insisted. A music major “with no discernible talent,” as she put it, chuckling, she saved herself the embarrassment of the dreaded senior piano recital by dropping out after her junior year.

The bride wore her mother’s satin wedding gown designed with an oval neckline of rose-point lace, an elongated basque, and a shirred skirt ending in a court train, according to the wedding announcement. Spencer Morten recalled Mr. Doug leaning toward him at the reception and saying: “Good for John. He’s got him a good American car and now a good American woman, a Baptist even!”

The kissing cousins have learned to ward off jokes by beating observers to the punch line. “We’re so inbred around here, our family tree is a palm,” their son J. Doug Bassett IV deadpanned. When my story about John Bassett ran in the Roanoke Times, their daughter, Fran, wrote to thank me for explaining, finally, exactly how her parents were related. She’d never before understood.

The couple honeymooned in Hawaii, then set up house in the modest Bassett apartment within hollering distance of the factories. The windows rattled when the trains passed.

They were a long way from their golf-course mansion in a gated Florida community, decades from claiming Tiger Woods as a neighbor. It was 1963, and the young couple had little concern for China, where Mao Tse-tung was declaring, “Communism is not love! Communism is a hammer we use to destroy our enemies!”

Mr. and Mrs. John Bassett III had also yet to hear of a Chinese force of nature named Larry Moh, a Wharton School grad who had just launched a parquet-flooring company in Hong Kong and whose ideas—heaven help the Southern furniture makers toiling away in the Taj Mahal—would one day threaten to transform the South’s humming factories into stagnant piles of bricks.

Pat Vaughan Exum Bassett settled into the hilltop hierarchy, where moneymaking was the rule and her in-laws called the shots. At the Taj Mahal, her father-in-law, Mr. Doug, delegated most of the factory details to Bob Spilman and Mr. Ed—especially during the winter, when he usually retreated to Hobe Sound. He was more consumed with finance and furniture design than manufacturing. Mr. Doug phoned his nephew-in-law Spencer Morten at home late one night, announced himself as J.D. Bassett Jr., and barked that he wanted a complete report on Bassett Mirror’s finances by nine thirty the next morning. Spencer stayed up till midnight compiling it—only to have Doug brush it off with a cursory “Looks like you guys are doing well.”

Doug had been drinking when he phoned, Spencer explained, and he’d forgotten all about his call. By the next morning he was preoccupied with arranging his afternoon tee time at the Bassett Country Club, where he took an avid interest in the maintenance of the course, regularly dispatching a truckload of factory workers to the club to help—a habit that still inspires fury in several long-retired plant managers when they think about it.

Underlings could tell how their mornings would go by how loudly Mr. Doug’s foot sounded when it landed on the wooden step outside his office. If a manager spent too long in the bathroom, he might counsel him to take the Wall Street Journal into the stall. If the manager was going to waste company time, he should at least be thinking while he did it. If supervisors wanted to change a supplier for their sandpaper, they had to run it by Mr. Doug first, or risk infuriating him by souring some long-standing backroom deal the family had made.

Doug’s best friend and confidant was his next-door neighbor and cocktail-hour buddy Whit Sales, the man who ran the Bassett-owned Blue Ridge Hardware. Whit and his wife, Virginia, couldn’t have children, and they treated Doug Bassett’s four as their own. The relationship was complicated and symbiotic, like a lot of things in Bassett, with Sales proving himself a reliable surrogate—and an extra set of company eyes—but always deferring to Doug.

This extended to hiring decisions, from the corporate office right on down to the person sweeping up at night. When Henry County native Joe Philpott returned home after college in 1955, he landed a job working for Sales—only to have Sales rescind the offer after discovering that Mr. Doug wanted Joe to learn the management ropes at Bassett instead. (Doug was incensed when he found out during one happy hour that Sales had nabbed him first, and Sales quickly set about undoing the deed.) The furniture job paid Joe considerably less than what Sales had offered. So, to make up for it, Doug dropped by the plants every couple of months, tapped Joe on the shoulder, and told him his salary had just been upped.

That the Bassett rule was arbitrary, completely at the whim of whichever Bassett was calling the shots, was both the best thing and the worst thing about working in a company town. Since there was no town council, churches and service clubs were left to organize civic projects. Mr. Doug ran the school board and the country club, while Mr. Ed was keeper of the Kiwanis. Doug’s branch of the family held the reins of Pocahontas Bassett Baptist, while Ed’s controlled the Methodist church. Nobody passed Go without the family’s blessing.

To outsiders, the extended-family hierarchy seemed equally fraught. When cousin Bonce Stanley was governor, Mr. Ed used to call ahead before church on Sundays to see if the governor was in town. If Bonce was in Richmond, Ed went to church. If the governor was in Henry County, Ed stayed home. He resented the idea of having to stand when the governor—who was not only his cousin by marriage but also his furniture competitor—entered the sanctuary.

Like most newcomers, John D. Bassett High football coach Colbert “Mick” Micklem did not receive a memo on the way things worked when he moved to Bassett, in 1961. Mick had planned to put the proceeds from the season’s first football game toward new equipment, but he quickly learned the Kiwanis Club had dibs on the money. Mr. Ed made sure the game sold out by requiring his furniture salesmen to buy tickets by mail, despite the fact that they were scattered across the United States and couldn’t have attended the game even if they’d wanted to. Tackle dummies for the team had to be ordered through the family-owned Blue Ridge Hardware too—or neighbor Sales might complain to Mr. Doug.

“The county owned the school, but the family owned everything from one foot around it. Everything, even the sports fields, belonged to Bassett Furniture Industries,” Mick told me. The exception was the smattering of independently owned stores, including a furniture store—which sold Bassett Furniture, of course.

But paternalism could also be beneficial, as it was when Mick and his wife went to the First National Bank of Bassett to apply for a seven-thousand-dollar loan to buy their first home. The bank manager he met with said he’d have to talk to the board and would get back to him, at which point chairman Doug Bassett popped in the bank doors, and he happened to be in a good mood. “Hello, Coach! What do these fine folks want?” he asked his manager.

“They want a loan.”

“Well, give it to ’em. They’re good folks!” He didn’t even ask how much the loan was for. When a Bassett deemed you fine folks, the deal was done.

Mr. Doug kept the tightest rein on Little John, whom he considered brilliant but undisciplined. It was okay that Little John wasn’t the humblest of people, but he should have the courtesy to at least act like he was.

“Motivation by intimidation,” Mick told me. “That was the motto back in those days.” The most important thing was always, Are the factories running full-time? Are we selling more furniture now than we did last month?

That relentlessness became an enduring legacy of Mr. J.D., who lived to be ninety-eight years old. He was seventeen months shy of the century mark and $17 million shy of hitting $100 million in sales at the time of his death, in February 1965. He died in his room at the Martinsville General Hospital, where his family had moved him, not just because they wanted to put some space between the old man and the nurse-girlfriend but also because he’d let his Victorian house on the hill fall into disrepair. “Miss Pokey said J.D. was too stingy and wouldn’t let her spend the money, so it was just never fixed up,” said a neighbor whose grandparents were close friends and original investors in the company.

Barber Coy Young recalled seeing the old man being chauffeured around town in his black Cadillac, and he remembered with great clarity meeting the man when he was a teenager. Coy was playing baseball with his friends near Mr. J.D.’s home, when he tiptoed into his garden to fetch an errant ball, nearly running into Mr. J.D., who’d stopped by his house to pick vegetables.

“Come here, boy, and help me.” He beckoned to Coy, then tapped his cane on the cucumber he wanted him to pick. He wore bedroom slippers and pajamas, and he carried his trademark unlit cigar. And even though Coy was scared of the ghostly-seeming grump, he thought it was a little bit pitiful when the old man said, “They tell me I’m a millionaire, and I don’t even have a suit of clothes!”

In her pressed uniform and stiff white shoes, his last nurse—not the amorous one—just about killed herself looking out for him at the hospital and on his daily outings, Young said. “He was one of those who got meaner the older he got. He thought he was staying at the hospital for free because he’d donated a lot of money to it earlier. But the family was paying for it.” (Mr. Doug was a hospital trustee.)

According to the inventory of his estate, at the time of his death he had $6.3 million in assets (about $48 million in today’s dollars), including sizable stock holdings in the myriad furniture companies he’d founded and in tobacco, coal, railroads, oil, and automobile companies. His children inherited it all, except for some bequests. He left sixteen thousand dollars to his longtime maid Gracie Wade, the one who succeeded Mary Hunter. He also left ten thousand dollars to his personal secretary, who’d told a reporter once that she’d been too busy working for the industries to ever get married.

His nurse got three thousand dollars. According to a handwritten note he filed with his will documents, Mr. J.D. had originally promised to leave her eight thousand but he wanted the money he’d lent her in 1959—to pay for her husband’s hospital costs and burial expenses—to be deducted from the initial promised gift.

He left his personal home and surrounding land to the Pocahontas Bassett Baptist Church. If the building ever ceased to be a church, he noted in wobbly cursive, then it should be given over to the “benefit of the white citizens of the Bassett community” to become a community center and a “playground for white youth.”

Area journalists poured on the love in numerous newspaper editorials, like this sweeping tribute:

Unlocked and still free of the shrouds of the casket and tightly secured walls of the burial vault, the heritage of an indomitable will hovered, as it will through the ages, along the factory-lined banks of the Smith River; the products of a spirit of conquest and great strength rumble by train and truck into every corner of the nation and to marketplaces throughout the world.

A little more than a year after Mr. J.D.’s death, Mr. Doug was diagnosed with end-stage spine and neck cancer. The announcement was a total shocker, and it heralded a succession issue that would haunt Mr. Doug’s only son and threaten to sever both business and family ties for decades.

Few people understood why, at the age of sixty-five, Mr. Doug had a major change of heart. Few could explain why, on his deathbed in the hospital, he called in some members of the Bassett Furniture board to announce a change in succession: now, upon Mr. Doug’s death, cousin Ed would move up to chairman of the board, and Bob Spilman, the hotshot son-in-law, would become Ed Bassett’s number two.

“But what about John?” asked Spencer Morten, board member and in-law.

“John will be handling my estate,” Doug said.

Mary Elizabeth Morten, one of the largest Bassett stockholders at the time, said she never understood why Doug chose his son-in-law over his own son. But Spencer has a memory of his uncle’s final hour: As Spencer walked into Mr. Doug’s room, he passed Jane Bassett Spilman walking out. The favorite child. The one Doug called his conscience. The daughter who had arranged her brother’s marriage.

The one with the mind of a man, as her father liked to brag.

After Spencer offered that missing piece of the family saga, I remembered the furniture store I visited when I began chasing this tale. Amid the bucketfuls of plunking rain, owner Delano Thomasson had shared a critical piece of information that few members of the Bassett family were willing to reveal. It resulted in both the worst thing that ever happened to John Bassett III and, though it would take him decades to understand it, the best.

The last-minute double-cross stung him and it humbled him and ultimately, it made one helluva fighter out of Little John.

“It’s real simple,” Delano told me. “Jane hugged Papa and got her man the job.”