9

Sweet Ole Bob (SOB)

He got a lot of enjoyment out of people being afraid of him.

—BILL YOUNG, RETIRED BASSETT FURNITURE CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

In 1972, the company hired Frank Snyder to be its first in-house lawyer. Like Spilman, a former army paratrooper and ROTC student at NC State, Snyder was an ex-military guy who was vigilant about workplace punctuality and impeccably shined shoes. During Snyder’s first decade on the job at Bassett, the two tough-guy veterans bonded like glue to plywood.

Snyder was initially tasked with handling a delicate legal case. Some workers had complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that blacks and women weren’t getting a fair shake at Bassett, resulting in a lawsuit. In fact, eight years after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required employers to halt discrimination, Bassett Furniture’s thirteen plants, now operating in several Southern states, were still largely segregated.

Sanding- and cabinet-room employees were all white, but the spray rooms—the dirtiest part of furniture-making—were operated entirely by black men. Black women handled the rub rooms, where workers wiped off the excess spray by hand. It wasn’t dangerous as long as there was proper ventilation, and workers wore masks and gloves. Women weren’t allowed to run machines, which put them at an unfair wage differential since machine operators typically earned more than those working the line.

Before Snyder came on board, Bassett’s legal affairs had always been handled by lawyer and top Virginia legislator A.L. Philpott, with his Main Street office just down the street from the Taj Mahal and his entwined Henry County family connections weaving several generations back. Having aligned himself with Bonce Stanley and the other Virginia segregationists, Philpott had been in no hurry to see the Civil Rights Act followed to the letter at Bassett. One of the first stories I heard about racial tension in the region, in fact, involved a brief run-in between A.L. Philpott and Doretha’s husband, William “Pork Chop” Estes, the chauffeur of Ruby Bassett, Mr. Ed’s wife.

Estes was out with his stepdaughter Naomi Hodge-Muse, a chemistry major home visiting her folks from historically black Virginia Union College, when they ran into the legendary state legislator, whom Estes knew through the Bassetts. Estes politely stopped Philpott on the street to introduce him to Naomi but was cut off with a stern “Boy, I don’t have time for you today.”

“All he wanted was to introduce me and say, ‘This my li’l girl. She in college,’ ” said Naomi, slipping into Pork Chop’s dialect. She’s in her early sixties now, retired from a management job at Miller Brewing in nearby Eden, North Carolina, and likes to joke that she was the first in her family to make alcohol and “do it legal!” The widow of the banker who ran Martinsville’s first black-owned savings and loan, she lives comfortably in Chatmoss, the upper-middle-class community named for one of the largest tobacco plantations in the area—not far from where her great-great-grandmother Amy Finney once toiled as a slave. She organized the Christmas parade float for her local branch of the NAACP in 2011—and shook her head when the city of Martinsville bestowed the honor of best float on the Sons of the Confederacy. “And they don’t understand why people stay mad!” she fumed.

The memory of her stepfather being dismissed by A.L. Philpott still brings tears to her eyes. He was so ashamed by the incident that he never spoke of it again. The following year, when the family fell short on tuition, Naomi dropped out for a semester to work at a competing furniture factory in the region. The man who fed the ripsaw spit tobacco juice on her feet to intimidate her, and a manager threatened daily to rape her during lunch. She knew if she told her stepfather, a World War II combat veteran, he’d do something about it that would end in his arrest. She confided in her grandmother instead. A maid for the Bassetts—the one who wore two girdles at once—Dollie Finney had sparked young Naomi’s interest in chemistry when she bought a science-fair kit for her on layaway in 1964. That was the beginning of a string of science-fair projects that eventually earned Naomi a college scholarship. She was the first in her family to go.

“I ain’t never let no man put his hands on me, save [when] I wanted him to,” her grandmother told her. “You take care of your business.”

The next day, the ninety-seven-pound firebrand tucked a switchblade into the back of her jeans on her way to work. This time when the supervisor cornered her and threatened to take her out behind the lumber stack, Naomi whipped out her knife. She demonstrated the movement for me at a quiet sidewalk café in Martinsville on a crisp fall day in 2011, the anger still palpable some four decades later. Her hand shook, and her eyes were blazing. The foreman had backed down immediately, swearing that he’d only been kidding. “That’s when I learned that being timid didn’t get you a damn thing,” she said.

But Naomi still shudders to think how her life would have played out had her blade pierced his white skin.

Her grandmother’s double-girdling may have been more prudent. But Naomi started working in the 1970s, when the great changes sweeping the nation were finally reaching this remote corner of smokestacks and red-clay earth.

It was race relations and the war in Vietnam that consumed most Americans when President Richard Nixon made the bold, historic move of meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-tung in 1972, thawing relations with the People’s Republic of China for the first time in twenty-five years. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon declared after leaving behind an American redwood sapling as a symbol of mutual peace, prosperity, and international trade.

Spilman had more immediate concerns than China on his mind. Up in his office at the Taj Mahal, he ordered Frank Snyder to bring the company into EEOC compliance and make the lawsuit go away, echoing the mandate of Mr. Ed Bassett, who didn’t want to experience the indignity of being chewed out by a federal judge again. Decades earlier, Ed had borne the brunt of a legal lashing when Bassett was found to have sixteen-year-olds on its payroll, a violation of child-labor laws. (Like his relatives before him, Ed had started working in the factories at fourteen and didn’t understand what the big deal was—but the federal government felt differently.)

Ed didn’t like the idea of paying a full-time staff lawyer, though, and Snyder recalled arriving at his office at 7:20 a.m.—long before most corporate lawyers were on duty—just to show Ed that he could keep up with any Bassett. One morning, Ed appeared at Snyder’s door, stretched his arms authoritatively against both sides of his door frame, and sighed. “Tell me again, what is it you do?” he asked.

Mr. Ed was the originator of the great Henry County adage that John Bassett would go on to adopt: “When you see a snake’s head, hit it.” Ed was also the subject of an even more colorful regional phrase: “Mr. Ed didn’t cull up and down the Smith River.” The first time I heard it—from a group of Vaughan-Bassett salesmen who worked for Bassett in the 1960s—I had to get them to spell the word to be clear.

C-u-l-l. In the furniture industry, it’s a term that refers to sorting—culling—the bad lumber from the good. Only in Mr. Ed’s case, the reference was not to wood but to women—secretaries and other companions whom he met with at his private retreat, a cabin in the Henry County woods. Several retired Bassett office workers I interviewed could still quote from the sex-talk-laden “business letters” Ed dictated to his company secretary (and mistress). The men routinely swiped the tapes from her desk and passed them around for a laugh. Once, in fact, W.M.’s secretary volunteered to type up the letters for Mr. Ed’s secretary when she was out sick, and when she discovered the content covered a lot more than baby-crib sales, she transcribed them and then forwarded the transcriptions, word for word, to W.M. “He was going to fire Ed, but they were reorganizing the sales force at the time, and he couldn’t afford to do it without him,” said Reuben “Scotty” Scott, longtime manager of the J.D. plants.

According to several industry insiders, “Mr. Ed didn’t cull up and down the Smith River” meant that when it came to women, he didn’t sort the bad from the good. He’d cavort with anyone. They also said he wasn’t the only higher-up to act like that either, adding that several managers routinely cheated on their wives.

It was Mad Men in the mountains.

With moonshine instead of martinis.

Some managers competed to see who could bang the new company nurse or the new hire in advertising first, and at least one senior manager contracted gonorrhea. (He quietly arranged for his wife to get treatment after making the family doctor promise not to disclose the real reason she had to be on the antibiotic.)

Spilman didn’t participate in it, multiple people told me. But he was eager to hear every lascivious detail. In 2005, he lamented in an American Furniture Hall of Fame oral-history interview that he missed the old ways of doing business: “You’ve got so many things you can do and can’t do legally—age restrictions, sexual remarks. Techniques are entirely different than they were in my really active years,” he said.

Managers were so brazen that a female buyer from J.C. Penney once turned the corner during a tour of a Bassett factory to see two people going at it during their lunch break.

The buyer deadpanned to a colleague, “Are they doing a cutting?”—the production term for a single order of a particular suite.

“The joke at Bassett was, you had to stand in line on the Smith River banks sometimes to get a spot at lunch,” Bob Merriman told me.

One out-of-town supplier was so shocked by the language and lewdness that he joked that all men in Bassett were afflicted with the Smith River Twitch.

But Mr. Ed was all business when it came to sales, arriving at work before seven every morning to run the prior day’s numbers. He encouraged sales managers to hound the salesmen working under them. “Send them a telegram or write a letter or call, or do all three!” sales manager Mick Micklem recalled him shouting. “Keep the pressure on these guys every single day. We’ve got thousands of people depending on us in these factories for their livelihoods, and we’ve gotta keep ’em working.”

Mr. Ed was so tenacious, JBIII said, that he once dispatched the company’s lumber buyer to the Mississippi Delta to buy lumber during an industrywide shortage, and when the man returned empty-handed, Mr. Ed was steamed.

“Did you get my lumber, Charlie?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because the sawmillers would’ve had to wade out chest-high into the swamps to cut it,” Charlie explained.

“Charlie, there’s no water in the swamp,” Mr. Ed persisted, squinting his already deep-set eyes.

“But there is, sir,” Charlie said.

“Charlie,” Mr. Ed repeated, enunciating each syllable, “there’s no water in the swamp.”

So Charlie went back to the Delta with Mr. Ed’s permission to beg, borrow, or overpay the sawmillers—whatever it took—to bring some lumber back.

If Mr. Ed needed wood, then there was simply no water in the swamp.

Snyder said it took him one week to figure out the corporate/family hierarchy: “Doug Bassett had given Ed Bassett a beating, and when Ed took over, he passed the beatings on to Bob Spilman, who passed all the static on to John.”

The truth was, Spilman was an equal-opportunity beater—tough on everyone who worked for him, from his company pilot to, eventually, his own son. He was honest, loyal to the people who mattered to him, and he culled, which meant he was faithful, if not exactly tender, to his wife.

“He’d sit at the table on Christmas Day, and I could strangle him, but he’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I heard the factory whistles blow,’ ” Jane said.

“He thought Christmas was a great waste of time,” his son, Rob, told me.

It was Jane, in fact, who came up with the pointedly ironic nickname Sweet Ole Bob. SOB for short.

If Mr. Ed was leery of going in front of a federal judge again, then Spilman would see to it that Snyder set things right in the factories. The blacks could have their civil rights for all he cared, as long as the unions steered clear of Bassett. Spilman’s allegiance was to his pact with Mr. Ed and their mutual goal to keep Little John marginalized.

Snyder toured each of the company’s plants, explaining how they all were going to adhere to the Civil Rights Act and the new EEOC rules. In the two J.D. plants John managed, the sanding room was staffed by white men, most of them relatives of two extended families who had been laboring for generations in that department. The families sent their elders into John’s office to throw down the gauntlet: they weren’t going to tolerate working with “any goddamn niggers,” as Snyder recalled them saying.

To which John calmly replied, “If that’s your feeling, then you can leave right now because this is the way it’s gonna be.”

“I always respected John after that,” Snyder said.

On the surface John seemed impervious to the bullying of his uncle and brother-in-law, an attitude that gradually earned him the respect of those who used to discount him as an entitled spoiled brat. When Spilman showed up at his desk in the factory, he made John stand up and give him his chair. Then he’d sit down in his tailor-made suit and put his feet up on John’s desk—while John stood and listened.

He paid no attention when Spilman told his inner circle, “My brother-in-law is still a child. He’s the most immature person I’ve ever seen.”

John didn’t complain either when Spilman refused to pay for production-incentive bonuses. John simply paid for them himself, ordering lobsters flown in from Maine and steaks brought in from Kansas City; throwing three-thousand-dollar parties (featuring pigs roasting on spits) to reward his factory supervisors for upping the company’s profits; and handing out gold #1 tiepins he’d had commissioned and Swiss army knives. One retiree told me that John once took the supervisors to a strip club in Roanoke as a reward.

“Bob should have offered [the incentives] to the other plant managers,” John said. “I could afford it, but the others couldn’t.” Besides, what JBIII paid out was pocket change compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of pure profit the company made when it produced a hundred and twenty dressers an hour instead of a hundred.

He used his money as a motivator again when he couldn’t convince his plant foremen to keep the factory as clean as he wanted. He called up a chocolate manufacturer an hour away and asked if the company could deliver an order the same day he placed it. Then he wrote a letter to the wife of each supervisor saying, If your husband’s department is clean by the time we shut down for Christmas, he will bring you home a box of chocolates made fresh that very morning. “The next Friday, you could eat off the floor of any department!” he told me, beaming at the memory. Chocolate—and the promise of what came after it at home later, if the guys were lucky—was a better motivator than intimidation.

Once, when he surpassed the allotted budget on a screwdriver order, Spilman had the money docked from his pay. “You didn’t get my permission!” he barked. Weeks later, Bill Brammer, the company’s chief financial officer and an old family friend, reimbursed John without Spilman’s knowledge.

It was a lonely spot to be in, with his father gone and Mr. Ed and Spilman eager to shove him aside. “When others only want their sons to do well, it hardens you,” he said. “But at some point you quit feeling sorry for yourself and say, How am I gonna get this job done?”

Publicly, he handled Spilman’s treatment well. “But privately I think it was always in his craw,” said Howard Altizer, a vice president who rented a house on the Spilman property that was equidistant from the couple’s elegant Dutch Colonial home and the mother-in-law cottage they built for Jane and John’s mother, Lucy, after Mr. Doug’s death.

It was a great perch from which to observe the family members, and observe them he did, noting the way Bob and Jane rarely socialized with others in the family except Jane’s mother, whose affections “they seemed to claim at the expense of John,” Altizer said. “In a small community like that, you’d think all the Bassetts and their relatives running the [competitor] factories would be thick as thieves, but they were not.”

While John didn’t seem to be revered in the family, he was admired in the greater community, said Carolyn Blue, who babysat for Pat and John Bassett’s three children in the late 1960s. Carolyn’s father and grandfather had worked in the Bassett plants, and from her perspective—spending hours inside the young couple’s grand house on Riverside Drive, the one they bought when the apartment became too small—John and Pat Bassett reminded her of a young JFK and Jackie, going to parties and staying out late and calling the Bassett taxi driver, Roy Martin, to take the babysitter home.

Pat was adventurous and fun, not blinking when she had to drive her Jeep up the steep back road to pick up Carolyn, the rocks flying in her wake, and not caring when Franny, her youngest, drew on the walls. Pat complained when Carolyn called her Mrs. Bassett, insisting that Carolyn call her the less formal Miss Pat.

“Can I be candid?” Carolyn asked me. “I just didn’t like that.… Why not just [let me] call her Pat? But I liked her and respected her immensely. She was lighthearted and very generous with me. She gave me tons of very nice clothes and jewelry.”

One time during a party at Pat and John’s house, Carolyn was glued to Star Trek and didn’t notice when little Fran made a paste of laundry powder and slathered it all over her face.

“Oh God, your parents are gonna kill me!” Carolyn shrieked.

“It’ll be all right, Care-non,” the toddler reassured her. And it was.

JBIII experienced no such warmth at work—and neither did anyone else. Spilman ruled the growing corporation as if he were a general, the kind who flies into a rage at the sight of a private’s dirty shoes. He controlled every aspect of the business, down to deciding who rode which elevator. No one in the corporate office was permitted to spend more than three hundred dollars (it was later upped to five hundred) unless Spilman personally approved the purchase. He chose the furniture suites the company would premiere every six months at Market. He decided which factories made which suites. He gathered his inner circle in his office after lunch every day to play gin rummy and poker—and so he could gather intel on what was going on elsewhere in the company. Without, of course, inviting his brother-in-law.

“They were throwing hundred-dollar bills around!” Snyder said of the games, which continued on the corporate jet during business trips.

“We used to say, all the decisions made in this company are made in that damn poker game,” recalled former Bassett sales manager Bob Merriman. “If you got rid of the poker game, the company might really take off!” If they were on the plane and still playing poker or gin rummy just before the landing, Spilman would order his pilot to circle around the city until the game was over—especially if he was winning.

Junior Thomas, the retired mirror-plant worker, nearly spit when I brought up Bob Spilman’s name, calling him a “wicked, wicked man!” Thomas had business on the third floor of the Taj Mahal one day when Spilman was in charge, and he couldn’t help hear him berating employees from down the hall. “He cussing them folks around there like he owned ’em,” he said. Spilman once threatened to remove W.M. Bassett’s name from the town community center sign when Bassett Mirror, run by W.M.’s son-in-law, reduced its annual donation to the center during an economic downturn.

No one was spared his fevered scoldings, longtime managers said. His closest confidant was the longtime Superior Lines plant manager Joe Philpott, whose factory churned out $600,000 to $1.2 million in furniture profits—a month—during the company’s heyday. Philpott got so mad at Spilman once that he threw his keys, accidentally piercing the company oil portrait of Mr. Doug. “I called him Sweet Ole Bob… and he’d call me one too. God, we’d go at it,” Philpott said, grinning.

The feisty, expletive-dropping plant boss was one of the few managers who did battle with Spilman on a daily basis. He not only lived to tell the tale but actually liked the man, warts and all. Spilman even sent him to Harvard once, a semester-long executive-training program run by Harvard Business School. “He was trying to refine me a little, but it didn’t take,” Philpott said.

One time, showing off a new product at High Point, Philpott pointed out the piece’s “bifocal doors,” at which Spilman erupted: “Goddamn! I spent all this money sending him to Harvard, and he can’t even pronounce bifold!”

But when Philpott’s mother-in-law died while he was at Harvard, Spilman dispatched the corporate jet to ferry him home for the funeral. When Spilman heard about a Martinsville woman who needed lifesaving surgery that was available only in New Haven, Connecticut, he quietly had the plane fly her up there and bring her home. He ordered the company treasurer to donate twenty-five thousand dollars in company funds for the renovation of a rural black church, though he was infuriated later when he learned the minister, a Bassett Mirror Company employee, had given it away to “some sisters who’d fallen on hard times,” Philpott recalled, chuckling at his boss’s fury.

Joe Philpott was among the handful of Bassett bigwigs I visited who actually deigned to have Bassett Furniture in their homes. Built on family land a stone’s throw from the center of his own family’s even older company town, the once-thriving sawmill community of Philpott, his brick house featured a dining-room suite and various other pieces made at Bassett during his career.

His family had not fared as well as the Bassetts financially, but they were equally entwined in the region’s good-old-boy network, especially when it came to Joe’s cousin A.L. Philpott, the powerful legislator. “I loved every one of them, but I have never known a Bassett who couldn’t give you a good ass-chewing,” he said.

When Joe and I met in the summer of 2012, he had just returned from a vacation in France and had garden produce spilling from his kitchen counters, so much that he sent me home with a bag of cucumbers and a to-go cup of iced tea. In an accent that was more Johnny Cash twang than Andy Griffith gentleman—and speech peppered with the word damn, which he used like a comma—Joe Philpott described midcentury furniture-making as cutthroat and fun, and so all-consuming that he once calculated that, given all the time he spent there, his salary came to about sixty-five cents an hour.

Stanley Furniture may have paid more than Bassett, as did the Hooker and American plants in Martinsville. But Bassett gave a bonus twice a year, at Christmas and on the Fourth of July. (At Christmas in 1970, the top bonus for line workers with at least twenty years of service was $490.) As the barber Coy Young put it, “It was the old sharecropper mentality, like you were being paid four hundred one-dollar bills, and you’d never seen that much money in your life.”

Bassett managers understood the factory-man mentality to a tee. And the higher-ups got hefty bonuses, Philpott said, adding that his last semiannual bonus before he retired, in 1999, came to $65,000. He was supervising thirteen Bassett factories at the time, including two in Georgia and five in North Carolina.

Spilman and Philpott sometimes went on factory-buying excursions together, once drinking an entire bottle of scotch while the company’s teetotaling financial officer did the driving. Spilman relished competing with other furniture companies, especially Stanley, though he was happy to team up with the cousin competitors when it came to keeping wages down. “We had a secret pact,” whispered Philpott, who worked for Bassett from 1955 to 1999. They tried not to hire each other’s workers—meaning a Bassett employee wouldn’t be able to leave and work for a slightly higher wage at Stanley, and vice versa. Back then, unemployment was low, and it was hard to find and keep good labor. Several dozen former mill workers from Henry County told me that, as late as the mid-1990s, it was possible to quit one job in the morning and have another one lined up by noon.

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 children 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.