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 Mayberry 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.

We used to have a lot of jobs around our little town

We made furniture and socks and shirts

Good times were all around

Here comes NAFTA, it’ll help us is what they say

So let’s give a cheer for progress, hip-hip hooray.

Russ helped construct the National Mount Airy plant for John Bassett in the early 1970s. Soon after, he remembered, he watched workers run to their cars when their shifts ended. “They wanted to get the heck outta there!”

My third visitor, George Fricke, had similar things to say about the early days of John Bassett’s Mount Airy tenure. “Low pay and bad conditions,” he told me. “It was a terrible place to work.”

But my favorite insight into John’s Mount Airy assignment came later, courtesy of Bassett High’s former football coach Colbert “Mick” Micklem, who recalled John phoning him from the real Mayberry RFD shortly after arriving there.

“Mick, it’s the fourth quarter,” John told the old coach. “I’m on my own one-yard line. There’s one minute left to play in the game, we’re down seven, and somehow they want me to win the damn game.”

The two tiny plants Bassett had purchased were bleeding money while the new factory was being built. The old-timers were used to competing against one another, but they struggled to get along when Bassett combined the workforce. And Spilman had tasked him with tripling sales while making high-end furniture, something the company had never before produced.

To complicate matters, the furniture makers in Mount Airy were real craftsmen, people who had only recently stopped employing the old bench-made building process. Rather than using conveyor belts and Henry Ford–style assembly lines, these guys worked at half the speed of the line workers in Bassett, and they rarely used standard interchangeable parts.

Until Bassett bought the companies, a customer could mail in a picture of a piece of furniture he saw in a magazine and designate the color he wanted, and the old companies would actually complete the order—even if it was just a single chair. Like their furniture-making predecessors in Grand Rapids, they took pride in it too.

Back in Bassett, W.M. Bassett had done away with those methods before World War II. As far as John Bassett was concerned, the workers in Mount Airy were fifty years behind the times. They were change-resistant, undisciplined, and spoiled. Most of them were also debt-free and owned orchards on the side and thought nothing of taking off work when peach- and apple-picking season hit. “They are very independent mountain people who will just tell you to go to hell and walk out!” said Eddie Wall, a retired Bassett manager who worked in Mount Airy.

Unemployment was low, which meant that if workers didn’t like the way their bosses treated them, they could quit and easily nab another job. By the time JBIII turned up, morale was lower than a snake’s butt in a wagon rut.

The workers had no idea the old companies had been bleeding money. They didn’t realize the customer base for their high-end tables and chairs had eroded when the plants, failing to modernize, could not produce the volume the retailers were demanding. Profits had gone into shareholders’ pockets instead of into updated machinery. If John Bassett had his druthers, he would have bought a bigger, better-run company to start with, one with a more loyal customer base. “But Bob never called me up and said, ‘What is your opinion?’ He said, ‘I want you to go run these things,’ ” JBIII told me.

As he recalled, “When your wagon’s in a ditch with a broken wheel, and you’ve been sent out there by yourself, you try everything you can think of.” He instituted the legal-pad method of management his father had used, only the young heir never knocked off midday for a round of golf, much less a scotch. To get the new plant up and running, his wife told me, “John worked nineteen hours a day”—one time for forty-five days straight. He thought, read, and talked about furniture twenty-four hours a day, including in his sleep.

His plant manager and number two man, Duke Taylor, remembered going on a business trip with him and developing a new empathy for what it must be like to be Mrs. John Bassett. “He went to bed talking furniture and he woke up talking furniture, and I finally had to say, ‘I’m getting tired of hearing that!’ ” Duke said.

The legal pad got his full attention at 6:00 a.m., after he read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. There were sometimes as many as three hundred problems he needed to address, but if he focused on the top seven or eight things he needed to do that day—after the two or three things he had to do—gradually, he made a dent.

Some of the items on the list involved cajoling Spilman into approving five-hundred-dollar-plus purchases or getting him to send supervisors from the Henry County plants to train Mount Airy people to operate the new machinery. But his biggest challenge was changing the mind-set of his stubborn crew: he had to convince line workers who knew him only from his famous (but mass-market) furniture name that he had more than money invested in the operation.

“Bob gave him the plant to do something with, and then wouldn’t give him the money to do it,” recalled Sherwood Robertson, who operated the National Mount Airy plant several years after John Bassett. “Bob was very good at watching pennies while dollars fell through the cracks in the floor.”

The other problems with National Mount Airy? The new roof leaked every time it rained. The ceilings had been ill designed, built so high that the lights had to hang down a full four feet. “It was ridiculous!” another Bassett plant manager harrumphed. The place was so big that the only way to get it profitable was to run the hell out of the machines… as well as the people operating them. “Bob thought John would hang himself,” Reuben Scott, the retired J.D. plant manager, said. “And he just about did.”

The workers hated the wholesale changes the mean, young Bassett was thrusting upon them. In hindsight, it was as if he expected them to go from using a rotary-dial phone to designing iPhone apps overnight. Pat Bassett even heard about it at the hairdresser, when another woman in the shop complained that this new furniture big shot in town was ruining her husband’s life. “Wait a minute, that’s my husband you’re talking about,” Pat said, bringing the gossip session to a halt.

The key was to get the workers to have the same amount of pride in their work as they’d had back in the bench-made days, when craftsmanship and elegance trumped production goals. “He needed them to believe that they could do it the conveyor way and have that same amount of pride”—even though they were now doing the exact same thing every day, with fewer mistakes and a higher output, “all words that made Spilman salivate,” company lawyer Frank Snyder recalled.

As Pat Bassett remembered it, John had been so worried about what Spilman would do in Bassett with him gone that he asked her to stay behind to keep an ear to the ground. “I said no. You are not going away to the war,” she said. “You are going seventy miles away, and I’m coming!”

She wasn’t the only one put in the middle. Spilman dispatched Bassett sales manager Bob Merriman to Mount Airy to head its sales force—as well as to spy. “Get one thing straight,” Spilman told him. “You don’t work for my brother-in-law. You work for me.”

“Bob, I don’t want that kind of situation,” Merriman said.

“I don’t care. Anything he tells you to do, you don’t do it without coming to me first.”

Merriman drove straight to Mount Airy to report what Spilman had said. “Here’s my dilemma. He’s got me in the middle, but I want to work for you both.”

To which John replied, “Just do what he tells you—and keep me up-to-date on everything he says.” Forced to be a double agent, Merriman was now the one getting ulcers.

Early in the overhaul, John lost his cool when he spotted one line worker sitting atop a bucket to do his work. He hadn’t realized in the new plant configuration that the worker had to be down that low to do the required floor-level detailing. John assumed he was lazy, and that kind of behavior was anathema back in Bassett, where no one ever sat down on the job. In Bassett, you could be so dehydrated that your fingers wrinkled, but you still didn’t sit down. Why, the company kept salt tablets right next to the drinking fountains for your electrolyte replenishment! It was no wonder Howard Hodges kept working twenty minutes into his on-the-job heart attack before anyone thought to send him to the nurse.

JBIII got so mad when he saw the worker sitting down that he kicked the bucket out from under him, sending him sprawling onto the floor.

The story spread across Mount Airy, over the mountains, and all the way back to Bassett—a display of temper that surely made Bob Spilman grin. But John did something that night that Spilman would never have entertained the thought of: He went to the man’s house, apologized, and begged him to come back to work.

If Spilman revered authority and dollar signs, John revered respect.

He did other things that endeared him, gradually, to the Mount Airy workers. He personally unloaded veneer when the company fell behind on orders. He stood atop the new conveyor belts and gave speeches about the company’s finances and goals. “He told ’em how we were going to survive, and eventually people actually mended together and started doing what he said,” Duke Taylor said. “But a lot of people still didn’t like him because he was so aggressive. He’d call manager meetings for six a.m. And everybody knew he was this silver-spooned Bassett and definitely not one of us.”

Taylor remembered when a Bassett textile plant cofounded by J.D. Bassett decades earlier was sold, which meant an eight-figure sum was dumped into the heir’s lap—in a single day. That was not something that happened to regular folks in Mount Airy, not even to Andy Griffith.

Gradually, though, the distance between JBIII and Spilman began to work in the Mount Airy employees’ favor, as John tried to insulate the plant from Spilman’s tyrannical whims, with varying degrees of success. To boost sales, Spilman would order the Mount Airy factory to help the other Bassett plants make midlevel furniture for J.C. Penney, Bassett’s largest customer, at the same time it was still making the higher-end stuff. “You couldn’t turn those people off and on like that,” Taylor said.

But Mount Airy was the place where some managers were finally let in on the secret to getting along with Sweet Ole Bob: You could never let him think that you needed him more than he needed you. Sherwood Robertson, the Mount Airy manager who’s now a furniture consultant, said he figured that out the moment Spilman let it slip that he knew exactly how much money Robertson had in his personal trust account, held in a Martinsville bank. He then had the nerve to suggest that Robertson invest the seven-figure sum in Bassett stock instead. (He declined.)

That was the moment Robertson became one of the few people amid the Bassett higher-ups brave enough to make unilateral factory decisions. He arranged an advertising deal that he knew Spilman wouldn’t have sanctioned, and he premiered the industry’s first suite of Louis Philippe bedroom furniture at High Point, a suite that Spilman had considered so “goddamn ugly” that he’d ordered it hauled out of the showroom. It later became National Mount Airy’s bestselling suite and an industry favorite, as well as a major weapon in John Bassett’s assault on his Chinese competitors.

Robertson just happened to have what most employees at Bassett didn’t—enough money that he could take Bob Spilman or leave him. A second key to getting along with Sweet Ole Bob was perhaps even more important: Spilman knew that Robertson could leave any time he wanted.

John Bassett had at least as much cash in the bank as Robertson, but what he didn’t have was the satisfaction of doing what his father and grandfather before him had done: run Bassett Furniture Industries. And that was Spilman’s ace.

There was no way to turn back the clock.

No way to make Mr. Doug return from the grave and safeguard his son’s position in the company.

There was no denying it: Not only had Spilman beaten JBIII to the CEO desk, but it seemed he was not ever going to clear a space for him at the top, no matter how much he matured, how much productivity he inspired, or how many days in a row he worked.

After two years at Mount Airy, John had proved to the board of directors that he could take a giant new facility and make it profitable. “He introduced some of the most beautiful and creative products I’ve ever seen,” said the furniture analyst Jerry Epperson, including a massive rolltop desk made of twenty-six pieces of solid oak that Epperson still uses in his Richmond office.

More important, John had proved that he could recognize top-notch talent, even in the quirkiest of places, a skill that would prove handier than he knew. With Taylor’s help, he’d recruited Linda McMillian in a Rose’s five-and-dime store—she was taking a popcorn machine apart—and put her on the path to becoming arguably the best furniture engineer in the United States. She had popcorn grease up to her elbows and no mechanical training at the time, but she worked hard and could do complex geometry in her head—as long as you let her chain-smoke all day long and didn’t make her talk to anyone.

Back in Bassett, he would have been laughed at just for interviewing such an eccentric maverick. How would a ninety-pound woman command the respect of the foremen and line workers?

But back home, it was finally starting to dawn on John Bassett III, the possibilities were no longer what they had once seemed, even if your name was on the smokestacks.

By 1977, when Pat and John tromped the seventy miles back to Bassett with their three young kids, the message had become even clearer. Spilman had rearranged the furniture on the third floor of the Taj Mahal. The design had Spilman and his secretary occupying two spaces, including John’s former office—the one where he’d hung the letter from his grandpop Mr. J.D. that said he hoped he’d do big things. Spilman had cleverly designed the floor plan so that to get to board chairman Mr. Ed’s corner office, you had to walk through his office first. Lawyer Snyder’s office was up there too, along with the head of finance’s.

But there was no longer room for Little John. Spilman had located the National Mount Airy corporate office in a shared open-air space inside a former clothing store, down the street from Bassett headquarters. “He had a telephone but no secretary and about twenty square feet of space,” Spencer Morten told me. “That was humiliating.”

JBIII had moved his family to another state for three years, and when he returned to his hometown, he was not expecting a victory parade, but he did expect something even rarer in Bassett—a little acknowledgment that he’d just won one squeaker of a game. Instead, he got nothing; even the framed letter from his grandfather had been taken down from the wall.