11 The Family Elbow

There was definitely a pre-1982 Bob Spilman and a post-1982 Bob Spilman. After Ed Bassett left, his body language, his gestures, everything about him became more aggressive.

—FRANK SNYDER, BASSETT CORPORATE LAWYER

Spilman soon found himself occupied with worries far more serious than his cocky brother-in-law. Overseas competitors were beginning to bore holes in the furniture market.

Mao’s successor, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, was forging his brand-new “socialist market economy” and opening China up to foreign investment, global markets, and limited private competition. “To get rich is glorious” became his mantra, the slogan credited with launching China’s path to capitalism. Entrepreneurs in Taiwan and Hong Kong were particularly keen to cash in. If they couldn’t sell much to the impoverished Chinese, why couldn’t they use its disciplined labor pool to manufacture products for sale elsewhere in the world?

In July 1978, the Hong Kong–based Taiping Handbag Factory opened China’s first foreign-owned plant in the city of Dongguan. Workers processed materials from Hong Kong into finished purses, then shipped them to Hong Kong for sale around the world, a business model that would go on to be copied by thousands of companies. Powerfully, if gradually, China was dismantling its old commune system and setting up shop. Purses would be followed by shoes, bags, garments, and suitcases in an export rush that elevated China’s foreign trade to $20.6 billion by the end of 1978. Furniture was bigger and bulkier than purses, yes, but it was not impossible to ship, especially items that could be broken down easily into parts, such as end tables (called occasional tables) and chairs.

By 1980, the Chinese government had set up four special economic zones, places where it could experiment with entrepreneurial concepts, including allowing foreign investment and offering tax incentives. Within another decade, Chinese exports would break $100 billion.

In the early 1980s, Spilman vented his feelings about Far Eastern competition in a speech he gave before a banquet of furniture manufacturers, including some Asian businessmen. “I was looking at a list, and I see you’re letting the damn slant-eyes in this business too,” he said of the foreign competition, causing some in the audience to shrink into their chairs. In 1985, after watching the company’s income slip 4 percent, he told his shareholders in a prescient speech that, while he didn’t welcome U.S. government intervention, some form of parity was needed, or American-made occasional tables would soon become extinct.

His wife, Jane, recalled the first time a New York businessman suggested that Bassett begin importing from Pacific Rim countries, which were exporting occasional tables and chairs that broke down neatly into parts for reassembly in the United States.

“I can’t do that,” Spilman said. “The people who live here, this is their livelihood. If I close these plants, they’ll have no jobs. Most have no other marketable skills and no high-school degrees. What will happen to them?”

Jane got goose bumps listening to the investment banker’s reply. Her stomach sank. “I will sit back and wait,” he told Spilman. “It will happen. You may not want it to happen, but you will be forced into this position.”

She remembered her father, a second-generation furniture maker, discussing globalization in the early 1960s, back when South Korea and Japan began exporting radios, TVs, and automotive parts. Mr. Doug was sure that furniture would be immune to offshoring because, he argued, its weight and bulk would make the cost of shipping prohibitive. Jane had begun to wonder about that when she heard the retailers at Macy’s and J.C. Penney in California—the first American region to be socked by the Asian imports—talking about how great the new furniture looked.

Spilman ordered his salesmen to ship some of the new Chinese cocktail-table imports to Bassett, then had his sample men make duplicates of the pieces and price out the parts. “And our costs, not adding any profit whatsoever, were appreciably higher than what the furniture was we were trying to compete against in California,” Jane recalled, still incredulous. “What do you do?”

Spilman understood that the retailers would pocket even more profit if they sold a higher volume of the imported goods—especially if the stuff was 20 to 30 percent cheaper than the American-made items—and it dawned on him that if the retailers cut out the middlemen altogether and went directly to the Asian manufacturers, they wouldn’t need Bassett Furniture at all.

The first time Spilman toured a Chinese factory, in 1979, the lack of safety precautions stunned him, Jane said. The plants were crowded, many had dirt floors, and most of the workers were crammed together into tiny dormitory rooms. As one shift ended, a tired worker would slide into bed—moments after his replacement had awakened in that same bed and left for work. It wasn’t quite Bassett, Virginia, circa 1902, where families moved in from the countryside, some carrying lanterns in the predawn as they walked to work. The typical Chinese migrant arrived alone via one-way bus or train ticket, camped out in a dorm, and sent money to his or her family back in the rural countryside.

As chairman of the Virginia Port Authority, Spilman “knew very well the size of those ships and containers, and he knew that the statement my father had made forty years ago was absolutely ridiculous,” Jane said. “The Asians could ship anything in the world they wanted to ship, and when he saw the size of those factories—huge plants on giant campuses—he knew it was no longer a threat. It was a real disaster knocking at our door.”

And guess which furniture company Asian factories knocked off more than any other?

“You didn’t copy the also-rans,” furniture industry analyst Epperson told me. “You went after Bassett.”

The first importers designing furniture solely for American customers were based predominantly in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Throughout the 1980s, they approached Spilman and other furniture CEOs, promising to deliver Bassett quality for 20 to 30 percent less than it cost them to make it domestically—and that included freight costs. As the Americans considered their options, they allowed the importers to tour their factories, though some things were still considered sacred: the Taiwanese were never permitted to tour the company’s cash cow, Bassett Superior Lines, which churned out two hundred nightstands an hour.

Back in the early 1980s, most of the Taiwanese exporters were novices at furniture-making, especially where the finishing process was concerned. But how long that would last was anybody’s guess. U.S. furniture workers were averaging $5.25 an hour, while the Taiwanese made $1.40 an hour, and the Chinese labored for 35 cents. The Far East may not have had the machinery or the lightning-fast conveyor belts that Bassett Speed Lines did, but when it came to throwing labor at a problem, no one worked harder, longer, or cheaper than the Chinese.

It was a delicate time for the American furniture makers, especially Sweet Ole Bob, even if he did still run the number one wooden furniture company in the world, with record sales of $301 million in 1981 and $25.1 million in profits. And even if he had gotten himself elected to several Fortune 500 company boards and to the councils of prestigious institutions—including colleges and coal corporations, banks, and an insurance company. And even if he was chairman of the Virginia Port Authority, a job that had earned him the nickname “Nuclear Bob,” in honor of his one-man protest against New Zealand. (When the island nation refused to allow the U.S. Navy’s nuclear ships to enter its harbors in 1984, Spilman stopped buying New Zealand lumber for use in Bassett furniture. “I just got tired of this country being kicked around,” he told Virginia Business magazine.)

To complicate matters at the Taj Mahal, the company was being hammered with new lawsuits and a storm of bad publicity: Children were dying in Bassett-made cribs. An Early American–style model called Candlelite had been designed to mirror the bed in a popular adult-bedroom suite, a perfect replica of the headboard, with cutouts near the finial posts, only in miniature. What the designer hadn’t taken into account was the risk of a toddler getting his head trapped inside the hollowed-out space between the finial and the headboard. Another design, a bamboo crib called Mandalay, had a similar flaw. Children had gotten their heads caught in the cut-outs. A child would panic and try desperately to extricate himself, yanking backward to the point of exhaustion. As he slumped forward on the crib’s edge, he choked to death.

Rather than recall the cribs, Spilman ordered production halted and sent out modification kits to retailers, who passed them along free to Candlelite customers—the ones they could locate, anyway. (With the Mandalay model, the finials could simply be unscrewed, which removed the danger.) The kit included a piece of wood that had to be affixed to the headboard with a screwdriver and drill. “I said, ‘Gee, Bob, not everybody has a drill at home,’ ” board member Spencer Morten said. “And he told me to shut up.”

A couple of the cases were bogus, as Bassett lawyer Frank Snyder discovered when pediatric forensic specialists figured out that one baby hadn’t died from suffocation at all but from blunt trauma to the head. In another case, a coroner determined the cause of death had been pneumonia, not choking as was alleged. According to a Consumer Product Safety Commission investigation, Snyder was concerned that Bassett was vulnerable to “crazy people” who might learn of the problems with the cribs and try to exploit the situation for financial gain. “He believes that such people may abuse their children and then contrive to set up accidents using Bassett cribs,” an investigator noted.

By the time syndicated columnist Jack Anderson wrote about the crib deaths in 1980, six infants had died—including one in suburban Detroit whose relative was a secretary for the retailer where the crib was purchased but who had failed to pass the modification kit on to the child’s parents. The repair packet sat unopened in the relative’s car trunk as the little girl died slowly from the compression of blood vessels in her neck.

A child in Greenville, South Carolina, languished on life support for seventeen months before dying—the same week Bassett agreed to pay her parents $416,000 in an out-of-court liability settlement.

Anderson’s column was a stinging rebuke. It lambasted Bassett for failing to notify the CPSC as required by law, resulting in a $175,000 civil fine. Anderson also hammered “the true insensitivity of the corporate brass,” as he put it, showing a back-and-forth between Snyder and a customer who tried to warn the company about the problem, reporting that his daughter’s head had been twice stuck (without injury) in a Bassett crib. “Such a situation could have proved fatal,” the father, Richard Ball, had written to Snyder in 1976.

Snyder pointed out that Bassett cribs complied with all federal regulations and added: “I suggest that you have over-reacted to the experience of your child. Certainly, the suggestion [of possible fatality] magnifies the incident out of reasonable proportion.”

When Spilman read the column, he asked his lawyer, “Good God, Snyder, did you actually say that?”

It was a nail-biting time. And heartbreaking. A pall was cast over each of the factories every time another Bassett-crib death was reported. “It weighed a lot on Bob,” his friend Bunny Wampler said.

In hindsight, Snyder regrets his handling of the ordeal. He personally tried to track each of the thousand-plus cribs sold between 1974 and 1977 to ensure that each customer had a kit.

But some retailers kept poor records, especially those who were paid in cash, and the twelve thousand posters the company sent out to its three thousand crib retailers weren’t seen by customers unless they happened to return to the store. (The CPSC estimated that most of the Candlelite cribs ultimately were not modified, a claim Snyder still firmly disputes.)

The company also voluntarily sent out warning posters to pediatricians across the United States for display in their waiting rooms, and in 1980 the CPSC required Bassett to take the unprecedented step of sending hazard notifications by mail to every parent in America who had a child twenty-one months or younger. The mailing was sent to four million parents and was estimated by CPSC to cost the company $1 million. Bassett also agreed to purchase half-page ads in TV Guide and Family Circle magazines to warn consumers of the potential hazard, as well as to offer a five-dollar reward to anyone identifying a crib in which the hazard had not been fixed.

The repair kits were beyond the skill set of many parents, Snyder conceded. “No wonder they scalded my butt,” he said. “We should have just replaced the cribs immediately. In hindsight, I know now it was stupid.” And though most of the lawsuits were bona fide cases resulting from the design flaw, “You had to investigate them all,” he said, adding undue strife to already grieving families. All told, nine deaths were found to be associated with the cribs, and, eventually, Bassett paid out $800,000 in settlements.

Snyder, a fit eighty-four and healthy enough to work his hobby farm, met me at the McDonald’s in Bassett Forks, a strip-mall cluster of fast-food restaurants and gas stations near the confluence of Martinsville and Bassett. It’s where he has coffee regularly with other retired furniture men, and where he frequently spouts his goal of living a long life. He wants to spite Bob Spilman, who refused to pay Snyder’s pension after he retired and went to work for a competitor, since, Spilman argued, it violated a noncompete clause in Snyder’s contract.

Snyder went to court to fight back but ended up settling for getting his retirement reinstated after he realized the case would cost him a fortune in legal fees. He gave up his job at Pulaski Furniture—which made curio cabinets, and therefore wasn’t a substantial competitor to Bassett, Snyder argued. He told me he still avoids fatty foods and eats predominantly vegetables and healthy grains and nuts, adhering to the alkaline diet, believing that it wards off cancer and other diseases.

“By God, I pray every day that Bassett stays in existence so they’ll have to pay me my retirement till I’m a hundred and ten,” he said.

Snyder said Spilman supported his work throughout the crib ordeal. But by the time Mr. Ed announced his retirement, at the end of 1981, his boss had begun to change—for the worse—as Spilman retained his presidency and also nabbed Ed’s position as chairman of the board. Without Ed on hand to serve as a check and balance, Spilman not only physically claimed most of the executive floor but also became the absolute center of the corporate wheel, with all spokes feeding directly to him, giving him a near omnipotent amount of power, Snyder said. Information went directly to Spilman, but very little flowed back out. And JBIII was nowhere near the inner hub.

The home furnishings industry praised Spilman’s demanding demeanor and “hands-on” attitude, naming him the top chief executive in the business in 1981. Bassett was still the biggest-volume furniture producer under a single name, with thirty-five plants in fourteen states and seven thousand employees.

Fifty-four at the time, Spilman was described as being charming and gracious one minute and profane and impatient the next. “His curiosity is boundless,” one reporter wrote. “Spilman, his colleagues say, has got to know.”

The worst thing Snyder ever witnessed Spilman do during that time? He had a salesman flown in from California so he could talk to him face to face—or rather, face to feet. With his underlings flanking him, Spilman removed his loafers, put his stocking feet on the edge of the boardroom table, and told the man he was fired.

Another time, Spilman learned that his yacht captain had accidentally been paid twice. When the captain refused to send the second check back, thinking he deserved a bonus, Spilman sent Snyder to Manteo, North Carolina, to threaten a lawsuit. “About something that amounted to fifty or sixty bucks,” Snyder huffed. “That trip costs five times what that check was worth, and it embarrassed the hell outta me.”

Spilman sometimes invited a select group of plant managers to join him on the yacht, according to manager Eddie Wall, who, like John Bassett, was not an invited member of the fishing or gin-rummy inner circle. “They said he was just another guy on that boat, very nice and gracious, except for one thing: He always made his visitors swab the deck and clean up at the end!”

No one in Bassett seems to know exactly what put John Bassett over the edge in December 1982. Maybe he got tired of the cubicle with no secretary or of having to ask for approval for every new screwdriver set he ordered. Maybe, as Spilman’s close friend and competitor Bunny Wampler believes, Pat Bassett finally put her foot down and said, Enough’s enough.

“Hell, they’re both millionaires!” Wampler said. “What do they need that crap for? So Pat says, ‘We’re going to Galax,’ and that’s that. The women are always smarter than the men anyhow; don’t you know that?”

The Spilman-JBIII rivalry is widely rumored to have culminated in a fistfight, the news of which filtered down, in its usual manner, throughout the Henry County hollows and hillsides. The regular people in Bassett—the line workers and librarians, the barbers and beauticians—tell the story so convincingly that it’s now just accepted community lore, like Mr. Ed’s inability to cull up and down the Smith or Mr. J.D.’s selling the railroad the same lumber twice. As Junior Thomas put it, “Bob Spilman and John Bassett didn’t trade no horses,” which is a Henry County way of saying: They hated each other’s guts.

“Little John like to have killed him. That’s true!” Junior said.

The most reliable source I ferreted out on the subject was eighty-five-year-old rescue-squad volunteer Claude Cobler. “All I can say is, Bob Spilman didn’t come back to work for a few days; he had a black eye,” Cobler said. Asked if he was the ambulance driver who nabbed the hundred-dollar bill—the rumored tip John Bassett handed over to keep him quiet about hauling Spilman to the hospital—Cobler shrieked, “I am not going there!

“Listen, everybody in town knew when it happened, but we never did talk about it,” he told me. “You just don’t say anything negative about people giving you anything you want.” Cobler had often called upon John’s mom, Lucy Bassett, for support of the volunteer rescue squad in Bassett, and, relishing her patrician role in the community, she never once refused to write a check.

Three decades later, Cobler conceded that he was the ambulance driver called to the scene. Friends of Spilman claim they never heard of Spilman getting punched by John Bassett, so I’m left to wonder whether it’s another part of the Upstairs Downstairs narrative in which the ones below stairs don’t provide information to the ones above—like Spencer Morten not knowing the complete family tree.

“I don’t know about a fistfight, and I think I’d remember if that happened,” said Joe Meadors, Spilman’s senior vice president for marketing. Retired plant manager Howard White, who still refers to his boss as Mr. Spilman, was so offended by the notion that he snapped, “If you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t put it in your book.”

As for John Bassett III, he firmly and repeatedly denied getting into fisticuffs with his brother-in-law. They didn’t trade horses, sure, and family relations were forever strained. But blood was never spilled, he insisted.

So, for the record, JBIII will go to his grave denying that he laid out his brother-in-law in late 1982, shortly before he turned in his resignation at Bassett Furniture Industries. The two had a mild shoving incident one time, he said, but no one ever threw a punch.

The day Little John resigned from the company he was born to inherit, he said to his brother-in-law, “I might end up a failure, but I’m not going to my grave being known as J.D. Bassett’s grandson, or Doug Bassett’s son, or Bob Spilman’s brother-in-law.

“I am not somebody else’s surrogate.”

JBIII departed Bassett to work for the company that his grandfather and his wife’s grandfather had founded in Galax, Virginia, in 1919. According to Home Furnishings Daily, Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company was making a fraction of what Bassett produced in a bad year—in 1982, it sold $22.8 million to Bassett’s more than $300 million—but the move would finally allow John “to fulfill his ambition of becoming a furniture president.”

Spilman was not available when a reporter called for comment. But when he accepted his brother-in-law’s resignation from the position of vice president and from the Bassett board of directors, he told him not to bother returning to his office to collect his things. Somebody would pack up the would-be heir’s belongings for him—including the framed letter from Grandpop—and bring them to his house. Those big things his grandfather hoped he would achieve? The only guarantee now was that he would not be doing them in his namesake town.

Things were unusually quiet in the Spilman household at dinner that Christmas. Pat and John spent Christmas with their children at their Florida home, as they typically did, while John’s mother, Lucy, spent the day with Jane and Bob. Practically the only noise came from the maid, Gracie Wade, who’d worked for the Bassett family fifty-some years, beginning with Mr. J.D.

Gracie was then in her seventies. A retired widow living on Carver Lane, she grew flowers and vegetables, and when her roof needed patching, she took care of the repairs herself. It was her tradition, by choice, to serve the family’s dinner on Christmas Day. She’d helped raise Little John and, after his father’s death, went to work for John and Pat, who accommodated her favorite chore—ironing—by adding a small ironing room onto their house, with a sign that said GRACIE’S OFFICE outside the door. She was a terrible laundress, Pat Bassett recalled fondly, regularly shrinking clothes. But her position in the extended family was absolute. (Her husband, Pete, was Mr. J.D.’s longtime chauffeur.)

In fact, shortly after Mr. Doug’s death, Lucy called Pat and John to tell them that Gracie was on her way to work for “Mr. John,” as she called him, because she worked only for Bassett men. “Get ready!” Lucy warned them.

Of all the people interwoven with the family/corporate tree, of all the millionaires and smokestack magnates, the only one willing to question John Bassett’s exit from the company he’d been born to inherit was the elderly family maid.

No one seated at the Spilman dinner table wanted to upset John’s mother, Lucy, by discussing what was on everybody’s mind. But Gracie didn’t care. She was tired of propriety trumping family, tired of them trying to mask their true characters behind some pretentious veneer.

A Bassett quitting Bassett? She didn’t like it one bit. She muttered to herself as she served the meal.

“It ain’t right,” she said.