13

Bird-Doggin’ the Backwaters

A good bird dog understands that the game has to be between the hunter and the dog. The dog doesn’t run out by herself and leave the hunter a half mile behind.

She knows exactly how you get the bird.

—JOHN BASSETT III

Decades before John Bassett made his way over the mountains to Galax, he hiked into the Henry County foothills with his Browning Sweet 16 shotgun and his English pointer, Cindy. They were quail hunting, a sport long enjoyed by Bassett men and their wealthy companions—well before Vice President Dick Cheney made a caricature of it in 2006 by shooting his hunting buddy in the face.

Cindy had always been a decent pointer. She could find and flush out quail from the heaviest of brush. But on every outing, when John shot down the birds, the dog refused to retrieve. He called in a dog-trainer friend, who brought along his beloved Llewellin setter Jill, arguably the best bird dog in the Appalachians.

John and his wife, Pat, were already among the nation’s champion skeet shooters. They’d earned top honors individually and as a hunting pair. When you’re married to a workaholic who spends most of his time thinking and talking about furniture, Pat said, it’s helpful if you pursue the same hobbies. So she became a golfer, a skeet shooter, and a hunter of quail and grouse, and by all accounts, she matched her husband putt for putt and bird for bird. (“She was a little petite woman, but she’d pull out that big gun and shoot the crap outta that thing,” said their babysitter Carolyn Blue, who traveled the skeet-shooting circuit with them.)

Cindy was not so enamored of the sporting life, though, especially retrieving. So John, the trainer, and their two dogs spent Saturdays trying to hone her instincts until finally they landed on the right strategy: The dogs flushed out the birds; the men shot the birds down. But when it came time to retrieve the prey, Jill sprang forward by instinct while the men kept laid-back Cindy tethered to her leash. Hour after hour, Jill was rewarded with praise for each bird she handed them while Cindy watched it all unfold, unable to move. Before long, she grew antsy.

By late afternoon, Cindy figured out exactly what she was missing and whined desperately to be put in the game. Every time Jill bolted for another bird, Cindy yanked hard to be freed.

The first time they let her go, the men kept Jill behind, tethered to the leash. Cindy was now not only a pointer but a retriever too. It went exactly as the trainer had planned.

Jealousy was a powerful motivator, and not just for dogs. When John begged to buy Jill from the trainer, he refused to sell. After three years, John finally got her, but only because he waited till she was almost at death’s door. After nursing her back from a life-threatening case of mange and paying a whopper of a vet bill, he’d learned the power of patience and of waiting a competitor out. Though her tail tip remained forever hairless from the mange, Jill was a friend and hunting companion so devoted to him that for years she slept underneath his Ford Bronco to indicate she was always ready to hunt.

When John Bassett told me the story of Cindy and Jill, I understood perfectly what he was trying to convey: his powerful, if one-sided, vision of teamwork. He gave the orders. And because Jill trusted him for saving her life, she listened and loyally obeyed, which he then rewarded. And the cycle continued, leading to rewards for all, especially the man in charge.

John Bassett’s likeness is rendered in an almost life-size oil painting that hangs in the parlor of his sprawling stone Tudor home in Roaring Gap, North Carolina, with views that stretch from Buffalo Mountain, near Floyd, Virginia, to Winston-Salem, a hundred miles south. Perched along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the community is so exclusive that the first time I turned onto its main thoroughfare, the road on my GPS vanished.

“And that’s just the way we like it,” John Bassett said.

The portrait, painted in 1969, shows a blond, thirty-two-year-old JBIII with his left arm around Jill and his right hand clutching his Browning. In the background, Cindy pants happily, as if waiting to spring forward and fetch him another bird. Mounted on the opposite wall of the room is a fan made of feathers from grouse Jill helped him nab, and looking out the window, you can see Jill’s headstone protruding from the well-manicured lawn between the mansion and its three-bedroom guesthouse.

The first time I visited John and Pat Bassett’s home, he spent twenty minutes telling me about Jill, a dog that had died nearly three decades before. It took one year and several visits to his factory before I understood what a mangy dog had to do with manufacturing—not to mention fighting the Chinese.

Cindy and Jill are minor characters in the trajectory of John Bassett’s career, but when you examine the scenario facing him at the Galax factory, where he landed in 1983—the worn-down workforce, the festering feud roiling yet another branch of the family tree—it all circles back to the dogs. John Bassett went after the notion of putting Vaughan-Bassett on the furniture-making map with the cunning and persistence of a hunter on the prowl.

But this time he couldn’t simply buy—or ass-chew—his way into a position of authority with the fifteen hundred Vaughan-Bassett line workers, as his forebears had done in Bassett. He had to bird-dog it—one department, one dresser, one sawdust-covered worker at a time.

But how to motivate a lackadaisical management team? And what to do with all the antiquated machinery, some of which had been purchased used—in 1954? When JBIII arrived at Vaughan-Bassett, it consisted of the Galax plant and a sister factory in Elkin, North Carolina, and together they produced a measly $28 million in annual sales with after-tax losses of $200,000. “The quality had gone to hell,” said Tom Word, a Richmond lawyer and longtime Vaughan-Bassett board member. “Some suppliers wouldn’t do business with them because they were behind on their bills. The designs weren’t very exciting, and customers were returning stuff all the time.” Quality was such a problem that several retailers had dropped Vaughan-Bassett from their showrooms.

Further complicating matters was the fact that C.W. “Buck” Higgins, Pat’s uncle and the company president, was not as ready to retire as he had hinted back when Little John was sweating his Spilman demotion to the cubicle and wanted out of Bassett. Two decades his nephew’s senior, Higgins named John plant manager instead of president and kept the top post for himself.

“I have never known a furniture man to retire well,” Pat Bassett said.

John made inroads where he could, investing $317,000 of his personal money in company stock the first year, which he used to pay off company bills. He negotiated new contracts with suppliers, eventually buying in bulk to get a discount, which explains why you can’t drive two blocks in Galax today without spotting one of the company’s myriad thirty-foot stacks of lumber. He also hoards lumber before the winter months because bad weather can halt work in the sawmills. It’s the same reason he tops off the gas tank of his bought-used 2007 Lexus every morning on his way to work—at Hess, the cheapest gas station in town. If you’re not thinking ahead, you might find yourself stranded. (“What a curious man,” said his wife of the gas-routine time-suck.)

To purchase new machinery, he loaned the company money from his personal fortune and convinced his boss to let him take out loans on behalf of the business, eventually saddling it with $18 million in debt, a move that made Higgins nervous. The Galax furniture factories had never been run with the drive—or the risk-taking—the Bassetts employed. “The family lived out of the business,” John said. “They were comfortable, but they didn’t drive the damn thing to the best it could be.”

Hope Antonoff, a longtime sales rep for Mid-Atlantic Furniture, was so frustrated with the company’s service—delayed orders, poor quality, and the old-boy mentality that resulted in her being treated like “some little girl”—that her company was planning to stop carrying the Vaughan-Bassett line. But when her boss heard that John Bassett was coming to Galax, he told her, “There’s no way we’re leaving now.”

Jere Neff had worked for Bassett Furniture from 1948 to 1969, and years after his departure from the company, he watched with interest the elbowing-out of John courtesy of Spilman and Mr. Ed. He’d seen John build the National Mount Airy plant into something the company could be proud of, only to be thanked with a humiliating homecoming in Bassett.

Neff knew that John was as detail-oriented as his uncle W.M., the one who’d transformed Bassett from a backwoods sawmilling operation into the largest maker of wood furniture in the world.

“John is more like W.M. than he was his own father,” Neff said. More important, “I knew John Bassett could sell ice to an Eskimo,” Neff said, adding that John was also willing to fly to Miami at a moment’s notice if his presence meant helping a rep close a six-figure sales deal.

After John’s humiliation during the Spilman years, Neff had a hunch that conditions were just about perfect for a forty-five-year-old family black sheep.

Neff told Antonoff, “We are hitching our wagon to that man’s star.”

Higgins may have held the reins, but he knew when to remove himself from his nephew’s path—especially where the details of the factory were concerned. John took his foremen to machinery shows, equipping them all with walkie-talkies (in the pre–cell phone era) so they could reach him if they spotted something he might want to buy.

“He ran a lathe. He ran a band saw,” retired sales manager Bob Merriman told me. “He wanted them to see how it ought to be done.” As the new equipment began rolling in, JBIII moved his desk from the Vaughan-Bassett offices and plunked it in the center of the machine room, between the rough end and the finishing department, something no plant manager had ever done.

People calling on the phone could barely hear him because of the roaring routers in the background, which is partly why he wears hearing aids today. Among my favorite moments of reporting this book was when he called me during my two-week residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The writer in the studio next to me was working on a memoir about his two years of solitude in the Vermont woods. He got so mad about my loud discussions with JBIII that he banged repeatedly on our thin mutual wall. Artist-colony studio silence and interviews of partially deaf furniture guys did not mix, I learned.

There was a new sheriff in town, and John wanted all fifteen hundred workers to know he was watching them. He pored over every number the bean counters produced, examined the course of each component traversing the conveyor line. The employees were so scared of him at the beginning that secretary Sheila Key agreed to be his assistant on a trial basis only. “The time he spent in the office felt totally different” from the time he spent elsewhere in the company, she recalled. “People were terrified of him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that, Buck?”

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