Putting the Baby Back Together
Sam Solomon reached the finish line of his morning commute from Columbus, pulled his black BMW with Illinois plates into his parking space, stepped out of the car, and noticed the handful of police vehicles, lights still flashing, idling seventy-five feet down the street. “They here for me?” he joked to himself.
They were not. They were there for Lloyd, who sat in the back of one of those police cars. Early that morning, Lloyd had been standing in his bathroom in the gray-box house across the street from Plant 1—or he sat in a recliner in the living room; it depended on who you wanted to believe—when SWAT and the MCU crashed through the front door.
About five other people were there with Lloyd. He didn’t know any of them well, except April, his girlfriend. They’d been awake all night, so most of them were a little strung out.
When the police ran through the house, they found moon rocks on the floor of the hallway leading to the bathroom. Diamond rings rested at the bottom of the toilet bowl, and the toilet was running. Lloyd said he’d been standing in the bathroom for the usual reason; he hadn’t jumped up out of the recliner to try to flush any evidence.
If he had jumped out of that recliner, he might have been spurred to action more by instinct than by any deep will to avoid arrest. Lloyd was tired, and not just from staying up all night. Life, and a prodigious menu of drug use, had exhausted him. Now he just sounded relieved.
“I don’t know what the hell it is. Something in my head, man,” he said, referring to, well, everything.
“You said you are forty years old. Look what it’s doing to you,” the cop said. The two men on opposite sides of the law chatted like a couple of middle-aged women in a Saks Fifth Avenue dressing room. “You look a lot older than that. You should realize that,” the officer said.
“Do I?” Lloyd asked.
“You do look a lot older than forty. Do I look forty-nine? You’ll probably say yes, because everybody says I’m fucking old.” The cop and Lloyd laughed.
Lloyd reassured him. “No, you’re not there. Do I look older than forty-nine?”
“You do.”
“Damn.”
“Get out,” the cop said. “You got to get out of this town.”
That afternoon, Jason Roach, Jessica Cantrell, and the three small children they cared for—Jessica’s two children with other men and the child they’d made together—drove south on 33 in their Mustang. It was raining. Again. The baby sat in the front seat so Jessica could calm it. The trip up to see the Mexicans on Country Club Road in Whitehall had transpired as it usually did. Jason dropped off the cash he owed from the last payload and picked up another five ounces. That dope, shaped like a baseball, was now sitting in a diaper bag in the backseat.
As they neared Lancaster, Jason received a text message on his phone telling him that Lloyd had been arrested. Moments after they crossed the city line on Memorial Drive, flashing red lights strobed off the rearview mirror. “Fuck, we’re getting pulled over,” Jason said.
Lloyd hadn’t snitched. He didn’t have to. The MCU had been tracking both of them for months. A GPS device on Jason’s Ford Expedition reported his last few Whitehall visits. (He didn’t take the Expedition on this day because his grandmother was using it.) Whitehall police had watched Jason go into the house on Country Club Road, then coordinated with the MCU.
Five ounces was the biggest single dope haul the MCU would capture all year. Detectives were excited about it. They saw it as an opportunity to get closer to the Mexicans in Whitehall—to “cut off the head of the snake,” as they said. There was no such thing as one snake or one head. Busting a single Mexican family wouldn’t have much impact on Lancaster’s heroin supply—the market was a powerful force that abhorred a vacuum. But five ounces was enough to interest the Drug Enforcement Administration in mounting a cooperative investigation.
Jason sat in a detective’s car and ricocheted from wheedling to weeping to bargaining. He was just a courier, he insisted.
He appealed to the cop as a family man. “I got a family to take care of.” He began to cry, just a little at first. “I got a little baby and two other kids. I’m tryin’ to take care of my family, man! I’m fuckin’ strugglin’ in life just like everybody else, man.”
When his mother, sister, and brother-in-law pulled up to the scene to take the children, his shoulders shook with sobs. He shouted, “Oh, my God! My poor baby! I love you!” out the window.
The detective’s cell phone rang. His wife was on the other end, wanting to discuss the transportation of a son to summer football camp and a ride to a sports tryout for another child. “Sorry,” he said to his wife. “I didn’t expect to be tied up tonight, but some shit broke loose. Yep. Love you. Bye.”
Jason’s mother stepped out into the rain and approached the car. “Mom, I love you,” Jason said. “Love you, too,” she answered. “I’s ready to take care of things.”
Jason offered to wear a wire. He promised to rat out everybody he knew. He called Lloyd “a piece of shit.” He looked out the window again. “I just got married. I’m sittin’ here lookin’ at my kids, man!” He convulsed with weeping.
“I’ll shut this whole fuckin’ town down, man!” Jason shouted. “Like, I know every fuckin’ drug dealer. I know every fuckin’ connect. I know everything.” He could do it, he said, because “anything that’s coming in through here is comin’ in through me. Like, I got the connect. I’m going up gettin’ the shit. Like, anybody’s fuckin’ with weight is goin’ through me.”
Jason had been carrying a lot of weight into Lancaster, but his connect was only one of many. Lancaster addicts typically drove themselves up to Columbus—as Carly, Mark, and Aaron had done—or bought small amounts from one another. Jason even had family members who obtained their own drugs from other sources; they’d been using and selling, too. The collective weight of all those small-time heroin users—not to mention pills, crack, meth, moon rocks like Lloyd’s connect was providing—likely dwarfed Jason’s weekly ounces.
Even so, the Mexicans did trust him to pick up “OZs”—ounces—not just grams, and return with money. The local cops figured they could use that trust. To do so, they’d have to know a lot more about the woman and her family inside the house on Country Club Road in Whitehall.
Jason sensed that his best chance to cut a deal was to make the Mexicans sound as major league as he was trying to make himself, and to promise he could take them down. “It ain’t no little shit!” he said of the Mexicans. “They fuck with dope, they fuck with ice. Those people I fuck with, they’re not little shit.”
And he knew them well. Not only did his son ride their four-wheeler, but he shared dinner with the woman, her parents, other members of the family. “She sees me, she hugs—fuckin’ hugs—my kids. My wife. When I go over to her house, we either, like, eat, get something to drink, sit around, and talk.” He refused to say the woman’s first name, because he wanted to preserve his bargaining power, though he later mentioned it accidentally: Sola. He just called the males “Juan” or “Julio,” and he never could pronounce their last name. “It’s like Guatemaly or some shit,” he said, making the cop laugh. As close as he said he was with the family, however, “I don’t care about them people, you know what I mean? And, I mean, I’ve never been one to fucking, like, rat on somebody or nuttin’, but, like, dude, I don’t care about them people. Those fuckin’ people don’t mean a fuckin’ thing to me.”
Both Jason and Jessica were taken to county jail. Jessica tried to smuggle some dope into jail inside a body cavity, so she was slapped with a conveyance charge.
The detective told Jason that if he really could help, he might get only two years in prison and rehab. He’d probably lose the Mustang, and the cash police found inside his house, but he could keep the SUV—but only if the police successfully dismantled a significant dope-sales operation.
They’d already been frustrated the day Jason was arrested. They found nothing but $8,000 in cash inside the Country Club Road house. “I’m saying when I do the lick [arrest], I better get keys,” Jason’s would-be handler told him, meaning kilos.
If Jason wanted an easy ride, he’d have to perform. “If you can help yourself, then that’s what’s gonna happen,” a detective told Jason. “It’s just like a business.”
* * *
Anchor Hocking was in the middle of an eleven-day shutdown when Jason was busted. This time, though, the shutdown was good news. The annual July 4 washout, when the factory closed for a cleaning, had been extended to allow for the most comprehensive cleanse and maintenance schedule in nearly fifteen years. Big projects would go unrepaired—there wasn’t enough cash or time—but a list of nearly four hundred smaller projects had been compiled.
Equipment would be steam-washed, the plant floor cleaned, mechanical systems checked for worn parts. Anchor Hocking was “trying to put the baby back together,” Solomon said. No doubt there would be unforeseen glitches when the process was complete and Plant 1 started back up. That was to be expected. But after those were worked out, Solomon looked forward to a long period of smooth operations and high efficiency—something he’d not experienced in the eighteen months since he arrived.
One hope was that the work inside the plant might improve quality. Both longtime workers and operations managers had been complaining about quality for a while. Line operators blamed the old machinery.
“I see it firsthand,” Mike Shook said. “They pull product out of inventory to bring it into the decorating department to have it silk-screened” with images for customers, such as a brewer’s logo. “You should see some of the crap that supposedly is classified as good product, that they can’t even decorate. It’s supposed to be round, and they look like eggs. It’s sad.”
Solomon knew there had been quality problems in the past, but he didn’t seem to be aware of the depth of the issue, nor that it remained. He insisted the ware placed in inventory was good, though he was disappointed that only about 70 percent of what came off the lines passed inspection. The rest was tossed for cullet. Shook said he brought such problems to the attention of the next level of management, the plant manager. “I said, ‘Hey, help me out here, man. These guys are dying down there. They have a standard. We quoted this thing with a cost of so much to screen-print, but we’re throwing 20 percent away because it won’t even fit on the machine.’”
The rest of the glass industry was not waiting for Anchor Hocking to clean up its house. Libbey announced a $30 million investment in a new “plant within a plant” in Shreveport, Louisiana. The new equipment would produce ware like wineglasses with long stems and a flat base. The “Perfect Signature” ware would be made using a proprietary glass formula created by Libbey’s R&D.
Anchor Hocking couldn’t compete in stemware, because Plant 1 had been so abused over the years. Anchor had once made it—Anchor Hocking once made scores of items it no longer made—but now wineglasses were simply too delicate for Lancaster, and EveryWare didn’t have the money to make an investment like Libbey had. Instead, EveryWare distributed imported stemware made by Stölzle, a German company.
Solomon argued that Libbey’s financial results proved that his strategy of focusing on what Anchor was good at making—“heavy” glass like bakeware—was the right one. Libbey’s sales had risen during the Anchor Hocking shutdown of the previous summer, with some of Anchor’s customers migrating to Libbey. But since then, Anchor was showing signs of winning a few of them back, and Libbey’s sales were being hit. Second-quarter net sales at Libbey fell by more than 4 percent. Solomon was convinced that the decline was at least partly attributable to Anchor’s halting rejuvenation.
But Anchor remained vulnerable because of its reliance on manufacturing ware for World Kitchen. World Kitchen–branded items like Pyrex constituted such a large percentage of Anchor Hocking’s overall production that Plant 1 earned more money producing World Kitchen ware than it did by making its own. But World Kitchen was not necessarily any more stable than EveryWare had been, because it, too, was a product of private equity financial engineering.
World Kitchen had gestated under Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). In 1989, KKR led the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the tobacco/snack food giant, in a $25 billion boondoggle immortalized in the book Barbarians at the Gate. The deal proved disastrous. KKR was soon forced to begin dismantling RJR to pay the interest on the debts. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. The episode so tainted the leveraged-buyout landscape—already plagued by spectacular failures and economic havoc—that it supposedly signaled the end of the era. But LBO shops simply rebranded themselves under the “private equity” moniker.
In 1994, KKR used RJR Nabisco stock to buy Columbus-based Borden, a food company that included dairy products and Cracker Jack, for about $2 billion. Then, in 1998, KKR and Borden bought Corning’s consumer products division, which included Pyrex, in a $603 million leveraged buyout, followed by yet another purchase, of Ekco Housewares and General Housewares (Chicago Cutlery), in 1999. KKR combined all these to create World Kitchen, much as Cerberus would later do to form Global Home Products.
Such names were no coincidence. The business gurus who dreamed up these combinations preferred words like “world” and “global” to names that were attached to any real place, person, history: Rootless and meaningless, their labels floated on vapor. It was all about a “platform” to “leverage brands”—though, increasingly, the brands stood for nothing. A lot of World Kitchen’s product, after all, wasn’t made by World Kitchen but by Anchor Hocking.
Like Global Home Products, World Kitchen, saddled with $812 million of debt, quickly declared bankruptcy, in 2002. By the mid-2000s, Oaktree Capital Management and W Capital Partners owned it. Suffering from declining sales, they’d been looking for a buyer since at least 2013. World Kitchen could pull the OEM work from Anchor Hocking at any time.
For now, Solomon was banking on keeping the World Kitchen OEM business, with the improvements he foresaw coming with the cleanup. As the washout began, both were being factored into bottom-line projections. All month, he and the other top executives would pore over computer screens, nag underlings for data, and add up numbers to prepare for the first formal, comprehensive board meeting since the bankruptcy. The meeting, scheduled for early August, could well determine the future of both the company and its management.
* * *
There was no rain on the Fourth of July. Normally that wouldn’t be news, but it was this year because the spring and early summer seemed like one long storm. The morning parade passed under a blue sky. The Soap Box Derby queen rode behind a Ford SUV that towed the champion derby car. A troupe of little girls in pink danced their way east on Main Street toward Broad Street. The Lancaster High School Golden Gales marching band played Sousa. People lined the sidewalks, waving tiny American flags.
Yet despite the good weather and the holiday, Lancaster remained eerily quiet all day. Miller Pool was nearly empty. Fewer than twenty children swam at Tiki.
Better-off Lancastrians weren’t any more visible. The country club had tried to hold a July 4 pool-deck party, with barbecue and music and drinks. Until the Great Recession, such holiday parties were well attended—during the 1990s, they were packed with families—but only six reservations had been made, so the club canceled. At about 6:00 p.m., Eleanor and Henry Hood sat alone on the patio overlooking an empty swimming pool, eating hamburgers with a couple of young relatives. Only one group sat inside the clubhouse bar: four or five middle-aged people, who spent the early evening talking about Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, who, they decided, had turned transsexual just for the money.
The bartender blamed demographics for the low turnout. The older generation had mostly died off, she said, and people with families “are pretty into organized sports with their kids.” On the occasion of America’s birthday party, the all-American town’s quietude seemed symptomatic of the slow-motion, but disturbing, change.
Two weeks before the Fourth, the United Way of Fairfield County held a Day of Action in front of Fountain Square, across the street from the old Anchor headquarters. The purpose of the Saturday event was to teach children how to play outside.
Every neighborhood in central Lancaster was within easy walking distance of a park—the city was famous for them. Several streams, as well as the Hocking River, ran through the middle of town. Lancaster was surrounded by fields, hills, and woods. I. J. Collins was right to marvel over the county’s name: Old Ebenezer Zane had staked out Lancaster in a beautiful setting.
But just about the only outdoor “playing” took place by way of organized, competitive sports teams. Many older people complained that young parents had succumbed to the fantasy allure of Big Sports, in the hope that their kid would win a soccer, football, or baseball scholarship. Otherwise they’d never be able to afford college. There were more grown men riding bikes around town than young children. The idea of a neighborhood tribe of kids running wild outside with no particular purpose seemed simultaneously exotic, marvelous, and scary—as old-fashioned as the apocryphal stories about Great Grandpa walking five miles to school in a blizzard. All over town, the few kids who did venture outside seemed to go no farther than a front porch, where they constructed invisible protective bubbles with their smartphone screens.
Thinking this pattern might be both physically and mentally unhealthy, the United Way and adult volunteers from partner organizations assembled to show children that playing outside could be fun—though some of the activities, like kids’ art and making balloon animals, weren’t exactly capture the flag. The Glass Museum showed off Lance McClellan, who’d won the boys’ division of the county marbles tournament (his stepsister had won the girls’ division), qualifying to go to the nationals in New Jersey. Hutchinson’s Company Wrench donated forty bicycles, most of which were given away.
In the summer, many of Lancaster’s children spent Monday through Friday in all-day childcare, because their parents—whether they were single, married, or, in fact, the grandparents—worked. Kids who weren’t in childcare were often watched over by an older sibling. Few jobs paid enough to allow any income earner to stay home with young children. For many parents, summer was a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to let children roam.
But there was another reason why so few children ventured outdoors: a gut-deep anxiety that somebody or something lurked somewhere in the shadows, ready to do harm. But for all of its problems—incidents, for instance, like the shots fired at the house on Maple Street—Lancaster was still a safe town.
“We have very courteous drug dealers in Lancaster,” Municipal Court judge Patrick Harris told me with a laugh. The fear, he agreed, was “unreasonable.”
Nonetheless, the changes of the past thirty years had created a constant low-level, nagging anxiety in Lancaster. It was vague—as if the earth’s magnetic field had shifted one degree—but powerful enough to instill gloomy suspicion. “Our whole society is just falling apart,” Brad Hutchinson told me, echoing Judge Trimmer.
That was why he mowed his lawn with a pistol on his hip, and why John Oatney had a loaded gun at hand when he heard that family trying to navigate a way to the park behind his house. Since 2004, when Ohio passed a law permitting gun owners to carry concealed weapons, more than fifteen thousand people in the county had been granted licenses, most citing a need for personal protection.
Handguns were once rare in Lancaster. In the previous century, lots of men, and a few teenage boys, had owned rifles for deer hunting, or shotguns for bird hunting, or old, rusty souvenir pistols from one war or another. Nobody could imagine why they’d want to haul a gun around. The idea would have seemed ridiculous.
“We issue a lot of carry-and-conceal firearm permits,” Sheriff Dave Phalen told me. “When we started, it was predominantly male, and today it’s about half and half, men and women.” Phalen believed carrying a gun was “comforting.” “I think it gives people a sense of security. Plus, I think there’s people who think it’s a right: ‘I’m gonna be able to exercise a right to be able to carry a firearm.’”
Phalen, an outspoken conservative Christian, favored concealed carry, but he also worried. The night of our conversation, he was scheduled to hold a gun training session for about two hundred local churchgoers. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to be armed with people in the church,” he said. “It’s like the airplane: Airplanes go down, but we’re not afraid to be on an airplane.” But on June 17, a white racist named Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, sat down, prayed with some of its members, and then shot and killed nine of them.
“The chances of an incident at your church is, like, almost none,” Phalen said. Media coverage, he believed, had inflamed the worry. “So what we’re getting is, because on the national news you see this overblown, you’re thinking, ‘My golly,’ you know? And that becomes a reality to people.” The mere presence of guns ignited the desire to display them and, if necessary, to use them. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, we got our CCW permits. We got these guns. We’re gonna put ’em in the church. If something happens, we’ll be locked and loaded.’ I’m thinking, ‘You’ll get somebody killed.’”
Many stores and bars displayed the universal red-circle-with-a-slash NO GUNS sign. They had to: If they didn’t, any CCW holder could legally walk in with a pistol. The signs themselves, though, only made danger seem more possible—a perpetual-motion machine of anxiety.
While many used incidents like the Charleston shooting as a reason to strap on a weapon, opposition to unrestricted gun ownership was equally motivating. Having convinced themselves, or been convinced, that guns were necessary, gun-loving Lancastrians feared that if liberal urban elites had their way, federal forces would come for their weapons. More provocative than even that fear, though, were anti-gun lectures from the metropolitan classes, who didn’t know people like Lancastrians, who had proven over and over again for thirty years that they didn’t care a whit about them, who sneered at them as bumpkins. Toting a gun was a middle finger in the face of the smarty-pants set.
“I had not been around guns growing up,” Jon Hale, the city councilman who commuted to Columbus, told the Eagle-Gazette. “My dad didn’t hunt, and I wasn’t a gun guy. But with the direction our country is going with the talk of ‘We’re going to get the guns,’ we decided to invest in a piece to protect our home.”
Confederate flags had sprouted in William T. Sherman’s hometown. In the wake of Roof’s murderous rampage, and of photos of him exulting in the flag, pressure mounted across the country to stigmatize the stars and bars. In reply, some Lancastrians raised those flags on their houses and in the beds of their pickups. They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.
Sometimes the fear and defiance turned to racism. The Mexicans who came to town to work at Plant 1 had been welcomed, for the most part. Glassworkers who otherwise might have looked upon them with suspicion viewed them instead as fellow factory men trying to make a living. The locals may not have liked the influx of “illegal aliens,” but they didn’t see it as the Mexicans’ fault. As for Sam Solomon, some Anchor Hocking employees liked him and some didn’t, but not one, hourly or salaried, ever mentioned his race to me.
Many in Lancaster were well aware of its racial history, and rejected it. Kellie Ailes, the director of Community Action, told a story about a conference she’d attended during which groups of social service administrators were tasked with solving a math problem about finance. Worried that a black man in her group would be unable to solve the problem, she offered her help. But he’d already solved it. A minor misunderstanding rooted in good intention, one might think. But though the conference had taken place long before, she broke down in tears, sobbing, when recalling the incident, shamed by her assumption and dreading even the possibility that she harbored unrecognized prejudice.
Raised to be midwestern-neighborly, good-hearted, and fair-dealing—but in a near-all-white town that had once been the master of its own fate (or at least seemingly so), Lancastrians were navigating a much more diverse and uncertain world. The town, Mayor Dave Smith told me during a break in a city council meeting, was “growing up.”
But the old Copperhead strain that had popularized the Klan a hundred years before still existed. There was the skinny, scruffy-faced man in a sleeveless Lynrd Skynrd T-shirt who’d sidled up to the barstool next to mine at Old Bill Bailey’s. It was about four in the afternoon on a Saturday. “I been drinkin’ all day,” he said, and I believed him. An unlit cigarette held in a gap where three missing teeth used to be bounced like Toscanini’s baton as he spoke. He told me he was partying with his roommate, who was about to move out of their shabby apartment nearby. Then, after an awkward silence, he turned to me and said, “Did you hear they wanted Michelle Obama to pose for one of them centerfolds?”
“No,” I said. “Do you think she’ll do it?” “Prob-lee,” he said. “It’s fer National Geographic.” He cackled with so much enthusiasm, he coughed up beery nicotine phlegm. Racism in other parts of town was subtler. It revealed itself in conversations about “strangers” and “newcomers.”
The roots of racism in those who expressed it were more tangled than simple hatred sparked by skin color. Lower-class whites were cut off from all the college campus rhetoric about “white privilege,” but they wouldn’t have understood it anyway, because they, with good reason, didn’t feel privileged. Most of them hadn’t done anything wrong, but they believed some malevolent force had reached into their community and punished them. Somebody, they thought, was screwing them out of the good-life lottery. Somebody was screwing them. It just wasn’t who they thought.
“They’re racist because they look at those people as getting all the breaks,” Harris explained. “‘Why do they get all the breaks? My life sucks. Why don’t I get breaks like they do? They get into all the best schools ’cause they’re black. I wish I could go into a job interview and be black.’ I’m always like, ‘Then do it. Trust me, you may find out that was not the best choice you ever made.’ So, yeah, there’s a huge amount of racism in this community.” But it was resentment based on “that perception that African Americans are getting special treatment.”
Harris considered the possibility that guns, race, the belief that the drug problem could be pinned on blacks and Mexicans in Columbus or Detroit, the generalized fear that turned parents into ever-vigilant kid guardians, might be the result of a strategy. Referring to Lancaster’s tax-starved schools, he said, “Of course, you could be really cynical, which I get sometimes, and say, ‘Well, that’s one reason to keep ’em stupid.’” Harris, raised a Catholic, continued. “It’s the old Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages: Don’t let ’em learn to read, because as long as we’re telling them what the Book says, then they’ll listen to us.” He blamed the dominance of the local Republican Party hierarchy. He was the only Democrat serving as a city-or county-wide elected official. He managed to win by running as a Republican, then switched parties. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. I believe it’s because you convince people that it’s all Obama’s fault, it’s all the Democrats’ fault, it’s all this or that, and they’ll believe it.”
Trying to explain that the roots of Lancaster’s problematic changes were deep and old was a futile exercise. A few people who were executives at Anchor at the time remembered Icahn, but nobody else did. Almost nobody knew the true story of the Newell takeover and of the shady dealings of Newell’s felonious financier, Gary Driggs. Cerberus had come and gone so quickly that the episode blurred. The vast majority of Lancastrians couldn’t name Monomoy, to say nothing of Barington Capital, Wexford Management, or the Clinton Group. They didn’t follow the intricacies of carried interest, the decline of union power, Wall Street lobbying, or the political contributions made by the predatory-lending industry. It wasn’t that they were rubes, as so many big-city liberals took comfort in believing. It was that they had lives to lead and work to do. Both the national and the local press, which might have once briefed them on how The System had been turned on its head, were themselves eviscerated by digital culture, by their own insular preoccupation with themselves, and by the drumbeat message from cable news and Internet propaganda to never trust “the media.”
John Oatney didn’t follow politics. He voted because he was a good American who felt it was his duty to do so. When he did, he usually voted for Democrats, because he’d been raised to believe the Democrats looked out for poor people, and he’d never had much money. But then he returned to the Lord. A nice man at church named Tom began educating John. Among other things, Tom told John that he could not call himself a Christian and vote for Democrats. Also, “Obama was a mean and evil person” who was trying “to drive the country down to where it will be easy for somebody from the Middle East, or somebody, to come and harm us, or take over.”
John hadn’t been aware of any of this until Tom explained it. Tom told him not to feel bad about not knowing. John had just been kept in the dark by watching 4, 6, and 10, the major network TV channels in Columbus. Those stations weren’t allowed to tell it like it really was, Tom said. Instead John needed to watch cable news. When John replied that he had “poor boy” TV—that is, no cable—Tom said he had to get himself somewhere so he could see the cable channels that told the truth.
By the end of the day, July 4 didn’t feel like much of a happy birthday. But, finally, a crowd of several thousand gathered at the fairgrounds for the traditional fireworks show. They surrounded the racetrack made famous by gas-illuminated harness racing and Peggy Cummins. The fireworks burst, sparkled, and flashed. Rousing, coordinated music blared over hundreds of radios. The booms were loud. Little kids covered their ears with their hands. A few people chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” And then everybody went home.
* * *
Just before the festival started, the Rotarians gathered for their regular Monday meeting at The Lodge, the former Elks hall, on Main Hill, which had been turned into a bar and restaurant. A woman stood before them to speak the invocation. As everyone bowed their heads, she spoke to God. “This is an exciting time for our community. We pray for our director, Joe, and our conductor, Gary. Please lay your hands on our orchestra members.” Her voice cracked. Tears streamed down her face. She read from Psalm 150: “Praise him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise him with resounding cymbals.”
“Our” director, “our” conductor, “our” musicians. There wasn’t much left of what Forbes had found, and Lancaster stood to lose more still: The hospital the town had built for itself—now its largest employer—which had just celebrated the completion of a $38 million expansion, was under attack. Big regional corporate health systems, following a grow-or-die mandate, wanted to steal its independence by absorbing it into their chains. The festival, though, was wholly Lancaster’s. “It’s about community, it’s about people,” orchestra conductor Gary Sheldon told the Rotarians.
The festival couldn’t start soon enough for Joe Piccolo. In late June, he’d told me, “If I am still pushing against an immovable wall in two years, I am not going down with the ship.” The board was reluctant to accept the changes he wanted to make, he said, but the operation needed to change. Hundreds of volunteers made up the workforce, but that squadron was graying. A few part-time paid employees served in crucial positions, but two women in the office were in ill health, and there were no contingency plans for replacing them. A small minority of aging donors wielded too much control. Lancaster itself was just too old-fashioned. Piccolo was getting heat for hiring Blues Traveler, but young people weren’t interested in orchestral music. The festival had to look to the future.
His other frustrations were minor, though many and varied. There was a snafu over rental buses to shuttle ticket holders to the big concert site at OU Lancaster. A group of ministers had hired a nationally recognized Christian singer to appear during the festival period, piggybacking on the sanctioned events Piccolo was trying to sell. Tickets to that event cost $15 or $20. Lancaster’s consumer buck would go only so far.
And Christians weren’t his only competition. When nearby communities witnessed the success of Lancaster’s festival as it grew in popularity, some of them decided to mount their own. Pickerington, a once-tiny farming village in northwestern Fairfield County that had become a Columbus bedroom community over the past thirty years, started the Violet Festival in 1997. This year, the graying rock band Kansas would appear there, on the same weekend Blues Traveler was performing in Lancaster. Dublin, closer to Columbus, was holding its Irish Festival. And the Ohio State Fair was being held July 29 through August 9. Reba McEntire, Meghan Trainor, Patti LaBelle, Alabama, Peter Frampton, Cheap Trick, Dru Hill, and Deep Purple were all slated to appear.
One day, while visiting with him in his office, I commented on a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer displayed on a computer screen. Oppenheimer’s fedora, as well as the cigarette punctuating his gaunt face, reminded Piccolo that Oppenheimer overcame every obstacle to lead the creation of the atomic bomb.
“But, Joe,” I said, “he later regretted it.”
“Well, we try not to think about that.”
By the opening-night concert, a program of Mussorgsky inside St. Mary’s Church, controversies had receded into the background. The day had dawned brightly—sunny and warm. Phones in the box office rang with more persistence. And now a sellout crowd of seven hundred had crammed into St. Mary’s, one of Lancaster’s grandest and oldest churches.
Piccolo seemed to be everywhere at once, huffing and perspiring outside the church, in the back of the church, in the sacristy at the front of the church. Spotting a couple of older female volunteers handing out programs, he dashed up to them and offered to take a handful. But he offended them. Didn’t he think they were doing a good job? Did he want to take over?
“I was only trying to help,” Piccolo pleaded. But he’d underestimated the importance of their involvement. They’d helped for years. The small bit they contributed to the success of the festival in their community gave them purpose and ownership at a time when there was so little of either.
* * *
Joe Boyer didn’t get to hear the Mussorgsky; he worked the night shift that night. He’d work nights all through the festival, so he wouldn’t see any of the events. Brian Gossett and Aaron Shonk didn’t attend, either. Instead they had some friends over to the Colfax cabin. Aaron built a big fire in the backyard and cued up big band music and some blues on a boom box. Sitting around by a fire, drinking some beer, being as loud as they wanted—that’s why they’d moved out there. The cheap rent was important, too, of course, and Colfax was a straight shot down 22 to work at Drew, but nights like this were what they’d been looking for.
Brian was in a mood to chill. Over the July 4 weekend, he and Mike had gone to a rave out in the country, and they’d had fun, but he came home deciding that he’d had enough of the rave-fest scene. “I was sitting on this bench, and Mike was sitting near me, across from me, and he’s like, ‘Are you waiting in line?’ And I didn’t know what he meant. I looked down, and there’s this circle of people sitting on the ground, waiting their turn to inject themselves.” He motioned to the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “And that’s so fucking retarded.” Flakka (akin to meth and moon rocks), sass (related to MDMA), ketamine, and heroin were wrecking everything. He may have been a libertarian when it came to drugs, but people didn’t use any sense at all. “Like, what are they going to do with those needles, man? Leave ’em on the ground? That just goes to show they’re not responsible enough to even be doing that shit in the first place.”
The topic of his own generation led him to tattoos. “Fuck tattoos!” he said, with real anger. “This one time, Renee came home, and she had this big picture down her side, and, I mean, it was really good, looked great, but I told her, ‘If you like it, why not hang it on the wall?’”
When Brian first moved in and showed me around the tiny space he’d picked as his bedroom—a side-entrance mud porch just off the small kitchen—a print of a Picasso nude from the Blue Period lay on his bed. A 401(k) enrollment form lay next to the art. I had picked up the 401(k) brochure and smiled.
“They’re gonna get me, man,” he’d said, referring to The System. His parents had lost a significant portion of their life savings in the 2008 financial collapse. Brian was still angry about it.
“You’re going mainstream,” I joked. “Well, they say it’s like free money,” he said. “I don’t like it, but…” He shrugged. Now the Picasso was hung up behind his bed, but he still hadn’t enrolled in the 401(k). He was thinking about it.
The work at Drew was okay—mindless, with the personalities in the warehouse a little hard to take, but he liked it better than he’d thought he might. His first performance review was positive and came with a raise. He still missed Anchor, though.
They hadn’t yet installed a landline phone, and since Brian refused to get a cell phone, the only way to reach him was to drive out and knock on his door. If you made the trip, it meant you really wanted to see him. Brian still didn’t get the point of the twenty-first century.
He left the fireside and walked back into the little house. Before everyone arrived, he’d been tuning the heads of his drum set, and he wanted to finish the job. He asked me if I knew anything about Dave Brubeck, whose jazz he’d recently discovered. I was a fan, I told him. To Brian, something about “Take Five” sounded honest and cool. With jazz on his mind, he slipped an old Lionel Hampton record out of its sleeve and placed it gently on a little turntable he’d set up on the kitchen counter, then picked up a small tool to tighten the skins of his drums. Swingy vibes, interrupted every few seconds by Brian’s tap on a drumhead, wafted out into the hot night, blending with the crackling fire and crickets at the corner of a country crossroads surrounded by fields of tall cornstalks.
* * *
The stage and band shell rose up out of the field by the creek. Portable toilets stood ready for duty. Generators, lights, and speakers loomed from eight-story scaffolds. The sun was out, and the grounds, swampy just three days before, had dried enough. The creek had returned to a normal level. The crew was exhausted. One member had reported for work a few days before at 8:30 a.m., carrying morning doughnuts to share, only to discover that it was 8:30 at night. They’d worked through wind and rain this year, but now they sat under the shade of a blue tarpaulin, sipping from beer bottles and surveying the work they counted as good.
Piccolo, though, stood by the stage like a nervous cat. “People in this town don’t realize how dire the budget situation is,” he said. “We couldn’t have survived another rain event.” But he didn’t seem soothed by the sunshine. His new problem was sound. Mo Pitney would be fine, but Thompson Square had been very loud during the sound check. The orchestra was irritated. Nobody would be able to hear a note they played under Thompson Square’s volume. With Blues Traveler already having refused to play with the orchestra, Piccolo faced the prospect of both the audience and the orchestra calling for his head. “I guess tonight will decide if I have good judgment,” he said.
The sun was still high when people began finding their tables and staking out their real estate on the hillside. Sundresses, madras shirts, and khaki pants were favored at the dining tables, while jeans, shorts, and T-shirts were in vogue on the hill. Eric Brown, Rosemary Hajost, Mayor Dave Smith, and Jen Walters were all there, along with about three thousand other Lancastrians and visitors from around the county. None of Anchor’s top management attended: They hadn’t come to the festival in years.
Caterers set up meals on the tables. People sitting in the grass opened coolers. Everybody was happy to be there, no matter where they sat. Maples and sassafras, ripe with fat, green leaves, formed woody curtains around the perimeter of the hillside. As the sun descended, the sky glowed, illuminating a few wispy, friendly clouds with orange-red highlights.
When the percussive downbeat and rapid-fire string notes of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” arrowed through the dusk, thousands of Midwest smiles lit thousands of faces. A few small children in short pants bobbled with unsteady toddler rhythm in front of parents with guardrail arms stretched out, just in case. Lovers looked at each other and kissed.
The orchestra played Hungarian Dance No. 5, by Brahms. Everybody nodded in recognition. Some knew it as Brahms, others as the soundtrack for a dozen different TV commercials. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol was less familiar to most, but it was joyous, like summer, and showcased the talents of individual musicians—Lancaster’s own musicians for these two weeks—even more effectively than the more famous compositions.
The two big country acts would follow—Mo Pitney (young, charming, and unpretentious) and Thompson Square (loud, slick, and canned)—but right then, nobody cared about the night’s headliners. Nobody cared about trying to book Taylor Swift or about drawing people from out of town as a way to boost economic development. They cared about being out in their town with their friends, milling about and seeing people they hadn’t seen in a while, listening to music they wouldn’t normally listen to, as they admired the skill of musicians who’d devoted their lives to making art. They wanted to drink a glass of wine or a beer and eat a fried chicken leg. They wanted to share all of this with one another.
Over the successive days and nights, the weather continued to cooperate—for the most part. Artwork hung in banks, stores, churches, restaurants, the library. More than fifty musical and other events—whether at a charge or free—went off as scheduled, most of them attracting audiences. None of them were held on the west side.
When the day of the big Saturday finale arrived, a crowd once again gathered at the tables and the hillside: Once again, a nice day turned into an ideal Ohio evening. There’d been backstage drama—a Blues Traveler member somehow wound up stranded in Columbus, for example—but by show time everything was ready.
Piccolo cleaned himself up, put on a new shirt, and stepped on the stage to introduce Sheldon. The orchestra played Sheldon’s arrangements of Journey, Aerosmith, and Radiohead songs, followed by an intermission.
During the pause, I ran into festival cofounder Eleanor Hood. “Are you happy?” I asked.
“Relieved,” she said. She cried the way people do when pressure is suddenly lifted. She and her friend Barbara Hunzicker had started the festival thirty years before, as if they’d foreseen what the town would face and wanted to manufacture a balm to soothe it. “We really needed this. This is the best night we’ve had in five years or so. Thank this,” she said, pointing at the sky.
The festival would live on. But from the moment Blues Traveler took the stage, Piccolo’s future with it began to seem ever more tenuous. The band played a lousy set—too loud, garbled, shambling—but that wasn’t really the problem. Like Lancaster itself, the festival had become mired in an uncertain search for what it should become: old people’s (and donor-class) music versus kids’ music, big versus small, Lancaster PR versus an event for the community.
There was one other problem Piccolo knew he faced but couldn’t control: As pleasant and successful (Blues Traveler not withstanding) as it was, the festival did nothing to solve any of Lancaster’s problems. It didn’t attract any new businesses, and it never would. Lancaster was now just one of many communities with arts and music fests; it had no more claim to being an “arts center” than any other place. Towns all over the Midwest were brewing beer, hosting new coffeehouses, and establishing vegan restaurants as ways to promote their leisure-hipness. Even as the festival unspooled under the bright skies, the economic forecast darkened.
The Lodge, where the Rotarians met, announced it would close for good. The owners had tried to sell the building and lease it back as a way to continue operating, but they couldn’t find a buyer for one of the grandest buildings in a prime location on Lancaster’s main street.
On July 30, two nights before the festival finale, at about 10:00 p.m., Michele Ritchlin, the director of the West After School Program, received a text on her phone from the Ohio Department of Education. She held her breath, anxious over how many of her grant applications had been successful. All were denied.
She thought of the teachers. They made either $10 or $13 per hour, with no benefits. Ritchlin had hoped to give raises to some, or a full-time position to Dawn Shonk, a relative by marriage to Aaron, who worked part-time. Then she wondered if she would have a job herself, and if the program would even survive.
“How do you replace $200,000 a year?” she asked herself. She couldn’t just ask one of Lancaster’s wealthy to drop a check in her lap. The pool of well-off people had become much shallower than it once was, so the same handful was tapped over and over from every nonprofit in town. Yet the need for the program was more profound than ever.
The day after Ritchlin received the bad news, I ran into Rosemary Hajost at the festival offices. I asked if she’d heard about the grants. She hadn’t, and when I told her the bad news, she said, “This will be devastating.” But then she locked her jaw and looked at me with undiminished gumption. “Maybe we should just go back to our roots: ladies with pencils and books and pieces of paper!”