For generations, every school kid in Lancaster could tell you at least part of the story. Ebenezer Zane made a road called Zane’s Trace. The road came through Lancaster. Settlers followed the road. They met some Indians called Wyandots. A girl named Forest Rose was kidnapped by the Indians, who took her to the top of Mount Pleasant, except it wasn’t called Mount Pleasant back then: The Wyandots called it Standing Stone, because it’s really a big stone, not an actual mountain. The Wyandots called the Hocking River HockHocking. Anyway, the girl was rescued. Then William Tecumseh Sherman was born. Thomas Ewing, too. And that’s why the two junior high schools are named Ewing and Sherman. Sherman burned down Atlanta. And Richard Outcault, the guy who made the first comic strip, Buster Brown, and another one called The Yellow Kid, was born here, and Lancaster makes lots of glass, and those are just some of the reasons why Lancaster is special.
Until the 1990s, you couldn’t spend more than a few days, even a few hours, in Lancaster without somebody trying to indoctrinate you as to why Lancaster was an exceptional town, and why living there was the same kind of lucky break as being born in America. Come to think of it, being born in Lancaster was sort of like being born in the innermost nesting doll of America, and if you thought that was prideful exaggeration, the proof was right there, in black and white, in the November 15, 1947, issue of Forbes magazine.
Forbes devoted most of its thirtieth-anniversary issue to making the argument that Lancaster, Ohio, of all places, was the epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system. The cover showed the intersection of Main and Broad streets. A corner of the Anchor Hocking headquarters peeked from the right of the frame. Main Street bustled with people and cars. Small American flags flew from streetlight poles. “This Is America,” Forbes declared.
Some Forbes readers may have wondered why the magazine would pick Lancaster as its model community to illustrate the brilliance of capitalism, but the choice wasn’t a mystery to Lancastrians. The backstory was just one more justification for Lancaster’s self-regard.
In 1941, Forbes founder and editor in chief B. C. Forbes set up the Fairfield Times, a weekly Lancaster newspaper, for his son Malcolm to run. Two days after graduating from Princeton, B. C.’s fledgling arrived in town. Months later, Malcolm founded another weekly, the Lancaster Tribune. Neither lasted long against the Eagle-Gazette, whose heritage dated back to 1809. Malcolm left Lancaster in 1942 to join the army (leaving, some locals still say, a few debts behind). But while his stay was short, Malcolm Forbes’s Midwest sojourn became Lancaster lore. Then, when Malcolm and some reporters from the magazine returned after the war, the resulting issue validated for all the magazine’s back-east big-shot readers what Lancastrians already believed: “Li’l ol’ Lancaster” was no hick town.
The Forbes issue painted an especially flattering portrait in the service of propaganda. B. C. wanted to use it to tantalize readers with the American Promise while warning them of the danger of “Socialistic New Dealism.”
The features opened with a sketch of Lancaster’s geography and history, its placement at the transition from the last western foothills exhaled from the Appalachians to the beginning of the plains, the road—more of a path through the woods—Zane and his brothers started in 1796, and the pioneer German-Dutch Protestants from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who named their settlement New Lancaster. The favorite sons received a mention: U.S. senator and secretary of the treasury Thomas Ewing and the Sherman brothers, William T. and John (U.S. senator, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act, secretary of the treasury under Rutherford B. Hayes, secretary of state under William McKinley). So did the canal built to carry Fairfield County’s agricultural products to New York.
Forbes was mainly interested in the story of Lancaster’s industry, which started when Civil War veteran Albert Getz opened a downtown shoe factory that employed a hundred people. Getz sold out to a bigger Columbus maker named Henry Godman in 1890. H. C. Godman Shoe eventually opened four factories in Lancaster.
But Lancaster did not become an industrial town until the late 1880s, when the city discovered that it sat atop a sea of natural gas. Once drillers started looking for it, they found so much gas that the county fair board sunk a well on the fairgrounds, on the northeast edge of the city, and the racetrack became the first in the world to hold nighttime harness races illuminated by gaslight. Gas was even piped into the water of a pond in the infield, then ignited to create an attraction called the “Lake of Fire.” Along with Forest Rose and Sherman, horse racing by gaslight became part of the Lancaster story. People still mention it today.
The city pioneered the public ownership of an energy utility by forming a municipal gas company to exploit the find. A bond issue to raise $50,000 passed by a wide margin. (The municipal gas company still exists, serving about fifteen thousand customers, though the gas now arrives via pipelines from other states.) As of 1906, Lancaster charged ten cents per month, half the rate for gas in surrounding cities and towns.
B. C. Forbes believed public ownership of utilities would be a disastrous step toward socialism, so Forbes clucked over the natural gas story. The resource “was channelized in a rather unusual fashion, for they decided that this new power was to be exploited for the good, and at the risk, of the whole community: the entire gasworks was therefore organized under municipal ownership.” Because of low prices, Forbes sniffed, the “gas field had been wasted extravagantly.”
Maybe, but the cheap, plentiful, publicly owned gas proved a powerful lure to glassmakers, for whom energy and labor were the biggest expenses. Glassmaking towns like Clarksburg, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania cities like Pittsburgh, Jeannette, and Monaca were close enough to draw migrating glassmen in search of lower costs to Lancaster. By 1890, a company called Highland Manufacturing was making window glass and lenses in Lancaster. Highland was followed by C.P. Cole, Columbus Plate Glass, Fairfield Sheet Glass, Lancaster Lens, and Ohio Flint Glass Company. (Though “flint glass” now refers to clear glass, it originally referred to glass that used a calcined flint in its production.) The Hocking Glass Company, the forerunner of Anchor Hocking, was founded in 1905.
In a series of articles dissecting the three pillars of the U.S. economy—Main Street shops, agriculture, and big business, as exemplified by Anchor Hocking—Forbes left readers with the belief that Lancaster was the purest distillation of America. Lancastrians were plain and plainspoken, and community-spirited. They didn’t believe in ostentation. Even the rich lived in relative modesty. Class distinctions were present, but fuzzy. Those with a little more money hosted cocktail parties in their homes and golfed, swam, and danced at the country club. But a factory worker might live three blocks from a factory owner. The store clerk might be chief honcho of the Moose lodge where the bank president was also a brother. No matter how much money you had, your children attended the public schools or the small Catholic one and made friends across the economic spectrum.
Lancastrians were patriotic. Forbes profiled a “big brawny man” named Jack Fisher—an ex-GI who’d fought his way through France, Germany, Austria, and Italy during the war, only to return to Lancaster and work at Anchor Hocking “in areas where the temperature reaches 204 degrees.” In fact, Lancaster’s glassworkers and shoemakers walked out of the factories and into the military just as young lawyers, businessmen, and Malcolm Forbes did. Over three thousand Anchor Hocking employees joined up; sixty-three of them were killed in action. Once the war was over, 80 percent of those veterans walked right back into the furnace rooms and offices of Anchor Hocking. They loved their town. As Forbes wrote of Fisher, “He has returned to his roots, to stick.”
The Lancaster in the Forbes imagination was orderly, convivial, and upright. There was little of the “roughneck element.” What crime there was seemed to be of the most petty, almost prankish, sort. Pretty much everyone lived in a home they owned.
A semi-pro baseball team entertained in the summer. There were bowling alleys, parks, the country club, plenty of taverns, and about thirty churches. A couple of locally owned department stores brought in fashions from New York, and regional retail chains like S. S. Kresge displayed their faith by establishing outlets. Two movie theaters showed the latest films.
In the Forbes image, Lancaster was governed by a set of long-held rules and customs. People possessed, and used, good common sense. They were a little stodgy, even stolid, but—and Forbes considered this a boon—homogenous to a degree that was unusual even then. “Though there are a number of rather exotic southeast European names in town,” one article stated with a nearly audible Princetonian accent, “there is no distinctly ‘foreign element.’”
There were no communists, socialists, and not even any “left-wingers.” There were, however, unions. Forbes considered these an unfortunate intrusion of the mean outside world upon Lancaster’s bubble of harmony, but it approved of the way Anchor Hocking had tamed them.
While rigorously quelling any union agitation during the ’20s and early ’30s, they had at the same time distributed their subsidiary factories in separate townships throughout the county to forestall concentrated organization, had used company picnics and other more or less paternalistic measures to foster employee goodwill, and had encouraged their people to buy their own homes and, often, to settle outside the city in small farms, thus preventing the growth of any inflammable proletariat. Their foresight enabled them in 1937 to have the city police bar the approach of a CIO organizer without raising much local protest, and to arrive at a comfortable understanding with the AFL.
Lancaster was not a company town in the strictest sense of the term. Though the other glass companies had come and gone by 1947, Lancaster Lens was still an important national producer. In 1934, a handblown Lancaster Lens was placed in the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Lancaster Lens made many of the taillight and headlight covers for American automobiles, and it was gearing up to supply the glass cases for the new television picture tubes. Godman sold out to the Irving Drew Shoe Company in 1937; ten years later, Drew was still making shoes. Essex Wire, Alten’s Foundry, the Stuck Mold Works, and other, smaller firms were all employing people and making money. But Forbes was correct when it wrote that the two glass companies, especially Anchor Hocking, were the economic skeleton on which Lancaster’s society hung.
“They sometimes wonder what would happen if the glass factories moved away,” Forbes wrote, “but there is no reason for thinking that they will, and as long as they remain and continue to manufacture low-cost glass tableware Lancaster can look forward to a relatively even economy that will not be unduly disturbed by either war or depression.”
* * *
Almost two years after the Forbes issue, two young newlyweds, Nancy and Herb George, stepped into their ’46 Plymouth convertible to search for their future. It was springtime, when green shafts of daffodils knife through thawed ground and pink and white blooms fluff dogwood branches.
Nancy (her last name is now Frick) was recovering from an attack of polio that had frozen most of her body. But she was up and walking now, and she’d earned a business degree at Ohio State. Herb, who’d delayed college due to military service, would graduate soon. World War II had been over for four years. Rationing was a memory. Businesses all over Ohio were hiring. They both had jobs already; Herb worked at the Columbus water department, and Nancy had an office position at the Sherwin-Williams paint company. But these were just jobs, not careers. Now they were ready to dive into the postwar economy and begin their adult lives.
Though they were definite about all of this, they weren’t sure exactly where they wanted to stake their claim. Both of them wanted to stay in Ohio—to be away from their families, but not too far away. That meant leaving Columbus for a smaller town in which they could buy a home and raise children. So, as Herb finished up at Ohio State, the couple spent Sundays that spring driving around Ohio.
One day, they pointed the Plymouth southeast down U.S. 33—then a two-lane stretch of blacktop—and toward Lancaster. There wasn’t much of anything between Columbus and Lancaster, just tiny farm villages that briefly interrupted the newly planted fields. As the Georges rolled into Lancaster, 33 became Memorial Drive, a road built along the bank of the old canal. They took a left at Main Street—U.S. 22—and drove through the three blocks of thriving downtown businesses, past the tremendous golden-hued sandstone city hall, then up Main Hill, with its antebellum Federal-style homes.
Nancy thought the city looked like a painting. “It was a really beautiful town. I mean, it was picture perfect, just like a Norman Rockwell.”
They traveled east beyond High Street, at the crest of Main Hill, and down the other side, where they crossed Cherry Street, then Ewing Street by the hospital, and headed out toward the eastern boundary of the city. They passed a few small manufacturing plants, and then the buildings gave way to fields. They stopped at an A&W Root Beer stand for lunch to compare notes.
After lunch, they retraced their path back through town. They were Episcopalians, so they wanted to look at the local Episcopal church. They parked the Plymouth near the corner of Broad and Wheeling streets in front of St. John’s, a beautiful redbrick structure built in English Gothic style. The still-new Hotel Lancaster rose up right across Broad Street. An antebellum mansion with Greek columns, the Georgian, stood on the opposite corner across Wheeling. Other grand houses stairstepped up Wheeling Hill, behind the church. The Georges had been there less than a day, but they already hoped Lancaster would be their town.
As soon as they returned to Columbus, Herb researched Lancaster’s businesses. For a town its size, Lancaster had many of them. But Anchor Hocking, with its two big plants—one on the west side, on Pierce Avenue, and one on the east side, on Ewing Street—and the downtown corporate headquarters that occupied a three-story brick building on the corner of Main and Broad, was by far the biggest: the rare Fortune 500 giant based in a small town.
Nancy used an old typewriter to clack out a letter on Herb’s behalf. She wrote of his pending graduation. She mentioned that he was a cheerleader for Ohio State. That carried weight then, as it would now. She asked for information and an interview. They didn’t have to wait long for a reply. All across the country, ex-GIs were graduating from college or landing jobs that paid union wages in factories. They were marrying, setting up house, and having babies. And they needed glass: glass dishes, glass tumblers, glass cookware, glass jars. They drank beer out of Anchor Hocking bottles. Anchor Hocking was ramping up its production and sales. After two interviews, Herb George signed on as the company’s newest salesman, starting at $50 a week.
Herb and Nancy rented a tidy little house on the west side, within walking distance of Plant 1. They paid $45 a month.
Nancy lived by an old motto: “You grow your seed where you are planted.” Lancaster proved to be rich soil. Unlike Sinclair Lewis’s fictitious Zenith—a larger city, more like Toledo—Lancaster didn’t have Babbitts. She found it to be an intimate, democratic place, where everyone knew one another, and people made judgments based not on class and material goods, but on time. A Lancaster saying held that if your grandfather wasn’t born there, you weren’t a local.
In the very next year, 1950, another major employer, Diamond Power, a maker of soot blowers for industrial boilers, opened a plant out east on Route 22. Diamond Power was not welcomed by Anchor Hocking. Cheap labor was part of Anchor Hocking’s business model, and Diamond Power represented competition for that labor. Anchor controlled—officially and unofficially—the newspaper, along with a good part of the city government, and it used that power to stall approvals. Diamond countered by siting its plant just outside the city limits. It brought in, or hired locally, hundreds of employees, including a new crop of executives that brought wives and children. Sixteen years later, Lancaster gained another significant employer when General Mills opened a plant near Diamond Power to make snacks like Bugles and Whistles.
At first, all the new hires bumped up against Lancaster’s clannishness. Even Nancy felt the chill of a cold shoulder, but she shrugged it off. She immersed herself in St. John’s and made new friends there. She got to know some of the other “Anchor wives.” Then, a member of an old Lancaster family stepped up to invite some of the newcomers to a tea—a mixer, really, for the new and the established. From then on, Lancaster became home. She embraced it, and felt embraced in return.
After a year or so, the Georges moved into another rental, by the fairgrounds. Herb’s career advanced, and children arrived. They bought a house, then another one in an even nicer neighborhood, near “Pill Hill,” where a lot of the doctors—more of them had come to town, too—had moved into modern homes close to the city’s hospital.
Through it all, Nancy threw herself into civic life. She was invited to join Twig 1 (of several Twigs), a women’s group with a mission to raise funds for the hospital. She volunteered as a “gray lady” in the hospital, working in a gray uniform at the reception desk, distributing newspapers to rooms, selling snacks.
She campaigned for school levies. When Nancy came to town, there were four main elementary schools, dating from the 1920s and 1930s and prosaically named West, North, East, and South. They were the result of a series of levies and bond issues passed by a previous generation. In 1938, despite the Great Depression and the possibility of a new world war, Lancaster’s voters passed a $268,000 school bond issue by 80 percent. Now, with more children and new neighborhoods, the city needed new grade schools. “And within not many years, we built all these new schools,” Nancy recalled. “We passed one bond levy after another, and we all didn’t have a lot of money, either, but we voted for them.”
She was a Cub Scout leader and a Girl Scout leader. In 1962, seven women formed the Fairfield Heritage Association to begin preserving Lancaster’s old buildings. Nancy joined. “We all worked on the Heritage,” Nancy said. The Sherman House, the Georgian, and other old buildings were rejuvenated. The association held a tour every year that attracted people from all around Ohio.
Nancy was not unique. She was one of scores of young women—the “Anchor wives,” but also the wives of men who worked at Diamond Power or Lancaster Glass (the renamed Lancaster Lens), doctors’ wives, lawyers’ wives—who poured effort into bettering the town.
“We were busy girls. Our husbands were gone all the time, so we didn’t have to have a big, fancy dinner every night. We had dinner, but the kids wanted applesauce and fish sticks or hamburgers, you know. So you just kept dinner warm in the oven, and the kids rode their bikes to [sports] practice; you didn’t take them. So there was time to be a mom, because there wasn’t as much expected, or we didn’t expect as much—I don’t know which.”
When the polio vaccine came out, the women ran inoculation drives. They agitated for improved sidewalks. They formed Parent League, an organization that attempted (and largely failed) to civilize children by teaching them how to play bridge and dance a waltz. The wives made Lancaster work.
Nancy enjoyed this life. She didn’t feel the nagging disquiet or disappointment described in 1963 by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. She was using her talents every day to build a community.
“I was happy with what I was doing,” she told me. “I loved being a mom. I didn’t mind keeping house and doing all the other things. And we did a lot of fun things.”
Parents left children with babysitters to attend house parties. They’d go out to dinner at the one good restaurant in town, Shaw’s, a steakhouse. Or they gathered at the country club. Far from the image of a country club in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Lancaster Country Club was pretty middle-class, and not restricted to WASPs. (Jews joined, but there were no African American members, a reflection, perhaps, of both unspoken policy and the fact that there were so few blacks in Lancaster.) You could join for $500 and small monthly dues. Many did: The country club soon developed a long waiting list for entry. The Georges joined in 1960.
“We’d be out at the [country club] pool and I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got all these hot dogs and stuff; why don’t you come over?’ And the other mothers would bring chips and baked beans and whatever they had, and we’d have an impromptu party with all the kids on a Sunday night. You,” Nancy said, looking at me, “were probably one of them.” (I was. I spent more than one sleepover at Kevin George’s house not sleeping in his backyard.)
If you weren’t part of the country club set, or even if you were, you’d go over to Old Bill Bailey’s—Benny Smith’s place on the west side—a couple of blocks from Plant 1, where Smith banged away on an out-of-tune upright piano and Anchor Hocking vice presidents and factory workers sang equally out of tune between gulps of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Stroh’s. If you weren’t at Old Bill Bailey’s, it was Charlie’s (later Leo’s Bier Haus) or the Fairview or the Pink Cricket or one of the lodges: the Elks, the Moose, the Eagles, the Knights of Columbus, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
When school was out, children went feral. Parents often had no idea exactly where their offspring were for hours at a time. Nobody worried unless a kid failed to show up for dinner.
When America passed through its tiki bar phase, a developer built Tiki Lanes off of Sheridan Drive, a South Seas–themed bowling alley decorated with palm trees and coconuts. The owner of Tiki Lanes built the biggest swimming pool in town, even bigger than old Miller Pool, in Miller Park on the west side. An Olympic-size job, it was next door to the bowling alley. You could spend the day there for fifty cents. On sunny summer days, the pools were packed with adolescents, their ears filled with AM radio, their loins filled with longing. On the Fourth of July, you’d climb Mount Pleasant to ooh and aah at the fireworks shot into the sky from the fairgrounds below. In the winter, if you were a kid, you’d ice-skate on Rising Park’s ponds, then warm yourself by the big log fire, your stomach filled with hot chocolate, your loins still filled with longing.
Almost every child attended the public schools or the tiny Catholic ones and still made friends across the wage spectrum, just as they had in 1947. They played pickup baseball games in parks, shot hoops on garage courts, swam on swim teams, played school sports.
Kids could stroll into Beiter and Flege Drug Store, in the middle of downtown, order a cherry Coke at the lunch counter, grab a pack of gum, and ask Mr. Flege to put the charges on their parents’ accounts.
All this, too, had become part of the Lancaster story, and Lancaster clung to this chapter with even greater ferocity than it had to Sherman. Brian Gossett heard it the whole time he was growing up. His mother, Melinda, was one of those teens who roasted and flirted on hot days at the Tiki pool. His father, Greg, grew up working-class but played and partied with friends like Bruce Barber, whose father, George, became CEO of Anchor Hocking in 1977.
This was Lancaster’s version of the American Promise, the ideal of today’s powerful nostalgia. Residents believed their town was the way America was supposed to be, the fulfillment of two hundred years of American struggle and progress, as embodied in Weber barbecue grills, Sea & Ski suntan lotion, good schools and a hospital, and children on Sting-Ray bikes in a friendly, civic-minded community of right-thinking people who were either moderate union Democrats or moderate business Republicans.
People worked hard, but most believed they’d made a fair deal. You could walk off the high school graduation stage on Saturday and walk into a plant on Monday, where you could stay for the next forty years. The company would make you a mechanic, a millwright, an electrician, a machine operator, a mold maker, a salesman. You’d do bone-wearying work, but there were the perks, too, like the company softball, baseball, golf, and bowling teams; the company choir and drama clubs; the insurance and pension.
You’d never get rich, and you’d bitch about management and fat cats, but you could buy a little house on the west side, then maybe over on the east side or out in the country, and maybe a boat to fish from on Buckeye Lake. You could get married. You could pay for your kids to attend decent state universities. Best of all, you could stay in the town where your kid’s fourth-grade teacher had taught you, too. If you bought in, obeyed the rules—spoken and unspoken—paid your taxes, loved your town and your country, that was the bargain on offer.
A lot of people made it. A 1982 Anchor Hocking employee newsletter noted retirements: Carlos Wolfe, furnace-room operator, forty-five years; Francis Danner, machine attendant, forty years; Roy Gwin, burn-off operator, forty-one years; Helen Savage, selector, forty-two years. Similar listings were published in 1972, 1962, 1952.
Lancaster wasn’t paradise. It had vices and scandals like any other small town. People drank hard—all those taverns weren’t there for nothing. Though it wasn’t talked about much, alcohol sometimes led to family abuse, dissolution, poverty.
Even after Diamond Power came to town, many workers were still paid less than they could make elsewhere. Forbes noted the low pay back in 1947 before dismissing the wages as a problem by mentioning the low cost of living in Lancaster.
For generations people called Lancaster “the whitest town in America.” That title may have been quite dubious, but people believed it, and many hoped it was true. Despite its pride in Sherman and the Union cause, Lancaster was streaked with Copperheads during the Civil War. The sentiment never disappeared: the segregationist George Wallace attracted 1,574 votes in the 1968 presidential election.
Lancaster did have a few African Americans living within its borders, but from the time the first black person arrived, they were treated as barely tolerated guests. In the 1920s, Lancaster fell into the grip of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan preaching its nativist, racist philosophy. The mayor and sheriff were both Klan members, and the city gave Klan ideas the force of law. The few black children attended the public schools, but they were permitted to swim in the Miller Park pool only on Fridays. Every Friday evening, the parks department drained the pool, then refilled it so whites would have “pure” water on Saturday.
Cross burnings were routine. They occurred even when Malcolm Forbes lived there in 1941—sometimes on the top of Mount Pleasant, where the flames could be seen all over town.
The handful of black Lancastrians understood their place. Most worked as domestics or laborers and didn’t try to take jobs normally filled by whites. So, with available jobs scarce, the resident blacks screened newcomers. If a black man wanted to move to Lancaster but didn’t have a job, he was told to move on. Whites told themselves (and some still do to this day) that blacks policed themselves in this way because they had good lives in Lancaster.
The Klan, fearing papist conspiracies, expended much of its energy harassing Catholics and anybody who served Catholic customers. When a young dentist named Hubert Eyman came to town to open a practice, he moved into an office in what later became the Anchor Hocking headquarters. The two men who occupied the offices on either side of Eyman were Klan members. One, Eyman later recalled, “was the main Gazebo or something” of the local chapter.
“Every time I stopped in the hall, they jumped me to join. I kept refusing, and finally they said, ‘We’ll fix you. We’ve got a blacklist. Believe it or not, we can get you on the Catholic blacklist.’ I said, ‘Well, you are going to have to do it, because I am not going to join.’ Well, apparently they did, because I had a few lean months. Then the truth came out, and I had quite an influx of Catholic patients. I still had some of them when I quit sixty years later.”
Lancaster could also be stifling, staid, and conformist in its sameness. It was no place to be different. Teenagers constantly whined that it was boring.
Even with its flaws, though, the Lancaster of Forbes, of Nancy, of Brian Gossett’s parents, really was about as close to the clichéd image of the all-American town as you could get, outside of a Hollywood movie set. In fact, it was a Hollywood movie set when the 1948 film Green Grass of Wyoming came to town to shoot harness-racing scenes at the fairgrounds. But contrary to how the Forbes story had it, industrialists didn’t create the community out of wise benevolence. In its zeal to defend the “American Way” against the New Deal, Forbes had ignored the fact that the Lancaster it celebrated had been difficult to build. It was the product of battles—real and metaphorical ones—and no small amount of intervention from the federal government, from the very New Deal B. C. Forbes hated.
* * *
In 1903, a young glassworker named Isaac J. (I. J., or Ike) Collins left his job at the Phoenix Glass Company, in Monaca, to take a new position as an assistant superintendent in the decorating department of the Ohio Flint Glass Company. He rented a room in a Lancaster boardinghouse called the Kreider.
Born in Maryland in 1874, Collins appears to have dropped out of school around the eighth grade. He worked locally in Maryland before moving to Pittsburgh, where he became a barber.
At the time Collins would have been living in Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie was consolidating his control of America’s steel industry. In 1892, goons from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency fought a pitched gun battle with striking union steelworkers at Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works, about six miles upriver from the city. Twelve people, Pinkertons and strikers alike, were killed. The Pinkertons retreated, but the victory proved Pyrrhic for the workers. Pennsylvania governor Robert Pattison sent the state militia to take over the works. Carnegie’s company then brought in strikebreakers and crushed the union.
One of I. J. Collins’s customers was a Pinkerton strikebreaker named Edward Good. The two became friendly.
Good later headed another Pittsburgh detective agency and became prominent in local politics. Drafts of a history written for Anchor Hocking’s fiftieth anniversary state that Collins worked as a Good public relations man, but this may have been an attempt to give Collins a business background he didn’t possess: In 1894 Collins went to work in the factory at the Phoenix Glass Company.
The glass business was booming at the start of the twentieth century, but it was also ruthlessly competitive, tenuous, even dangerous. Small companies popped up, served a local area for a few years, pocketed the profits, and shut down. Workers moved on. Some factories burned down. Others fell into receivership. By late 1905, it looked as though Ohio Flint, too, was beginning to fail.
Meanwhile, the Dickey-Sutton Carbon Company, which made the carbon rods used in early electric lights, was becoming enmeshed in Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting movement. Its Lancaster plant, called the Black Cat because so much carbon dust clung to its exterior, had fallen under the control of a trust engineered by the National Carbon Company of Cleveland. National, in turn, was accused of price fixing through its control of the U.S. market. Caught in the fallout, the Black Cat closed. The dark hulk sat empty on the west side.
As Ohio Flint’s prospects dimmed, Collins viewed the Black Cat as an opportunity. In late 1905, he and a group of partners that included Fred von Stein—Collins’s immediate boss in the Ohio Flint decorating department and subsequently the mayor of Lancaster at the time of the 1947 Forbes issue—pooled their money and bought the Black Cat for about $8,000. They incorporated the Hocking Glass Company with about $30,000 worth of stock. The balance came from Edward Good.
Collins and about a dozen employees melted the first glass in February 1906, inside a “day tank,” a glass furnace that was used only during the day. “The Hockin’,” as the company soon became known, made a profit in the first year, even as Ohio Flint Glass folded.
Collins approached Ohio Flint’s treasurer and receiver, a young man named Thomas Fulton, to negotiate the sale of some of the defunct company’s equipment, including a continuous tank. Fulton squeezed dimes out of Collins, who, figuring he could use a tough negotiator like Fulton, asked him to invest in the Hockin’ and join the company. When Fulton successfully tapped a relative for $5,000, he became one-quarter owner as well as secretary and treasurer. Collins owned another quarter; Good owned half.
After World War I, Collins hired a young military engineer named William Fisher, a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, to help run the plant and design machines and processes. Collins, Fulton, and Fisher formed a ruling triumvirate.
The glass business was a rough trade. That was true no matter where, but the Hockin’ earned a reputation as an especially tough place to work. Though the company made a profit every year, Collins was a stingy paymaster. The men worked twelve-hour shifts. If they fainted, their coworkers dragged them outside to lie under the shade of a tree. Fresh air was scarce inside the Black Cat. In the winter, anywhere other than the furnace room could be so cold that workers wore three or four layers of clothing. All through the year they wore extra layers in the hot end to protect themselves from the flames and heat.
Ellsworth Boyer, employee number 87, “went in” in the early 1920s. (In the same way coal miners talk of going into a mine, company workers still say “went in” when they talk about starting their glassmaking jobs.) Boyer started at 27.5 cents per hour, grinding stoppers for perfume bottles. Then he sandblasted streetlight globes—until one of Collins’s first employees, John Behrens, approached him.
“He come out and said, ‘You wanna work in the furnace room?’ I said I did, because furnace-room men made more money. It was a real hot day, and I didn’t know whether I could stand it or not, but, God willing, I stood it right on through forty-three years.”
W. Robert Taylor quit school and started working at the Hockin’ in the spring of 1924. He worked five nine-hour days and one half-day every week. He once worked three days and nights with no sleep: “We just kept a-goin’.”
Alice McAnespie’s brother, Charles, worked at the Hockin’ for decades. She remembered an especially hot summer watching as “that ambulance passed that door so many times, hauling them to the hospital. They just dropped in their tracks.”
Ollie Smith was hired on in the early 1930s, mainly because he was a good baseball player. By then the Hocking Glass Company fielded a team in an industrial league.
“Leon Miesse, my captain in [World War I], was head mechanic over the repair shop there. I was working for him. I was out there about five or six weeks, I guess, and I said, ‘Cap,’ I said, ‘thirty cents an hour is not very much money.’ He said, ‘Well, what would you get if you wasn’t working, Ollie?’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t get anything.’ He said, ‘Thirty cents an hour’s pretty good wages.’ Well, anyhow, Miesse said, ‘Mr. Fisher’s up there in the plant someplace. He’ll come down in a little bit.’ I said okay. I come down in the tool shop to get something to work with upstairs in the press room, and so, just as I was going in the door, [Fisher] was comin’ out, and he says, ‘Well, Ollie, when did you start to work here?’ I says, ‘Four or five weeks ago.’ He says, ‘Oh, I’m so glad, and you’re going to play ball with us.’ I says, ‘Yes, I hope so, Mr. Fisher.’ I said, ‘By the way, I’m only getting thirty cents an hour here. Could you see if I could get me more money?’ He said, ‘Well, Ollie,’ and he began to jerk at the lapels on his coat, and at the bottom of his coat. And just there, Johnny Noice come along, and he says, ‘How do, Mr. Fisher?’ ‘Hi, Johnny.’ ‘Hi, Ollie.’ ‘Hi, John.’ And when he got by, Mr. Fisher says, ‘Now, there’s Johnny Noice. Now, he’s been with this company when it was down there along the railroad on Maple Street under Mr. Collins.’ He says, ‘He’s only makin’ thirty-five cents an hour. I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘That’s all he gets is thirty-five cents an hour.’ I says, ‘Well, by that, then, old Smith’s doomed; he won’t get no more money.’ He says, ‘No, I don’t think you will, Ollie.’”
In 1918, the average manufacturing wage in the United States was fifty-three cents per hour. By 1935 it was fifty-eight cents per hour.
Working conditions were safer at the Godman Shoe factories, but the pay was low there, too. Employees, many of them women, worked from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, as well as every Saturday morning. Around 1918, an edge trimmer made about five or six cents per dozen pairs.
Industrialists could get away with the low pay and lousy conditions because the manual labor force in and around Lancaster had already been leading hard lives. Many were from subsistence-farming families. Others had been draymen, brickmakers, coal miners. They had little education. They were poor.
Unions formed to protect workers like the ones in Lancaster. Forbes traced unionism in the glass plants to the 1930s, but the American Flint Glass Workers’ Union (the “Flints”) was in Lancaster as early as 1904, at the Lancaster Glass Company plant, on the east side of town on Ewing Street, by some railroad tracks.
Contrary to Forbes magazine’s comforting assurance that Lancaster was an island free of leftists, the early Flints were militantly socialist. As a Lancaster Flint wrote in the national union’s magazine, “The question in my mind is ‘What must be done?’ Has it come to a time when labor cannot protect itself in a peaceable manner? Has it come to a time when the government will stand and see the capitalist of this country drive little children into starvation in order to force the fathers to work for a wage which they cannot exist under? I say ‘Yes.’”
The Flints were inside the Hocking Glass Company within a year of its founding, but the union had little power. Collins could do most anything he wanted—and he did. When a dispute arose in 1911, Collins hired scab labor from out of town. The Hocking’s abrasive relationship with the union was a topic of regular discussion at national conventions. Flints even coined a phrase for Hocking’s reputation as a hard place to work. When a union brother would leave for some other company, they’d say he’d been “scratched by the Black Cat.”
With the passage in 1933 of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, labor in Lancaster, as well as across the nation, seized its opportunity. The NRA’s Section 7(a) forced company owners to recognize a right to join independent unions, to bargain collectively, to receive a minimum wage. So many union locals organized that, by 1934, the Lancaster Gazette felt the need to print this advisory: “Due to the many unions being formed, and the frequency of meetings, it is impossible for the newspaper to send a reporter to these meetings.” Union leaders joined in a Central Labor Body to work collectively across industries. Collins still hated unions. But, forced by the new national law, Fisher met with Central Labor Body leaders working on behalf of Hocking employees. Relations between union and management improved.
Godman Shoe took the opposite approach. Godman’s Lancaster chief, William Miller, the man who donated Miller Park and Miller Pool to the city, refused to yield.
The union struck, and struck again. During the unrest, a Godman supervisor was shot. A truck driver was roughed up. Six Lancaster shoe workers went to state prison for the assault. In 1937, frustrated and facing financial setbacks, Godman sold its factories to the Irving Drew Shoe Company, which had moved from Portsmouth, Ohio, after that city suffered Ohio River floods.
The Supreme Court overturned the NRA in 1935, but that same year, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the Wagner Act. The law expanded upon the labor provisions of the NRA. Though still low by national standards, wages in Lancaster rose and working conditions improved. Main Street stores Forbes had profiled were supported by those factory workers’ wages. Fiery calls for socialist revolts ceased. The industries kept growing and kept making profits.
The same year Godman cashed out, the Hocking Glass Company merged with a New York outfit called Anchor Cap and Closure, a container-making company. By 1946, the year before the Forbes issue, Anchor Hocking reported consolidated net sales of $64,399,742 ($837 million in 2016 dollars). The company had its own natural gas supply division, Gas Transport, Inc. It sponsored one of the nation’s most popular radio shows, Casey, Crime Photographer, on CBS, and in 1950 invented late-night television with Broadway Open House, an NBC show hosted by Morey Amsterdam.
It had plants across the country, eventually including the old Phoenix Glass in Monaca, where I. J. Collins started in the glass business. Its container division supplied beer bottles, liquor bottles, peanut butter jars, baby food jars, coffee jars. The company’s Jade-ite and Fire-King brands competed with Pyrex baking dishes. When you filled up at a Texaco station or opened a new bank account, you got a free tumbler made by Anchor Hocking—showing the company’s little anchor at its bottom. Your electric meter was covered by an Anchor Hocking glass dome. Millions ate off of Anchor Hocking dishes and stubbed out their after-dinner cigarettes in Anchor Hocking ashtrays. “Li’l ol’ Lancaster” was a national player.
Over the following decades, company and town developed a deep symbiosis. With the exception of the scattered plant managers and some sales chiefs, every executive resided in Lancaster—Collins and Fisher lived on Mulberry Hill, right in town. Especially in the case of Anchor Hocking, the people of Lancaster came to see themselves as owners as much as any big shareholder was.
On the night of March 6, 1924, the Black Cat was destroyed by fire. (One man, Merrill Deaver, was killed. A hundred robed and hooded Klansmen presided at his graveside funeral.) There was doubt that the Hockin’ would ever reopen—the plant was insured, but the loss wasn’t entirely covered. So the chamber of commerce offered free land and buildings and Lancaster residents dug into their own pockets to help raise funds—as if the Hocking were a charity and not a private company.
When it merged with Anchor Cap and Closure and went public, new board members felt the combined company should be headquartered in New York rather than in a small Ohio town. Collins, Fisher, and Fulton resisted. They loved Lancaster, too (and enjoyed their control there). The board reluctantly agreed to stay in Lancaster on the condition that the town build a hotel for visiting businessmen. So, in 1938, local townsmen, including Collins, created the Community Hotel Company of Lancaster. They sold stock at $100 per share. In fifteen days—in the midst of the Great Depression—the people of Lancaster raised $227,000. When the Hotel Lancaster opened in 1940, it was considered the best hotel of its size in the Midwest.
Heeding the campaign slogan “Good Will for the Ill,” Lancaster voted in 1914 to tax itself so it could build a public hospital. But by midcentury a new facility was badly needed to serve Lancaster’s growing population: New doctors were refusing to hang their shingles in town. One young doctor, Gordon Snider, turned to an Anchor Hocking executive named Roger Hetzel.
“He was very community-minded,” Snider told me, “so I said, ‘You know, you, Anchor, if you’re going to recruit anybody, you’re going to need good schools, you’re gonna need a good hospital.” In 1970, Hetzel and Snider organized a meeting in the hotel’s Jadite Room. Anchor executives, a couple of doctors, and Boo Miller, a prominent local attorney who’d long represented Anchor Hocking, agreed to mount a bond-issue campaign with Anchor Hocking’s full support. The bond issue passed, and the hospital was rebuilt.
In the 1970s, when the company was hit by a national shortage of cullet—scrap glass that is critical to making new ware—Anchor Hocking put out a call. Families loaded their cars with every bottle, jar, and tumbler they could spare. Lines of cars stretched across Pierce Avenue at Plant 1, and down Ewing Street at Plant 2.
When the Flints struck—and there were a couple of angry strikes—Lancaster rooted for both sides at once. Residents knew what working in a glass plant could be like, because they’d done it, or their fathers, mothers, or children had. On the other hand, they knew how important Anchor, Anchor executives, and Anchor wives were to the life of the town.
Anchor’s leaders—and the leaders of Lancaster’s other industries, too—usually reciprocated the devotion. They gave land or money or both to charities and civic organizations.
When William Fisher died in 1970, his widow gave $400,000 to build a new Catholic high school. I graduated from William V. Fisher Catholic. Today, the Lancaster High School football team plays on Fulton Field.
Some concluded that Collins was a hard man—true—and that Lancaster hadn’t gotten into his bones the way it had so many others. He had interests elsewhere. He owned race horses and spent much of his later years in Florida, where he was a regular at the tracks.
But still, he never really left. Even as a very old man, Collins liked to sit at a back table of the country club bar, where he was a somewhat imposing presence. (I met him there. When I was introduced, he shook my hand and said, “Hello, young man.” I was about eight years old.) He did give some land to the community, though the donation wasn’t publicized. Once, as he was being driven down 33, he looked out the car window at the passing farmland and sighed, “It sure is fair fields.” The skinflint reputation persisted, though, stoked by a well-known Lancaster tale: Not long before his death, in 1975, just before turning 101, his Lancaster attorney pointed out to Collins that, unlike other top executives around town, he’d left no provision for the city in his will. Collins brushed off the suggestion. “I gave them all those jobs,” he countered.