Glass House Read online

  One day while John was sitting in the living room, he heard some sounds outside. He picked up his semiautomatic and charged out of the house, waving his gun at what turned out to be a family trying to find its way across the river to the park nearby.

  “One cop that come down here and stuff … Me and Wendy had those Nextel phones … two-way, that was like walkie-talkies? I was in here, and she was in the bathroom. Heard all these sirens. What in the hell’s going on? I go ahead, and thought I heard my phone chirp, so I picked my phone up and say, ‘Hey, Wendy, where you at? What’s goin’ on?’ She wouldn’t answer me. I throwed the phone back down and took one step outside that door, and a cop had a .45 to my head.” Aggravated menacing with a handgun was not a charge many employers were willing to overlook.

  Their money troubles were amplified by a debt Wendy owed to one of the many car-title and payday lending offices that had sprung up all over town. John paid off Wendy’s debt, but that left them short and owing other debts. A minister suggested they contact a new service in town called Loving Lending, a bank-backed, church-based charity set up to combat the high-interest money shops. Loving Lending helped pay their debts in return for a commitment to a program of financial counseling and saving strategies. They had just completed the program. Both were hopeful they could now catch a break.

  * * *

  Brian, the budding glassman, grew up in this new Lancaster. He made $14.55 an hour at Anchor Hocking. As of his late November paycheck, he had taken home a little over $21,000 in 2014. He had no pension plan, no 401(k). He lived with his parents. He didn’t see any way he could avoid living with his parents next year, too, and the year after that. “I’m poor as shit,” he said. His younger brother, Mike, was a full-time student at Ohio University, down in Athens, but he came home nearly every weekend to work at a Kroger gas station. Mike was Brian’s best friend, but Brian rooted for him to become the first in his family to graduate from college, knowing that a degree would keep Mike out of Lancaster. Brian fantasized about starting a skateboard graphics business with Mike. When Brian brought it up, Mike smiled, nodded, said nothing. He couldn’t wait to leave Lancaster behind. He wasn’t sure where he would go, but it would be far away. Maybe Europe. He’d never been to Europe, but from where he stood in the glass booth of a gas station in Lancaster, Ohio, Europe looked better than America.

  A few people over forty admitted that the whole town felt defeated. “Lancaster’s been beaten up,” Dave Bailey, the police chief, told me. Most, though, tended to avoid ruminating on Brian’s Lancaster. Sure, they knew that Anchor Hocking had been slipping down a long, embarrassing slide for more than a generation. Few saw any point in trying to understand why. Some even used the past tense when talking about the company—“When Anchor was here…”—though Anchor was still there. Others regarded it as a shaggy uncle living out of a 1978 LeBaron, the relative who is no longer discussed at Thanksgiving. Anchor Hocking had become an uncomfortable metaphor.

  They viewed Carly and Mark and Lloyd and the Oatneys in the same way they viewed Anchor Hocking. They were aware. It was a small town; they couldn’t help but be aware. But they found consolation in thinking how aberrant it all was, how it wasn’t the real Lancaster. Possessing the memories of Brian’s parents, not the memories of Brian, they grasped at every positive development to support their view that one of these days Lancaster would return to normal.

  The vacant restaurant over on Cherry Street was getting a makeover. Billy and Lorena Smith, who’d run another little place everybody liked before they moved to Florida, were back. They hoped to have the Cherry Street Pub open by the end of January. That would be the third new place to open in the space of a year. And Paul Hoch had bought the Pink Cricket, a tavern/restaurant on East Main, a Lancaster landmark since Prohibition.

  Downtown, Brad and Penny Hutchinson, who owned a heavy-equipment-leasing business called Company Wrench, bought the Mithoff Building, an abandoned nineteenth-century wreck in such disrepair it was falling into itself. Two old buildings had been gutted by fire a few years back, leaving a big gap in the middle of downtown. The city wanted to yank the Mithoff in order to avoid a similar episode. But the Hutchinsons promised to spend whatever it took to resurrect it. Construction was about to begin on new elementary schools. Some of the schools they would replace were nearly a century old. The new ones would have the latest technology, which was thought to be very important.

  And Lancaster still had what it had always had: the Fairfield County Fair, the Lancaster Festival—a music and art fair held every July since 1985—William Tecumseh Sherman’s house, a decorative arts museum, and a new glass museum. Lancaster had beautiful antebellum homes.

  Brian and Mike didn’t buy into any of this optimism. They watched their parents struggle to provide a middle-class life for them after their father, Greg, lost his job at Anchor. Greg found another job with a company in Columbus, but their mother, Melinda, had to go to work, too, as a customer service rep at the Anchor Hocking distribution center. Brian hated that his mother was forced to work. To him, that was one more piece of evidence that The System had failed.

  He’d been a skate punk all through high school and for some years after, and the music and the ideas still appealed to him. A thrash punk/ska outfit, Leftöver Crack, was a longtime favorite band of his, for lyrics like this from their song “Nazi White Trash”:

  eugenics, social darwinism, an excuse for yer positioning

  Brian liked many kinds of music, as long as it had integrity. Lately he’d been raiding his father’s large collection of LPs and had come to appreciate funk from the 1970s, rhythm and blues, classic rock, soul—sounds that almost nobody he knew, other than his father and sometimes Mike, appreciated.

  At the moment, he was especially taken with Harry Nilsson. He thought Nilsson’s “Me and My Arrow” was brilliant. Nilsson’s song was tonic for a broken heart. Brian’s girlfriend Renee had been his best friend, aside from Mike. But she wrecked a car in 2013, and that precipitated questions of her own about where she was going, or, more accurately, not. Her decision to leave was hard—at least, Brian believed her when she told him so. She joined the air force, and they rarely communicated after that.

  Renee was still a raw subject. Brian would tell a story and, in the course of it, would say her name without really thinking about it, because Renee was part of most every story. He’d stop himself with a pause while he chased away the thought of her, then pick up the story further down the timeline, as if he were reading a document poorly redacted by the FBI.

  One gray day I rode with Brian and Mike out to a spot they called Hilltop. It was warmer than usual for December, about forty-five, a good day to work on a project Brian had started the previous summer. We piled into Brian’s white Ford F-150. He’d bought the truck used, and it needed a little work, but it was fine for hauling rocks.

  More than a hundred years ago, a Gossett ancestor owned land by the banks of Clear Creek, about ten miles southeast of town. The creek burbled through a hollow in the Appalachian foothills. The ancestor farmed along the bottomland at the base of a wooded hill. Almost all the acreage around had long since become a nature park, but the Gossetts still possessed a small inholding, Hilltop, crowning the hill. The land wasn’t good for much except enjoying the woods and hunting deer. Brian had decided to start building a cabin on it. So far, he’d laid out the beginnings of a sandstone foundation made from rocks he’d collected. He’d cleared a few shrubby trees. He hoped to make good progress over the coming year. Maybe, he said, he’d become a back-to-the-land hillbilly.

  We drove south, out Broad Street, across the railroad tracks, across the Hocking River—about five yards wide there—and veered onto BIS Road. The road was named after the Boys Industrial School (called the Ohio Reform Farm at its founding in 1856), a reformatory that in 1980 was turned into a state prison for adults, the Southeastern Correctional Institution. Everyone still called it BIS.

  Brian slowed his truck to navigate the t
wists in the road as it wound through the prison campus. Mike looked out at the razor wire and asked Brian if he thought they knew anybody behind the fences.

  They couldn’t be sure, but it was possible. They talked about friends who’d overdosed, about the girl who appeared in a homemade porno for her drug dealer boyfriend, about the tweakers in town. It wasn’t like he and his friends all came from lousy homes, either. His own parents cared. The parents of his friends cared.

  “But they don’t want to know how it really is,” Brian interjected. “Dad sort of gets it, but Mom, she wants to stick her head in the sand and act like it’s not there.”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed. “It’s way different from when they were kids.”

  That night, after we cut some trees and piled a ton of rocks, Brian, Mike, and I hung out in the studio listening to a bootleg Sex Pistols album and rummaging through Brian’s art. Brian lit a cigarette and stood by the open door to smoke it, because he hated the smell of cigarettes. While blowing a cloud out into the cold night air, he spotted a friend, Aaron Shonk, over by Leo’s. Aaron was one leaf on a complex Lancaster family tree; there were scores of Shonks around town. He was in a funky folk-bluegrass band, the Shonk Brothers, with his brother and a couple of other guys. He was headed to practice when Brian called out to him by raising a fist in the air and shouting, “White power!” It was a joke he and Aaron had been acting out for years to make fun of people who said asshole stuff like “White power,” like those guys from the Klan who had come through Lancaster a few months before and handed out flyers to kids. The flyers had lollipops attached.

  Aaron and a friend walked up the shaky stairs that clung to the outside of the garage. Aaron was a good-looking young man with a black beard. He was so tall, he nearly had to hunch over to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. Brian brought out three bottles: Jägermeister, Bushmills, and Johnnie Walker Black Label. He showed off some stencil work. “I have so many projects I wished I’d finished,” he said.

  Brian sometimes joked about being ADD. Maybe he was, a little. But his self-diagnosis was more fecklessness than ADD. He’d gone to a technical college in Nelsonville, a town to the southeast, to study music engineering in an effort to combine his attraction to craftsmanship with his love of music, but he didn’t complete the courses. He took some art classes at the Lancaster branch of Ohio University, but he stopped attending. His relationship with Renee had fizzled. He could pound out some good beats on the drums, but he lacked follow-though. He hated his inability to complete things. He felt pressure to pick a path in life and stick with it, but what path? Where could he fit, find meaning, not sell out to The System?

  He held up a piece of stencil work, admiring it. He’d done a good job on the image. It depicted a dandelion, the flower head turned to puffs of dry seed and tiny puffs flying off into the air, where, far away, they morphed into birds.

  Anchor Hocking was not going to be his longtime career, he said. He was sure of that much. Five years, maybe, then he was gone. But he also liked to say of the H-28, “For eight hours, she’s my bitch. I run her. Sometimes she runs me.” He boasted that he made some of the best ware of any operator. So I asked him to show me how he worked.

  He stood up, comparing the machine to the size of the room. He stretched his arms out wide and shuffled around an imaginary H-28. Brian had played JV football and was still a little stocky, but he was light on his feet. We all watched as he stood on his tiptoes and pantomimed removing a mold. The imaginary H-28 rotated, with Brian following it, narrating every maneuver with increasing urgency and passion, still on his toes, gliding around and around, his hands a blur. He danced like Astaire.

  TWO

  The All-American Town

  1947–1982

  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.