Glass House Read online

  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 i
nterview. 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 int
o 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.