Glass House Page 5

  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. Th
ough 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 Ancho
r 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.