'The Real Mayberry' uses Mount Airy's pop-culture image to tell the promise and problems of small-town living

Bill Hayes in Mount Airy, with Blue Ridge outcrop Pilot Mountain (inspiration for TV's Mount Pilate) in distance. (Daily Yonder)

Mount Airy, N.C., population about 10,000, was the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in "The Andy Griffith Show," starring its most famous native. On the show, neighbors were neighborly, and the town's problems could be solved in a half hour, but the reality is different. With his new documentary "The Real Mayberry," Mount Airy native Bill Hayes takes us beyond the pat answers of a TV show and digs into the problems and promise of living in a small town.

"But like any honest look at small-town America, the engaging film has no pat answers. What it does have are the right questions: What is special about our place? What is here that we can build on? How do we create opportunity while preserving what we love? And how do we pass on our town to a new generation that has new ideas?" Tim Marema writes for The Daily Yonder. "Your hometown may not have inspired Andy Griffith, but we bet it has more than a little in common with this former mill town on the North Carolina Piedmont." Mount Airy and Surry County have struggled with the decline of three major industries: furniture, textiles and tobacco, and have in recent years embraced the Mayberry identity to attract tourists.

"Like Mount Airy itself, Hayes’ documentary uses the pop-culture notoriety of Mayberry to create a connection," Marema reports. "Once you’re inside the city limits, the viewer is prepared to have a much deeper conversation about the future of small-town America." Hayes told Marema that he made the documentary because "Our country is built on small towns in rural America and I feel like they're misunderstood and don't get the proper nurturing."

Journalist's book details Appalachian furniture maker's fight to keep jobs from being outsourced

Beth Macy

Inspired by a story she wrote in 2012 for The Roanoke Times, journalist Beth Macy has taken the idea one step further and turned it into a book, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town. In April Columbia University gave Macy a $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, which is "given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern," Carole Tarrant reports for the Times. Macy left the paper in May to work on a second book.

The book, set to be published Tuesday, July 15, centers on John Bassett, who lives and works in Henry County, Virginia, an area where 19,000 jobs have been outsourced, Ralph Berrier reports for the Times. Macy's story chronicles "how the brash, cocky, opinionated Bassett had been cast aside by his own family and was left with one small factory in Galax, Va., the Vaughan-Bassett company. From that humble outpost, he launched the largest anti-dumping petition against Chinese manufacturers—and he won. He pumped the money back into his company and added jobs."

Macy told Berrier, "The story has everything. He’s a rich Bassett, he’s a fighter who took on China and he won in the International Court of Trade and he’s from Galax. It’s a family-feud story, and it’s the story of every factory that closed in America, from textiles to whatever. I said, 'I have to go meet him.'" (Read more)
  
New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin says Factory Man "is loaded with colorful minutiae . . . but it also seriously traces an important arc of regional decline, as the conditions that once made Appalachia ideal furniture country begin to fail." (Read more)

Kirkus Reviews says: "The author’s brightly written, richly detailed narrative not only illuminates globalization and the issue of offshoring, but succeeds brilliantly in conveying the human costs borne by low-income people displaced from a way of life—i.e., factory jobs that their Appalachian families had worked for generations." (Read more)

UPDATE, July 15: Macy was interviewed on "Fresh Air." To hear it, click here.

Silver lining of expensive oil: Manufacturing jobs return to U.S., even to Piedmont furniture belt

Globalization, which wiped out hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in rural America, depends partly on low shipping costs. With oil prices at $125 a barrel, the shipping has become so expensive that some of those jobs are coming back. "Globe-spanning supply chains — Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago — make less sense today," Larry Rohter writes in The New York Times.

We took note in May when Swedish furniture giant Ikea opened its first American factory in Danville, Va. Today, Rohter notes that and says furniture makers in the area, "where the industry had all but been wiped out," are adding jobs. “There’s just a handful of us left, but it has become easier for us domestic folks to compete,” Steven Kincaid of Kincaid Furniture in Hudson, N.C., told Rohter. The company is a division of La-Z-Boy, which started a new line in the Piedmont area this spring.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, told Rohter. “That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.” (Read more)

What goes around comes around: Globalization now helps Danville and parts of Southside Va.

Danville and much of the rest of Southside Virginia declined economically along with the linchpins of the Piedmont: tobacco, textiles and furniture, all hurt by globalization, especially the latter two. Dan River Fabrics (in photo by Misscharo) is down to 50 employees from its former 15,000. But now, "The powerful global economic forces that swept away thousands of jobs over the past two decades are now working in Danville's favor," and for other towns in the region, The Washington Post reports. "New companies are moving in to breathe life into once-tired economies across the industrial corridor in central and southwestern Virginia and in Southside, a strip of generally poor counties in the south-central part of the state."

Ylan Q. Mui reports for the Post, "The weakening dollar has made the United States more attractive to foreign investors. Companies from England, Canada and India have recently opened operations or expanded in Danville." The latest is Swedwood, the manufacturing subsidiary of the IKEA home-products chain, and one reason is rising oil prices. "Shipping Ikea's popular Expedit bookshelves to the United States, for example, costs more than it does to make them, said Joseph Roth, the company's U.S. public affairs manager," Mui writes. To get the plant, which is supposed to eventually employ 700, "The city paved its entry with new facilities, secured permits and state Tobacco Commission grants" -- money from Virginia's share of states' 10-year-old settlement with cigarette manufacturers.

At Swedwood's log-cutting (IKEA's version of a ribbon-cutting) last week, Gov. Tim Kaine said, “Sometimes people hear about globalism and think ‘what are we going to lose next? Globalism is also about winning, and so many of the announcements we’ve done here in Danville are foreign companies wanting to come to the United States. …There isn’t a reason we have to be afraid of globalism.”For the story by Sarah Arkin of the Danville Register & Bee, click here.

Danville still has a long way to go, the newspaper said in a May 1 editorial: "The best long-term solution is raising education levels and worker skills, which helps people get better-paying jobs that offer health insurance, which leads to more preventative care and the faster, more intensive treatment of disease, which typically leads to longer, healthier lives." Noting a recent report that people in the region are living shorter lives, the editorial concluded, "Declining life expectancies are another result of the long slumber that Danville has only recently started to awaken from. If we understand how we wound up with these problems, it’s easier to get started on the solutions." (Read more)

The local hero is retiring City Manager Jerry Gwaltney, who also successfully pushed Danville as a regional shopping hub for several rural counties. A shopping center that will employ 1,300 to 1,600 is under construction. A list of Gwaltney's successes ran in a Register & Bee story on his retirement. Writing in the Daily Yonder, Danville native John Borden asks, "Can Danville as a whole rebuild its economic life and energize its educational and social life after seeing its textile- and tobacco-town identity definitively become part of the historic past? Is there a unique next chapter? If not, does this mean that the city over time becomes just another distribution center of the national consumer culture, helping to deliver what the focus groups say is good to every corner of our country. Will people finally speak 'proper' English and then have nothing to say?' (Read more)

Globalization, housing bust, changing tastes make historic bad news for hardwood mills, landowners

"Global economics and the housing bust are throwing a relentless string of problems at the mom-and-pop sawmills and logging companies that make up much of the nation's hardwood lumber industry," much of it in economically struggling Appalachia, writes Tim Huber of The Associated Press, reporting on the fallout of furniture-factory closures and a change in homeowners' tastes. (AP photo by Randy Snyder: Harley Yoder feeds boards into a laser-guided saw at Twin River Hardwoods Inc. in Southside, W.Va.)

The decline in lumber production is historic, U.S. Forest Service economist Bill Luppold told Huber. "I don't even think the numbers demonstrate how bad it is," Luppold said. "We haven't seen this amount of decline year in and year out since the early part of the [20th] Century." In 1999, the industry produced 12.6 billion board feet; this year, Luppold expects 10.5 billion. "Timber jobs nationwide fell almost 13 percent to 8,790 in 2006 from 9,910 in 2000," Huber notes. "The number of logging equipment operators has declined more than 17 percent to 28,300 in 2006 from 34,180 in 2000."

As if globalization and a housing bust weren't enough, homeowners have lost their taste for red oak, "the most common hardwood in much of Appalachia" and Arkansas, Huber reports. "Now, lighter- grained species, especially maple and poplar, are in vogue," and the price for red oak lumber has fallen 35 percent. That translates to lower timber prices for woodland owners.

Virginia Tech professor Urs Buehlmann told Huber that sawmills in Western Europe are surviving by getting into manufacturing of made-to-order furniture and cabinets. "They're pretty much customizing the kitchen to your specifications," he said. "I strongly believe this will be the guide." (Read more)

Another Appalachian furniture plant bites the dust

Another furniture factory in Southern Appalachia has closed, this one a leader in "a controversial but ultimately successful campaign to persuade the federal government to investigate the pricing of wooden bedroom furniture pouring in from China," says The Roanoke Times.

The furniture makers proved "Chinese manufacturers were violating anti-dumping trade laws by exporting furniture at illegally low prices," and federal agencies imposed fees on the imports and distributing the money to the American complainants, Duncan Adams reports. Vaughan Furniture of Galax, Va. (near center of Encarta map), got $3.3 million over several years, enough to keep it going -- but in the end, not enough to keep it open. It employs 275 people and is the last factory of a company that once had five.

Founded in 1923, "The company expects to employ about 35 people as it moves forward as an importer, distributor and supplier to furniture retailers," Adams writes. "Vaughan Furniture will apply for federal benefits available to workers whose job loss can be attributed to foreign competition. The Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits can, among other things, help pay for job training, provide relocation allowances, extend payment of unemployment benefits and provide a tax credit for health insurance coverage costs."

The story is "Breaking News" on the Web site of the weekly Galax Gazette. The closing is the latest in a series on the Blue Ridge Plateau and adjoining Piedmont of Virginia and North Carolina. Adams calls the toll in the Old Dominion: "In 2007, Hooker Furniture in Martinsville, as well as Stanley Furniture, Ridgeway Furniture and Bassett Furniture Industries, all in Henry County, each closed a manufacturing plant, with related layoffs." (Read more)