The Company Town (9 page)

It took seven more years to negotiate, but in 1999 Pacific Lumber sold to the U.S. Interior Department what remained of the old-growth-rich Headwaters Forest—about 7,500 acres—for $480 million in federal and state funds. Then in 2007 Maxxam filed for bankruptcy. Pacific Lumber was taken over in June 2008 by yet another group of outsiders, the Donald Fisher family, owners of The Gap, Banana Republic, and the Mendocino Redwood Co. They reorganized Pacific Lumber's mill-and-forest holdings as Humboldt Redwood Co. Mendocino partner and former PALCO creditor the Marathon Structured Finance Fund now owned the town and all of its buildings. Pacific Lumber—the company and the all-embracing way of life—ceased to exist.

Humboldt's owners have pledged to take a conservative approach to logging, letting the forest regenerate at twice the rate it harvests. Environmentalists, who point to Mendocino Redwood's Forest Stewardship Council-awarded green seal, say the new owners are credible.

Scotia is now home to what the company calls a “state-of-the-art sawmill,” where computers position logs for cuts that command the best prices and that match consumer demand. The cut lumber is also graded and sorted by computer. Some of Pacific Lumber's paternalistic policies, including its college scholarships, are still in place. But as of 2009, there are only a few hundred workers—more than one round of layoffs has hit the workforce—and Marathon's attempts to sell parts of the town are a source of unease. The grand Scotia Inn, with its wood-relief carvings and twenty-two cozy rooms, has been assigned a price tag of $2.5 million. A major obstacle to the sale of Scotia real estate: The entire four hundred-
acre town exists as one tax parcel and must undergo various zoning and environmental hurdles before it can be subdivided.

With all of that, many locals are relieved to see the back of Maxxam and are hopeful about the future. The company's new owners “may put the town back to where it used to be, honoring its roots,” butcher Mel Berti told the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
. “People here are concerned about the roots.”
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In Pullman, the defining characteristic proved to be its restrictions. For Hershey, it was a benevolent one-man rule joined with an increasingly quaint philanthropy. And at Scotia, a paternalistic legacy gave way to a ruthless late-twentieth-century capitalism defined on Wall Street. All three—and Lowell, for that matter—shared one thing: an initial vision and daily existence articulated and elaborated by a capitalist father figure. Each place outgrew that plan. Today, Pullman is a down-at-the-heels urban area, Hershey features a diverse service economy that includes a Disneyland-like theme park, and Scotia is an isolated but lovely town in the woods struggling to maintain its legacy.

No discussion of ideal company towns would be complete if it failed to include a singular type: the domicile of the high-tech company. Such places include Schenectady, New York, long associated with General Electric; Redmond, Washington, home to Microsoft—and Corning, New York, home base for Corning Inc. Neither a purpose-built model town like Pullman and Hershey nor a single-enterprise village like Scotia, Corning developed as a country crossroads and railroad town, with a growing concentration of glassmaking enterprises. As Corning Inc. became the area's preeminent glass concern, it emerged as the town's benefactor—and savior. Its philosophy was also different from those of the three other enterprises in this chapter—a modern “corporate welfarism” that, executives said, in no way conflicted with the company's primary goal of making money.

Like most high-tech outfits, Corning Inc. came of age in the 1940s and 1950s. The specialty-glass maker has experienced an unsteady, boom-and-bust-prone life ever since. Perhaps its happiest period began in 1959, with the release of Corning Ware, the Sputnik-age cooking products
made from a material also used in rocket nose cones. The decade that followed would be an unusual period of prosperity and self-assurance for Corning Glass Works, as it was known until 1989, since the company enjoyed near-monopoly control of the highly lucrative television-tube market. Further high-tech glass products such as fiber-optic cable would follow. During the 1960s and 1970s, the company made its most pronounced commitment to the town of Corning, New York.

Corning Inc. traces its existence back to the mid-nineteenth century, and especially to 1868, when the proprietor of the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works, Amory Houghton Sr., arranged to relocate his operation to Corning, an agricultural town of 7,000 souls on the Chemung River in upstate New York. He moved his furnaces, pots, molds, and other equipment up the Hudson River and on to Corning via canal. Two years later, the company came close to folding, but a bank bailout led to its revival. Thereafter, focusing on such items as railroad signal lenses, thermometer tubes, and lamp chimneys, the glassware company grew slowly along with the town whose name it adopted. It also long maintained a dynastic organizational structure: Except for a few intervals, a member of the Houghton family was at the company's helm through the late twentieth century. Common stock was not sold to the public until 1945.

A signal event was the decision by Thomas Alva Edison to purchase glass globes for his lightbulbs from Corning Glass Works, beginning in 1880 and continuing with the organization of General Electric Co. in 1892, ensuring the ongoing health of the glassworks. The development also indicated the company's future course—electronics and scientific applications of glass, as opposed to, say, the making of bottles or window glass.

During this period, the town of Corning was evolving from an agricultural trading center into a manufacturing burg that included glassmaking operations, several foundries, stove makers, farm-implements factories, and more. Companies such as T. G. Hawkes & Co. and J. Hoare & Co. produced intricate and popular cut-glass wares. Even more significant, the town was becoming a railroad hub through which passed the Erie Railroad; the Blossburg, Corning, and Tioga Railroad; and the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. In 1891, 12,000 trains passed through Corning. Hundreds of local men worked on these railroad lines, while Corning Glass Works employed between
270 and 780 workers, variously. With a population approaching 10,000 in 1890—the year in which Corning, New York, was incorporated—the town supported seven churches, fourteen hotels, thirty-four saloons, eighteen barbers, fifteen boardinghouses, twenty-seven dress-makers, ten tailors, and an opera house that hosted touring theater companies, meetings, and minstrel shows. The village was also home to two daily newspapers of opposing political viewpoints, the
Corning Democrat
and the
Corning Journal
.
³³

In 1908, the town built a large park with pavilions, a wading pool for children, a bronze fountain, and a ball field. It was named Denison Park for the businessman who contributed most of the land. Only several years later, in 1916, did the glassworks contribute to public facilities, when the Houghton family conveyed to the town a plot of land north of the Chemung River, which became Pyrex Park, named for the company's popular glassware.
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However, Corning Glass Works was becoming an ever more important employer and physical presence. By 1913, it had three large plants in town, arrayed along the river and marked by what would become a town landmark: a 187-foot tower in which molten glass was stretched for thermometer tubing. Stenciled on the outside of the tower was the blue-on-white silhouette of “Little Joe” the lightbulb blower.

The company's two notable products after the turn of the twentieth century included the clear glass kitchenware Pyrex—adapted from battery jars—and lightbulbs. (Corning was also responsible for the art-glass productions of Steuben, an independent company it absorbed in 1918.) A round of department-store demonstrations in 1915 kicked off a Pyrex marketing campaign, and by 1917, the product had annual sales of $460,000. Lightbulbs were hand-blown, as if they were art glass, into the twentieth century: Corning demonstrated no urgency about developing a mechanical electric-bulb-making machine, but by 1913 it operated five such devices. During World War I, Corning increased its production of scientific glassware, a product once supplied largely by Germany. Although mechanization led to some layoffs and deskilling of workers, the glassworks had 2,000 workers by 1916, a year in which bulb sales reached $1.7 million. The area's second-largest employer, compressor-maker Ingersoll Rand, employed around 800.

Like many other corporations, Corning Glass Works adopted a number of so-called corporate welfare programs in the 1920s, intended to build loyalty among employees and to enhance the company reputation among the general public. Innovations included a company hospital and clinic, health and accident insurance for all workers, and a factory upgrade to reduce chemical hazards, which had killed four workers in 1910. There was also a Corning band, a baseball club, and service awards handed out to longtime employees. At the same time, the glassworks was openly antiunion: In the 1910s, when the American Flint Glass Workers Union attempted to organize a local, the company dismissed two hundred of its five hundred glassblowers.
³⁵

The Great Depression initially resulted in a large number of layoffs and wage cuts, along with price cuts in such key products as Pyrex glassware. But the company's fortunes turned around quickly, and the new joint venture with Owens-Illinois Co., Owens-Corning Fiberglass, brought sizable revenues. Corning initiated a so-called company union (discussed at great length in later chapters) in 1933, called the Industrial Council; its joint labor/management committees discussed a variety of workplace issues and announced reforms that included paid vacations and guaranteed minimum wages. And in the larger community of Corning, New York, the company formed the Corning Realty Co. to expedite home-building and to construct a centrally located apartment complex.
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A growing, mature sense of community within the company led to a changed relationship with workers, stakeholders, and with the town on the Chemung beginning during World War II. In 1944, the company acknowledged the inevitability of unionization and facilitated a union election that was won by the Flint Glass Workers over the more militant United Electrical Workers. (The latter would shortly become the bargaining agent for employees at Ingersoll Rand.) In 1945, as the war approached its end, management realized that it would need new capital for postwar expansion—and that a public offering of shares could serve as an incentive to employees as well as allow a market for the holdings of the increasingly numerous Houghton heirs. As a result, the company put up for sale 412,340 shares, representing 15 percent of its equity. Finally, the company backed various development schemes in the town, ranging from new apartments and houses, donation of land on which the War
Memorial Stadium would be constructed, and, in 1951, opening the Mies van der Rohe-designed Corning Glass Center (later renamed the Corning Museum of Glass). Constructed in only a year and embellished with a panoply of glass surfaces, the center housed a historical collection of glass objects, a science hall, a factory for Steuben art glass, and a large auditorium that would become the venue for touring theatrical presentations including that year's
Happy Birthday
, starring Hollywood actress and Academy Award nominee Joan Blondell.
³⁷

Corning Glass Works was now anything but a one-town company: As early as 1917, it had begun moving production out of its cramped hometown. Over the years, its operations were increasingly far-flung, from Pennsylvania to Ontario. In 1954 it completed a five-year plan of plant construction running to $48 million. Altogether, it had 12,250 employees. Such joint ventures as Owens-Corning also multiplied to include a glass-block enterprise with Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and a silicone-products venture with Dow Chemical that became Dow Corning Corp. But Corning Glass Works did not neglect the town of Corning, where it had more than 3,000 employees by 1959: In an area north of the Chemung River, it built a new complex known as Houghton Park that included a nine-story office building, and it purchased four hundred acres in the nearby town of Erwin, where it constructed a research-and-development center, Sullivan Park, named for the company's longtime research chief. In 1960, the Corning Foundation offered a $4.5 million grant to jumpstart construction of Corning Community College, where in time employees would be able to take courses for which the company largely footed the bill.

And in that decade, company management seemed to realize that if the town of Corning were to avoid the fate of other, increasingly down-at-the-heels upstate burgs, Corning Glass Works would have to be a prime mover. At the urging of Amory Houghton Sr., who had retired as company president in 1941 but remained much involved, the company began a community projects department to oversee its efforts in the town, contributing $9 million to the $39 million needed for various buildings including a new library, a two hundred-unit apartment complex, new recreation facilities, and more. It also became a vocal champion of revitalizing the eight-block downtown core.