J. CLYde hooker, jr.; hooker furniture

AMERICAN FURNITURE HALL OF FAME

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW

TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1999

MARTINSVILLE, VIRGINIA

OFFICE OF CLYDE HOOKER, JR. AT HOOKER FURNITURE

Roy Briggs, Interviewer

INTERVIEWER: This is Tuesday, May 4, 1999. We are in the office of Clyde Hooker, Jr. at Hooker Furniture in Martinsville. The first question is, very appropriately, when were you born?

HOOKER: I was born on December 20, 1920, in Bassett, Virginia.

INTERVIEWER: Was your family in furniture?

HOOKER: Yes, my mother’s family was in furniture. My mother was Mable Bassett and her father was one of the original founders of Bassett.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any in-laws in furniture?

HOOKER: You mean from my wife’s side? No, but I have a lot of cousins.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us anything about your family, particularly as to the furniture association.

HOOKER: Maybe I ought to start with my dad. He was born up in Patrick County, Virginia, and the family moved to Bassett when he was a young boy. He went to school in Bassett and I don’t think he ever got beyond the eighth or ninth grade. They didn’t have but that much school in Bassett and so he quit when he was maybe 15 or 16. He went to work a little bit later for the railroad. He was born in 1895 so this was probably in the early 1900s, 1910 or 1915, somewhere in there. Then he worked for the railroad for a while, Norfolk and Western. He was a telegraph operator, which he liked very much. He told me at one time that he really enjoyed the railroad, the trains and all.

INTERVIEWER: This was in Bassett?

HOOKER: He worked up and down in different places. When he met mother – she was a couple of years younger than he was – they went to school together. Then he went to World War I. He was probably 21 years old in 1916, around the time the war started, so he was just right to go into the service. He was in the artillery and went to France. He was over there and he didn’t get hurt or anything. He came back, and when he got home from World War I, they were married in February of 1920 and I was born in December. He then went to work for Bassett and worked there for several years. J. D. Bassett, they had separate companies at that time; it wasn’t one company. He worked for J. D. Bassett in manufacturing and he was in the purchasing part of it. I was born in 1920. Incidentally our next door neighbors were the Philpotts, Robert and Cabel Philpott. He and Daddy both worked for Bassett. I think Mr. Philpott was older than Daddy but he worked there and they lived next door to us. Robert Philpott and I were both born in Bassett and we were good friends as long as he lived; we were friends with all the Philpotts for that matter. That was just one of the nice families in the industry. After he worked for Bassett for several years he was down here in Martinsville buying some mirrors for Virginia Mirror, which is still in existence. A man named Mike Shotlin owned it. They had Pulaski Mirror Company here. So he was buying mirrors for Bassett, and Mr. Shotlin asked him, (he was about 28 years old by this time), if he ever thought about going into the furniture business. He was shocked. He told me he couldn’t believe anybody would ask a 28 year old who had no money if he was interested in going into the furniture business. He said if enough money could be raised to give him a start, he’d consider it. He said the figure he picked was $30,000, which sounds so ridiculous today, so they said, “We can do that.” They raised the money and people bought some stock. The man that owned the newspaper in Danville had a lot of property up here. The James Family had a lot of relatives here – the Hostin Family – and they gave about 20 acres of this property right where this plant is. There were no strings on that. They said, “We’ll give you that property.” Then they got started, I don’t know how, and people bought stock in the plant. My grandfather Bassett bought some stock in it, which was nice. He probably didn’t think it was going to be much of a worry I don’t imagine. So, that’s the way they got started. They were organized in 1924. This year we’re celebrating our 75th anniversary. Just this April would be 75 years since the plant was organized. We actually didn’t get into business until early 1925. That’s when the plant started up. They’ve always told me that my grandfather Bassett lifted me up and I blew the whistle when the plant started on the first day. Of course, I don’t remember it; I was just 4 years old then. My grandfather Bassett was never active in the business; he was a director, but he had no part in the management of the company. Ed Bassett, my mother’s brother, was a director after his father died. He was a director as long as he was able to be, for many years. We struggled like anybody else.

INTERVIEWER: Why do I have in my mind Hooker-Bassett?

HOOKER: That’s because of my grandfather.

INTERVIEWER: That was the name of the company?

HOOKER: At the time it was organized, it was organized as Hooker-Bassett Furniture because my grandfather Bassett was involved in it, passively; he was an investor but never active. There was never any Bassett active in the management other than as a director. Then we had the Hooker-Bassett name until after World War II. I think it was somewhere around 1950 or 1951 that we decided to change the name of the company to Hooker Furniture Corporation. Bassett was, at that time, advertising, and I think it was good for both of us. We were trying to seek our own identity, and Bassett was growing very fast in that era. They were beginning to advertise nationally. I remember my dad went to see J. D. Bassett, Sr., who was still active at that time, and Bill Bassett, his older son. He told them what we were going to do and why. He said that we wanted to build our own identity and that Bassett was the same way. We didn’t want to ride on their coattails. They didn’t want anybody to think we were owned or in any way managed by Bassett. It was better for both of us. They went their separate way and we did too. It was nothing but a change of name. There was no change in management or philosophy or anything else. We decided that we had to upgrade to be successful in a niche. We couldn’t be right down in the trenches with Bassett and Broyhill and people like that who were much bigger than we were. We felt like this was a decision that we had to make to cut us a niche and make our own reputation. That was the beginning of it and it was a struggle for a while, several years. Fortunately, we’ve been in business 75 years and we’ve never lost money but one year and that was in 1930. A lot of them lost money then. We have been fortunate to make some kind of profit, be it however small, in all those years we’ve been in business. We’ve managed to grow consistently, not fast but steadily, and that’s the course we’ve chosen. I think it was good for us.

INTERVIEWER: W. M. Bassett and J. D. Bassett were in there, weren’t they?

HOOKER: They were. Originally, they would build another plant; for example, W. M. Bassett – Bill Bassett, the oldest son, bought a bankrupt plant here in Martinsville. It has since been torn down. (That was the one that was closed last year or two years ago.) It was a big plant. He named it W. M. Bassett Furniture Company. Bassett, back in my dad’s time, built this first; they had the one that was across from the office that they called Bassett Furniture, the original Bassett. That was the first plant. Then they built J. D. Bassett in the north end of town, maybe a mile away from that. They called it J. D. Bassett after the founder. Then as they expanded, they bought another plant down in this end of Bassett, and they named it Bassett Superior Lines, but it was a Ramsey family that owned it. A couple of families started businesses here during the Depression. Bassett was successful and they bought up a lot of those plants for a very good price. That’s how they expanded a lot when the others were really struggling. They had the money, they were successful, and they had been organized since the early 1900s, maybe 1901 or 1902. We started as Hooker-Bassett and I guess that’s why Vaughan- Bassett started. B. C. Vaughan worked for Bassett and when he left, they had some ownership, some small stock originally, not a lot. Of course, Stanley was the same way. There has been a lot of family involvement for both the Vaughans and Vaughan- Bassett. That would be a long day in history to tell that whole story, all the connections.

INTERVIEWER: It’s a wonderful story.

HOOKER: You’d have to have lived here to understand it really.

INTERVIEWER: Wasn’t it Hugh Chattam’s wife that wrote the genealogy book?

HOOKER: Yes, about the families in Virginia and the start of the Bassetts.

INTERVIEWER: The American Furniture Hall of Fame has a copy of it.

HOOKER: That’s a nice book and tells a lot about it. Of course, they were one of the early settlers in this country, the Bassett family from England. They were the early ones.

INTERVIEWER: Describe your growing up years.

HOOKER: It was about like anybody else that grew up during the Depression. You just played baseball, rode bicycles and skated. There wasn’t any TV or radio or anything much else. I was born in Bassett and we moved to Martinsville in 1925, just about the time the plant started. I still wasn’t in school yet and my sister was born. She was born in 1925 but later. We lived near where American Furniture was; the house backed right up to American. We lived there and I went to the public schools here. I think they didn’t have an eighth grade at that time. Growing up my dad hunted. He didn’t fish much, but he’d take me hunting and he was interested in playing golf. As I got up to maybe 12 or 15, he got me interested in playing golf and hunting with him. I still hunted up until my hip went bad years ago, maybe 7 or 10 years ago, and I got so I couldn’t hunt. That was one of my recreations – quail hunting particularly. We had a place down on my grandfather’s farm where we used to hunt quite a bit and release a lot of birds. Anyway, that was sort of uneventful. I was in the Boy Scouts and things like that which everybody gets into. I went to Boy Scout camp and I ended up an Eagle Scout. Later I was very interested in scouting when I got back from the service and I was scout master for a while and then I was district chairman for a while. I was active at that level for a few years, but I haven’t been in a long time. I support them financially, but as far as being active in it, I haven’t been. It was a good experience because it brought in a whole new of group of friends and a whole new opportunity to learn. We went to the Jamboree in Washington in 1937, and we camped around the Washington Monument. I remember that I had just graduated from high school. I was 16 years old. It was about the time that I got my Eagle Scout. We went to the thing as a group from Roanoke. My childhood was relatively uneventful. I didn’t have any serious injuries or illnesses or anything.

INTERVIEWER: Where did you go to college?

HOOKER: I went to college at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington. I actually went to prep school one year at Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. My dad wanted me to go there first of all because I didn’t have the eighth grade so he felt like I was too young to go off to college. They had things like physics and trigonometry that they didn’t teach here in high school at that time. It did make me better prepared for VMI, and I graduated from VMI in 1942 and went right into the service. I graduated May 15th and I was a second lieutenant in the field artillery. We had 10 days. May 25th, I reported for duty in Fort Monroe in Virginia to take my physical. That was the beginning of my Army career.

INTERVIEWER: What was your college major?

HOOKER: I went for Liberal Arts/History. They didn’t have any business-related courses or I probably would have taken that. I had planned, and my dad had always wanted me to go to Harvard Business School, which at that time was very small. I remember my senior year at VMI in January, my professor called me in and said they had two openings at Harvard Business School and I was one of them that could get it. I didn’t really want to go then because I was so close to finishing at VMI. I decided I’d just rather cast my lot with the ones I’d gone through school with. It would have been a soft deal because I could have gone to Harvard for 18 months, which would have deferred my going into active duty. I would have been in the Army, but I would have been in school for 18 months and they would have put me in the quarter master rather than the artillery, which would have been a lot less risk. Anyway, I called my dad and he said, “No, I think you ought to just finish at VMI.” That’s what I wanted anyway. He said, “Maybe if you want to go after you get out of the service, you can go.” But I never did. If it had been anything but a family-type business I would have gone. There were two of us who had the chance. The other fellow went and he ended up working for IBM or somebody like that. Anyway, I graduated there and I really haven’t been sorry. It would have been a nice credential, but I wasn’t sending out any resumes anyway.

INTERVIEWER: What significant happenings in college have directed your life?

HOOKER: I guess the military, which was my dad’s choice; it wasn’t necessarily mine, but then you did what your parents suggested. My dad liked the military when he was in the service and he thought it was good training. I agree with him. Military gives you a sense of discipline and organization, which is good. You’re more self-reliant and you stay in better condition. It was a good experience. It was sort of tough the first year but after that it sort of eased up and I really didn’t mind it that much. I’m sort of laid-back anyway. I didn’t take it to heart. I never was really that ambitious as far as being a soldier at VMI so I never had any rank there. I think I was a corporal but I never got above that. I ended up valedictorian of my class, but that was an elected job. Up there the valedictorian is elected by his classmates, which is unusual. It had nothing to do with being the top one in grades. I had probably an A average, but there were a lot, maybe 20 or 30, who had a higher grade average than I did. I was in the top 10 percent, but I wasn’t the top. I had to make a speech on graduation day, and it was sort of a teary time because we were going right into the service and the war was just beginning. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor. I remember I was home. It was my senior year and I was home for the weekend on December 7th. I was graduating the next May, which was when the war got really serious. So the graduation was a month early and we were the last class that graduated that got their diplomas because the others had to graduate early; they got their commission; the others had to go to OCS.

INTERVIEWER: You’ve spoken about your military experience. Is there anything else you’d like to say about that?

HOOKER: I was a second lieutenant when I went in and then I was promoted to first lieutenant pretty quickly. They sent us to Fort Bragg for the first part of field artillery the first month. I was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to what they called a battery officers course for three months. When school was over, I was kept on the staff of the school. I wasn’t an instructor; I was in the administrative part, which was really a pretty soft job. I was kept there about a year and I was promoted to first lieutenant right away. After a year I was assigned to an outfit in Texas. I was first lieutenant and I was battery executive. We were there from about November until the next summer. Of course, D-Day was that next summer in 1944 and I wasn’t there. Luckily, I wasn’t there for D-Day. We left port in Boston. I figured we were going to France, but we went to England. We stayed there about six weeks. Then we actually went over to France about the middle of August, so it was about two months after D-Day. It was just about then that things started moving out. They were all pretty well hemmed up until it broke out. Then we were sent over. I was attached to the Third Army and that was when the tanks began to move, when they really began to move out a lot. That was about the time we got over there. We won several battles – no hand-to-hand stuff like you have in the infantry; we were back a mile or two and fired a lot. We were there until the end of the war – in four different battles: The Battle of the Bulge, Battle of France, I guess, and whatever. There were three or four battle stars, but I didn’t get hurt. I did go through the entire war. I was a captain at the end of the war. I stayed over there until about Christmas. I got home on Christmas Eve in 1945. After that I came to work here at Hooker, and I went to Florida. My mother was down there. I spent about three months there and then went to work here in April of 1946 and I have been here ever since. It’s been about 53 years.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s look at your furniture industry background. What was your first furniture job?

HOOKER: When I first came to work here they sent me up to the lumberyard to work. I think they were paying me $200 a month. It’s sort of a funny story. I told my dad that I was making more than that when I was in the Army, because I was a captain. He said, “If you want to stay with Army pay, we’ll pay you the same that you would be getting in the Army and promote you.” Then he just sort of laughed about it. Anyway, I worked there several weeks and I worked around in the plant for about 18 months in the manufacturing part. I didn’t run any machines. One thing he told me was, “I don’t want you running any dangerous machines.” But I did a lot of different things in there and sort of got the feel of it. The main thing was that I got to know most of the people that worked in the plant. At that time, the company probably didn’t have but 200 people. It was interesting from another way. We had a union. That was the only time this company has ever had a union. They had gotten in during the war when we had only about 125 to 150 people, mostly women, because about the only people we could get were either the ones that were too old for the draft or female. That was the first time we ever hired women. Anyway, they got a little union in for one year. The union didn’t get anything really. There were wage controls and all that kind of stuff so there was nothing you could do. They got sort of disheartened by the end of the first year. We had one employee who was very anti-union, and he took it upon himself to decertify the union. He was a very religious guy and they threatened to kill him and this kind of stuff. (My dad told me the story.) They threatened his life, so this guy called the FBI and they came down here and they asked him, “Aren’t you afraid?” He said, “No, when the Lord’s ready, I’m ready.” They didn’t bother him a bit. Anyway, they got enough signatures to decertify it after one year and it went away. By that time, we were coming out of the war and you could raise wages and things. We began to pick up. I remember the wages were so low; they were something like 25 cents an hour or 50 cents an hour. But from that time on, we began to build. It was 1970 before we ever expanded to any other location. We stuck pretty much with that old plant on that property that you can see down there. Then we sort of struggled. I don’t know how much volume we were doing, probably a million to two. I doubt if it was $2 million; it was probably more like $1 million. We made a little bit of profit, maybe $50,000. I don’t know what after taxes. When people came back from the war at the end of 1947, after about a year and a half, I was brought into the office and made assistant sales manager. I began traveling and I remember my dad immediately started taking me to the Markets with him, Chicago particularly, and New York.

INTERVIEWER: We’re going to get to the Markets. That gets very interesting.

HOOKER: We just sort of struggled along through the late ’40s. It was a very difficult time, because there was a huge pent up demand immediately after the war. Then about 1949, everything sort of went in a hole. I guess they caught up and had sort of a recession. I remember that we made a little bit of money in ’49 and Bassett lost money. That was the only time we did better than Bassett, I reckon. I was traveling some. I wasn’t married at the time, so I traveled quite a lot with our salesmen in Texas and different places. I was going around, seeing what was out there. I got involved with the marketing and I was the assistant sales manager. We were making real commercial – what we call waterfall furniture, the same as Broyhill, Bassett, Osier’s, and Johnson-Coleman. All these different companies were making it. We didn’t expand any particularly. We didn’t have enough money to expand or enough demand. We were having trouble selling enough to keep the plant busy. At that time furniture was more seasonal than it is now, because we always thought if you could get through the spring, the fall would take care of itself. We were so concerned about these months, like now through the summer until August. Everything was related to crops and farmers and things. It was so seasonal. We would struggle almost every year it seemed. We worked short-time in the late spring and finally we would get to July in High Point. We had a showroom there. We had this little showroom on the hall. You had one phone on the hall. You didn’t decorate anything; you just set it up. You put the beds on short rails and showed the dressers. Maybe you had three or four bedroom suites or something. It had a concrete floor, no carpet, no nothing. It had one telephone. Betty Simmons, (she later married Jackie Lynch in High Point), was on the hall. She and I got to be good friends and I dated her some. She was still in college and I had just gone to work. Anyway, that’s how I got to know her. She was our receptionist for the whole hall. Whether we got a call or somebody down at the end, she would have to get up, run and say, “You’ve got a phone call up here.”

INTERVIEWER: She was from Rocky Mount, right?

HOOKER: Yes, that’s right. She was an attractive person and, nice, very nice. She died later of cancer.

INTERVIEWER: Who was your first boss?

HOOKER: My first boss was Mr. Mayfield Crouch. He was the plant superintendent and I reported to him.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything in particular that you remember about him?

HOOKER: He was very well organized and he was an older man. At that time he was probably 60 or more. He worked several more years until he retired. He was a very organized guy. He had worked for Bassett and some of the others in High Point. He kept good records. He got us off to a good start. It was more of a push-and-shove-type industry then. It wasn’t as well organized as it is now. He was a good record keeper, and he knew how much lumber we were cutting and how much the yield should be – all these things that were important. He wanted me to work in here until I could set up any machine in here. I told him, “Mr. Crouch, I’d spend my whole life over here and I never would get so that I could.” I had to tell him that wasn’t my forte, the mechanical stuff. Anyway, I did a lot with him. I tracked him around. I would work on a specific job for a while, but he would not just leave me there. I remember we had glue reels – that’s what they called them then. That was the bottleneck because everything that we made had a lumber core. You had the end panels, the fronts, the tops – everything was five ply. We just couldn’t get enough cores made and we were having trouble keeping them. Mr. Crouch and I talked about it. We said, “Why don’t we try piecework and let’s see what we can do with them.” They had four black guys that were running the clamps. We figured out by doing piecework how much these cores would cost us the way we were doing them – so much per foot to get the labor. Then we said, “We’ll take that price and we’ll lower that price but put on an incentive.” They ended up doubling that thing. We got two or three guys that came from Bassett and they made probably $5 per hour, which at that time was ridiculous when everybody else was making $1 or $2. They fought it like fighting fire, but we got the cores, and the bottleneck was relieved. That’s the only piecework we’ve ever had but it showed me what incentive-type wages can do. It really opened my eyes to the difference in a normal pace and one when its incentive- based. We started buying equipment when we could get new equipment and we started growing. We had put in a finishing conveyor before the war, which was early. My uncle Frank Hooker was more in the relationship, and my dad was involved in the marketing primarily. Frank Sr. was involved in all of the purchasing and manufacturing. That’s pretty much the way Frank and I are. He’s always been in the manufacturing area and I’ve been more in the marketing, pretty much following in our fathers’ footsteps.

Once we got so we could buy equipment, we started moving along. We had the finishing conveyor. We got that just before the war apparently because it was here when I came. That helped us a lot because a lot of them still didn’t have a finishing conveyor. I remember Ed Bassett telling me about when they put it in up at Bassett. He told this guy that was running something, “John, that thing really takes it away, doesn’t it?” He said, “Yes sir, but it sure does bring it to you, too.” I remember Ed laughing. He said, “Yeah, it brings it to you, too.” And it does. We sort of struggled through the ’50s. We didn’t grow much. By the end of the ’50s, we were maybe a $4-million company, still profitable but not growing much. We were making commercial furniture and we’ll get into the marketing later. I sort of fell into the sales manager job. We had a man named Jim Fogerty, who had been with Simmons Company, and he was quite a salesman; he had come during the war. He was the sales manager and was a high-roller type of guy who liked to promote stuff; he was a very, very good salesman. Anyway, he died in 1956; he had a stroke. So I inherited the sales manager job then. We were still trying to find some identity, trying to get a niche of some sort. When I first came here, we made some wardrobes. We had been making dining room furniture and bedroom before the war. Then during the war, they got into a line of cedar-lined wardrobes. The reason they did it was that you could get a lot of production and could ship everything out. It didn’t have to be in units; you didn’t have to have a matched set. That’s basically what we made during the war.

We had the dealers on allocation and they got so many dollars. We took the dealers that we had before the war (I wasn’t involved in this) and gave them a quota based on what they’d bought. We were making some plywood for the government so we had some part of our production tied up. We were making Marine plywood, so we got a hot press during that time. The government let us buy this hot press to make the plywood, so that helped sustain us too. Then we got back into bedroom but never back into dining room. We decided we’re just going to make bedrooms and we were trying to find some identity; nothing really stuck much. We started making some items like those wardrobes again, and we started making desks, cabinets and things. I think the ’50s were pretty uneventful times for us really, as far as growth is concerned. Although, it was probably a very good time for the country. We probably didn’t get our share then. We maybe got more than our share sometime since but I don’t think we progressed as much then. We were probably too conservative.

INTERVIEWER: In those days, $4 million was a pretty big business.

HOOKER: Yes, it was. It was profitable. We probably made a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, but I was thinking about how we never even considered building another plant. I remember one time I said something to my dad about it when we were really busy right after the war. I said, “We don’t have enough production.” He said, “You see that plant over there? You just wait until business gets back to normal. That’s going to be the biggest thing you ever saw in your life.” He was right. It wasn’t long, about two years later, in 1949, that we couldn’t sell anything. Nobody was buying; it looked like they were just taking it away from you right after the war. Selling was no problem; there was allocation and everything. He was exactly right. Because they struggled so much during the early years, I think the philosophy was very conservative in the posture of the company. They wouldn’t buy anything until they could pay for it because they had been in debt so much. He told me that in the early days he owed 13 different banks himself, which was something I couldn’t imagine. He probably was broke and just didn’t know it back in the late ’20s and early ’30s when they were still trying to pay for things. I think that put a certain type of scare in him so that he was never going to get too far away from the base. He wasn’t going to get off in deep water, so that was good training because you had to make the money before you could go forward with it. My dad called me in. It was in 1960. It was just about my 40th birthday. It was around October and our annual meeting was around the middle of December. He said, “I want you to be president.” It shocked me. He said, “Next year, ’61, is going to be a very difficult year, but I think you should take the job. It’s better for you to take it in bad times than good. You’ll learn more by having to struggle. Now you think about it and if you want to wait a year, it’s fine. Do you want to think about it?” I said, “No, I’ve already thought about it. I’ll take it.” He said, “I think that’s the best thing, and I’ll promise you one thing: I’ll never second-guess you, but if you ask my opinion about something I’m going to tell you exactly what I think, not what you might want to hear.”

He was thinking about retiring; he would have been 65; he was born in May of 1895. He was thinking about taking more time off, traveling, staying in Florida longer and all that stuff. Sure enough, he was exactly right. That next year was terrible. We worked three or four days a week for about the first three or four months. The employees thought, “The young ones have taken over.” We had a new sales manager because I had stepped out of that job, we had a new president, and we had a new plant superintendent. The employees thought, “This young bunch is going to break us sure as the world.” We struggled along and made a little bit of money. Late that year we were still scuffing with it and I asked my dad, “We don’t seem to be making any kind of headway. What do you think we ought to do?” He said, “Be important somewhere. Get a niche and be important. Be determined that you are going to cut a niche for yourself.” He was so right about it. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. We were really too conservative. We still made a little bit of profit, but very little. We then explored making stereo cabinets before the TV cabinet came along. We made those and sold them to people like Churchill up in New York and they were profitable for us.

INTERVIEWER: They installed the components?

HOOKER: Yes. They just bought the cabinet and put their own components in it. We were making desks and room dividers. We started getting into the item business more. We were still making a little bit of bedroom. This new sales manager that we had had been my assistant. He had been a service man in the Marines. He had been working for a plumber contractor or something. He came over here and took a job in the office doing the costs or something like that. Then he was made assistant sales manager when I was sales manager. His name is Bill Sladen. He was sales manager after I moved up to president. He said, “I think we need to involve the dealers somewhat in finding out where we need to go. We need to get some kind of feedback from the retailers.” He was right. That was about 1962 or 1963. We had a New York showroom at that time and we started having what we called design meetings; we still have them. We brought out a little walnut (everything was walnut then in contemporary) with little screw on legs, simple box-type Danish stuff. We went to New York and had these cases in our showroom. We invited several dealers and some of the salesmen from the Northeast came. We started getting their feedback and getting them on board with us. That started the company moving forward probably more than anything else. We had a different philosophy. We were trying to find out what they wanted us to make rather than us telling them what we wanted to make. It made a big difference in our relationship with the dealers. We began to attract the department store trade. There were a lot of them in Philadelphia and New York. We stated calling on them. We were making pretty good quality. We were making a little better quality than the average low-end furniture, but it was pretty simple, plain merchandise. It didn’t have a lot of pizzazz, so it appealed to the department store. We started selling when they started coming to these meetings, and it wasn’t long, about 1965 or ’66, before we got into the wall unit business.

We were talking about this walnut wall unit by an outfit called Homer around Hagerstown, Maryland. We kept seeing that around and it was very functional. It had a desk in it. It was similar to this type of wall unit but not as nice. This buyer from Strawbridge in Philadelphia said, “If you will make me a wall in Spanish, I think we can sell a thousand pieces in a year.” I said, “You got it.” We’re probably the biggest producer of wall units in the industry and it’s still a $40-million plus business with us. That theory of having design meetings has carried on until right now. They are much more sophisticated. We have them twice a year, around the 1st of August and the 1st of February. We still bring in dealers from all over the country and all of our salesmen come.

INTERVIEWER: Did you bring them here?

HOOKER: No, to High Point. We bring them to the showroom and we pay the dealers’ expenses. The salesmen pay their travel expenses and we pay the expense of the meals and have dinners and all that. They always come. They don’t have to come but they do. We get maybe 50 dealers or more. They come from Seattle, Los Angeles and Texas. We show it much more sophisticated. Our decorator sets it up. We just have dummy cases. We don’t have big full bedroom suites. They set it up and decorate it. Before it was just lined up – just a few boxes. That’s the beginning of the marketing. The dealer will say, “I like this set.” They are already sort of pre-sold. It’s been a very good selling tool. Some people are very afraid of tipping their hand, so to speak, of letting you see what they’re doing. Lexington in particular is one of the most secretive.

We are more afraid of making a mistake in judgment than we are of somebody knowing what we are doing. If the dealers are onboard with us – and we’ve got about 3,800 dealers – they’ll buy from us on a pretty consistent basis. Once we got this system started, we began to develop more volume. Then we began to think about more production. This was about the middle ’60s. My dad died in 1966 so he really didn’t get to see this. He had no idea that he was sick, but three to four years after he talked to me, I was president of SFMA. We were having a meeting in September or October sometime. We played golf together; George Vaughan and Joe Frye played with us and that was the last golf game he ever played. He came home and the next week he got really severe stomach cramps. He had colon cancer. This was in October of 1964. He lived about 18 months and never worked another day. He went in the hospital, had colon surgery at Duke and thought he was getting along fine. Then it reoccurred about two months later. He had about three surgeries and never had a well day after that. So he never saw this side of the business or the time we were beginning to make a bit of a move. When I was president, I asked my Uncle Frank Hooker if he wanted to be chief executive officer. He said, “No, I don’t want to be.” My dad was chief executive officer and chairman. He said, “I want you to be the CEO and I’ll be chairman.” There was never any family problem about that. He supported me 100 percent. We were talking about adding on. We needed some more machine room capacity. First we started with a warehouse. We were renting warehouse space and needed more. We were starting to build; Frank Jr. was in charge of that. We were getting ready to build something and he called his dad, who said, “When you get a million dollars in the bank, you can start.” Sure enough, one Monday we had a million dollars in the bank and Frank called his dad and said, “We got the million dollars.” And he said, “All right, go ahead.” So we started and we added on. We started adding on this side and we built the warehouse later. We went from one to another. It was a continuous program. Then we began to really grow. Business was really good, we had our niche, and we were really beginning to move. That momentum carried us all the way through. We were about $4 million in 1961 and we’ll be about $225 million this year; that’s what our goal is. We managed to have very consistent growth over the years – some of it was by acquisition. John Boardman came to me one day, just stopped in. He was desperate; he said, “I want to sell you a desk plant we’ve got in Kernersville.” He told me, “We need to sell it bad. I bought it and I was making desks and selling them to Macy’s and different people.” He sold primarily to department stores at that time. I remember the desk was $87.50 or some price like that, which was ridiculous really. He said, “I’ve got a $400,000 tax loss on that property; we’re on strike out in Tennessee; we’ve shut down; we’ve just got to sell the thing.” We talked about it and went down and looked at it. I said, “We’ll give you $200,000 for it.” We figured we could get that back with the tax loss. He took it. He brought Bo Rodgers with him and we had our attorney and we went down and bought it. It was a little old nothing of a place, an old mill, and it had a little bit of machinery. It probably wasn’t worth $200,000.

INTERVIEWER: The tax loss went with it?

HOOKER: Yes, but we had to keep that, so we set that up as Hooker of Carolina and we billed everything to Hooker Furniture. They billed us at their cost plus 10 percent and we sold it at whatever the price we had. Some of it we sold at a loss probably. But we recouped that, then we added on to it and that’s probably the most profitable plant we’ve got. We do about $32 million or $33 million in that plant now. We’ve fixed it up a lot. It’s a nice looking plant there right in the middle of Kernersville. We’ve added on to it twice, and we’ve got about 275 or 260-something people working there. We’ve been there over 36 or 37 years. It’s a wonderful plant. That’s where we make most of the wall units and they are low-cost. It’s not big; it’s 115,000 in footage, but we’ve redone it, put in new windows, refurbished the old building and it really looks nice. That was our first expansion and that turned out very well. Doug Williams, who is our head of manufacturing, came to work for us just after he got out of N.C. State; he’s worked his way up. That was the beginning. We went along for about 10 years and added on about all we could here. We filled up everything on this property and we needed some more production. We made a deal with Wells Furniture in Roanoke. We bought them in 1981. We paid them about $3.5 million or something – I’ve forgotten what it was. They had a growing business and that was probably way too much. But it turned out well and we added on. They were making a nice line of occasional tables, and they had a good workforce so we bought the plant knowing that we were going to have to spend a lot of money on it.

At that time you weren’t worried too much about the environmental impact studies and all that, but they had no conveyors or anything and had a lot of old equipment. We put a major expansion in that plant and probably spent about $7 million to $8 million. We had a bond issue and we bought the bond and had to close on the bond issue the day the prime rate hit 21 percent – that’s unbelievable now. We signed it and of course, we were getting them at 65 percent of prime, which was about 13.5 percent; that was tremendous. We had those bonds with BB&T. That’s how we got to know BB&T. They had bid on them and got the bonds. We put that money into the plant and got it going. About three or four years later they had that big flood that just about wiped the plant out. We were closed for three months and had to send a lot of the machinery back to get it rewired and rebuilt. It was horrible. We were out of business for about three months, but we put it back in better shape than it was and now they produce all of our office desks and all of the upper-end walls. We’ve got about 300 people working there. We don’t make tables. We made them for several years but soon found out they were importing them cheaper than we could make them.

INTERVIEWER: The occasional tables?

HOOKER: Funny thing, when we got ready to put the finishing conveyor in we said, “Why don’t we make it big enough to make solid furniture?” We thought maybe there was a market in solid furniture like dressers and six-six beds, like Henkel Harris. That was one that we thought about. We knew that was way above where we would be, but we said we might want to make solid furniture. So when we built the finishing room, we said, “What’s the 100-year flood level?” They said, “The level is 901 or 902 feet or something.” We said, “We’ll build it 2 feet above that.” It was 3 feet deep in the finishing room when that flood came, so that flood was 4 to 5 feet more than any other. It got into the office and everything. It was the biggest mess, and we collected our insurance for about $6 million or $7 million. We built it all back and it’s fine.

Now they produce the best furniture that we have in the office and better entertainment centers. It’s a good workforce. When Singer closed, we got a shot in the arm. We had a chance to pick up about 30 or 40 employees. We had been struggling. They had some experience. It was a one-time benefit that we had and it worked fine. We would have been fortunate if we would have been able to sell as much as we could make all the time. There have been a few times that we’ve had a little bit of short-time but almost none. The product line has grown a lot. In 1993, we bought the plant from Thomasville and in 1996, we bought the one in Carolina Mills at Mayodan, so we’ve got six plants now. We’ve got two in Martinsville, this one and a plywood plant. The plywood plant has about 100 employees, and we’ve got about 800 people working in Martinsville. We’ve got about 2,000 all together. We’ve spread out, and I’ll tell you – those North Carolina plants have done well – Pleasant Garden and all. They all do up in the $30-million area. Roanoke is about $30 million to $32 million and that’s a nice-sized plant. I’m convinced it’s better than this size. I think a 250- to 300-person plant and maybe 200,000 to 300,000 feet is better and easier to manage than one that’s a big, old rambling multistory plant.

INTERVIEWER: It’s more than one person can oversee.

HOOKER: That’s right. It really is. I would rather have two small plants than one big one. I think Lexington realized that you could have a joint lumberyard and a joint shipping room maybe, but you could have two separate plants to manage so that you could make two cuttings at one time.

INTERVIEWER: Your design meetings, how do they fit in with the Premarket?

HOOKER: They’re ahead of it, usually. In fact, we were meeting last week to work on things for the next design meeting, which is the week after Market. We have independent designers – Earl Welborn and Haywood West primarily. They live in High Point. They are on a royalty basis. We don’t have any kind of design staff. Design meetings are usually about six weeks ahead of Premarket. We pick the line then. We are able to show a lot of it at Premarket. We show the dummy cases; we show something even if it’s not a complete bedroom suite. Now the entertainment centers, we would have them and maybe one of the bedrooms. We are able to pick our line and have it pretty much ready for Pre-market, which is a month ahead of Market. You never get everything until the last day no matter what. It’s worked very well for us. I guess it costs us a lot of money. We maybe don’t even know how much it costs. I know we make a lot of samples. I think it heads off a lot of mistakes. You make a lot fewer mistakes by doing that and you also have the benefit of pre-selling. You’re tying your dealers in as tight as you can so that they are mentally committed, if not by voice, to some of the product. It has worked very well for us.

INTERVIEWER: That’s market research.

HOOKER: It is, exactly. We do some. We’ve had a couple of focus groups about some of the home office stuff to try to get some ideas from the public. But the industry has changed so much. When I first got in it, it was so much of a small-company industry where each one had their own line and sales force. There were a lot of them around Lenoir, a lot of them in the Hickory area and a lot up here. Over time a lot of those companies have either sold out or gone out of business. You had a lot of companies that were smaller than we were and then the larger companies. Stanley, Vaughan and Vaughan-Bassett have gotten bigger. Bassett really hadn’t gained as much. They are doing less. In 1960 and ’61, we did $4 million and Bassett did $60 million. Now they don’t do twice as much as we do. The first quarter we did $52.5 million and they did $98 million, so we’re gaining on them. They are one that peaked – I don’t know whether by choice or what. They diversified tremendously. They got into bedding and a lot of different areas. Now they are taking a totally different course: They are closing plants and they are focused almost entirely on their retail stores. They say if they had 200 retail stores, they could support Bassett. We don’t have any idea about that because we’re not big enough to fool with it in the first place, and, second, I think a dealer is going to leave you once you get your own store. You’re going to lose all the distribution in that town or whatever. Getting from here to there is a big thing. Some of Thomasville bought up Carwell and Huntly and these were all independents back when I was young. Bassett’s bought some of them. It’s just not the same kind of a deal. I guess you either get bigger or go out of business, one or the other. You can’t stay still.

INTERVIEWER: We’ll get into some of that as we go into the Market. What was the first Market you attended?

HOOKER: It was in January of 1947, I believe. I had been here about nine months. My dad was still working over in the plant and wanted me to go to the Market. He felt like I ought to be exposed as early as I could and he wanted me to meet others in the industry, like Paul Broyhill and the others that were coming on, the younger ones – John Creech and different ones. At that time the SFMA was a great club because you got to know all of them. He took me to the meetings with him. They had it at Biltmore Forest and would have a day or two days of meetings. They didn’t play golf or do anything but talk about business. Later they got to bring their wives.

INTERVIEWER: That’s when it got to be a party.

HOOKER: My dad was President in 1950, I believe it was, and he had the meeting at Pinehurst. When he had it he said, “We have got to play golf.” They started playing golf then and they still do. Before, during the war in particular, it was government regulation and Jim Ryan, of course, was talking about how many ton miles we had, how much freight and how many cars you shipped. He always gave a very statistical report about the amount of tonnage that they had.

INTERVIEWER: The Market in 1947 – tell me everything you can about that.

HOOKER: It was in Chicago in the American Furniture Mart. We had a showroom that had two bays in it. It might have been 4,000 feet; I don’t know if it was 2,000 feet or 4,000 feet, probably 2,000 or 3,000, prime interest. Everything went right back on one side and we had it lined up. One corner was a circle and the dealers were just in a frenzy. They wanted to get merchandise so badly. It was right after the war and dealers would take anything you’d sell them. We had them on allocation and we weren’t taking any new dealers. One told me, “I’ll give you a couple hundred dollars cash if you’ll ship me some merchandise.” I said, “We’re not going to do that.” That shows you that if somebody pays you to ship them, well that’s… I told my dad, “This is some business when somebody pays you to sell them.” He said, “That won’t last long.” We stayed in Chicago two weeks. We stayed over the weekend and the Market was closed on Sunday, generally. We stayed well into the second week. They always had a sales meeting upstairs in the furniture club or somewhere and had a dinner before the Market. We really didn’t have much product and there were just little dealers coming in that would buy a bedroom suite or two wardrobes or something. There were a lot of small-town dealers then. The Market building was just mobbed. You couldn’t get a cab, you couldn’t get on the elevators, and it was just unbelievable the number of people that were in there because everybody was getting back into business after the war. I continued to go with him to the Market. I didn’t always go to the New York Market but I did sometimes, and I always went to Chicago. We showed from then until the mid-’60s. We finally moved out of Chicago – it got so that it wasn’t much of a Market. We stayed there about 20 years and I went twice a year every time.

INTERVIEWER: You were able to catch the train here, weren’t you?

HOOKER: Yes, we used to catch it here and it would go to Roanoke and connect with the one going to Cincinnati. Later we flew. Up until the last few years, we always went on train. It was an overnight trip and we’d be in Chicago the next afternoon.

INTERVIEWER: It took my dad 24 hours. He got on at Winston-Salem.

HOOKER: That’s right it’s about 24 hours. We’d get on here maybe 3 or 4 o’clock to get to Roanoke. Sometimes you had time to eat at the Hotel Roanoke. You’d go there and it was maybe 8 o’clock that you caught that other train going to Cincinnati, Pocahontas or wherever it was going out through West Virginia. All the furniture people would be on the train and they would be playing cards and having a big time drinking and celebrating and going to the Market. I got to know a lot of people that were in the industry. I remember Harold Coffey showed right next to us and the Heiman’s showed next door to us. You got to know a lot of industry people, like your Broyhill’s, because you’d meet them at the meetings and some of the younger ones would get together. That’s probably when I met Smith Young and Tom Finch. I would see them mainly at the industry functions but we got to be where we were friendly with them. I think it was nice to know the others. You know your competitors. They’re not going to give you any trade secrets; you don’t expect them to, but they didn’t slam the door. The Philpotts were always good friends of ours since they grew up in Bassett. I remember going down to Mr. Philpott’s funeral; he was really a fine man. I was driving the car and my dad was riding – he was a good friend of B.C. Philpott, Sr. He said, “If Philpott doesn’t go to heaven there’s not going to be room up there for anybody else.” I never forgot that. I’ll tell you, he was as fine as they get. All of the Philpotts were that way, very solid, just about as good as you could find anywhere. It’s a shame that they sold the business. They had sold it to Burlington and then Burlington sold it to that guy Turner and he just destroyed it. He really destroyed it. I guess Alvin had Alzheimer’s and he died early and Claude had died, so they didn’t have much family; Robert was getting up in years.

Marketing then was about who had the cheapest bedroom suite or something. One Market – this must have been in 1949 – we had a bedroom suite for $69; this was a suite – it had a dresser, mirror, bed and a chest for $69. Now we have a nightstand that’s about $200. Business was pretty slow and we were trying to get back in business after that slump in 1949. We sold to Sears, Roebuck which helped us get the volume we needed. It was really a struggle because you had so many competitors that you didn’t know who they were. They were from everywhere – down in Arkansas and different areas. You had some from Pennsylvania; they were mostly higher end. Then you had all of them in Lenior, Hickory and North Wilkesboro. There was Kemp’s down in Goldsboro and Lee in Richmond, Roanoke Johnson and the Vaughans in Galax. Pulaski Furniture wasn’t in business then; they didn’t go into business until about 1956 or something. You had Coleman Furniture, Joe Shumate and old Tom Coleman. It was really a different time. It was strictly a small dealer market business then.

INTERVIEWER: Was it more because of price?

HOOKER: I think it was more price and less style, more price sensitive. It is more style sensitive now. Now it is much more service sensitive than it ever was because now they don’t want to buy. Back then dealers would buy in big quantities. They backed our loads – the good dealers, the big dealers. You don’t find any dealer now that takes much quantity like that, even the biggest. We showed in New York for years and years, although Chicago was bigger. New York was purely regional; Chicago was national.

INTERVIEWER: You were at 206 Lexington Avenue?

HOOKER: Yes, well, 200 Lexington.

INTERVIEWER: They’ve changed it.

HOOKER: Yes, right, 200 Lexington. We were there for years. We later showed in Dallas and Atlanta. We showed in Dallas when it opened, soon after it opened back in the mid-1970s. No, we showed earlier – before it even built the World Trade Center, way back in the 1960s. We showed there and we showed in Atlanta for several years. There was no justification really for Atlanta. It never should have been. If Dallas had managed it right, there would’ve never been an Atlanta. Dallas could have easily still been a very good Market if they had managed it properly, because it was located geographically right and it had January and July Markets. Now we’re in San Francisco. We have about a 4,000-foot showroom there, but that wouldn’t have been important if Dallas would have really done what they could; they had the locations, they had the hotels, and people liked to go there. They just dropped the ball somewhere – I don’t know how.

INTERVIEWER: People weren’t nearly as greedy as they were in Chicago.

HOOKER: No, they weren’t. They really weren’t. In Chicago, there was the greed of the building and everything about it and the hotels. In the first place they would put you there at the worst time – Fourth of July and New Year’s, two bad times. They wanted to sell the hotels, I guess, on those days, so they made the furniture industry go in for those times, which weren’t necessarily best for us. We had one membership in the furniture club upstairs. They came to us and said, “You’ve got to have four memberships.” We said, “We’re not going to buy four memberships.” This was in the mid-’60s. They said, “You’ve got to, to stay in this space. I said, “Let’s give up the space,” because we were sort of teetering on the brink anyway of whether we should stay or not. And we moved out. It wasn’t any time before everybody was gone; they had already started to leave when their leases were up. As soon as their leases were up, they wouldn’t renew a lease. The Whitings just pushed everybody out, they just sort of strong-armed everybody, and the Market was dying, so it really didn’t make that much difference. We got down to High Point and everybody liked the fall and spring, which made more sense from a business point of view. Get in preparation for the selling season; that made a lot more sense. In High Point, once they merged, I was on that marketing committee when we had the two Markets, and it was the biggest nightmare I’ve ever seen.

INTERVIEWER: Furniture Highway.

HOOKER: Oh yeah, and it would open in Lenoir a day earlier or something. They were worried about them, but there Market was over by Thursday when they started in High Point. They had about two to three days over there, and they were trying to hold firm and not open until Wednesday, one day earlier than High Point. That Market had Broyhill, Bernhardt, Century and all of them. Finally Century moved over, and Broyhill and everybody gradually moved on over. High Point was able to accommodate them – using the private homes, plus what was being built in the Triad. They managed to take the Market and they could handle it from a logistical point of view. There’s no question that it’s the International Market now. There was some splinter group that thought Dallas was going to replace it. Bill Kemp Jr., was one of them; they were going to bring out their new line in Dallas. It wasn’t too long until they weren’t even out there. Somebody bought them out, Universal or whoever.

INTERVIEWER: Ok. You’ve covered the beginning of your company and the growth of your company. How has the growth of Hooker been affected by labor?

HOOKER: We have been able to get enough labor. It hasn’t been easy but our needs are really very minimal as far as help is concerned. The thing that concerns us is that the skill level continues to deteriorate; we’re not developing real cabinetmaker-types that fit the drawers and hang the doors – that type of thing. We have to compensate for that by doing better machining and using different equipment.

One of the biggest things that has affected the industry is the short cycle of manufacturing – trying to make smaller quantities, adjusting your manufacturing so that you can make 50 of something instead of 300. That’s what everybody is into. We’re right in the middle of it here because our dealers are demanding quicker delivery on everything and about the only way you can give it to them is to cut smaller cuttings more frequently to keep warehouse space down. We’re in that and trying to get them accustomed to setting up a machine on a quick basis or putting computer controls on the machines to set them up automatically. That’s what it’s coming to. We’ll be spending a good bit of money on that, I think, to get the machinery set up quicker. It is being developed. With the CNC things computerized, you can take somebody just out of high school or that’s been in junior college or something and they are probably better at it than some old timer that’s been running a shaper for 10 or 20 years, because they are more adaptable; they are more interested in the new things. Some other things that are playing into it a lot are the Hispanics and Asians. Now we have a big group of Vietnamese in our Pleasant Garden plant. We must have 50 or 60. They are very good workers. They’ve got a cluster of them over in Greensboro and we’ve got a lot of them that work for us. They are excellent workers. We’ve got a lot of Hispanics working in most of our plants. We’ve got some here and we’ve got a lot in Kernersville and a lot in Mayodan. Those immigrants are some of the best workers that we have.

They have a language barrier, so it’s hard to promote them, but if you teach them a skill, they’ll do it. They may not be able to communicate with them well, particularly the Asians. We’ve got a scholarship program. It’s interesting that we give scholarships, about $50,000 or $60,000 a year, to children of employees. The

scholarships range up to $2,500 – anywhere from $500 to $2,500. In Roanoke, we had one family that got four scholarships. It was a Vietnamese family that had four different ones on scholarship. The father was a professor in Vietnam and he could speak just a little bit of English, but he didn’t want any kind of supervisory job. One of his children is in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech – you can see why they are going to educate their children. The Hispanics are not of that bent, but the Asians in particular are going to see that their children are educated well. They have been excellent workers and that’s picked up the slack at the low-end. If we didn’t have them I think we’d have a difficult time doing it. I was talking to our plant manager in Kernersville the other day and he told me, “If we didn’t have the Hispanics, I don’t know what we would do, because we have almost no walk-in traffic coming to the door.” We drug test everybody. He said somebody who wanders in off the street won’t pass the drug test. It’s pretty tough in areas where it’s fully employed.

INTERVIEWER: Do your Hispanic workers bring their families to come to work? Do you get a lot of family relationships and friends?

HOOKER: Yes, they do. Another thing is that they go back to Mexico, a lot of them, at least two weeks a year so they terminate. You don’t have the longevity in them that you would have in others because they go home at Christmas and might stay two or three weeks and come back and you have to replace them. You can’t just let them take what time off they want; you can’t have two sets of rules. They come back and if they were good workers, we’ll hire them again as a new employee so they never seem to build up seniority or any kind of benefit program. They’re the ones getting hurt, but now more of them are coming and staying; they bring their families with them. They have sort of displaced the blacks in some of the starting jobs. They really have and I don’t know where the blacks are working. We’ve got a lot of blacks here particularly. Maybe they work at service-type industries like the hamburger stands and things like that, but not in this industry too much. We’ve got a lot of good ones that have been with us for years who live out in the country. A lot of them are living on a farm or somewhere. They are good workers. The main blacks that we get are the ones that some of our present employees bring in, sons or son-in-laws or daughters or something.

INTERVIEWER: How has your growth been directed by style and design?

HOOKER: We’ve tried to move into different areas – a couple of them have been very good for us. We started in walls in the ’60s, then we got into wall units, and later we incorporated some entertainment functions into the walls. We got into the entertainment centers around the early ’80s; that’s another big increment of our business. Walls are around 20 percent of our business; entertainment centers are in that neighborhood; and home offices are in that neighborhood. Those came later and those are the fastest growing. The entertainment center business is a little more mature market and home theater has helped that. We sell things that go with the big TVs, and that’s been pretty good. We’ve got three or four niches. Bedroom furniture is less than 20 percent of our volume. We’ve got five segments of the business. The import division will do around $50 million this year. Walls, entertainment centers and home offices will probably do in the $40 million. Then we’ve got bedroom, which will be about $25 million to $30 million. We’ve really got five different segments that make us a little more versatile than being all bedroom like Vaughan or Lexington, for instance. Hank Long, who’s our head of merchandising, has gotten a lot of good ideas on home office. That’s one of the really good areas of the business. There’s a big demand and I don’t see it getting any less. We had State Farm call us last year, and they wanted to know something about a home office program. It didn’t work out, but they were talking about decentralizing. They had the idea of giving their employees an office at home and they could buy certain types of furniture. A lot of these bigger companies are doing that because of the commute and the traffic and everything. I think you’re going to see more of it. For instance, our decorator Patricia Ball lives in High Point, and she has a laptop computer. She’s tied right in with the e-mail. And our salesmen are all tied in with laptops. When they get ready to go to see a dealer, they draw out of our computer at home what that dealer has on order and what he’s been selling. When they go in they know exactly what their status is as of that morning.

It’s a different type of selling. It’s more service-based selling. They want to know when they’re going to get it and you have to follow up. Service has gotten bigger. It’s bigger than price. Service would be number one, quality would be number two, and price would be third. You might have quality first and service second, but price would definitely be down as low as third. They want to know when they can get it, that they don’t have to carry too much inventory, and that you’ll give them good point of sale materials – a good catalog, place cards or whatever they use to sell it. In the home office, we have a lot of things that show the function of the pieces. You’ve got four different groups, maybe in oak, cherry and pine. You show one group and the other three have the same pieces, same function. Then you can sell three or four off of one piece and special order it. We’ve got a tremendous amount of small dealers like decorators and interior designers. They are sort of a pain in the rear end, but they’re steady buyers. They’ll order it from you, and they don’t walk away as quickly. They are a little safer.

We try not to sell anybody more than 5 percent of our volume. We never have wanted to get in bed with Sears, Roebuck or anybody. We sell Sears or Penney’s. Federated is our biggest customer and they’ve got maybe a little bit bigger than 5 percent simply by the fact that they’ve merged Macy’s and all the stores. That’s sort of been our thing. We just keep a good group of dealers but not let any one dominate us. The big thing is that we don’t want them to be able to influence our production schedule.

INTERVIEWER: What about advertising?

HOOKER: We don’t do much advertising, per se. We don’t do any kind of newspaper advertising. We work with dealers on special occasions like anniversaries which they advertise.

INTERVIEWER: That’s co-op advertising?

HOOKER: Yes, right. We do that, but we don’t do institutional advertising. We used to have a program of dealer endorsements that ran for years and years in Furniture/Today or Home Furnishings Daily. We got away from that though. We have suggested some little drawings for ads and some TV spots, but I think that we are not big enough to really make a real impact. If we spent 2 percent in advertising, it wouldn’t make a lot. We were involved in the Home Furnishings Council. This just came out this morning. This shows you some of our dealers. They are ranked in what they bought this year and there are some really class dealers in there. There are the big ones. One of the best that we’ve got is Boyle’s. They are very professional people. I don’t know that we have a dealer that I think is as professional in the way they warehouse and everything. They are right on the top. They’ve bought $1.4 million from us. To give you an example, when they receive a shipment from us, they take that shipment and they deluxe it. They take it right through the shop, clean it up, every way, first class, ready to deliver, put shrink wrap on it and put it up in a rack. They are ready to deliver. They’ve got it already opened. If there’s a piece of hardware missing, they’ve had a chance to get it. They are just very professional and they’ve got a huge warehouse. Larry Hendricks was in during the Market and he told me that they were adding on to the warehouse. They’ve got a fleet of trucks and they will deliver in Phoenix, if you live in Phoenix, and tell you within a two to three hour window just when that truck will be there. They are an important part of business in North Carolina.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, they sure are.

HOOKER: He’s (Larry Hendricks) not one of these guys that just buys it. Furnitureland South, Rhodes, Wood-Armfield, Boyles – they are all very good people. They treat customers right. We don’t want to get a fly-by-night that’s going to ship it off to California or somewhere and then wants you to take care of it, one that doesn’t have any kind of deluxing or anything. This trend toward having your own stores is going to polarize the manufacturers a little bit. Thomasville, Bassett, Ethan Allen, and now Rhodes to a degree, La-Z-Boy, Kincaid, and Norwalk – you’ve got quite a few that are going that way. That’s going to mean that the other manufacturers are going to have to supply the needs of all the independent dealers that are not hooked up like that. I don’t see that it’s a threat to us. It takes some potential dealers out of play – if you were a big Thomasville dealer or if you were a big Ethan Allen (dealer). I consider them out of the net. They’ve got their own factories and their own stores so they’re not really trying to sell our customers. But, the others I know, we sell (to) Norwalk stores.

INTERVIEWER: Oh really?

HOOKER: Yes, we sell a lot of those stores, because they’ll buy entertainment centers from us or something to go with the chairs, upholstery or walls. Of course, we obviously wouldn’t be able to sell Bassett.

INTERVIEWER: We’ve gotten through your career in your own business, and the next category is furniture industry involvement.

HOOKER: I was president of the Southern Furniture Manufacturers Association in 1964 and I’ve been on the board of the Dallas Furniture Mart, the Atlanta Merchandise Mart and the International Home Furnishings Mart – all of those during my time.

INTERVIEWER: I have a note here about the Home Furnishings Council.

HOOKER: Yes, I’ve been involved in the Home Furnishings Council. Of course, I received the Hall of Fame honor and I’ve received the James T. Ryan award, and also the Pillar of the Industry Award, so I’ve been very blessed that way.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any other associations? Of course, you wouldn’t have been in NAFM.

HOOKER: No, I wasn’t in that. I’ve been to some of the meetings because I’m an honorary member of the board, but I really wasn’t involved in any major thing.

INTERVIEWER: Then when they got together and started AFMA.

HOOKER: Yes, I was on that committee when Jim Ryan retired and we picked Bob Spelman. That got us into a more professional level management. We got a nice benefit out of that because we got Doug Brackett. He came to work soon after that.

INTERVIEWER: He and Doug Kerr were there at almost exactly the same time?

HOOKER: Exactly. That was when the Association began to spread out a little bit. When Jim Ryan had it, it was his group. When he passed out the financial statements, he’d take them up. The board would meet, and I was on the board for several years, and Jim would pass out the financial statements and before we left the meeting he would take them up so everybody could see it, but he didn’t want anybody to know how much money they had in there; they might want to spend it. He set the tone for fiscal conservatism and the Association has benefited from that till this day. They are very strong financially and of course the programs have broadened tremendously. I was president around 1965 and Harold Coffey was president following me. I was chairman of the Association at that time, and Harold was president so he put me on a committee. I was chairman of the committee to pick a successor. Morgan Simmons, Don Jordan, Charles Hammond, and Tom A. Finch were probably on it. Mr. Broyhill may have been on there. They were the ones that were on the committee to pick Jim’s successor because they had worked with Jim over so many years. I have relatively few compared to them, but it was a very good experience. When Bob brought a lot of association-type ideas, because he’d been involved in some other association, the Association began to be a members association rather than so tightly run by one person. You got into your divisions and all of that more than they’d ever been. The meetings got bigger and more elaborate. I remember the first meeting I ever went to and all the Association people had on the same color coats – a blazer that was light blue so you could see the Association staff. It made the Association.

When it later merged, about John Boardman’s time, with the other associations, it got even bigger and broader in scope. It had the Washington office and it’s the Association it is today and is really meaningful. They have a lot of areas and do a

tremendous job for the companies. It’s sad that more of them don’t utilize it. We’ve got two presidents. We’ve got the head of the marketing division and the head of manufacturing. Marketing, Hank Long, was about two jumps back, but two of them left so he got promoted pretty quickly. We’ve supported it and I think it’s very important for us from a technical point of view, but also from knowing the other manufacturers and people throughout the industries.

INTERVIEWER: Inventory?

HOOKER: That’s right. That’s where it is. Stanley has, through necessity, stepped out and made us all look bad in a way, because they didn’t have the money to build the inventory. They had to take some kind of position that would enable them to hold the inventory down. They developed a system, probably through trial and error and smart engineering, that has made them better at it than the rest of us. We’re all trying to play catch up right now. We’ll eventually get there. Paul Toms, my nephew, was on the committee about the AFMA merging with the Home Furnishings Council. He and Albert Prillaman were on that.

INTERVIEWER: What can you tell us about changes in production methods?

HOOKER: The biggest change is going to smaller cuttings on a more frequent basis – what we call synchronous manufacturing. That’s really high-tech, but it’s also fraught with changes of culture. The biggest problem we’ll have with it is the fact that our older employees won’t take it in. It’s hard to get them on board. They say, “Why is this better? How can you do better making 100 than you can making 1,000?” Even some of the administrative people are that way. You can’t really do it, but the payback is in the service and the inventory management. We’re starting this system. We’ve been working on it since about the first of the year. It takes a lot of time to build a database and then you’ve got to know what you want, what you can do, and then believe what the computer tells you. Where are the bottlenecks going to be? Constraints. You being a N.C. State guy, you know it’s a system of constraints. You predict where the bottlenecks are going to be. That’s what it’s all about really. It’s an industrial engineering situation. That’s the problem: getting the system set up quickly and getting the molders set up. At least a few days ahead, you know that you’re going to have a bottleneck in the sanding department next Wednesday or something, and you know you’re going to have more panels in there, more product than you can stand. I asked them how they were getting along and they said, “We’re getting along all right.” The production hasn’t dropped off much. I was expecting it would. We started it here for a reason. We figured it was the hardest place to start because bedroom furniture has more parts than any other piece. It has something like 200 pieces in a dresser. We said, “We’ll start it here, and then if we can make it work here, it will work well in our other plants.” Now we’re building the database in the other plants, but we haven’t done any more than that. Once we get this one underway, it’ll be a piece of cake to get the smaller plants into it, because they have younger employee and they are more focused, more specialized like Roanoke with the home office desk and a few pieces. Pleasant Garden makes some of the modular type home office and few other things. I think it’ll work. I’m sure it will. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re still making a profit and we’re getting there one step at a time.

Our people have embraced it pretty well, the management people. They’ll laugh about it. They say we’ve got all kinds of headaches but we can see some light at the end of the tunnel. It’s tough.

I think the biggest problems with manufacturing is getting the service that the dealer expects by having the right inventory mix, and being able to deliver within a maximum of a month. Our average delivery schedule is maybe 60 days. We’ve got to cut that in half. Stanley says they can deliver in three weeks. We’ve got stuff that may be six months out there – I don’t know. We have three different levels. We have an A, B and C. The A is cut every 60 days. The B is cut every 90 days. The C is maybe every 6 months and they are marginal. It’s addressing that and building

the quality that the customer expects, because they’re not going to do much in the way of deluxing. They don’t have the shops where we know everything goes through this little shop in the back of the store in the warehouse – they go over it, touch up any scratches, fit the drawers, clean it up and make it look good. They want to get it out of the carton and deliver it, just like you would with a TV, a tape recorder, or a VCR, but it’s not that kind of product. Once we get those two things – the quality and the service – we can manage the style and price. We’ve got a pretty good feel for the market, and with our design meetings, we get a lot of contact with the dealers. We had a dealer, Bob Davidow of Benchmark in Kansas City, call us. He’s a good customer – one of the best. He’s probably one of the top 10 on that list. He called and said, “We loved what you had Market, but what bothers us is one of the office desk units that we have. We are losing sales everyday on that and we can’t get it. We’re a lot more concerned about what we already know will sell and what’s out there. Although we like what you brought out and we bought it, I’m probably getting what we’re selling.” He said he was so frustrated by the thing. He said, “We’ve just got to get more of that product. It’s an elaborate European-looking desk with a Florentine Old World type of finish – it’s beautiful.” He said, “I lose a sale every day,” and boy, he was frustrated. That guy is going to put a store out there and it’s going to be all Hooker furniture, except in wood and upholstery. He’s going to put everything in that one store. It’ll be like a showroom. It’s about 20,000 feet. We’ll have our own store there – but it’s his, not ours. He’s building a strip shopping center, and he’s going to have a Hooker store, a Lexington store, and a Lane and Action store. He’s going to have four or five stores like a shopping mall. It’s a pretty clever idea.

INTERVIEWER: He’s a smart man.

HOOKER: He’s very smart. He’s about the most aggressive dealer I know. We haven’t been selling him long, maybe four or five years, but he’s

INTERVIEWER: What about changes in purchasing?

HOOKER: We’re going through that too. Everything’s on a computer. When you cut a thousand, you just pull it up and it multiplies what you need of everything. Of course, that’s getting to be a nightmare because of lead times. It goes back to these cuttings that we put in 60 days in advance instead of 90 or 120 like we used to do. Maybe you’ve got cartons – 50 of this size, 75 of another and 150 of another. It’s harder. Really the purchasing thing is a matter of expediting to be sure you’ve got the right thing when you need it. It’s much harder, because it’s tougher on your suppliers. We’re not a single-source supplier. We like more than one source, two probably, just for safety reasons. We’ve got two finishing suppliers and a couple of carton suppliers. In lumber, of course you buy around everywhere, but we have one particleboard supplier – Union Camp. We have to put a lot of pressure on them. It has got to be a partnership deal to get it done because they’ve got to deliver a lot of product. Doug Williams was telling me that he took a month’s production, and it averaged about 150 pieces of everything that came on the cutting schedule, some less or some more, maybe 25 of 66 beds or maybe 400 of a dresser. I bet 10 years ago that figure was 300 to 500, so we’ve made progress. We’ve been cutting the cutting sizes down for a year or more, but we didn’t have this system in place.

I feel good about this system – if we get it – and I think by the end of this year we’ll be certainly over the worst of it. This plant should be through it, and the others will be already embracing it as far as the philosophy. Our managers in the other plants say, “When am I going to get the system?” They’re ready to get it and get on with it. Our Mayodan guy (He had worked for Henredon; that’s why we got him as plant manager.) said, “When are we going to get it? I think I can get it in three months.” He’s a younger guy and he’s an N.C. State guy too. They believe in him. I think that’s what we’ve got to do. It’s a change of culture and once you get it, the people coming in won’t know any different. They’ll figure that’s the way it’s always been. As you get better at it, you can even reduce the numbers. It’s going to take some good people to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Everything takes good people.

HOOKER: That’s right. Our plant manager, who is the head of manufacturing, is an N.C. State graduate. The Roanoke plant manager is N.C. State; Pleasant Garden is N.C. State; Mayodan is N.C. State; head of quality control is N.C. State; and we’ve probably got about 10 N.C. State guys and they are very good. Doug Williams, of course, is N.C. State. Most of our management people are and we’ve got a second-in-command at Pleasant Garden that’s N.C. State, so we’ve got plenty of them in there. I understand now, Roy, that they are having trouble keeping that course going. I hear from people that they have so few that want to get into it that they can’t keep it going. That’s sad.

INTERVIEWER: The next question is about changes in sales and merchandising.

HOOKER: It’s more of relationship selling business now than it’s ever been. When I first came into business, you were peddling. You went around with a bag and you had pictures of bedroom suites or upholstery pieces in your case. You went to this dealer; you called them and they said, “Give me three of that.” You ship them whatever – it may be three to five months, and you never worried about following up to see when he was going to get it. He didn’t care; he put them in his warehouse. Now the dealers are tied closer to the manufacturers and they expect a lot more from them. They expect to buy from you and they don’t move around as much. You buy broader. You own more of the floor space than ever because there are fewer people, but you also have a bigger responsibility for quality and delivery and everything.

INTERVIEWER: As you mentioned, your salesman can pick up his laptop before he makes a call and he knows the whole situation around that customer – when his orders are coming in, how much of this he’s sold this year.

HOOKER: Exactly. They know pretty much before the Market starts what the dealer is going to buy, because he’s seen him at Premarket; he’s been by to see him with sketches before the Market. He said, “He’s going to buy this home office group of ours. We sell him a lot of furniture. Although he’s a big Thomasville dealer, he’s also a Kincaid dealer, a Broyhill dealer, and we sell him a lot. He buys home office and things that they don’t have.” What each dealer can do, what his niche is, you always try to improve things if you can by getting more out of your dealers. Generally your distribution is pretty well limited in the larger cities, particularly to the ones you’ve got. In Atlanta, we sell Havertys and we sell Rich’s, and they are both very big users so you have to work around that. It’s a different selling (game). It’s not a peddling game. It’s building a relationship and maintaining it.

INTERVIEWER: What about finance?

HOOKER: Finance is different too. We have a line of credit at the bank, but we owe about $10 million or $11 million, which is very little. You sweep the account every day. They invest the funds. Our credit manager has an MBA. He’s a secretary, treasurer, money manager and an ex-banker. He was the vice president of a bank, so he sees that we pay down a debt, maybe $1 million off, and then we might go back and borrow a million depending on the situation. It’s the same way. NationsBank (now Bank of America) has been our major banking source. We’ve thought about having

them receive the checks, credit them to the account and mail it if it’d save money. We’re looking at all kinds of ways to save a little bit of money. Now in administration things are so much more technical. You use more legal advice, more professional advice whether it’s a pension plan, 401(k), a banking relationship or overseas stuff. It takes more technical people. We don’t have a lawyer on staff. We use people like Norwood Robinson. We use lawyers for everything, whether you restrain a trade, cut off a dealer, sexual harassment or the internal stuff. We have another lawyer that does that kind of stuff for us. It’s a totally different game really. We use bonds in the Mayodan plant. When we bought that plant we had a $10-million bond issue and we paid about $6.5 million for the plant. We added quite a bit of machinery and stuff. You get a bond issue for things like that that are very favorable for finance. It’s been a very good time for financing. If you’ve got a good credit rating, you can get a good deal.

INTERVIEWER: Management is the next question.

HOOKER: I think we’ve got the right people in place. We brought along a lot of people and now I’m planning to retire about the end of next year. I’ll be 80 years old and it’s about time to turn it over to somebody.

At the end of 2000, in December, I’ll be 80, but I think we’ve got a real good group of managers: plant managers, two guys in finance, we’ve got a good man as head of the information systems, we’ve got three of them in marketing and we’ve got them in manufacturing and all these areas. I think we’ve got the bases covered really with people in their 40s to early 50s. All of the plant managers are pretty much in that group and so we’ve got a lot of good young people. Most of them are college graduates from

N.C. State and wherever. I think we’ve got a team and they seem to get along well together. We have a bonus approval that’s based on profits of

the company and nothing else. This group’s – all the plant managers and officers – in that pool and they participate to some degree with varying percentages. They’re focused on profitability. My dad had that in effect; I didn’t start it. It’s been here for 50 years or more. It’s been enlarged. They look at the monthly statement and see how we’re doing, how their plant is doing, when they get the statement on their plant. It drives them and it also brings them together as a team, because they all participate or contribute to the success of the company. Once a year we have a retreat. We have a couple of days. We’ve had it over at Grayland two or three times. We’ve had it at Hotel Roanoke once, and I think we’re going to have it here; we’ve got a new club this year. We get together and talk about planning for the next year – what we need to do. Each one talks about his own plant, what he needs, what he thinks he can do and what would improve it. We get everybody in one group. Then we play golf and have dinner together and cocktails for a couple of nights. It’s just a nice group. We invite the outside directors and they come to see what we’re doing. Bob David spoke to us last time. He was on the program that last fall and he was telling us what he thought would be next. He’s way out on the edge of the Internet and that stuff. We try to focus on the team goals rather than the individual goals and they seem to get along. The plant managers exchange a lot of information. They are competitive with each other, but they still exchange a lot of information. If they find a way to do something well and it works out, they tell the others.

INTERVIEWER: Describe the support you personally have received from other people in our industry.

HOOKER: My dad, one of the first things he did was take me to the Chicago Market and a Southern Furniture Manufacturers Association meeting. We started way back at Blowing Rock. He always wanted me to meet the others in the industry. He felt that if you knew your competitor, both of you had something to gain. You didn’t have to divulge any trade secrets, but by being friendly with them and looking at things that help the common cause, you could work together better. I think that was important. At that time, my contemporaries were 20 or 25 years old – Paul Broyhill, Smith Young, the Philpotts and all of them that were in the business. I think that helped, getting to know the other manufacturers. I think that the Association has been a big support too, because they’ve bonded us together to have one voice. In a lot of the areas it’s been the only way we

could get things. It started about freight rates and things – that’s where Jim Ryan came from; he came from a railroad. He was a freight rate man. We were able to get together on a lot of other things. We’d meet and push certain markets that meant a lot to us and over time we found out where the best markets were and what the best prices were. The manufacturers have been competitors, but they’ve been pretty friendly, generally speaking. I’ve never had anybody much that refused us the chance to look at a piece of equipment or something. I don’t know that I’ve ever had it done. They’d say, “We’d be glad for you to see it, see the way we’re doing the finishing room.”

INTERVIEWER: Describe the support your company has received.

HOOKER: Are you talking about from the community or from the furniture community?

INTERVIEWER: From the furniture community.

HOOKER: We’ve been involved in the marketing association and I’ve been president of that too, along with the Furniture Factories Marketing Association along the way and with people like Hamp Powell. He was a case in himself. He is the most determined man I think I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a story about Hamp. I was president of the Marketing Association and Hamp Powell and Bob Spelman were very active in it. This was when we were arguing about the opening dates. This was before we merged West and East. We were having one of these design meetings in New York in the summertime around the first of August. It was on a Friday, late in the afternoon, and my secretary called up and said, “I just wanted to tell you that you’ve got a meeting in your office tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Mr. Powell has set up a meeting in your office with him and Bob Spelman, so we’re going to meet in your office at 8 and he’s already planned for it.” I knew Hamp – there wasn’t any need for arguing about it; he’d already set it up. So I said, “We’ll be there.” I went, which I particularly didn’t want to do that Saturday morning. They were there, every one of them, just like they said they would be. We must have all been officers at that time and we were going to talk about the market opening dates. When Hamp got something going, I guarantee one thing: He’d get it done. They tell me that he bought Action right out from under somebody that thought they had it – Bassett, I believe it was. He went down and sold them on the idea and locked them up before they even knew he was down there. It’s been fun knowing people like Hamp. He’s an inspiration because of his work ethic and his absolute dedication to his industry goals. The Lane Company was important, but the overall industry goal was very important. He wasn’t selfish that way about his time. He was a workaholic. Gosh, he got up at 3 or 4 in the morning – unbelievable.

INTERVIEWER: He’d have a late breakfast at 5:30 a.m.

HOOKER: Yes. He said that’s what he always wanted to do when he interviewed a salesman. He’d say well meet me at a restaurant somewhere in High Point. He’d say meet me over there at 5 in the morning. He wanted to find out if the guy was an early riser or not.

INTERVIEWER: What have you done for other people?

HOOKER: Do you mean inside or outside the industry?

INTERVIEWER: In the industry.

HOOKER: I think that I’ve shared information. We’ve built these friendships with all of these other manufacturers over time and have shared our people in AFMA. We’ve also shared information with anybody that wants it about machinery or the ways we do things. It’s been a give-and-take and I think that’s what has been important. We’ve gotten at least as much as we’ve given.

INTERVIEWER: Describe your business strategy.

HOOKER: We’ve got a couple of things. We believe it’s market-driven and the best thing we can do is, if possible, find out what the customer wants and give it to them, not try to inject our pace into the customer and make him buy something just through sheer force that he doesn’t want to buy.

INTERVIEWER: That’s why you hold the design meetings.

HOOKER: That’s exactly right. We try to get the customers on board with us to support us but also to give us the information. We’re much more afraid of making an error in judgment than of being copied before the market, in other words tipping our hand. We feel that if we make the right product at the right price that the competition is not going to hurt us too badly. They might get a little of the business, but I think that the philosophy has been a people philosophy. We believe very strongly in paying your bills on time and doing exactly what you say you’re going to do – commitment. For instance, one time we rented a warehouse and the manager said, “You were the best renters that we ever had,” because we left it in good condition. We even took a scrubber, like a street sweeper, over there and cleaned the whole floor. Leave it like you’d expect it. That’s been the way. My dad always had a policy. He said you pay the guys that bring the lumber when they bring it. You don’t put them off. He’d say, “That guy can’t afford to be put off.” We always discounted the bills, always, and we pay within 30 days or less. We always have and we’ve never tried to go to 60 or 90 to beat something out of the suppliers when we really didn’t need to. Now we might sometimes say, “Business is bad. Would you give us a special price for three months r six months, like five percent on cartons or some small thing?”

In dealing with your employees, your customers, and your suppliers, you’ve got three different constituents. We deal with all of them in the same way – we do what we say we’re going to do, we deliver what we’ve promised, and we expect you to pay on time. We are very difficult credit-wise. They’ll be right on top of them and our collection time is 41 days or something. I’ll bet it’s as low as anybody in the industry. We give 30-day terms and when it gets past that 30 days we call them up and say, “Where’s our check?” If we don’t get it, they know it. That’s a contract and if they need terms and they say, “Can I be 30 days extra?” That’s fine, no problem. We don’t let somebody consistently ride us. We try to help our employees. The wage scales are in the better end of the area. Stanley, Hooker, and American have an average rate of about $10 an hour and we have about probably another $3.50 or so, about 35 percent or 37 percent in benefits, so it’s probably an effective rate of around $14 an hour average. Stanley and American are right there with us. Bassett and Pulaski are behind us. Stanley and

Hooker has almost exactly the same wage scales and always has. It’s not contrived and we have almost no traffic between the two plants. American’s the same way – very little traffic. They just like to stay where they are. We lose one occasionally and they lose one, but basically none. We’ve got a benefit in which our employees own about seven percent of the company and that percentage is growing because each year we make a contribution. If they leave, they don’t get that money; that’s a retirement benefit. If they are vested (it’s five years or something) and they leave for any reason, we give them that money. It might be $10,000. It might be $20 or $30 or whatever. They’ve got a share in the Hooker Company and of course, that gives them more reason to support the company. Then we have a 401(k) where they can invest. We don’t have a defined benefit pension plan, but we have the 401(k) where we match some of their savings. The 401(k) is about $10 million, and 7 percent of the company, 300,000 shares of stock at $30, so that’s at $9 million or so. We have to get the stock appraised every year. The appraisal value is $36 and the market value is $30 so if they leave, we pay them $36 a share. They get a chance to take the stock with them or they get the $36; almost without exception they take the money. We’ve had one or two that took the stock. The appraised value has consistently run even or ahead of the market value. I think because of the way we’ve treated the employees over the years, we’ve had very little turnover, except for that one flurry – once they tried to organize us when Stanley had the strike. They had a union at Stanley. That was when Meade owned Stanley. They came down here and we had an election, we won the election 57 to 43. That was a full-time job. The hardest job I had was when we had those four to five months that the union drive was on. It was about the toughest time I’ve ever seen. In our other plants we haven’t had any problem.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any particular management techniques? You’ve mentioned Hamp Powell and his management techniques.

HOOKER: No. We’re more of a delegated management. I feel like my job is to get the right guy in the right job and let him do his thing unless he varies widely from what I think is right – maybe if he’s too tough, like if he’s a plant manager and we think he’s too hard on the employees or we’re getting a lot of problems with him, I’ll take that up. Generally speaking, we set the parameters and let them go – don’t tell them how to get there, but we tell them what we want and leave it that way. We set a goal for selling each year. This year we’ve got a 10 percent increase. That’s what our philosophy is: to grow about 10 percent every year, which is a pretty good rate. That’s steady and sustainable and we can pay for most of it from within. We try to get really good plant managers. They in turn get good supervision under them and we have a strong team without much turnover. We have very little turnover in the officer group. One officer left us. He was an import guy and Lexington hired him away from us about two to three years ago. That’s the only one and he wanted to marry a woman that lived down there in Lexington; that had something to do with it. It’s nothing unique about the philosophy; it’s just that I’ve got a lot of confidence in people. If you motivate them properly, they would rather not have someone looking over their shoulders, telling them how to dot the i’s and where to cross the t’s. They don’t necessarily have to do it exactly the way I do. Like my wife – sometimes she’ll want me to do something. Then she starts telling me how she wants me to do it. I’ll say, “Just tell me what you want done and let me do it. I’m not going to listen to exactly how I’m going to clean out a gutter or something.” Just tell me what you want done. That’s the way I feel about the employees and about the supervisors. I don’t lose any sleep worrying about what somebody is going to do or not do. They are all innocent until proven guilty. I’m never going to indict anybody for doing a poor job until they prove it’s poor. I’m not going to hire them with the idea that they’re going to do a poor job or that they probably will. I’ve just got a lot of confidence in people. I feel like if you get the right ones, they can do it. It’s up to us to motivate them, to give them a reason to do it. Most people like to do the job right if you give them encouragement. I don’t think there’s any satisfaction in making a poor piece of furniture, poor quality for no good reason or doing a sloppy job typing a letter. Pride is a big thing that we try to build in our sales organization and our employees – that pride in what you do and the company you work for is very important. We keep trying to build it. We tell the salesmen how good they are. We don’t browbeat them. We have a sales meeting and talk about the goals – what we want – and we recognize the ones that made the quota or did so many million dollars. We’ve got one team that did $17 million last year in Georgia and Alabama. That’s a lot of product in Georgia and Alabama. Believe me, that’s a lot of product down there. We recognize them each year and I think that’s what you need to do: Lift them up and make them play as a team.

INTERVIEWER: What has been your central personal goal in this business?

HOOKER: Happiness and fulfillment more than monetary gain. I’m not driven much by money. I’ve been lucky enough to have enough of it but that hasn’t been a significant factor. I’m not the highest paid person here. It doesn’t bother me, because I cut my pay to give it to somebody that I feel needs it

more. That doesn’t drive me, but being happy and healthy really, and the self-satisfaction of having a successful company, that’s the whole thing. And being respected in the community.

INTERVIEWER: That was your goal. How well have you achieved that goal?

HOOKER: I feel like I’ve accomplished about everything I’ve set out to accomplish, really. The company has grown tremendously in that 45 years and it’s been

successful. We keep a running 25-year thing about our growth. If I could find one I’d give it to you. Over 20 years we’ve grown tremendously, and we’ve averaged making 5 to 5.5 percent after taxes over a 25-year span – not five years, not 10, but 25. We’ve paid out somewhere between 20 to 25 percent of that to the stockholders and we put all the rest of it back in the business. Every year we put at least as much back in the business as our depreciation was. We’ve always felt like that’s money we didn’t have to pay taxes on so let’s reinvest that money. Being a private company, we never had to be short term oriented, and work to make the statement look as good as it could look. We’ve tried to have conservative statements that will withstand the test. Now our depreciation is close to $5 million a year so we buy that much or more in new equipment every year, upgrade the equipment and the facilities and keep plowing it back in. Our stockholders are a lot of family. We’ve got 15,000 employees, so we just found out that at the end of last year we had to register with the SEC. We completed our registration around April 5th. We filed our first quarter statement that we had to report to the SEC. We are not going public per se – with a public offering – but we have to do all of the SEC things that are required. We have to have a disclosure statement and insider trading reports and everything that we would need if we were a public company.

INTERVIEWER: What has been your company goal?

HOOKER: I think the company goal is consistent growth, consistent profitable growth. We try to be what the dealer expects us to be. A guy gave me that

little sign up there that says, “No Surprises”. I thought about that. It was a dealer that gave it to me. We want to be what that dealer expects us to be. When he walks into that showroom we want to be the same Hooker Furniture that he thought we were going to be as far as personality of the

company, the commitment to the business and the quality and value of the product. We don’t want to one time show him one thing that’s way

off-base. We are not going to be very far afield. We’re not adventuresome particularly. We don’t want to back up. We try to make each year a little

better than the last one.

INTERVIEWER: How well have you achieved that?

HOOKER: We haven’t been the most profitable company in the industry, but we are among the most profitable And we’re consistent. We’ve averaged 5 percent or more; some years it’s 6 percent and some it’s 4 percent. This year the first quarter was about 6.4 percent. Last year it was 5.25 percent for the year. We’ve got a good reputation in the industry and we don’t want anything to detract from it. We don’t want to go haywire. That’s another reason I don’t want to be in business against our retail base. I don’t think that builds any friends.

INTERVIEWER: What was the overriding business philosophy of your company?

HOOKER: My dad, from the beginning, was always talking about credibility and honesty. That’s where we started. Of course we struggled, but I wasn’t big

enough to know what was going on then. It was a good thing I didn’t. In the Depression, nobody had anything. We were comfortable. We had a nice house and a cook. That was more than anybody else had. Nobody ever thought about money, all these big cars and that kind of stuff. I was brought up in that era. Now I think people are so anxious to make a statement when they get successful; whether it’s a professional man or a young broker that makes a lot of business trading, they’ve got to show it. They’ve got to make a statement. That has stuck with me. I remember coming over and seeing them (plant workers) bringing lunchboxes. The guys working in the plant would come in, and they weren’t making much. I was going to school with their children. It was just different than it is now. Of course, all of those folks are gone, most of them. We’ve still got

some that have been here 40 or 50 years. I’ve been here the longest now. There are one or two that are pretty close, within two or three years. We’ve done about all we set out to do. In athletic vernacular, we’ve stuck to the game plan pretty well – to have a solid merchandising direction and to back it up with good manufacturing techniques, both in quality and cost, and a pleasant relationship through people, whether it’s your salespeople, your managers or whomever. We try to have good people skills. We’ve got a huge commitment to the community with the hospital, YMCA and all. We’ve always been a liberal supporter of those – personally

as well as through the company. There’s not too many companies left in the area now. Bassett downsized and a couple of the textile people are struggling. One of them has moved away. Sara Lee closed up. We feel like we’ve got a big responsibility. The ones that are left have got to pick up and pull the wagon. In a small town the industrial people have to do a lot.

Being a private company has helped. We don’t have to make decisions short-term. To give an example, we bought this plant in Mayodan in 1996. It was slow getting started and hurt our earnings overall. In 1997 we didn’t raise prices much so that we could be sure we could sell enough to keep our employees busy. We had a big increase in volume, but the profit percentage dropped off. We didn’t have to explain that to anybody other than our stockholders. That was the reason for it. Last year we put a price

increase in because we were pretty much backed up to capacity. We picked up that extra sales volume. Now our earnings are back up again. It was a

conscious decision that we made to try to be sure that our employee stayed busy and that we didn’t lose any of them either; we had that side of it too.

We didn’t put as much price on the product as we should have if we wanted to keep our profit margin normal. That’s the kind of decision that we’ve made over the years depending on what we think business is going to be next spring or this fall. If we were public and had a public offering, I’m not sure if we could. We would get a lot of heat for that kind of decision. They’d rather you layoff the employees than to let the earnings erode a little.

INTERVIEWER: Describe your relationship with your suppliers.

HOOKER: We have a very strong relationship because we pay quickly and we don’t ask a lot of favors other than good service. We don’t try to get terms. On rare occasions we’ve asked for a better price on something for a very short period of time but those are very rare occasions. We just don’t feel like, although there’s no risk involved, that our suppliers should carry us for three months worth of finishing materials. We just don’t buy into that. That’s not our way of doing business. We have a very strong relationship with our small suppliers of lumber, for instance; those would be our smallest individual suppliers probably. We get along fine with them. We buy as much locally as we can, but, of course, now it’s been cut away so most of it is brought in from about 200 to 300 miles away. It’s not local anymore.

INTERVIEWER: I think you’ve thoroughly covered your relationship with your customers.

HOOKER Yes. We have a good relationship with them. They know us and know that we try to make them happy. At Market I always sit up in the front lobby to watch for people that I recognize and I speak to them and let them know that we appreciate the business.

INTERVIEWER: That’s where you were when I came in.

HOOKER: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: What were your greatest problems with your suppliers?

HOOKER: You always have some suppliers that you have a quality problem with. We don’t keep them long. But, by-and-large, it’s been delivery. As we shortened up our manufacturing cycle, it put more pressure on that part of the game. Years ago, when we had cuttings three, four or five months out, it wasn’t a problem. Now it’s been a problem because we don’t give them much lead-time. We understand it, but we still have to have it.

INTERVIEWER: Have you had any problems with your customers?

HOOKER: Not really. We have distribution problems a lot. They don’t like you to sell to certain people. You have that kind of a problem, and there are always

some that say, “I didn’t get it shipped quick enough so I lost a sale.” It’s no pattern of problems and no serious ones that we can’t resolve. We gain more dealers every year than we lose, and we rarely lose a big dealer.

We lost J.C. Penney by choice. We were doing about $3.5 million a year with them and it was our second biggest account. This was about five years ago. We kept getting these chargebacks through their warehouses that we felt were not warranted. It amounted to 5 to 7 percent of what we were shipping. Our national average is about 1 percent or slightly more. We kept bringing it to their attention and they did nothing about it, so we decided we were going to part ways with them. Soon after Paul, my nephew, took over from Jim Roberts as head of marketing and he had to go down and deliver the message to the buyers. They couldn’t believe it. They said, “Nobody’s ever left us.” We said, “You’ve got one now.” We just felt like we were being treated unfairly based on our relationship with other dealers so we opted out. We told them that we would give them six months or three months or whatever they needed to fill in, but that we were severing the relationship because it wasn’t fair. We had the goods on them. We were shipping them through two divisions. We were selling them a set of walls in the catalog division where we were delivering the walls to the customer. We sold them the same wall through their warehouses. The catalog division had virtually no problem. The ones that went through the warehouse, they were charging us back 5 to 10 percent. We knew it was a rip-off.

INTERVIEWER: Sure, that’s just policy.

HOOKER: That’s right. They said, “Our distribution doesn’t have anything to do with merchandising; that’s a separate profit center.” We haven’t regretted the decision. About the only times we’ve broken off is when we think we’re being treated unfairly like in that case and they wouldn’t do anything. We talked about it a lot and they never did anything about it. We just severed it and I’m glad we did. I had a fellow tell me just last week that he wished to heck that Bassett would do the same thing. Come in, Larry. You know Roy Briggs. This is Larry Reiner. He’s getting all the information he can on us for the American Furniture Hall of Fame. My dad said that he felt like we ought to be a part of it (American Furniture Hall of Fame) if we’re going to be a member, and he always supported it. He was a very big supporter of Jim Ryan. He liked him very much and they got along fine. He’d known him since his early days. We’ve always been a member of that. We’re not much joiners on other things. We belong to the Virginia Manufacturers Association. We just support it, but we’re not active in the membership. We were one of the last ones to leave the Home Furnishings Council. We thought that was the right course to get some advertising for the industry. We were willing to put up the 1 percent or whatever it would cost us.

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t the new AFMA initiative going to replace this?

HOOKER: Yes, and we’re happy about that. I know Paul Thompson’s involved in working that thing, and the Association is taking the lead. They are distributing the cost among all of the manufacturers with a revised dues schedule, which I think is fair. We’re very much in favor of it – anything we can do to promote the common good. If we don’t get our share, that’s our fault. I’m not worried about whether Thomasville gets more out of it than we do. If we’re sharp enough we’re going to get our product. I’m not jealous of contributing, even if it’s going to give somebody else a competitive advantage.

INTERVIEWER: What other business enterprises or joint ventures have you been part of?

HOOKER: Not really anything. I’ve been a director for 40 years at a bank up here, the Piedmont Trust Bank. I just went off a few years ago. That’s the main one outside of being the director for Bassett Mirror Company. There’s not any other business particularly. I’ve never been particularly interested in starting a business or being involved in some other business. I’ve invested personally in other things – the stock market and things, but not as a manager or director of anything. I’ve been involved in the church and things like that but, that’s a different area.

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have any joint ventures?

HOOKER: Not really. We did have this Triwood, which made particleboard. We were in a joint venture with Bassett and Pulaski.

INTERVIEWER: They did the same thing in Lenoir.

HOOKER: That’s right. We were in a joint venture with them and then we bought Pulaski out. Burlington was in it too, but later. We bought them out, so Bassett and Hooker owned it. We began to have some environmental problems and it cost a lot to fix it. We decided to close it down. We closed it down and told the employees that we would give them jobs at either Bassett or Hooker, carrying the seniority over. Bassett got the bulk of them which suited us. We didn’t need as many as they did. We just transferred them here so nobody lost a job and they kept their benefits. Just recently, within the last week or two, we’ve been selling off the equipment and getting the building ready to rent. American of Martinsville has leased it and they’re going to buy it next year.

INTERVIEWER: The building?

HOOKER: Yes, the building, the property, everything. We’ll divide the proceeds with Bassett. That will liquidate it. It won’t have any impact particularly on the financial statement one way or the other, so we’ll be out of that project. That’s the only joint venture we’ve ever been in.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s look at changes in the furniture industry. Describe how the industry has changed over the years that you’ve been active.

HOOKER: I think the biggest change has been the consolidation. When I first came in, in 1946, we had a world of small companies. In about every one of the North Carolina furniture towns you had a dozen or two manufacturers, maybe small upholstery people or small case goods people like in Lenoir, Hickory, around High Point and Galax. Many of those people are not in business anymore. They’ve been bought up; I know Broyhill bought a lot of them, Bassett bought some of them, Vaughan- Bassett bought Webb, and then we bought Wells and John Boardman in Kernersville. We’ve seen a lot of consolidation. The companies now are much stronger and much more professional. They are bigger and better companies. They weren’t big enough for your selling organizations and things like that. If you’re very small you just have to take what sales you can find. It’s a very difficult situation. When we were much smaller than we are now, we had a terrible time keeping good salesmen in certain territories. Now we don’t have any trouble with it. We’ve got enough packages that they can sell; they go where the money is, where they can make the best and you can’t blame them.

INTERVIEWER: No, that’s why they’re doing it.

HOOKER: That’s the big change that I see. It’s the same in retail. There are so fewer dealers. Look at a town like Martinsville: When I came over here, we probably had 30 to 40 furniture dealers in this area. I bet there aren’t 10 now. You’ve got Heilig-Meyers, Schewels, Grand Piano was and has left. We’ve got a few dealers and that’s it, because people go to the larger cities where they can see a bigger display to buy. Driving 50 miles is nothing. If you want to buy furniture you go to High Point, Roanoke or Greensboro. Government control is another thing. That’s a big factor we didn’t have when I came about – the environment. We’ve spent a lot of money on the environment. We’ve got an environmental engineer. We have to worry about the emissions. We spent $2.5 million for boilers. We had an old boiler rebuilt, moved and then we put in new boilers. The EPA came in and said we were in violation after we’d spent all that money. We’ll probably get fined and have to go to court or something. It’s this kind of thing, the same thing that closed Triwood down. They called it blue haze. It was some kind of dust but it wasn’t any pollutant. It was just real fine, like sander dust. It’d rain and it would get on people’s cars. It was biodegradable; it’d rot. They raised so much sand about it that we got sited by the EPA. We were talking about fixing it and it was going to cost $2 million. They said, “We don’t guarantee it – put in new burners and new this”. We said, “We’ll just close it down and buy the product somewhere else.” That wouldn’t have happened years ago.

INTERVIEWER: In your own business, talk about the difference in your marketing strategy.

HOOKER: It’s totally different than it was when I first came.

INTERVIEWER: Market research particularly.

HOOKER: We found something we could make at a good price and we designed it. The superintendent or somebody designed it and it sold like we designed it, too – nobody would buy it. It looked so homespun or homemade that it wasn’t good. Once we got the dealers into it and found out what they needed, instead of what we wanted them to buy, it changed the whole picture.

INTERVIEWER: I think that’s very important. What do you see as the most serious problem facing our industry today?

HOOKER: We’ve got two. The environmental issues are going to slow the expansion, because it’s hard to get the permitting that you need. The other side of it is things like N.C. State not being able to attract enough good people or not doing enough to attract them. Furniture is a blue-collar industry in its image. A textile mill is a blue-collar industry. It’s not a glamour industry, like cellular phones, computers or whatever. It’s hard for young people to see the opportunity there. The ones that go into it do very well. Of course, there is this threat of what offshore is going to do to it and long-term, where we think we’ll be. It’s really the industry – that’s why we’re importing. It’s 20 percent of our business – maybe more this year – and it gives us the chance to upgrade and lift the whole look of the line with things we can’t make, that we don’t have the facilities to make, like metal tables, carved and all this. There’s a fear that the industry might go offshore. There’s a sort of overriding concern about the future.

INTERVIEWER: You’re going to have to have educated people to run it no matter where it is.

HOOKER: That’s right, exactly.

INTERVIEWER: As I said before, the textile school at N.C. State has done 10 times a better job of selling it.

HOOKER: I think that furniture is not a glamour industry, per se.

INTERVIEWER: It’s more glamorous than making socks.

HOOKER: That’s right, it is. It’s got some style about it. There’s going to be a place for it because people are beginning to want to make a statement with their

home and furnishings. We had a bed this Market that we’re importing from China. It had burl and crotch mahogany. It’s beautiful. We sold that bed for $2,000. We’ve never had a bed over about $1,000. It sold pretty well. It’s for somebody whose neighbors come in and say, “Where in the world did you find that?” It’s for somebody that builds one of these houses with a ceiling about 20 feet high and puts that bed back against the wall. Its 9 feet tall or so. I think that if we are sharp enough to find out what they want, there are going to be plenty of people in it. If we’re smart enough, we’ll be one of them. We’re not going to give up and say we can’t do it because it’s difficult or because we’re worried about what might happen.

INTERVIEWER: Is there any difference between short-term problems and long-term problems?

HOOKER: I don’t see a lot of difference. You’re going to have ups and downs economically. You’re going to have good years and bad ones. If you have enough momentum in the good years, it carries you through the next cycle. If we can grow at 10 percent a year, we obviously are going to have to have more facilities. I can’t see us filling our market – home office and all – offshore. We’ve got to make things like that. I couldn’t see us building a plant. It would be almost impossible to build a plant and staff it with the skilled people we’d need; it would be a long time until it got profitable. We figured if we were going to build a new plant in the industrial park about the time we bought Pleasant Garden, it would cost us somewhere between $15 million and $18 million to do it. To do $30 million volume (if you made 5 percent after taxes), you’d be making $1.5 million and that would take you a long time to pay. It wasn’t a very good deal, but we bought the plant from Thomasville for less than $6 million and it was already equipped – had the workforce. We started and we were producing in there a month after we bought it. Those people were ready to go to work. That kind of situation we would definitely buy – not go out and build one. Stanley is going to build in the industrial park.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, I read about that.

HOOKER: Maybe they’ve got enough people they can transfer from Stanleytown, skilled people. Maybe they’ll do that with some of the supervisors.

INTERVIEWER: What has been your own greatest contribution to our industry?

HOOKER: I don’t know. We’ve been one of the more fortunate ones. We’ve been successful over the years. I’ve supported the industry causes almost without

exception. Of course, I haven’t been involved with things like UFAC because we didn’t make upholstery. Anything that’s worthwhile, we’ve supported it financially and with people. That’s probably the biggest contribution. We’ve set a good example both locally and within the industry as an important manufacturer. Again, we’ve been consistent.

INTERVIEWER: How much of this contribution was built on already existing techniques and methods, and how much came from innovations that you originated and put into use?

HOOKER: I don’t think we’ve innovated many things. One of the things that I know we innovated was a short work week; we close at noon on Fridays. We were the first ones to do that. We started working a 40- hour week with longer days. Now everybody up here has that. That was important simply because it was a convenience to the people, but the reason we put it in was because we didn’t want people to be absent to go to the dentist, the bank, the doctor or whatever. This way they could schedule it on Friday afternoon, so it worked fine. Now if we were to go back to the other, it would really be a huge mistake.

INTERVIEWER: Based on what you’ve told me, I’d say that your design meetings would be one (an innovation).

HOOKER: Yes, that would be one.

INTERVIEWER: I don’t know of anybody else that does that.

HOOKER: I think we’ve done that for a longer time. We’ve been doing that now for over 40 years without ever missing a year. We haven’t missed a single year. I don’t think we’ve missed a single six months in over 40 years. I guess that was innovative.

INTERVIEWER: Sure it was.

HOOKER: That’s maybe the most important thing we’ve done.

INTERVIEWER: You don’t read more than three or four issues of Furniture/Today before there’s something in there about the fact that our industry does no market research. We put it out, run it up the flagpole and see.

HOOKER: We’ve been doing it through the dealers and our salesmen who are out in the firing line all the time. They’re the ones who see the customers and know.

INTERVIEWER: You put that into use before most other companies. Most of them aren’t even doing it now.

HOOKER: Yes, we’ve had it for 40 years, at least.

INTERVIEWER: What about the influence of outside factors on the furniture industry, such as the Depression?

HOOKER: I wasn’t here then, but I think it taught us discipline. I wasn’t here, but I was brought up through the Depression. We were just in business four years when the Depression hit. My dad told me we had a warehouse full of furniture, and we had the banks right on our necks. We closed out everything just before the fall and paid off a lot of debts. He said if we hadn’t had done that, we’d probably had gone broke because that product was worth about 50 cents on the dollar immediately after that. We unloaded it for maybe 80 cents on the dollar. That one move probably saved us from going broke. He was always, very much, a pay-as-you-go guy don’t borrow too much. After that, he learned a lesson early. He was about strangled with debt personally, because he was buying stock and the company on the other side. He stood to lose both ways. It made us a little more disciplined and a little more conservative in our growth and the way we spent money.

INTERVIEWER: What about the world market?

HOOKER: We do very little outside. We buy a lot overseas. We buy probably $30 million overseas and of course we mark it up by about a third. Maybe we’ll be buying $30 million to $35 million overseas and we export to Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East and wherever, one percent or two percent. It’s not much but we have some export (business). Most of that’s in Canada; probably half of it’s in Canada. The rest of it’s in the other places.

INTERVIEWER: What about women’s issues other than in Pleasant Garden?

HOOKER: Generally pretty good. They’re a bigger percentage of the workforce than ever. Martinsville would be the biggest plant. We don’t separate it anymore. We’ve got somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of the workforce, at least 40 percent overall in the whole company. We don’t have any women officers. We have them pretty high up, not an officer of the company per se, but I could see that we could. There are several jobs that they could do. The personnel director could easily be a woman and probably will be someday. All of our plant personnel managers are women. The head of personnel on the officer level is not. We’ve got a lot of women in personnel. In marketing we have several salesmen. We’ve got three territories that are run entirely by women. North Carolina has two women, there are two in South Carolina, two in San Francisco, plus we’ve got some in other areas, but those three are totally women.

INTERVIEWER: How has shipment of product affected your company?

HOOKER: There has been a dramatic change. There’s no more rail shipping. That’s about gone. We’ve got rail sidings here and at our warehouse at the new

distribution center, but I bet we don’t ship one percent of the product. We’re shipping by truck because everybody wants it so quickly. They want it in two or three days. I’ll give you an example from another company. John Bassett told me that they have a rocking chair program with a total of 24 SKUs in eight different styles, each offered in three finishes. All of them are UPS shippable. They go into a dealer and guarantee him that if he’ll put three of them on the floor, that they’ll deliver any part of that 24 SKU package in a week for $15. He says that they ship it via UPS and they can get it to the pacific coast in seven days and of course everywhere else quicker. He’s got the warehouse and it’s his responsibility to keep it full. It was smart because he had a big chair plant that he wanted to run and he’s probably doing well with them. We’ve got $30 million in finished goods inventory, more than $30 at selling price, $30 at cost. We turn our inventory seven times a year or something like that. That’s probably the industry average. Years ago we probably turned it 10, 15 or 20 times, I don’t know. I think that’s part of it. The dealer’s inventory is relatively small compared to what it used to be, and our inventory is much bigger.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have your own trucks?

HOOKER: No. The only trucks we have are intra-company. We have about a dozen that you see on the highways that are bringing product from Roanoke and Kernersville. We warehouse most of the product here in Martinsville and those trucks are bringing it back. We’ve also got a plywood plant here and they take back a load of plywood. They may take a load of boxes too, but they aren’t delivering them to customers.

INTERVIEWER: What’s been the effect of environmental regulations? You’ve touched a little on that.

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HOOKER: We’ve spent a lot of money in the boiler and finishing areas. The emission restrictions have kept us from expanding. I’m not saying the environmental thing isn’t good. I think in the long term it’s the right thing to do, but they take on specific areas and put limits on what you can emit.

INTERVIEWER: What about water-based finishes?

HOOKER: Well, we’ve experimented with them but we haven’t found them to be as good as the others. I think on a chair or something that doesn’t have a flat surface, it would be all right to have a basic oak or cherry finish that looked like the front of this desk but not the top. I think there’s a place for it in casual furniture, but I don’t see it at this stage. The technology will come about because necessity or environmental laws are going to drive us to it, but I don’t think you’ll get the same quality finish.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it will develop so that you can use it?

HOOKER: I think they’re going to get better – they already are, but they’re a long way from being as good as lacquer finishes. They could be used for upholstery by someone like Sam Moore. I don’t see why they couldn’t use them.

INTERVIEWER: Where the finish is not so critical.

HOOKER: Right. Where it doesn’t have to be as shiny.

INTERVIEWER: Is it possible to use a combination of the two – using a water-based finish on part of the case?

HOOKER: I hadn’t thought about it but I would say that could be a possibility.

INTERVIEWER: It would be that much less emission overall.

HOOKER: Oh yeah, and that might be a compromise. What you’d probably have to do is finish the tops off of the case, unless you masked it off somehow, but that would take a lot.

INTERVIEWER: You use masking for desks with leather.

HOOKER: Yeah, you’re right. So, it’s possible that it could be done. That may be the compromised solution to it.

INTERVIEWER: This question you’ve covered. What has been the involvement of your business in the community? You already mentioned the hospital.

HOOKER: We’ve had people at the head of the hospital, the Piedmont Arts and the YMCA. Several have been officers and others have been presidents of all these things. We support them financially. Once or twice a year, we have a sale for our employees and then open it up to the public. Mostly odds and

ends are left. The employees get furniture for something like a third of wholesale; a ridiculous price. A lot of the pieces are samples from our design meetings, so many are one-of-a-kind pieces that never went into production. There’s some beautiful stuff in there and nothing is wrong with it, maybe it’s just a finish that we didn’t run. Then we take the proceeds from that sale and put it into what we call a better community fund which goes to the boy’s soccer league, little league baseball, and to the schools for yearbooks. It amounts to probably $150,000 a year and it’s distributed in small amounts of $500 or $1,000. Down in Pleasant Garden, the fire department had bought a truck or something, and they had $10,000 in debt. We told them we’d give $5,000 if they would match it. It was a challenge gift. They raised $11,000 or $12,000. They got our money and raised $5,000 or $6,000 to add to it. Things like that where you give little bits in different communities gets us a lot of good will. We also give to the churches if they have a building fund. It’s only $50 per member that works here – not their family. It’s not much money but you’ve probably got a hundred churches around here. It has to be a building fund and it has to be an employee.

INTERVIEWER: Describe your involvement in social, civic and business activities outside of the furniture industry.

HOOKER: That’s been mainly local. I’ve been president of the country club. I’m chairman of the trustees of the Methodist church and have been for years. I’ve been in Boy Scouts and have served as district chairman. I always end up on the fundraising committee for the hospital, the YMCA and the Piedmont Arts Association. You have to get the people and their companies with the money behind these things in order to have a decent quality of life. If they aren’t, it’ll fall on its face.

INTERVIEWER: What is your favorite charity?

HOOKER: I guess the Methodist church although I’m partial to BMI. No, I take that back. I’d say my favorite charity currently, or certainly my co-favorite, would be our Hooker Educational Foundation. We’ve got two foundations – one is the Hooker Foundation, which my mother started. It gives small amounts of money to charities serving the local area. We give away between $10,000 and $12,000 a year to the Mark’s School for the mentally handicapped. The community college is also very good and close to my heart because it gives so many of our people a chance to get two years of college education and it’s often a springboard for getting them four years. The Hooker Educational Foundation is something that our family has supported. It’ll get bigger and bigger because we’ll be leaving money to it. Up until this time it’s been gifts primarily. My mother gave some, I have given some and Frank has given some. I think it’s got less than a million dollars in it now, but someday it will have several million I hope. That foundation gives scholarships to children of people who work here. They have to maintain a C average to keep the scholarship. That’s been a very, very important thing for us. We haven’t done it for very long; it’s probably been no more than five years.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, so that will grow?

HOOKER: Oh yeah, it will grow tremendously. I think its something that we’ll be proud of. The students get their pictures in the paper and it goes to all of our plants, not just here.

INTERVIEWER: How does the supply of money compare with the demand?

HOOKER: Well, it’s pretty good. The company puts up about $50,000 or $60,000 a year. We have a non-family member scholarship committee with maybe six or so educators, some retired. We have nothing to do with the distribution of the money. The committee goes down and looks at all of the applications. If we give a student a scholarship one year and then we later fire their parent, then they still get four years of scholarship money provided that they qualify. So that can’t be taken away from them.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful.

HOOKER: I think that’s they way it ought to be. It’s not the child’s fault that their parent got terminated for one reason or another. We are committed to the child. If a student is going to a community college where the tuition is lower and they’re living at home, they may give them $500 or $1,000. If they’re going to a college away from home, like N.C. State or somewhere else, they might give them up to $2,500, which is the limit. They’ll probably give away this year somewhere between, I’d say, $75,000 to $80,000. We’re trying to build endowment up. Right now, the company is supporting most of it. In fact, I gave them some stock the other day, about $40,000 worth to put in the foundation and I don’t have to pay any tax on it. It would help them and Frank does the same thing. We’ll build that endowment up and they will invest in that; they invest in the principle. There’s going to be more and more demand, of course we’re not growing so much right now, but once they get in school, they’ve got four years as long as they meet all the criteria. It is a very good thing. Like that Vietnamese family over there. One of them didn’t make it so they had to drop out of the scholarship, but they understood. You just say, “well I’m sorry you don’t get one this next year,” but they can come back and maybe qualify later. They’ll have to do it on their own. It’s been a great thing for us, those two things where we can give back some to the community. We’re not much on big national charities like the City of Hope, the Jewish Appeal and all those things that your dealers hammer you for. We want to serve the area where our people are. Forget New York, Chicago and all that. We’re very much in favor of the Red Cross and the people that are right here, the Salvation Army and all of those organizations.

INTERVIEWER: What is your principal leisure time activity?

HOOKER: Well golf, I guess, is my main one such as it is.

INTERVIEWER: What has been your greatest success in golf?

HOOKER: Well I’ve had four holes in one; I guess that’s pure luck. I’ve never shot my age, but I’ve been close. I’ve been within one of that, but I’ve never shot it.

INTERVIEWER: My dad did that three or four times.

HOOKER: He lived probably until he was about 90 didn’t he?

INTERVIEWER: Oh yeah.

HOOKER: Mr. Broyhill and his putting, if he was as close as that sofa he said I’m not going to three-put it. After he putted it twice, he picked it up. Of course, he had Parkinson’s and was shaking so bad. I remember I was playing with him once, I think it was in Bermuda or somewhere on one of our trips years ago, and he got him a little bottle of Jack Daniels out of the dash and

said, “I’ll get a little steady in a minute.” He was a character. Golf is my main leisure activity, and my wife plays too which makes it nice.

INTERVIEWER: What’s your best experience in golf, besides four holes in one? I don’t think you can beat that.

HOOKER: Well, I guess, that would be the best. Like I said, I’ve never shot my age. I’ve played with a couple of good players. I’ve played with Mike Sucheck, Dale Marmion, Dean Beman, but never in a Pro-Am. I’ve never been in a big Pro-Am or anything. I used to be into hunting. Quail hunting was another leisure activity I enjoyed. I haven’t hunted in ten years or more.

INTERVIEWER: Do they still have any quail around here?

HOOKER: No, they’re about dried up. That’s the reason we quit hunting. We used to hunt a lot up in Patrick County. We quit, I guess, because of both their

farming methods and the predators.

INTERVIEWER: The foxes got all of ours.

HOOKER: Exactly. When I was growing up – you’re probably aware of this – foxes and hawks were bounty. They had a bounty on them. If you killed a hawk, you got a dollar or fifty cents or something. The same if you killed a crow. Then of course when they stopped doing that, all the predators had taken

care of the quail. They’ve just about wiped them out in most areas.

INTERVIEWER: You never hear one at home.

HOOKER: It’s a sad thing. There used to be a lot of them up here. They say there’s only one out of a clutch that is apt to fully age; one full grown out of a whole dozen eggs or whatever.

INTERVIEWER: The final subject, which is not appropriate, but you may have some thoughts on it, is retirement.

HOOKER: My plans are to retire at the end of next year. I think it’s time to move on. Not that I don’t enjoy it, I just don’t think that my health is good. I’ve had three or four things: prostate cancer which I had surgery for about seven years ago; I’ve had a hip replaced; and I’ve got myasthenia gravis which I’m being treated for and I’m hopefully in remission. I’m in relatively good health as far as activities, I just feel like it’s time to move on. Then I’ll have a chance to see if we’ve picked the right people to carry the company to the next level. It’s just time to step down. I’ve got all of the confidence in the world in these people and they’ve been here long enough and I think they can do it. I think they deserve a chance to do it.

INTERVIEWER: Sure they do.

HOOKER: Frank and I are both going to retire.

INTERVIEWER: Not at the same time?

HOOKER: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Oh really.

HOOKER: I don’t think he wants to be the head of it when I’m not here. We’ll just move a whole new regime in here. It’ll be just like when I came in 1960.

We’ll have a whole new deal. We’ll see what happens. I would have been president for 40 years from 1960 to the year 2000. So after 40 years, we’re changing administration.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you for taking so much time today for this important contribution to our furniture industry. I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. Keep in mind that you may request a follow-up interview if you wish.

HOOKER: Thank you, Roy. I enjoyed the conversation and lunch.