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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
I-0068, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Richard Barentine arrived in Winston-Salem, NC, certain that the modest city in the middle of the state held a great deal of potential. In this interview, he describes his effort to nurture that potential, first as a member of the city's Chamber of Commerce, and eventually as CEO of the International Home Furnishing Marketing Association. Barentine took the lead in transforming the Southern Furniture Exposition into the International Home Furnishings Market, a wholesale furniture event of international importance. For most of this interview, Barentine recalls his efforts to shape and expand "the Market," detailing his strategy as it unfolded over a period of years. He also describes his focused leadership style, which emphasizes communication, and reflects on the history of Winston-Salem and North Carolina's furniture trade, which is expanding its global reach. This interview will be useful to researchers interested in Winston-Salem's furniture industry and in business leadership.
Richard Barentine, CEO of the International Home Furnishing Marketing Association, describes his leadership style and his contributions to Winston-Salem's furniture industry.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview on Thursday, January 28, 1999 with Mr. Richard Barentine who is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Home Furnishings Marketing Association in High Point, North Carolina. We are at his offices in High Point. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program. This interview is a part of the SOHP's new series North Carolina Business History. We are joined today by Dr. Dorothy Darr who is involved with the Center for the Study of the American South and the Oral History Program, a long time ally and colleague. Because it is the 28th of January, this is cassette number 1.28.99-RB. I thought Mr. Barentine we might start today with just a sketch of your personal background: where and when you were born, your family life, what you folks did, the community you lived in, early schooling.
I was born in Memphis in Tennessee in 1944 in February, so I am nearing my fifty-fifth birthday. I was educated in the public schools of Memphis. I received a Bachelor's degree from Memphis State University, which has renamed itself the University of Memphis. My degree is in history and political science, which shows that if from my generation you were educated in a broad based way, you could do a lot of things. I don't know if that holds true today in today's technological world, but it did in my world. I grew up in the wonderful, sort of sleepy, hazy '50s. [I] experienced the opposite in the '60s. [I] wouldn't have missed the opportunity to live through the '60s. I left Memphis three days after I graduated from college.
Which was which year?
Let me ask. What were you doing and where?
Well, you know, I knew you were going to ask that. I was a federal venereal disease investigator. Having lived through the sleepy '50s and the turbulent '60s, that was a real shock for the grandson of a southern Baptist minister.
Was this a Great Society job?
I don't really think it was a Great Society job because the jobs are still in place today and were in place, I would suspect, from the end of the Second World War and maybe back before then. It was an interesting job. My mother never quite got up to speed on what I did for a living for those two years. When asked, she would just say, "He works for the Public Health Service." "Well what does he do?" "I don't know." She didn't know.
A young person coming out of college, did this look like a potential career path, or was this "I'm going to do some public service" in that era?
No, I got a draft deferment. Anyone who didn't live through the '60s
could be quick to criticize. We have heard the criticism of our public
officials who lived through the '60s. The Public Health Service of the
United States government was offering college graduates a draft
deferment to do this work. I came to North Carolina and worked in that
capacity for two years, which was the deal I had with the government, to
serve in the Public Health Service. Perhaps I would have gone on in the
Public Health Service, but they move you around too much. They wanted me
to go to New Mexico to
Let me ask you another question, too, before we move too much beyond the distance of this discussion of your early childhood. Can you describe the process, as you look back, of your values formation? Like most of us, parents were a principal influence?
I had a very stable childhood. My parents are both, at this point, still
alive in their eighties. I didn't experience divorce. I did experience
much death. I lost grandparents, but I had no siblings who died. I have
an older sister, a younger brother
What did the employment landscape look to you like in '69 when you were coming out of your Public Health Service job?
I was fascinated by Winston-Salem. I had moved from Memphis. Memphis in
the '60s had a million people. [It was] a very large metropolitan area.
It certainly had all the cultural and social and shopping opportunities
that cities of that size have. I moved to North Carolina [and went]
first to Raleigh — and didn't stay there very long
—with the Public Health Service. Then they moved me to
Winston-Salem. I was absolutely fascinated with Winston-Salem because it
was a microcosm of a big city only it was a small city. I started off a
little frightened because the opportunities for shopping were fewer.
Then I realized the same things I could get in Memphis, I can get here.
That's not always true when you move from a city of a million people to
a city then of probably 135,000. It was sort of a shock. I was
fascinated by Winston-Salem. It's an extremely sophisticated, very
cultured city, and very wealthy city. I was able to be befriended by and
become a friend of James A. Gray. James A. Gray, Jr. served as a mentor
of mine for a number of years. Jim Gray is descended from a very
prominent
Really?
For a number of years. Winston had the kind of things I liked. It was forward thinking and I liked the Chamber of Commerce. A number of very fine business people contributed to my success. I felt very fortunate [about that]. [Despite] not being from there — being newly from North Carolina, from Tennessee — I felt accepted. I was fascinated by that city and my job.
Let me draw you out a little bit more on the networks of business leaders into which you were drawn in that role.
I have a degree in history. So, history—. There's a thread of
it through everything that I do. Winston-Salem was one of the most
fascinating towns because at the Chamber of Commerce you were able to
sit at the arm of the power structure. You weren't part of it, but you
were there to implement the wishes of the people who ran the town. Many
of them were kin to each other. You had to understand the dynamics, or
you couldn't survive. That served me well in the furniture industry, as
well. I stick to these sort of nepotistic industries. There was no lack
of money to do what we needed to do. If you needed a special project,
either the tobacco company or the bank would provide the funding.
Winston-Salem was very well placed in the state political arena. There
was plenty of money for projects. Those big businesses were perhaps
paternalistic, but that sure wasn't all bad because Winston excelled in
the state. It had the first Arts Council in the nation. It has a long
history of doing things. I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated by the
genealogy. I was fascinated by the Moravian heritage — an old,
old heritage. All of that played into the love of history that I have.
It was wonderful to see enlightened people getting something done.
Politics was civilized. You could see the
You've anticipated another question, which is the extent to which you had contact with that realm of leadership, which is expressly political in those years. Were you drawn into political circles, working with government officials to a great extent and so forth?
The Chamber of Commerce works with all levels. It's a business
organization, obviously, but business is there to use the government
services or influence government services. In the tourism sector, that's
what I did. I ran the Convention and Visitor's Bureau. We needed the
help of the city. The city owned the Convention Center, so there was a
built in partnership. Tax money had built that facility, so we were
charged with promoting the city to bring the conventions in. The federal
government had provided a variety of grants to help clear some land and
build some hotels and things. So, we were dealing with the federal
people. The mayor and the city manager — all of those people –
we worked with very closely because we were bringing visitors to the
city who needed to be served and protected. One of the things that we
accomplished, very early on, was great alliances with the state of North
Carolina. The state's Travel and Tourism Division, for whatever reason,
had paid most of their promotional attention to the mountains and to the
coast. This "heartland" is what they called where we
are now — but it was the Piedmont — sort of got left
out. They would say, "Well, you know, y'all are so strong, you
don't need the promotion and it's not a recognizable—. It's
not mountains and ocean." We said, "We're what keeps
the mountains from falling in the ocean. You need to pay attention to
the middle of the state." We fostered that relationship and
He participated in our politics series, so yeah—.
I was the democrat on the plane. That taught me a good lesson, too. Don't think that they don't know what your party affiliation is. They always do. To that point, in the late '60s — in '69 — the advice from my mentor was, "You're going to work for the Chamber of Commerce. You're going to work for a state that has not had a republican governor since Reconstruction. You need to be a registered democrat in the state of North Carolina." He explained to me that a registered democrat in the state of North Carolina is a person who votes democratic on the local and state level and republican on the federal level.
Even back then, that was his perspective?
Even back then, yeah. " Jim," he said, "If
you're going to be appointed to boards and commissions on a local level
or on a state level, you're going to have to be a registered
Democrat." Of course, that was true until the republicans came
in, but there was an understanding even then that, I mean, everybody
can't be a republican all of a sudden. All of us who had been registered
democrats for all these years, had served the
What led you down the road to High Point in 1977?
I was comfortable at the Convention and Visitor's Bureau. We were at the
height of our influence. I was at the height of my influence in my
career there. No other city in the state came near to what we were
doing. In fact, we were running how-to sessions for Charlotte and
Asheville and Greensboro, and everybody else that wanted to do what we
were successfully doing. I told the executive vice president of the
Chamber one day that, "We really ought to charge for some of
this. It's wearing me out doing all these how-to's." He said,
"No. This is kind of a part of what you do. You share with the
other communities around." That was a good lesson for me to
learn, too. We started an informal organization, which now has become
the North Carolina Association of Convention and Visitor's Bureaus. I'm
the founder of that organization and served as its first president. I
served as its president for probably five or six years before we had any
formal structure to it. I didn't really want any formal structure, but
we finally put some structure to it. Well, I was at the height of my
effectiveness and had real high recognition around the Triad because of
what Winston was doing. I got a call from a man from the
Difficult to sort out this committee form of boss, if you will?
No. No, not really. I think you have to have real sharp instincts. I think you have to know how to treat all of those people. You have to understand that they're very competitive, but they're also probably kin to each other and they're also friends. When they come together, you don't get caught in the middle of that business competitiveness. In any career that deals with very powerful people in a group, you have to learn, more often as not, not to ask permission but to ask forgiveness if it doesn't work out. I have a broad mandate that I check every once in a while with them. None of this work is done by a committee. That's what they wanted, and that suits my style. They want to manufacture furniture, bring it down here, and show it to their dealers. They don't want to be bothered about when are they going to close bridges and what's going on when we get there.
Maybe we could turn to the history of the organization, which will bring the story up to the point—. I'm keenly interested in what you found when you drove down here to take that new job in '77. What were these problems that they wanted solved? Maybe you could reach back for a minute, if you think that's most convenient. Or, do you want to go another direction?
At some point — and this might be the best place to do it — I think we need to go all the way back to why this event's here and that would take us all the way back to the end of the American Civil War. So, let's do that and get us through that period of history and then get us to the World War Two era, which is the era that the organization and I both have served in.
Yep.
North Carolina has a very rich heritage of cabinet making. If you look
back at the history of the state and if you look all across the state
from the coast to the mountains, you find excellent examples of fine
cabinetry. In many instances it was copied from the pattern books of the
great European cabinetmakers. Then it had some vernacular adaptations,
and it became ours. You had the Swicegoods in Davidson County. You had
the Moravians in both Salem and Bethabara. You had Thomas Day in Caswell
County and then many others whose names are familiar in history, but
those are some significant ones. What they made provided the basis for
the skill. Why they made it was because we had the raw materials. We had
the wonderful Appalachian hardwood forests running through this area. We
still have it. At the end of the American Civil War, the railroad had
been destroyed. The north [to] south railroad [system] had been
destroyed. During Reconstruction — the early part of
Reconstruction — it was fully
Quail hunters?
Quail hunters — dove and quail. So, there was an easy mixture between the north and the south at that point of Reconstruction. People like Colonel Francis Fries from Winston-Salem — who was a major industrial entrepreneur — and others came through. With the support of other people, we can get a railroad built. They went to Mr. Bassett. They went to Mr. Burnhart. They went to Mr. Broyhill, [and to] the Finches in Thomasville and others who owned timber and who were sawmillers. They said, "We want the sawmill. We want you to sawmill the crossties to build this railroad." So, they did that. That was wonderful work. We had the raw materials. When the railroad was finished, then lumber started being shipped out of here as the principal cash crop. In the 1870s and '80s that was about all we were doing here. As a cash crop, it didn't take the southern entrepreneurs and the northern entrepreneurs long to figure out that we ought not to be shipping lumber. We ought to be shipping furniture. So, in about 1880 — almost simultaneously in other parts of North Carolina — mass produced furniture started being made. I believe this city dates it [to] about 1888 as the beginning [the year] of mass produced furniture. So, in the '80s, it must have been a wonderful time in the south, particularly in this part of the south because—.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Okay.
A large idle workforce was put to work. The quality of life —
the standard of living — immediately was ready to change
because people had jobs. There was a focus on the future. It was natural
that we were doing this because we had the basis for building the
cabinetry. We had the heritage of the handmade [furniture], and now we
would do machine made [furniture]. Well, we started off in that period
of time making not the finest furniture. What the southern manufacturers
wanted to make was furniture for everybody. We were scoffed [at] a
little. Of course, we were scoffed at by Jamestown and Grand Rapids and
Chicago and New York because we quit sending them the lumber. We, as
upstarts, got into the furniture manufacturing business. Who did we
think we were? Well, we actually knew who we were. We made furniture,
and we shipped it north. We put it in these nice wooden crates called
cases. Unfortunately for our furniture manufacturers, we didn't know
this for a long time. The people on the other end didn't really care
about the furniture. They wanted the cases because they had very fine
lumber that they could then make furniture out of. That's where the word
case goods comes from. It's wooden furniture. We learned quickly that we
could build a finer product. Most factories built a single piece of
furniture. They built a bed, and this factory would build a dresser.
Through consolidation people bought factories, and that's how we ended
up with bedroom suites in rooms. It was happenstance. Today many
manufacturers of dining room furniture don't make their chairs. They
make the table, but they don't make the chairs. So, there's still some
of that going on. Here we were, [in the]1880s, making all this furniture
[that was] on a railroad that was bringing northern
Because of perceived insufficient quality?
I think that was part of it. I think we had—.
The resentment?
There was probably a healing process that wasn't quite complete. We had,
after all, stopped shipping them lumber. Here we were competing, and I
could expect that the northerners felt towards the southerners what we
in the United States sometimes feel about exports from other countries.
This was stuff coming from virtually another country. They had never had
this kind of competition in the north. The people in the south didn't
really like the way they were being treated in the north. They realized
that they were getting started, but they needed a way to market this
product. There were several efforts in the late 1880s to bring buyers to
this area. They weren't very well organized. They were sort of civic,
sort of industrial, but not very well organized. They'd have them one
year, and then they wouldn't have them. It would depend on this railroad
traffic because in the 1880s, that's the only way you got down here.
People in the community and in the industry decided that we need to do
this a little differently. We know we have the product, and we know that
people want this product. We just need to get it into the mass
merchandising networks and not just carry this stuff around on wagons
and try to sell it. That's how a lot of it was done. It was done by
peddlers who just would come in and pick up the stuff. You can got to
museums today and see the
By 1913, the event was held twice a year, very successfully. Still, it
was being held in small buildings, mostly in the upstairs of existing
buildings in the uptown area. We don't know how many buyers came in
1909, but we do know in 1913 that the event used 30,000 square feet of
space. It had space in eight different buildings here in High Point and
Thomasville. There were a hundred furniture manufacturers, and four
hundred qualified buyers came to that event in 1913. So in the few
years, from 1909 to 1913, this
From 1913 on the Market began to grow rather dramatically. In the late '20s, a group of investors built the Southern Furniture Exposition Building, which still stands today as one of the core buildings of the International Home Furnishings Center. I guess that building was probably about nine stories, maybe ten, when it was built. It was a very solid expression of confidence in the industry and in the event. You know, by that time the event was pretty well established. The quality of the furniture had greatly improved. The number of manufacturers had consolidated. They still were mostly kin to each other. The event was theirs. It was a business event for the purpose of getting buyers to come to see this product. I had a conversation several weeks ago with the recently deceased Herman Bernard. Herman was one of our carriers of history. Herman had been in the furniture industry in this city for many, many years and would sit and tell stories about the Market and could remember when the Southern Furniture Exposition Buildings was built. He said, "You know, it was just this massive open core — no partitions, no walls, and no curtains. You just went in on the floor and everything was just there. You were standing right next to your competitor looking at what they made, and they were looking at what you made." He said, "Then we finally put some curtains up because it was getting a little too close for comfort. We put some walls up."
So the event has been one that has evolved. It has evolved at the same pace that this city has evolved. We've not outstretching its capacity. The event has been here so long, it is referred to as "Market" and that is a capital M. Nobody outside of this town misunderstands what you're talking about. You're going to Market. You're not going to the grocery store. It's with a capital M. That got the event well established. The buyers were coming down. They also didn't just come to High Point and Thomasville. They took these motor excursions and went to the factories in Lenoir and at Bassett. They were going around to those factories. First, they were going to buy closeouts. "What kind of deals you've got?" "Closeouts." "We're going to come down here." A lot of that was done in January and July — kind of look at that Florida schedule, too. How do we do business? Well, we do business sometimes because it's where we want to be. But then, as the Market grew, more and more exhibitors came down to Southern Furniture Exposition. That building from the late '20s to the '60s dominated the landscape without much competition from other real estate developments. There were a few. The '60s saw a great growth spurt in other kinds of showrooms.
During the First World War, everybody made war materials. We had a break
there during the First World War. [During] the Second World War, there
were no markets held. The whole industry was making war materials. The
Southern Furniture Exposition Building was a record office for personnel
records for the Armed Forces. All across the United States, the
government took over various buildings. This was a perfect building to
take over because it was empty. They stored personnel records there
throughout the Second World War, which also attests to the national
influence that this city had gained by that time. For people in
Washington to identify a building in High
At the end of the Second World War, as anyone who was born near it or reads their history knows, that there was this great burst in the economy. All of the veterans were coming back. I remember as a kid just hundreds of houses under construction at one time. Every other one was different. They had three or four plans. As a kid, we'd go to these vast subdivisions and go and look in all the—. we'd never seen that many houses being built because right before the Second World War, there weren't that many houses being built. All of a sudden, you had this huge demand for home furnishings. Many of the leaders of the industry had come back. It was a time that the generations were changing in the factories. Sons were moving into ownership. Not many daughters. A few. I'll touch on that, but not many. It was the times. But, a lot of change in management and some of those people were the people that I encountered in the '70s and that now are nearing their retirement. So, I worked through all that.
The Market was growing overwhelmingly. In 1955 the manufacturers decided
they needed to have a cohesive group. They founded an organization
called the Furniture Factories Marketing Association of the South. It
was the major case goods people. It was after all those people who had
invested the time, the money, the energy, and their reputations in
founding this market in 1909, so they wanted to see it continue. They
had a vested interest. They had a paternalistic interest. They were
going to control it. It served the industry and served them very well.
So that the focus never got diverted from
So the Market is here because of the raw material. It's here because of the heritage of cabinet making in North Carolina. It's here because the northern and the southern entrepreneurs joined together to make it be here. It's here because they want it here. North Carolina today produces thirty-five percent of the furniture made in the United States. Virginia produces twenty-five percent. So in a radius of about two hundred miles, from High Point and Thomasville, you'll find sixty percent of the furniture that's made in the nation being made. Point of production has always been where the market has taken place. When Grand Rapids was the manufacturing furniture capital of the world, the market was in Grand Rapids. The same thing [occurred] in Jamestown, Chicago, and New York. But [in] those cities, as we increased our influence, their influence declined. As theirs declined, we moved into the leading position. Very early — in the late '50s — we were the dominant market. Certainly by the early '70s, we were the largest home furnishings market in the world.
Even by the early '70s?
Yeah. When I got here in '77, we were the largest in the world. So [it
happened] sometime in that period of the '70s. I think it had to do with
that great
No staff? This was the manufacturers doing this?
No staff.
On sort of a rotating basis? You do it this time [and] I'll do it next time.
Um hmm. There were generally four officers. For a while, they would serve a year term. Then they realized that they were running out of each other, so they'd better have two-year terms. They weren't really about letting too many other people in. They gave themselves two-year terms and sort of held out for generational change to bring in new officers.
Do you know if during some of those early promotional materials exist?
I have a few, [but] not many. The box that they sent around, I guess it
would be thinned out by different officers. It had the legal records,
the minutes and things, but it didn't have very much of the promotional
materials because they farmed that out to an ad
The Hampton Powell phone call that came in '76? I want to make sure I'm
clear on this.
I can't answer that because they weren't talking to us in Winston-Salem.
High Point was very parochial about this event and can be sometimes
today very parochial about it. It's theirs. We didn't know anything
about it in the Triad. We didn't exactly say, "Oh, Lord, who
are all these people?" We knew when Market was going to take
place and it was a good piece of business. You knew you were going to
get full. But, we didn't really know what kind of problems they were
having. They weren't telling us. These problems were accumulating. It
was problems with transportation. It was problems with accommodations
[and] problems with communications. This Market was stretched out across
North Carolina for 150 miles. The interstate didn't even go all the way
to Hickory in '77. You had people come down here, and they didn't know
where to fly. Then they couldn't get a car. You had to have a car then.
You had to move back and forth in a car. The east wasn't talking to the
west because they were very competitive.
So the Market had perhaps depended a little on the manufacturers, and they had found a very strong advocate in Robert Gruenburg. Bob Gruenburg, the late Robert Gruenburg, was the head of the Southern Furniture Market Center for many years and was in that position of leadership in '77 when I was hired. He was one of my supporters, one of the people who advanced my name. He was tough. He was fair. He ran a very tight ship, and his influence was broader than just his building. Yet, he wasn't the right one to do the job. He was a landlord. There were these other buildings growing up. And he realized it. Bob and I had not an uneasy relationship, but it took Bob a while to relinquish spokesperson roles and things of that nature that he had done because it had sort of been left to him to do it. He picked up the responsibility. Manufacturers weren't angry about him, but they didn't want him doing it. They didn't want the landlords doing it.
I don't know how long they were sitting over here wringing their hands. I
don't know how long these problems were going on, but they were pretty
serious by the time they got to me. Yet, they were very simple to solve.
They simply needed day to day leadership — someone carrying
the message back and forth and some entity that actually communicated
with all the landlords, all the exhibitors, all the hotels, everybody
that needed to be a part of this event. My style, my mandate was
"You do this. We want you to straighten all this up."
We talked about what was practical, what wasn't practical and kind of
set the mandate. The mandate came together that we were to create and
sustain a business climate where all of Market's participants can have a
profitable, a pleasant, and a
Now, the other day, Bob Spilman described my career as, "We told
him to do all this. He's done it. Everything now runs real smoothly.
"Now when we come down there," of course, he doesn't
now, but, "When we come down there, he's who we can yell at if
something goes wrong." That's Bob Spilman. The way to make all
that happen was to bring forward my Convention and Visitor's Bureau
career. This is just a bigger audience. They have to have a place to
sleep. They need to move around. They need to eat, and all those things.
We're going to push them into a box that's a private event. That's
different. That's a little different because you're only promoting to a
qualified group of people that can come. That's a little different. But,
I had the visibility in the Triad to be able to work with all these
communities. We had taught most of them what they were doing. We were
not an adversary.
That you did not.
[That I] did not live in High Point. I said, "Well, good. I wouldn't be interested in the job if I had to move twenty minutes from where I live now." In '77, Market took place in two places. It took place in Statesville, Hickory and Lenoir. And it took place here in High Point and Thomasville. In '77 immediately I used my Chamber of Commerce background. I came over to High Point to my friends at the Chamber of Commerce. They knew I was being hired. They were some of my supporters as well. I said, "There is no more logical place to have an office, then than in your building. There is no more logical service for you to provide the Market, than to give us our office." I went to Hickory to my friends in Hickory and said the same thing. So in early '77, I started a migratory office routine of three days in High Point and two days in Hickory. Now remember, we all travel when we want to, where we want to. My office hours in Hickory were Friday and Monday. Mr. Powell asked me one time, "Why do you go up there on Friday and Monday?" I said, "Mr. Powell, I have a house in Blowing Rock." He said, "Oh." I said, "You don't have to pay a hotel room. If you send me up there two consecutive nights, you have to put me up in a hotel." Then he thought that was wonderful. I was just really sleeping at home every night and just went to my office on Fridays and Mondays. I did that for eight years. I was there from '77 to '85, and I'm the person that kind of turned the light out and brought the flag down. We stayed one market longer than we really needed to to close down all those operations up there.
But again, it was that same kind of style of working with them and being
able to identify the public officials and leaders in the community and
making them understand how important the event was. Through the Chamber
of Commerce format, I found those
Now you had to have western partnerships and eastern partnerships. We pulled this event together and promoted it as one event. There was none of this east and west conflict anymore. It took someone carrying the message back and forth, three days [and] two days to make that happen. My schedules during Market during the '70s to '85 were absolutely horrendous. I remember the amount of driving I had to do. It was tough not to have a breakfast meeting in Hickory, a luncheon in High Point, an afternoon reception in Hickory and a dinner down here. It just was awful, but it was what it took to get it together.
The Market all that time is growing. Its problems are decreasing because they're being managed properly. They're also decreasing because the area is growing, so you're having more hotels built. That's all a result of being good stewards of the economy around here. The tourist industry was a big participant in building a lot of these hotels. As we managed the problems, they were solving themselves as we grew. Well, not always solved because they're always ready to have a problem, but they're managed.
Then the idea [arose] that the Market ought not to be separated as widely. People, who came to this Market, traveled it and worked it and liked it, but that generation was changing. The next generation hadn't remembered when you had to go to the factories all over. The new generation didn't care particularly that you could go have dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Burnhart. [They didn't care that] they'd take you home with them or Mr. and Mrs. Broyhill. That didn't mean anything to them. The early part of the southern manufacturing climate was [based on] personal relationships, a lot of that. It still is today, but it's a little different the way we do business today. The western part of the state was more relaxed. We had a million square of space up there. We had never more than four hundred exhibitors. In the '70s we had probably 1300 exhibitors. There were still parties at Mr. Burnhart's house. There were still parties at the Broyhill's. But, times were changing. The buyers weren't interested in making those long journeys. People were telling those people up there it was too far to go. "We can't go up there." They also were finding that they had about a two-day Market up there. Big dealers would come up there and stay a couple of days, and then they would come down here and they wouldn't see them again.
There was an emotionally wrenching decision that many of those manufacturers had to make. Did they give up these wonderful factory showrooms, that they owned, that were across the street from their offices? They always could sleep in their own bed at night during Market. Did they give those up to come down to High Point or Thomasville? Where strategically could they find themselves located? Location [was] important. Many of the manufacturers were stockholders in the infrastructure. They owned hotels. They owned portions of stock held buildings in Hickory. I don't remember exactly who precipitated it, but I think it was probably a number of decisions that happened very quickly when Broyhill announced they were leaving. The Lane Company closed all of its divisions up there, Century, then Burnhart.
This part of the Market — the eastern part of the Market — was fully aware of the thought process that was going on in the west because those big exhibitors were chatting with landlords and developers down here. Bob Gruenburg, brilliant businessman that he was, decided he would build the Design Center. It's not the last building that's been built in that complement, but it was built to accommodate this demand that was coming from the west. All of those western exhibitors didn't choose to go in that building. Market Square was being developed at the same time. Market Square was a little before its time.
We had all been to Ghirardelli. We all knew what an old factory could
look like if it were rehabilitated. We'd been to San Francisco, again,
because you travel where you want to go. We'd been to San Francisco, and
we'd seen how that can work. We didn't know that it could work here. The
visionaries that were going to make that work, hoped it would. In the
South, there weren't many of these factory redos. There were plenty of
factories that could be redone, but there hadn't been any major ones.
This city had no
[Was it] too big of a bite?
Yeah. Bob Gruenburg was over here, busy building the Design Center to
take the sting out of Market Square. These landlords are big
competitors. When Century signed as an anchor tenant for Market Square,
and Market Square had been open—. Century didn't come down
here and open with them. Century Furniture Company came down and said,
"This will be where our showroom will be." Century is
as sophisticated, as design conscious, as image conscious as any company
you'll find. They're going to go on the top floor of an old factory
building [in which] the roof leaks and all the water pipes and all the
utilities are hanging up there in the ceiling, and the floors squeak.
It's not this House and Garden sterile showroom environment they've had
and that everybody else had. That's when Market Square caught on. Now
the owners may differ with that perspective. When Century came, that's
when—. If you talk to Jake, I think Jake will agree that
Century then put that stamp of credibility [on Market Square].
"We can handle the environment. It's not the way we've done
business in the past. It's not the way this Market has done business in
the past. It's probably not the way the south had done business in the
past. But we're going to try it." They tapped in again to that
history that
I'm sorry. I don't understand those implications. [Tell me about] the Tax Act.
The federal government will give you tax credits — real tax dollar credits — if you will rehabilitate for adaptive use a National Register of Historic Places building. They have oversight through the state Historic Preservation Offices as to how its done, what has to be saved, how it's looked after, all those things. Then you get twenty percent.
: Jake did it under twenty-five percent.
Twenty-five percent.
They got about a two and a half million dollar tax credit for an eleven million dollar project reducing the overall cost from eleven by two and a half million.
It's taken off the tax by the dollar.
Dollar by dollar. It's a federal income tax credit.
[It encourages] historic preservation. The reason there's historic preservation is because it's economically feasible to save the building and because there is a use. Now the building complexes have all just been sold to the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Isn't that ironic?
I'm sorry.
Isn't that ironic? You want to take a break?
Let's take a little break. [break]
In the consolidation of Market from west to east, it is very important that it be noted that the move from Hickory and Lenoir was not based on anything those communities did wrong. They had served this event well, but at a point, the distance between the west and the east was no longer the way the event could do business. Those people for whom the event is held — the manufacturers and the buyers — made the decision that the Market would no longer be held in the west. Almost immediately, at the end of 1985, no wholesale showrooms were located outside the immediate High Point-Thomasville area. There were some in Lexington. There is one in Asheboro. But when it closed in Hickory-Lenoir, it closed. All the big energy came down here. There was a million square feet of space built for that transition, and almost immediately another million square feet was constructed in the 1986-87 era. We found ourselves consolidated. The record keeping that I inherited in '77 — because of the sort of the looseness of the Association and the relationships — wasn't very good. The real statistics that this Market works from—. We work from the 1913 statistics that we can document. Then we benchmark '77 as the year, remembering that the event is a private function. It wasn't seen as a major North Carolina event — a major Triad event. They didn't keep big attendance figures. They just said, "Yeah it was good. We had a lot of people here." Nobody was benchmarking—.
Well, it sounds like they didn't really have the apparatus to do that sort of statistics accumulation.
Yeah. [They] didn't have it. They had gotten pretty much into the hyping
business. Whatever figure—. It was astonishing, some of the
figures. I once told a very credible participant in this Market that,
"If you're not careful, every man, woman and
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
This is the second cassette in the Thursday, January 28, 1999 interview with Mr. Richard Barentine in High Point North Carolina. This is cassette 1.28.99-RB.2 for the Southern Oral History Program's series North Carolina Business History. We are continuing our general discussion on the Furniture Market and the evolution of the Association in High Point. We are here with — in addition to myself, Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program — Dr. Dorothy Darr of the Center for the Study of the American South and a colleague and ally with the Southern Oral History Program. Let me have you recapitulate a touch because we might have missed a little bit right at the end of that cassette.
Any event has to have a body of statistics. You have to be able to define the event. It's the way everybody does business. Well, until 1977 because it was a private event, they didn't have a lot of external communication. It was all pretty much internal. In '77 one of the jobs I had to do was [to] benchmark some figures, so that we could move forward. We benchmarked 35,000 attendees at the Market and because the event needs to be seen in its largest terms — not cut up into little pieces — we don't separate out buyers and things like that. It was 35,000 people and we had a 1000 international people in 1977 from thirty countries. That's an extraordinary number of international people coming to the interior of North Carolina for an industry event — a private event.
[That was] more than twenty years ago.
[Yes,] more than twenty years ago. We had 1,300 exhibitors. We were
using ninety buildings at that point. The Market had grown so
dramatically after the Second World War — particularly in the
'60s and early '70s — that we were actually using