The Wife Who Owned The Factory
The Plant My Husband Worked For
Ted had been at Millrace for twelve years by the time it nearly went under. He worked in sales, a good, steady job he was proud of, not because he loved farm equipment particularly, but because it let him say he worked for Millrace, and in Redbud that still meant something.
The trouble started the way it usually does for small manufacturers, a bad line of credit, two lost contracts in the same year, a founding family that had run the place well for two generations and had nobody left in it willing to run it for a third. By the winter I am describing, Millrace was six weeks from a bankruptcy filing that would have put a hundred and forty people, including my own husband, out of work in a town that did not have a hundred and forty other jobs waiting.
I found out the way Merle Yoder found out most things, through the quiet network of lawyers and lenders who talk to each other before anyone talks to a newspaper. He called me on a Sunday and told me the numbers, and I sat at my kitchen table with a legal pad and ran them myself, twice, the way my father taught me, before I called him back.
“Buy it,” I told him.
It took four months, two point one million dollars, and a closed-door meeting with the plant’s creditors that I attended myself, sitting at the end of a long table introduced only as “the buyer’s principal,” while Merle handled the talking. Millrace’s general manager, a broad, quiet man named Verlon Callahan who had worked there for thirty one years and loved that plant the way some men love their own children, was in that room. He shook my hand at the end of it and said, “Whoever you are, thank you for not letting this town lose it,” and I told him my name was Valerie, and nothing else, and he never once tried to find out more, because that was not the kind of man Verlon was.
Ted came home from work three days after the sale closed and told me, at our own dinner table, that Millrace had been bought by “some investment group out of Columbus, thank God, because we were all sure we were losing our jobs.” I passed him the potatoes and told him that was wonderful news.