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Last spring, Cochrane -- who has two partners -- walked into the empty 300,000 square-foot factory. He soon added family touches, among them an oil painting of his father, hung on the lobby wall. With their silver hair and Clark Kent glasses, father and son share an uncanny resemblance. His eyes mist when he mentions him. "I think about how much he would love this," he says. Starting over, Cochrane also looked to the past, recruiting former company workers. When he phoned the first two -- both weren't working -- he heard doubt in their voices. "Both of them said, 'I don't think I can do that anymore,'" he recalls. "They had lost their confidence. It (joblessness) puts people in such despair. They think there's something wrong with them rather than the circumstances." Karen Padgett was one of those first calls. She'd worked her way up from the shipping department to human resources manager, spending 35 years with Cochrane and its successor. When the factory closed, Padgett was adrift. She was in her 50s, jobs were scarce and a lifetime of working with folks who'd become good friends was suddenly gone. "It was such a loss," she says. "If you have a death in the family, you feel like you just can't pick up and go forward. That's how I felt. ... I knew I needed to work. I knew I was still vital enough to do something, but I didn't know what I would do." Jerry Cochrane had urged her to return to school, so she enrolled in a nearby college to polish her skills. She was just starting to scope out job prospects when Cochrane called. She knew immediately she wanted the job, but had a moment of hesitation. "Being out of work strips you of your confidence," she says. "I felt,
'Oh, gosh can I do this?' I just needed somebody to reassure me." Cochrane described his plans to build American-made furniture. "He said,
'I really believe it's coming back and we can make some money doing this and we'll have a good time, I promise.'" Padgett is now on the other end of the job search, fielding calls and conducting interviews. She's received about 1,400 applications for what eventually will be about 130 jobs. (Starting salaries range from $9 to $16 an hour.) One caller had a particularly poignant story: He said he wanted to work for the company because as a boy, he'd lived down the road from the old Cochrane factory. His single mother had struggled to provide for her six kids, he said, and when times got tough, Sonny Cochrane made sure their utility bills were paid. The man was eventually hired.
About two-thirds of Lincolnton workers have experience in the furniture industry. North Carolina lost nearly 60 percent of its furniture jobs from 1999 to 2010, as the percentage of imported furniture sold in the U.S. doubled. It has been a slow-motion economic disaster. Padgett says everyone noticed how one factory, then another closed, and yet "it was like we just woke up and it was swept out from under us. It kind of slapped us in the face when it was all gone." It was so traumatic that when Cochrane asked Pat Hendrick to return as purchasing manager, she was thrilled but had one question: "'Will you be importing anything?' I didn't want to be involved with anything like that," she says, "because that's how I lost my job." To Hendrick, her job offer was an answered prayer. Literally. Every day while she was unemployed, she says, she'd pray she'd find work. One day, she tried something a little different: "I said, 'God, I'm tired. You're going to have to drop a job in my lap that you know I can do and have people there that I can get along with and work with. I'm just leaving it in your hands.'" Cochrane called at 8:59 a.m. the next day. Driving back into the parking lot for the first time, Hendrick says she felt as if she'd never left. But two years of unemployment aren't easily forgotten. "After losing your job of 32 years," she says, "you do have reservations. I'm comfortable here, but I don't think I'll ever have that same sense of security that I thought I had." Dean Hoyle understands uncertainty. After nearly 30 years at the factory, he found himself out of work, too, scraping by doing yardwork and mowing lawns. His situation, he says, was even more agonizing because he was still recovering from the death of his wife from breast cancer, and work, he says, "had been a rock to me." After 14 months, Hoyle was hired at another furniture company, only to be laid off last year. Hoyle, who works in the packing department, is struck by how much has changed since he first walked into the factory as a fresh-faced Army veteran. "These places were all up and running when I got out of school," he says. "Where are all the people going to go now and what are they going to do? Not everybody can be a computer programmer." Hoyle's ruddy, mustachioed face breaks into a wide smile as he recalls going to the bank to deposit his first paycheck from the new job. "I'm 57 years old and soon to be 58, and I've got enough sense to know this area is not full of opportunities for someone like me," he says. "If I could sum it up in one word, it would be grateful." ___ In January, Lincolnton's first piece of furniture -- a cherry-wood nightstand
-- came off the line. All the workers signed it. That same month, Bruce Cochrane had two dates in Washington, D.C. The first was the White House conference on insourcing, where he met Obama. The other was an invitation to sit in the first lady's box at the State of the Union speech, where the president spoke of a manufacturing renaissance. (For the record, Cochrane says he's never voted for a Democratic president.) Cochrane thinks there's an appetite for U.S.-produced goods. He attaches a "Made in America" tag to each piece of his company's furniture, with a message: "We take immeasurable pride in the fact that our furnishings are made of select solid American hardwoods," he wrote, appending his name. "I think people realize that made in America means jobs in America," Cochrane says. "And they have experience with a loved one or a family member or a friend who lost a job so it becomes more and more personal to them." Bud Boyles, owner of the Carolina Furniture Mart in Lincolnton (where the nightstand is displayed), senses a similar mood. "Timing is everything and he's definitely got the timing right now," Boyles says. "It might be a hard first year for him but people are saying,
'We're going to have to take a look at what we're doing. We have to go back to our roots and help our neighbors.'"' There have been small moments of satisfaction these first months, such as touring the factory with a friend, who said he thought he'd never again smell that earthy scent of fresh-cut wood. "It's nostalgic," Cochrane says. But there have been problems, too. A malfunctioning machine needed fixing and the plant had to be rewired, a costly project. The technology has become so efficient that Cochrane says he'll need half the workers he first expected
-- though of course that's a mixed blessing, given the area's struggle with unemployment. Within three years, Cochrane hopes to do $25 million in business a year. For now, he's determined to prove the naysayers wrong. "People in this industry still don't believe this can be done," he says. "I don't have any doubt at all."
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