NEWELL, W. VA — If you’ve eaten at a fine-dining restaurant in New York Ciy or Washington DC, you’ve likely been served on Homer Laughlin china.
Artisan china is the kind of thing successful, educated, refined people expect their upscale meals to be placed on, but they probably never wonder where it came from or who made it — or whether or not the worker had a “peculiar” accent or more than a high-school education.
It takes unique skills from a variety of unique people to craft such a plate. And the artisans, skilled laborers, engineers, scientists and technicians at Homer Laughlin — our country’s last remaining major pottery plant — live along a curve of the Ohio River in rural West Virginia.
Spend one hour in the mile-long factory, which is sited to take advantage of both the region’s rich clay soil, perfect for making ceramics, and the skills passed on from one generation to another, and you understand intellect and talent do not have to come from a four-year institution.
Value and virtue in your work comes from a variety of skills, education and experience.
Fifteen years ago, we didn’t know what people who weren’t like us were thinking, because they were not around us, explains Dane Strother, a Democratic strategist.
“Facebook and 24-hour news and a plethora of news stations and social media has brought focus to those differences. It’s the first time different Americans have ever looked up and seen each other every day. And neither one likes what the other one is seeing,” he says.
Stereotypes are peculiar things. They make targets out of those who are different, be it in language or traditions. And it appears Appalachia remains the last minority population in America for which it is socially acceptable to question intelligence, speech pattern, the way people dress. Their uniqueness.
Last week as the president was delivering a speech in West Virginia, Stu Rothenberg, a respected Washington-based journalist, remarked on Twitter that “Lots of people can’t support themselves or speak English in West Virginia.”
Speaking to me afterward, Rothenberg did not walk back his comment, but he did offer interesting insight. Like lots of people who do not understand why anyone would “buy in” to the president, he was seeking a way to explain it — by dismissing their intelligence.
What he failed to understand is how insulting his explanation is.
When Liz McIlvain — the fourth generation of her family to work at the Homer Laughlin plant and the company’s first female CEO — reads comments like Rothenberg’s, it burns her. So does this recent tweet from The Washington Post: “Rural towns in the eclipse’s path brace for a flood of smartphone-toting visitors” — apparently implying country folk have never seen an iPhone.
“I’d challenge people with those attitudes to spend a couple of days working here and then talk to me about skills,” she said.
McIlvain, a petite firebrand who seemingly knows every worker by name and can run at least half of the machines herself, gave me a tour along with her daughter Katie Bricker.
A little twang in speech or that habit of ending sentences in a prepositional phrase does not mean West Virginians cannot speak English.
The company’s marketing manager, Bricker went to college with plans to leave her home region, only to find that the grass really wasn’t greener anywhere else.
The Homer Laughlin factory is a thing of beauty. It is filled with 900-plus workers busily producing pottery, including the colorful and immediately recognizable Fiestaware widely sold in department stores.
“Most of America’s china factories closed years ago, but we’ve been in this region since 1893,” McIlvain explains.
A tour of the showroom is a trip back to the turn of the 20th century, complete with ornate plaster walls, gilded tiles and beautiful displays of all of their artisan china and pottery. But it is on the factory floor where you get the feel for what it means to make something real and valuable — something that contributes to your community when it is placed on dinner tables every night.
People are working everywhere: hand-painting glazed plates, attaching handles to green ware, placing spinning plates on a conveyer belt. Technology is also a big factor. Homer Laughlin uses 3-D printers to expedite the design process, and computers run the kiln firing.
There is dignity in the work people do here, and that kind of work has lost favor in America’s elite society.
While Rothenberg did not say all of West Virginians talked funny or were uneducated, the implication of “A lot of” hits home here.
This is not a story about politics but rather one about people, bigotry and why America is in such turmoil with itself over, well, itself.
A little twang in speech or that habit of ending sentences in a prepositional phrase does not mean West Virginians cannot speak English. It just means they are part of a region that still clings to the Scots Irish speech pattern of their ancestors.
Fifteen years ago, as social media started connecting us in ways we never imagined, America looked up and across at the other America; as they looked back at each other, neither side was terribly pleased.
As long as the coastal elites look down their noses at the middle of the country, we’re going to be a divided country.
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