Same Place, Different World

The Factory -- as the townspeople refer to it -- is as big as a modern shopping mall. In a rural county of 23,000 people (4,000 of them schoolchildren), a place that employs 3,000 is the dominant force in town. Everyone knew that payday at the Factory was every other Thursday -- when $2.5 million cascaded into town in a single afternoon. Grocery stores and banks loaded up on money in order to be able to cash Fruit paychecks, and people scheduled yard sales for the weekends that followed payday.

Campbellsville and Taylor County flourished as the Factory flourished. "We had men in the bleach house who earned about $50,000 a year with overtime," says Helen Vaughn, 67, who started as a secretary at the Factory at 18 and ended her career as an assistant vice president 43 years later, before the layoffs occurred.

"People at the Factory often made more money than teachers," says Betty Jane Gorin-Smith, Campbellsville's self-appointed historian, who has taught high-school and college history for 30 years. "You'll notice when you go out into the country that there are a lot of brick houses. I call those 'Fruit of the Loom' houses or 'Factory' houses. The men farmed, and the women worked at the Factory. Factory money built those houses, not farm money."

Campbellsville has a country club, two golf courses, and a modern hospital. The city has block after block of neat homes, with well-tended lawns. Everyone cultivates flowers. Underwear built it all.

Even as it flourished, though, part of Campbellsville also suffocated because of the Factory. At the time when layoffs began, some 40% of the adults in Taylor County didn't even have a high-school diploma -- more than twice the U.S. average.

Going to work at the Factory was easy and lucrative. In the 1980s and 1990s, sewing jobs paid twice minimum wage or better: from $10 an hour to $12 an hour for workers who could really sew. The Factory was so effective at sucking in people that it left few workers for anybody else. Fruit of the Loom was such a compelling employer, few other companies bothered to come to town.

That Thursday -- August 7, 1997 -- the worst rumors turned out to be untrue. Fruit of the Loom announced only that it was permanently eliminating 1,482 jobs in Campbellsville. At the time, Mark Steinkrauss, vice president of corporate relations, said, "We can do the same work cheaper somewhere else." He pointed to Central America. The remaining jobs, Steinkrauss said, were relatively secure.

Those jobs were eliminated in November (220 layoffs), January (410), and April (812). On April 15, 1998, Fruit of the Loom delivered twin announcements: A 38% increase in quarterly earnings, and the final closing of its Campbellsville factory. In nine months, Fruit of the Loom had gone from three shifts to no shifts. Eleven months later, Campbellsville lost another anchor employer: Batesville Casket Co., which closed and laid off 212 people. Taylor County's unemployment rate was near 30%.

"For a long time, people felt this community was set for life," says Kevin Sheilley, the boyish-looking director of economic development for Taylor County, hired after Fruit of the Loom closed. "Two of the largest employers were Fruit of the Loom and Batesville Casket. No matter what happened to the economy, those were things that people would need: underwear and caskets."

The same forces that swept away Campbellsville's economy -- the mobility of work, the migration of jobs to cheaper sources of labor, the pace of change -- would ultimately restore it. But first, the people of Campbellsville would have to surrender not only their paychecks, but their daily routines, their identities. No one would be "hem bottom" or "V neck" or "sew pocket" anymore.

Voices (II): "The World Has Come to an End"

Bertha Marr: "I started at Fruit of the Loom on September 16, 1967. My mom told me I had to go to work. I got to the eighth grade, then I went to work. We needed the money."

Debbie Stiles, 41, born in Campbellsville to a mother and father who both worked at Fruit of the Loom: "Growing up, all my friends' parents worked there, and then my friends worked there. It was a ritual.

"What I really wanted to be was a stewardess. But my mom got upset; she was worried about plane crashes. So, after high school, I went to Campbellsville College. I was going to go into nursing. After my first year, I applied for the nursing program at the University of Kentucky. They said they were filled for that year, but I could apply the next year. I thought, I'll just wait. Then I seen a car I wanted. It was a 1977 brown-metallic-flake Trans Am. I thought I would go to work, pay for this car, then go back to nursing school. I got a job at Fruit of the Loom, folding T-shirts. I was there 19 years. That turned out to be an important car."