Same Place, Different World

It's a good thing that corporate planners aren't purely rational, because a purely analytical view of Campbellsville wouldn't have seen it as a place where the information economy would thrive. In the 1990s, some 27% of the adults in Taylor County had less than a ninth-grade education; 13% of adults had some kind of college degree, including two-year degrees. In other words, twice as many Taylor Countians had never made it to ninth grade as had been to college.

People in Campbellsville were accustomed to good wages, cheap health insurance, and a solid middle-class lifestyle for doing jobs that hadn't changed since the invention of the electric sewing machine. Campbellsville is so insular that there is nowhere in town to buy a copy of "USA Today." At the time Fruit closed, it's a fair bet that most of the town's adults had never before touched a computer keyboard.

With the loss of one-third of the community's jobs, it was hard to foresee anything but a cascade of misery: lost income, failing farms, home foreclosures, shuttered businesses, an exodus of the most energetic people to Louisville or Lexington, both 90 minutes away -- a gradual shriveling of Campbellsville.

But Campbellsville surprised everyone but itself. The people of the town -- many of whom had done the same job every day for decades -- turned out to have enormous reserves of resilience and adaptability, faith, optimism, and good humor.

Campbellsville looks like a lot of other small American towns, with a Wal-Mart, a Kmart, a Ponderosa Steak House. Main Street is bypassed by a four-lane state road a couple of blocks over, so the town's older buildings seem to have their backs turned to passing traffic. On the road into the city, a "Welcome to Campbellsville" sign stands directly across from a town cemetery that is so large, it runs for a third of a mile along Broadway and contains twice as many deceased residents as the city has live ones.

But here are some interesting clues to the town's spirit: Campbellsville's public library is in a beautiful old church building. When you roll through the McDonald's drive-through, the high-school-aged clerk is upset, and will apologize, if she can't take care of your order quickly enough. When Fruit of the Loom was still expanding, in 1993, and word reached Campbellsville that the company needed to build a half-million-square-foot distribution center, Mayor Bob Miller went out with a couple of colleagues and surveyed the land himself so that the survey could be sent to Fruit officials that day.

The people of Campbellsville are astonishingly friendly. Pharmacists and supermarket-checkout clerks start spontaneous, engaging conversations with strangers. "In most places," says Palvena Pace, 44, head of Campbellsville's unemployment-services office, "it's odd if you go to the grocery store and see someone you know. Here, it's odd if I go to the grocery store and see someone I don't know." Indeed, townspeople are so friendly that the town's divorce rate -- higher than the national average -- is puzzling. It's hard to imagine married couples getting testy enough to divorce. "Oh, that's not the problem," says David Joe Perkins. "The problem is that we're too friendly."

After the layoffs, home foreclosures did surge. Jim Richardson is CEO of Community Trust Bank, one of several banks in town, and his holds the largest number of local home mortgages in the area. "We went from three foreclosures a year to maybe two a quarter -- eight in 1998" -- the year Fruit of the Loom closed.

The half-century success of Fruit of the Loom in Campbellsville was no accident. The city is a place of discipline as well as a place of cheerfulness. Attendance in Campbellsville's public schools "ranges over the past 20 years from 95.5% to 96%," says a school official. The layoffs aside, job turnover in Taylor County averages 4% a year, 1% in manufacturing jobs.

Because the closure of the Factory was the result of jobs being sent overseas, workers who were laid off qualified for expanded benefits: a year's worth of unemployment, instead of 6 months' worth. That was extended to 18 months' worth for those who went to school -- and the state paid their tuition and provided gas money for them to get there. Shortly after the layoffs began, Campbellsville University, a small, bustling, Christian liberal-arts college, announced that it would accept former Fruit workers, charging them no more than what the state's educational reimbursement provided. Overall, more than 1,000 laid-off workers took advantage of the state's retraining money. At Campbellsville University's graduation last year, 104 of 108 students who received associate's degrees were former Fruit workers.

There are 2,578 cities in the United States with at least 10,000 residents. In Campbellsville's campaign to stand out from that crowd, plenty of characteristics were important: the local tax rate, the cost of electricity, the availability of a fiber-optic network. But exhibit A was 1,000 small-town residents, laid off at mid-career without warning, relentlessly reinventing themselves for a future that they could not imagine. From half a continent away geographically, and half a century away culturally, it was the people of Campbellsville who looked so compelling to Amazon.com.