Potluck

When the home-town pottery plant closed down in 1927, little Scio, Ohio (it rhymes; pop. 1,450) began to die. When Lewis P. Reese, a rough-handed West Virginia pottery worker, scraped up $8,000 and bought the plant at a sheriff's sale one day in 1933, the town came to life again. Reese thought he knew how to save Scio; he was sure he could mass-produce teacups, saucers, plates, etc. for 5-c- apiece and compete with cheap Japanese chinaware.

His plan worked so well that by 1946 he had become the biggest U.S. producer of whiteware. The town was more prosperous than ever before, thanks to the 825 jobs and to the fat bonuses passed out by Lew Reese; in 1946, he gave his workers $705,000 at year's end. But last Christmas, as he prepared to pass out another $423,000, trouble caught up with Lew Reese. His plant burned down, and he had bought no fire insurance.

Instead of getting the bonuses, the townspeople took up a collection of $1,000 to help Lew Reese. Then they went out and helped him clean up the blackened wreckage of the plant. Even Jay Spiker, the town banker, joined in. Said Reese hopefully: "We'll be turning out cups and saucers here in two months' time."

Nobody believed him. They knew how hard it was to get steel and construction workers. But the town caught Reese's enthusiasm, sent a delegation to the National Steel Corp.'s Ernest T. Weir. Weir promised to send steel. From his Great Lakes Steel Corp. in Detroit, Weir also sent Quonset-type buildings. The Pennsylvania Railroad helped out by giving priorities to Reese's materials and stopping through trains at Scio just to unload them. When he ran short of cash, five New York chain stores, which had sold millions of pieces of Reese-made china, lent him $10,000 apiece. They told him he could take ten years to pay it back in cups and saucers.

There were few construction workers in Scio, so Reese's pottery workers learned how to build. Men & women worked at a flat $1 an hour, many for 48 hours a week. The women's clubs served meals on the job. The Quonset buildings went up four times as fast as they had even in disaster-stricken Texas City, Tex.

By last week the new plant, with a production capacity of 22,500 dozen pieces a day (11% greater than the old), was ready to open, 64 days from the time Lew Reese made his "two months" boast. One morning at 7 a.m., the opening whistle blew. The erstwhile construction hands went back to their pottery jiggers exactly 15 years from the day when Reese first reopened the abandoned plant.

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