Apeshaw-Hooman, Inc: A celebration of two centuries of continuous existence

For 200 years, Apeshaw-Hooman Inc. has been one of America’s companies that has continued to exist, achieving a record of accomplishment and service that should have consigned it to the corporate ash heap long ago.

Ape-Man, as it’s referred to in the hip shorthand of  happy and contended employees lunching in well-lit break rooms today, began more than 200 years ago, when a modestly talented handyman named Abraham Skittleman opened a furniture store in Philadelphia in 1810. While other furniture makers concentrated on making finely-crafted work that could be displayed proudly by the very wealthiest of East Coast families, Skittleman’s Furniture instead made average furniture that regular people could afford.

“For it is true when you say I am not a master furniture maker, but for the meager dollars you pay, it is fine stuff, indeed,” Skittleman once wrote, a philosophy that lives on in Apeshaw-Hooman today.

In 1835, after Skittleman died in a tragic lathing accident, the business passed to his only child, his beloved daughter Mildred, and her newlywed husband, Ephraim B. Apeshaw. Ephraim was a longshoreman who knew nothing about making furniture but took over the business so as not to disappoint his new wife and to honor the memory of his father-in-law. Sadly, the strain of a young marriage and running a business took its toll on young Mildred, and in 1837, she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she would never recover. In 1841, when he was assured by doctors that she would need to remain institutionalized for the remainder of her days, Apesahw divorced Mildred and changed the name of the company to the E.B. Apeshaw Furniture Co.

In 1843, he married his cousin, the former Eunice Apeshaw, and their union of love produced five children: sons Carl and Chester, and daughters Constance, Catherine and Victoria. But the responsibilities of caring for such a large family on the meager wage of a struggling furniture maker took its toll on Apeshaw and he sought escape more and more in drink. In 1857, while in a drunken stupor, Apeshaw unwittingly traded two of his children (Chester and Victoria) for the Buckworth Gold Mining Works, a barely-solvent mining company in some western state he had never heard of. Upon regaining consciousness, he remained unaware he had made the trade, and was not made aware of it until 1859, when he received a telegram telling him his miners had struck a huge vein of lead. When he asked what the telegram was about, his business manager told him he owned the mine, and had for two years.

“Say what?” Apeshaw said, the first recorded use of that term (although more than 100 years would pass before it would find its way into popular use in Negro street parlance). More good luck followed in 1861, when the Civil War began, and the newly renamed Apeshaw Lead Mining Co. produced more than 80 percent of the lead shot fired by Union guns during the war. By the time Lee met Grant at Appomattox, thousands had been killed and maimed by Apeshaw lead, and Apeshaw was a wealthy man.

“Indeed, it is true, that my hands are awash in blood,” said Apeshaw. “But my pockets are now filled with money, and such an exchange is one I find acceptable.”

Following the war, Apeshaw used that wealth to build his business empire. He started a shipping company and a railroad that helped to tame the West (the towns of Apeshaw in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming are all named in his honor). The Apeshaw Repeating Rifle was a favorite among Western pioneers and played an important role in civilizing the west against the savage brutalities of the red-skinned primitives.

During this time, Apeshaw became fast friends with Carnegie and Hill and Morgan, and together, they fought hard to maintain the rights and freedoms of business owners to do as they please with their own property, as well as others’. Apeshaw soon expanded his mining company to the British Cape Colony in Africa, drawn by its supply of abundant and inexpensive Negro labor. Soon, he was friends with Cecil Rhodes, and twice had the honor of an audience with Queen Victoria.

“I have a daughter, the youngest, who bears the same name as you,” he told Her Highness.

“We find this excellent,” Victoria replied. “And, We wonder, where is she now?”

“Verily, I do not know,” he said.

Alas, the inevitable end came in 1885, when, in a fit of dementia, Apeshaw jumped off his yacht anchored off Cape Cod in pursuit of a mermaid he was convinced wanted to marry him.

“Nay, I hear the Siren’s Song,” he insisted to others onboard the yacht, who tried to convince him there was no mermaid. “Do you not hear the Siren’s Song? She calls for me, I hear it plain as day!”

His body washed ashore on Nantucket three days later, and was interred on the grounds of his Philadelphia estate.

Apeshaw’s death was just the beginning of the company’s troubles. Shortly afterward, his Western lead mine was veined out and Apeshaw Mining Co. went out of business. The company’s six ships were all sunk during the Boer War, when a nearsighted British squadron commander mistook them for enemy battleships off the coast of Africa despite the fact the Boers had no battleships. Although not a single British shell found its mark, the Apeshaw ships, rickety and long-neglected, fell apart from the force of just a near-miss. The Apeshaw and Western Railroad disappeared when Lorenzo B. Apeshaw, a distant cousin and the railroad’s president, beat up James J. Hill after drunkenly claiming the robber baron made a pass at his wife, even though Lorenzo was not married at the time. The company was sold to Hill and absorbed into the Great Northern Railroad for only $1 to make amends.

By 1914, the Apeshaw Co. had been reduced to nothing more than a single knitting mill in Massachusetts making average socks that could be afforded by the nation’s poor immigrants who didn’t have the time to knit their own. But once again history saved the company’s backside by delivering a war just in time. The company’s knitting plant was managed by one Klaus A. Hooman, a German immigrant whose brother served on the General Staff of the Imperial German Army. Seizing the opportunity, Hooman secured numerous contracts to knit not only socks for the growing German Army, but pantaloons, underwear and, later, gauze bandages. The contracts kept Apeshaw Co. alive until 1916 when, sensing a change in the political winds, Hooman cancelled his contracts with his brother and sought contracts with the British, Canadian and American armies.

“Dearest Ralph,” Hooman wrote his brother. “It pains me greatly to leave you abandoned in a moment of such distress and need, but I know upon which side my bread is buttered.”

Klaus Hooman was a man with little focus or patience and he may have suffered from what is known today as ADHD, or it could be that he was simply a hyperactive pain in the ass. Yet this always annoying restlessness provided with him a forward-thinking vision that paid off in 1917, when America did indeed enter the war on the side of the Allies and the company was rewarded with the largest sock and pantaloon contract granted by the United States Army (the company also received a contract to manufacture life vests for the United States Navy but the contract was cancelled after it was learned sub-par materials allowed the vests to become fully waterlogged in just minutes). Hooman used the good fortune to maneuver control of the company away from Nelson “Nelly” Apeshaw, a distant cousin of E. B Apeshaw’s second cousin’s grandson who had no interest in running the company and never showed up for work. On Nov. 11, 1918, Klaus Hooman renamed the company Apeshaw-Hooman, Inc., and a new chapter in the company’s history had begun.

You work hard, you deserve to have your candidate elected

At least our politicians aren’t assaulting each other, like they are in Greece, but the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen here sometime soon. The Scott Walker recall circus is finally behind us, but that’s not going to end the divisive politics, not as long as enough people are disconnected from reality enough to believe the president was born in Kenya. 

So why is this happening? How has the political system gotten so completely gummed up? Plenty of explanations have been floated, some of them crazy some of them convincingly coherent (here’s a recent one that’s very much on the coherent side). 

But it seems like so many attempts to explain how we got to this point come from some ideological source and presume some kind of nefarious plot committed by people of the other ideology. I don’t normally go in for plots to begin with, especially one of this vast scale, because eventually someone would spill the beans. Besides, many of these explanations come off more as an attempt at self-deception, finding excuses  for why voters would vote for a candidate or a party the writer doesn’t like because I suspect the writer has too fragile a psyche to accept the fact that good, reasonable people can make informed, rational decisions that disagree with their own. 

So here’s an explanation that has nothing to do with ideology, though it might be just as crazy as what the conspiracists come up with. It seems to me that the rise in the divisiveness of our politics parallels at least in part the rise of the consumer culture. Go back to the 1970s, when consumerism was really starting to take hold in the country. What you bought became an increasingly important part of your identity, and it was no longer Mr. Moneybags buying the Cadillac and the Armani suit to send the message that he was rich and better than you. Now it was the kind of gum you chewed or lip balm you used or shoes you wore. 

Bubble Yum or Bubblicious? The choice said a lot about you (or so we thought). I was cursed with wearing Toughskins jeans because my mom worked at Sears and she could buy them with her employee discount, consigning me to dweeb status for years because cool kids wore Levi’s and only total dweebs wore Toughskins (Sears was clearly already starting to have branding issues even then).

The 1970s was also The Me Decade, when narcissism and self-obsession became not just acceptable, but expected. Looking out for Number One, the book told us, and we should accept nothing but the best because nothing’s too good for us. Marketing and advertising followed along, insisting that the best way to get what we want was to wear the right shoes or the right perfume/cologne, or shave our legs with the right flesh-burning chemical. Even schools got in on the narcissism act, telling kids that if we can dream it, then we can live it and nothing can hold us back. It’s all about YOU, you good lookin’ hunk of a person. If you want it, you deserve it, you’re entitled to it, and nothing, NOTHING should stop you from getting it.

This rampant consumerism has only exploded in the decades since, with out of control branding reaching into every nook and cranny and crack and crevice of our lives. Advertisements are everywhere, sponsorships are omnipotent. Hip hop and hipsterism are both based on living your life with the right brands. Companies try to figure out how to build brand awareness in toddlers. You can’t even escape it going into a bathroom anymore (or the men’s room, at least) because so many stores sell advertising space above the urinals to reach an extremely captive audience.

What all this has done is to train us to expect to get what we want, and to accept nothing less because it’s all about YOU. You can custom order just about anything, from cars to computers to furniture. You can build your own burger or bear. Getting a blue shower curtain isn’t enough anymore, it has to be falling water blue but because just plain old blue doesn’t go with the remodeled bathroom like falling water blue. Any restaurant that puts “no substitutions” on its menu is not going to stay in business long.

It’s gotten to the point that this is considered a part of our birthright as Americans, to buy what we want, to get what we want, and nobody better try to stop us.  

And all the time this has happened, our political discourse has become increasingly harsh and the battles more rhetorically violent (yes, I know that our political system was torn up during the 1960s and 1970s, too, in many ways even more so than today, but those conflicts were of a different nature, with protestors objecting to the political system in general, not one side or the other. For the most part, the people inside the political system still got along). Liberals loathed Reagan in the 1980s and his pro-defense, anti-union policies, but the toxicity hadn’t progressed to the point that he couldn’t toss back a few drinks with Tip O’Neill and find common ground. In the 1990s, conservatives’ obsession with Bill Clinton caused them to ratchet it up a notch, working to stop any legislative action on his agenda. When his political skills proved superior to theirs, they impeached him and tried to remove him from office.

The election of George W. Bush brought a few months of peace, when Democrats and Republicans got together and actually passed a few bills (unfortunately, one of them was No Child Left Behind, but that’s another matter), but September 11 brought that to an end and soon liberals were complaining and accusing, and the parties went back to plotting each other’s destruction. 

Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s just ridiculous, with the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans refusing to go along with even routine bills if it means Obama could claim a victory and making up stupid stories about his citizenship.

And as noted before, it’s not just at the federal level. California Republicans pitched a fit and had Gray Davis removed as governor, and now we have liberals crying about Walker in Wisconsin.

But what’s the link between these two?  The connection is that sometime in the 1980s, we started applying the consumer ethos to our politics—that is, I want what I want, and I’m entitled to it. At some level, we think we have the right to get what we want not only in a hardware store or at Amazon.com, but in government, too. If I want Candidate A elected president/senator/governor, well, damn it, Candidate A had better be elected because if he’s not, somebody is robbing me of my right to have what I want.

Unfortunately, in politics, you can’t go somewhere else to find what you want. If Lowe’s doesn’t have a falling water blue shower curtain, then we’ll go to Home Depot, or Overstock.com. In politics, if Candidate B wins an election, then Candidate B wins the election. But marketing and consumerism have so thoroughly trained us not to accept anything less than what we want that we can’t accept it if Candidate A doesn’t win. Even worse, there’s no recourse—it’s not like we can demand to see the manager because Barack Obama or Scott Walker won an election.  

And so we get angry and frustrated and pitch hissy fits and when Walker does things that his opponents don’t like (things that he promised he would do during the campaign, by the way, and which a majority of voters evidently approved of by voting for him), they have sit-ins and chant silly slogans and try to oust him in a recall election. When Barack Obama wins the presidency, instead of accepting the fact that a black man won the presidency, his opponents do everything they can to stop him politically and make up absurd stories about his birthplace. 

All the while, we justify this silliness by accusing opponents of trying to destroy the country and the constitution and we must stop them from robbing our rights and liberties, disguising our self-obsession as national security.

Which is why I don’t think the gridlock or the harshness or the nastiness or the stupidity will end anytime soon. Marketing has done too good a job convincing us that we’re entitled and deserving, so that now, losing an election no longer means losing an election, it just means adopting different strategies to get what you want. 

Gatsby and the silver screen

I picked up The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time not long ago, inspired I suppose by the release of the trailerfor Baz Luhrmann’s film that’s due for release later this year. It’s a good clip, one that gets your attention, focusing on the book's dark menace and filled with so many of Fitzgerald's iconic images—the wild party, Daisy’s shirt orgasm, Gatsby’s circus wagon, the Negroes and the white chauffeur, the Eyes of T.J. Eckelburg—that it seems almost self-conscious, as if Luhrmann is telling Gatsby-philes “see, I read the book, I know what it’s about.” Behind it all is Kanye West’s and Jay Z’s ‘No Church in the Wild,” a song that’s not only a compelling musically but shares the book’s theme of a society that worships all the wrong things.

I’m not sure, though, how you can make a movie version of The Great Gatsby and make it work. The book operates on many levels that can be translated to the screen by a talented director like Luhrmann—a love story, the slow unmasking of a mysterious stranger, an historical document of the Jazz Age, a critical analysis of The American Dream. Dozens of movies every year include one or more of those themes. But the level the book operates at most successfully—the level that sets it apart from so many other great works of literature-- is that it’s just a damn good read, and translating that to film seems pretty much impossible. So much of the joy of reading Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s words, his turns of phrase, his sense of humor, the way he says the obvious in a way nobody did before and hasn’t since. It’s so well written it takes only as much time to read as your average bodice-ripper; it’s about as third as long as those idiotic vampire novels but infinitely better.

Fitzgerald’s writing style is ahead of its time, with its irony and droll humor. Even though it was the umpteenth time I read it, I still laughed at Gatsby’s attempt to manufacture a meet-cute with Daisy or the way Wolfsheim pronounces “gonnegtion.” Like all great works of literature, you’re compelled to go back and re-read Fitzgerald’s sentence, but with Gatsby it’s because you do it because the sentence is fun to read, not because you’re trying to figure out what the author is saying. How Luhrmann manages to translate that to the screen will depend on whether his film is successful. It’s one thing to tell the right story and film the right icons; it’s another thing to make it as fun to watch as the book is fun to read.

Eventually, Fitzgerald would wind up in Hollywood himself writing screenplays and re-writing others while he slowly drank his life away. His last novel--The Last Tycoon--was about a Hollywood studio head and was left incomplete when his liver finally blew up. So there's a certain irony at work here, that while he worked on all kinds of screenplays himself, his greatest book is pretty much unfilmable.