The Company

Heritage Falls Candy Company is the main employer in its namesake community. The company, a family and the Viet Nam war intersect in this story.

I’m not sure how to react to the news.  Heritage Falls Candy Company may be acquired by the Global Confections Corporation.  Heritage Falls is a company town and HFC or “the company” as most folks call it, is the single largest employer in town, and in fact, is the reason for the town’s existence.  The four-block-long streets of compact two-story brick row houses near the center of town, once company-owned were built in the late 1800s to attract workers and their families.  After both wars, larger houses on more spacious lots were added.  In the fifties and sixties, two and three-bedroom ranches were added on the outskirts of town.
  

Entire families work for the company.  Mostly men work the first shift, having started there, full-time right after high school. Women work the second shift.  They have less tenure because they stopped out for five or ten years to have their babies.  The young kids, recent high school graduates, work the third shift and deal with the periodic layoffs that come with the ebb and flow of business.  Everyone, young and old, gets involved at harvest time.  Area farmers and growers depend on the company to buy their bounty, all the wheat and milk, and fruit and nuts and the company prides itself on locally sourcing their raw materials.  Then there are the small and medium-sized paper and printing and transportation companies and the independent mechanical and electrical and plumbing contractors, hundreds and hundreds of people who aren’t employed by the company but work for the company in other ways.  All that could change under a new owner whose M/O is to buy respected companies for their brand and reputation, move production to highly mechanized foreign factories and completely ignore long-held company traditions.

The needs of the company outgrew Heritage Falls long ago.  Small cities and towns across our corner of the state count the company as their major employer too.  Holiday packing times are a boon to the economy with hundreds more part-time workers hired to keep up with the picking and packing and shipping ahead of the big Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas candy holidays.  All the extra workers need a place to stay, so company employees make a little extra holiday money themselves by renting out rooms, or even a spare bed or couch to the temporary workers.  That’s how Mom met Jim when he came to stay at their house for the holiday packing season.

It's hard to think of Mom as a high school girl like me, but that’s what she was in the late Summer of 1964, anticipating her senior year in high school and her future.  She hadn’t decided on Teaching or Library Science, but she knew one thing for sure, she was going to college, and not the state college over in the next county.  It had to be a state school of course, because of the tuition, but there were colleges all over the state.

Grandpa had other ideas.  First thing, girls didn’t need to go to college.  And the second thing, why would you want to live anyplace besides Heritage Falls anyway.  You do what all the girls do.  You get out of high school, go to work for the company, meet a nice boy and get married and settle down.  Besides, the family could use the money she would earn at the company to help pay expenses. Grandma had similar sentiments, but she told Mom that she should follow her head and her heart and do what would make her happy.  Mom applied to state colleges in all four corners of the state and to several private women’s colleges that offered scholarships for Education majors.

The mounting escalation of the Viet Nam war had a disproportionate effect on smaller towns and cities.  Perhaps it was that city boys were busier and had more valid reasons for avoiding the draft, or simply that they were more skilled in finding exceptions that would exempt them from serving.  And of course, it was a badge of honor in small towns for young men to go off to the service whether in war or peace.  The company valued veterans for their skills and greater maturity and welcomed them home to the sought-after apprentice programs that led to the higher paying hourly jobs at the plant.  Grandpa learned to be a machinist in the Navy.  The company hired him back as a Maintenance Mechanic, and today he supervises periodic maintenance plant-wide.

The war also affected full-time hiring too.  In preparation for the Christmas holiday season. The company put out the word that not only did they need pickers and packers and shippers, but they also needed temporary skilled workers to fill in for the men who had been drafted. 

Jim had only his final year remaining to earn his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering at the State “School of Mines”, the archaic name still the official title of the Engineering School.  He took a leave of absence because he felt certain he would be drafted in the coming year.  He could have applied for a deferment to complete his education, but the men in his family had served in every war since the Civil War, so deferment was not an option.  He would go when he was called.

Jim heard about the job when his uncle who had moved to Heritage Falls to work for the company called him to say the company was desperate to find someone who knew how to troubleshoot the electronic components that were appearing on the new production equipment.  Grandpa liked Jim a lot when he showed him around the plant after he was hired and told him that he had an attic room that he could rent for a few dollars a week for as long as he needed it.  When he mentioned that Grandma was famous for her baked ham and blueberry muffins, that sealed the deal.

Grandpa didn’t mention that he had a pretty daughter only a few years younger than Jim.  When Jim came down to dinner that first night, his easy confidence faded quickly to tongue-tied single word sentences when he saw Mom sitting at the table.  After dinner, he offered to help with the dishes and he and Mom became friends.  Jim helped Mom with her math homework.  They took walks at night and Jim told Mom what it was like living in the dorm at college and about his plans to go out West after college and someday open his own business.  After their first kiss by the fountain in the park, she let herself admit that she had a boyfriend and she liked the idea.  Although there were some nice boys in school, Mom dated rarely.  Her lingering fear was of falling in love with a nice boy in town and being stuck in Heritage Falls for her entire life.  Jim had barely dated at all.  On dates, he wanted to talk about the books he was reading and the ideas he had for building things.  The girls seemed more interested in going to the park and “making out”.  Although he wasn’t immune to thinking about girls that way, he wanted more, he wanted someone who was excited about the future.

At first, Jim went home on weekends, but as the Fall days slid by, he found reasons to stay in Heritage Falls.  He and Mom attended football games and dances and dinners at the VFW at night and found reasons to spend time together during the day.  Sometimes Jim helped Grandpa with projects, and although they weren’t together, Mom liked it that Jim was close by.

Of course, Jim had to go home for Christmas, so the weekend before, Grandma and Mom made a nice ham dinner and Mom and Jim exchanged presents early.  In the days before cell phones and unlimited calling plans, a call outside the county was a toll call, so Jim and Mom had a three-minute chat on Christmas day and each expressed how much they missed each other.

Jim was asked to stay on at the company after the holiday season and he truly became like one of the family.  At church, they were considered a couple and Mom was always Jim’s date for social events that the company planned for its younger workers.  On Valentines Day, Jim asked Mom to marry him and the next day, Mom Added the local college to her list of applications.  Fittingly, on April 1^st, Jim received his draft notice to report in May to Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri for basic training, followed by technical school in Houston, Texas.  Mom wrote to him every day and joined the prom planning committee to work with the other girls who didn’t have dates for that special night.  Jim wrote back as often as possible, telling Mom every detail about Army life and that he loved her more and more each day.

It was wartime.  Losses were mounting in Viet Nam.  Normally, new soldiers get a state-side assignment for a year to practice their new skills and get adjusted to the Army, but Jim received orders for Viet Nam with departure after an additional month of combat readiness training.  No leaves were permitted save for a weekend furlough prior to shipping out.  Ironically, Jim’s furlough coincided with prom weekend.  Mom skipped the prom to fly to Texas to see Jim before he left for Viet Nam for a minimum one-year tour of duty.

Communication was sketchy and confused.  After a month, Jim’s parents received a form letter from the Army saying that their son had arrived safely along with an APO address where they could write to him.  Not long after, Mom received her first letter from Jim.  Letters would take about a month in transit.  Mom wrote to Jim every day.  His intermittent return letters reflected that he wasn’t getting all of Mom’s letters and references he made to his previous letters were a clue that not all of his letters were getting to Mom.  Mom told him everything with one important omission.  Within weeks of his departure for Viet Nam, Mom knew and later confirmed that she was pregnant with me.

Mom confided in Grandma right away.  They waited to tell Grandpa until Mom began to show.  With characteristic resolve, Grandpa accepted the news and expressed his confidence that Jim would come back and “do the right thing”.  He told Mom that whatever happened, she and his grandchild would always have a place there.  Mom made plans to attend the local college and wrote Jim a long letter telling him about their baby.

Mom knew that Jim had been assigned to a helicopter crew from the cryptic notes she received instead of longer letters.  He couldn’t say much, not even about where he was and what they were doing.  He talked about the younger guys, the ones who had joined right after high school, how scared they were and how they needed to know that what they were doing was important, that someone back home cared about them.  Then even the notes stopped coming.

Mom kept writing, pushing aside the tiny but growing fear that Jim knew about the baby and wanted nothing to do with her or their child.  She felt certain about Jim’s love, felt certain that she knew the kind of man he was, felt certain about the bond that had grown and flourished between them.  She felt certain that Jim would not abandon her and their unborn baby.  She prayed for strength and for his safety.

Six weeks after all communication had stopped, Jim’s parents received the letter from the Department of Defense.  His helicopter had been shot down.  The bodies of all the crew members except Jim’s had been recovered.  He was officially listed as MIA.

Mom was visibly pregnant with me when she began her classes at the local college in the next county.  It was too difficult to fit part-time work at the company into her class schedule, so she applied for a work-study position at the college library, re-shelving books and working at the reference desk.  She found solace and security in the quiet space, a refuge from the new reality of her life.  In the days before the Internet, completing research for a project meant a trip to the library, waiting for materials that were on reserve and waiting in line to use other resources.  As part of the library staff, Mom learned how to use the special collections, had easy access to reserved references and use of the typewriter and copier in the library office.  She became particularly adept at assisting other students with their library research.  On weekends, instead of dating like other freshman girls, Mom wrote letters to our Senators and Congressmen, the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army seeking information about Jim.  All that they could tell her was that he was “missing in action”.

Mom was determined to start the Spring semester even though I was due in March but finally agreed with Grandma and Grandpa that it made more sense to stop out a semester to give me her full attention.  I would be lying if I said that I remembered our first months together, but I feel certain that our close bond is a result of our inseparable early days and months together.

My early days were spent following Grandma around and doing “chores” with her.  Rather than sitting me in a corner to play while she worked, Grandma gave me tasks to do to help her cook meals, clean the house, sew and read.  We shopped for groceries together and visited with the neighbors.  Mom was exhausted from school and work but always found time for me too.  She never gave up hope of hearing good news about Jim until early 1970 when Jim’s parents received another letter from the Department of Defense saying that Jim was “missing in action and presumed dead”.  Apparently, the letter was deemed an act of empathy to bring closure to the family’s grieving and the one-thousand-dollar check was intended to help defray the costs of a memorial service.  In truth, the government didn’t have a clue about what happened to Jim and this was their way of writing him off and moving on.  Mom completed her bachelors degree that year and felt relieved and resigned when she was offered the Librarian position at the high school.

Jim remembered the impact and the explosion when the rocket hit the helicopter.  The pilot was slumped over the controls.  All the crew could do was brace for the crash landing.  The last English words he heard were the voices of his dying comrades.  When the fire extinguished itself, the Viet Cong soldiers ravaged the wreck, looking for equipment, guns and ammunition, food and anything they could use.  They assumed everyone on the crew was dead. 

Phan Hien waited until he was sure the soldiers were gone before creeping up to the wreckage of the helicopter to see if they left anything his family could use, a storage can for water, usable things that could be sold at the open-air market.  He crawled around the dead bodies.  At twelve years old, unfortunately, he was accustomed to seeing corpses.  He knew the soldiers checked the bodies for valuables, but he checked again for anything that might have been missed.  When he came to Jim, he certainly looked dead, but something willed him to put his head on Jim’s chest and listen.  He was still alive!  Phan Hien ran back to his family’s stilt house to tell his Father.

Jim was unconscious, barely alive and seriously injured.  His left leg had been shattered in the crash and his right arm crushed. He awoke briefly, aware he was being moved, desperately trying to get away from the all-consuming pain.  He wanted to die, end the pain.  He was ready to submit.  Deep in his sub-conscious state, he was aware of a bright light, a pinpoint off in the distance.  Is this what dying is like?  He reached for the light.

Phan Binh knew it was dangerous to harbor an enemy soldier.  If the Viet Cong found out, he and his family would be killed.  But he felt in his heart that it was God’s will that he help save this soldier.  God wanted this man to live and God had made him, Phan Binh, responsible for doing God’s work.  He and his wife, Phan Hanh would find a way.

Jim remained in a semi-conscious state for days, aware only of the pain and the fever.  Was he burning in hell?  And yet, when he was about to be consumed by the flames, he felt a coolness on his face and body, and then darkness again.

He awakened to the face of Phan Hanh hovering over him.  He knew instinctively from her eyes, her gentle smile and her cooling touch as she washed him, that she would not hurt him.  She spoke to him softly.  Nearly all the Vietnamese words were unfamiliar to him.  At her side was a young girl who he would learn was Phan Hoa. She held a cup in both hands and silently, patiently looked at him.  In a moment, the woman called out and a young boy appeared.  Together, they propped him up on the mat where he was lying.  The pain was excruciating, but he had no strength to resist.  He understood when the woman reached for the cup in the girl’s hands and moved it to his lips and tilted it up, so the hot, vile fluid entered his mouth and throat.  He had no choice but to swallow to keep from choking.  Finally, they let him lie back down again.

Jim’s waking moments were filled with pain.  He vaguely knew he survived, that he was still in Viet Nam and that someone was taking care of him.  Any movement caused him unbearable pain.  Something was terribly wrong with his left leg and his right hand wouldn’t work.  He wanted to close his eyes and die.  Something kept him going.  It was duty.  While he was alive, he had a responsibility to survive.  There was no letting go.

Days passed.  Months passed.  Jim came to understand that he was being cared for by a rural farm family.  He was surprised to learn that they were Catholics, a legacy of the French occupation of Viet Nam.  They weren’t opposed to one side or other in the war, but simply kept a low profile, trying to avoid the conflict altogether.  Slowly, Jim learned to communicate with them.  The boy, Phan Hien, and his younger sister, Phan Hoa were full of questions and eager to learn.  They taught him to speak their language and he taught them English.  The children, in turn, taught their parents.  With the help of their father, Phan Binh, Jim fashioned a crude brace for his leg and a smaller one for his lower right arm.  He began to think about the possibility of going home.  Jim tried to describe America to the children, that people lived in cities and towns, that houses had indoor plumbing and refrigerators and stoves and people traveled in cars and not just on bicycles.  He wished he could describe life in America.  One day Phan Hien came to him with a book he had salvaged from the helicopter. The book brought tears to his eyes.  It was his copy of Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric and Other Stories”.  Jim read the stories to the children and ached for home and all he had lost.

Without news about the war or any news at all, Jim began to accept that he would spend the rest of his life with his adopted family in Viet Nam.  He had no hope of going home and was in no condition to try or even formulate a plan.  He couldn’t help in any physical way.  He felt he was a burden to his family, another mouth to feed who wasn’t contributing.  The family felt no resentment to him and in fact, treated him like a respected elder.  He spent his days thinking about how to build an external device so he could use his leg and damaged arm and teach the children all he knew.  As word of his teaching spread, other people brought their children to him.  In time, he often had a dozen or more children coming to him daily.

In 1972, word spread even to the most remote areas that the war was over, and the Americans were finally leaving.  Hanh Binh came to him one day to tell him that the American prisoners were being released from Viet Cong prison camps and allowed to go home.  He asked Jim if he wanted to go home.  Jim was speechless and could only nod yes.  Hanh Binh recruited seven other men to help transport Jim to the prison camp.  They constructed a crude stretcher and with alternating teams of four, carried Jim the long distance to the prison camp.

Jim’s parents passed away thinking that their son had died in the war.  There were no other living relatives to notify that Jim was alive.  The fact that Jim had been declared “missing in action and presumed dead”, but now was alive, created a colossal paperwork snafu for the Army and along with his serious untreated injuries caused extensive delays at every point on Jim’s long journey back to the States.  The return trip lasted nearly six months.  At each facility in his transition, he was held in limbo as his identity was reverified and his injuries assessed.  Finally, he was transferred to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Tx. For treatment and rehabilitation.

When he arrived back in the States, Jim wanted to contact Mom.  He had no hope that she had waited for him because he was “dead” right?  He never stopped thinking about her.  In his darkest hours, delirious with fever, he saw her face, heard her voice telling him to be strong.  He taught himself to write again using his left hand, but he thought his cursive looked crude, and worse, childish.  He tore up note after note, feeling pathetic.  Even if she were still single, why would she want him with his crippled body and no hope of being productive?  He faced the prospect of a long lonely life, yet resolutely determined to make his own way on his own terms.

At Brooke, the doctors determined that the useless, atrophied leg and his lower right arm had to go.  They assured him that great progress was being made in developing functional prosthetic limbs to meet the needs of the thousands of returning Viet Nam veterans.  Jim had ideas.  He used his engineering training, his mechanical ability, and his own body as the guinea pig to work with the doctors to develop artificial limbs that moved and functioned like original equipment.  Jim left the Army with years of accumulated back pay, a one hundred percent disability and the desire to start his own company.

My life has revolved around family.  My only home has been Grandpa and Grandma’s house.  I knew the story about my father, that he had died in the war.  There were lots of kids who lost their Dad in the war. Very few of them were as lucky as me to have grandparents who loved me and a Mom who made me her priority.  There was always someone in the stands rooting for me when I was out on the soccer or softball field, or in the audience for a concert or play or applauding for me at an awards assembly.  Mom was the beloved school Librarian, treasured by teachers and students as a creative resource.  She remained fit and attractive and politely declined invitations for coffee and dinner or the movies from eligible gentlemen.  When I was dating age, we talked about boys and love and yes, sex.  I knew that Mom and my Dad were never married.  She told me she felt married, that my Dad was the only one and that she would carry her love for him in her heart forever.  Although she had no reason to think he was alive, “presumed dead” gave her a glimmer of hope that comforted her on cold winter nights.

The news that Global Confections had decided against taking over the company was greeted with relief by employees, vendors and citizens alike.  But the company was honest with all its stakeholders.  Competition was fierce.  The company business model was outmoded.  Reduced sizes, higher prices, cheaper ingredients, direct distribution, and online sales were the path to future survival.  While noteworthy, all-natural ingredients and green packaging didn’t help the bottom line.  What to do?  Everyone, retirees, employees, local institutions, owned company stock.  If the company failed, it would decimate Heritage Falls and the entire region.  A benevolent corporate owner or better yet, an angel investor was needed to save the company.

Mom and Grandma and I are sitting at the dining room table on Tuesday evening before the prom.  I’m on the planning committee.  Our senior year is the centennial year for the high school and our theme is “reflecting upon and honoring the past”.  I’m telling them about the retro decorations and the “hall of memories” with photos of past proms and that some of the teachers plan to wear prom dresses from their era.  I notice that Mom is starting to tear up.
“Are you OK Mom?”
“Yes Dear.  I was just feeling a bit of nostalgia.  I was on the planning committee for my prom, but I never got to go.”
“Why? Were you sick?”
“No Dear.  It’s a long story.  We’ll talk about it another time.”
Mom made an excuse about having to run an errand.
“Grandma, will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Well Dear, we all must make choices in life.  On the night of her prom, your Mother had another important place to be, so she had to miss the prom.”
Grandma changed the subject, I suspected on purpose.
Why don’t you look in that big trunk in the attic?  I think you’ll find your Mother’s senior yearbook in there.  And if it hasn’t crumbled to dust, your Grandpa’s yearbook will be in there too.  Did you know, I was his date for the senior prom?”
I looked at Grandma and imagined her at my age, in 1944, before the war.
  

Up in the attic, I pull out the yearbooks.  There are no pictures of Mom at the prom of course, but in pictures from earlier dances and Fall events, there is Mom with a handsome guy who looks a bit older than her.  Beneath one picture of them smiling and laughing together, she had written, “You’ll be in my heart forever”.  Was this my Dad?  I looked in the trunk for anything else from the past and found a small pocket-size photo album.  I turned the pages and there was a picture after picture of Mom and the same guy.  In the last picture, he was in uniform.  The picture was dated 1965.

When Jim learned that his parents had passed while he was in Viet Nam, that gave him another reason to avoid returning home.  Although thoughts of Mom were always with him, now, nearly twenty years later, he could only imagine the horror in her eyes if she saw his ruined body.  He tried to find out about her.  But this was 1983.  No Facebook, no internet, no immediate information about everything like we have today.  He was resigned to living a solitary life.  He had immersed himself in his work, created a thriving technology company that he had sold for many millions of dollars.  Now he looked for investment opportunities, small and medium-sized companies that had a long history of making quality products, that had community involvement embedded in their mission statement, that were struggling to compete in a world of mega-corporations run by piranha-style financial managers whose only priority was enhancing “shareholder value”.  He was looking for information about another company when he noticed the small article in the Wall Street Journal about the dire straits of the Heritage Falls Candy Company.  He called his investment adviser to get more information.

The President of HFC, the third generation of his family to head the company, called a community meeting to announce that an angel investor had indeed been found who could save the company.  The investor had stipulated that before he would undertake the challenge, he wanted to be sure that the employees and the community shared his commitment. Before he invested millions of dollars in modernizing equipment, developing new marketing strategies and reviving brand identity, not on glib clichés, but on deeply held company values, he wanted to make sure that the employees and the community still believed.

The name of the investor was held in strict confidence.  Rumor had it that he had once worked for the company, that his own experience on the shop floor had bolstered his interest in saving the company.  Grandpa, along with other middle and senior managers had been briefed on his proposal.  Salary and hourly wage increases would be deferred in exchange for shares of company stock with guaranteed dividends.  Salaried and hourly workers must agree to enroll in company-paid training on their own time at the community college or the university to prepare them to use the new equipment and information systems.  Salaried and hourly employees must recommit to the company’s long-held policy of voluntary community service. 

There was some question about where to hold the community meeting.  Some felt the high school auditorium would be adequate.  Others suggested the field house at the community college.  The investor expressed his desire to hold the meeting in the main warehouse at the company, everyone standing, no stage or pomp, and circumstance.

Mom wasn’t going to go to the meeting.  After all, she had only worked for the company briefly as a temporary worker when she was in high school.  But Grandpa encouraged her to go.
“We’re a company family.  We should be part of this.”
Naturally, I was excited.  I’m not sure I understood the importance of the meeting, but I knew that the outcome would affect us all.

The warehouse is a newer building, so it was easily cleared to create a large open space.  There were no reserved sections except for an area with chairs that had been provided for the retirees who might have difficulty standing for a long period.  There was a festive mood as employees, their families and others moved slowly but smoothly into the warehouse.  We arrived early so we could get a good view.  Grandpa chatted with his fellow co-workers.  Mom talked with friends and neighbors who worked for the company, many of whom had children in school.  My friends were there with their parents. 

At precisely 7 p.m., the murmuring faded away.  I could feel the anticipation in the air.  I expected the President of the company to come forward and make a speech or at least greet the crowd before introducing the man we had come to see and hear.  That didn’t happen.  In the small clearing where a microphone had been set up on a stand, a thin attractive man in his late forties approached the microphone.  He had a slight limp and those closest to him could see that he had a metal appendage instead of a right hand. He began speaking in a clear voice.  I heard Mom gasp.  I looked over at her and there were tears in her eyes!  She knew this man.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”, I whispered. She looked at me.
“That’s your Dad.”