The Growth of the Model Community
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the company store.
A THOUSAND times a day. U.S. jukeboxes moaned out Sixteen Tons, a Tin Pan Alley folk song about a coal miner who is soul-deep in debt to his employer. The song landed with a sixteen-ton impact because of its tootling orchestration and Tennessee Ernie Ford's richly lugubrious style. To the jukebox generation the words were all but meaningless. Yet, as late as the 1920s, the ballad's bitter plaint was a real-life refrain to millions of U.S. workers from Georgia's green-roofed cotton villages to Oregon's bleak lumber settlements. Those workers had lived, like Composer Merle Travis' coalminer father, in company towns—drab, depressed communities where the worker traded at a company store,* rented a company house, was watched by company cops. Today company towns are still flourishing in the U.S. But the towns, and the tune, have changed.
Typical of today's company towns is New Cuyama, a California community that sprang up from the sagebrush after Richfield Oil Corp. made the state's biggest petroleum strike of the decade in a barren desert valley southwest of Bakersfield eight years ago. Determined to create a community that would match its underground wealth, Richfield sold 201 model homes at cost to employees, put up a handsome shopping center and leased it to independent merchants. The company also provided a $75,000 community hall, a $250,000 motel-restaurant, a $20,000 playground, plus land for two new churches and a $1,500,000 high school. Says a Richfield executive: "Most of these families never owned a home before. Now they are settling down to grow with the valley."
Treat People Like People
The big change in company towns stems from the social and economic maturity of U.S. industry. Community and employee relations are as important a factor in modern management as raw materials, markets and transportation. Most companies today bend over backward to be good neighbors in their communities. Industry's new attitude to community relations was simply defined by Troy Blanket Mills' Vice President E. J. Russell, whose company has been the only industry in Troy, N.H. for 75 years. Said he: "People like to be treated like people."
No More Lock, Stock & Barroom
To treat people right, most big corporations, e.g., Ford, Alcoa, G.M., now employ top-level executives to concentrate exclusively on community relations. On the other hand, Du Pont, which operates 69 plants in 25 states, says each plant manager is "Mr. Du Pont in his community . . . the way he runs his plant constitutes the major part of Du Pont's public relations program."