In the beginning, the onslaught of numbers seemed an affront, a fist-shaking outrage.
Since Hanebrands Inc. spun off from Sara Lee Corp. in September 2006, the company has been systematically dismantling its uniquely American footprint. Twelve domestic plants closed, and thousands of jobs scuttled -- more than 5,000 in North Carolina, close to 2,500 here in Forsyth County.
A partial hit list: 610 jobs lost at the South Stratford Road plant in March 2007, 720 jobs gone from a plant in Eden in September 2008, and another 440 in Winston-Salem in April.
It was like watching a doting grandparent's slow death. You scream, you cry, you bargain. You're angry, then sad and perhaps bitter. Eventually you give in and come to accept it.
So the news that Hanesbrands was going to shut its last production plant in Forsyth County didn't exactly come as a seismic shock.
The Weeks plant is closing? Think it'll rain this weekend?
A division's namesake
Before the inevitable was announced Tuesday, few people outside the company truly grasped the significance of the closing of the once-mighty Weeks production plant.
In its day, the plant was a colossus. Hanes Hosiery invested about $30 million in the 850,000-square-foot plant, opened it in 1960 and employed about 4,000.
Two years later, the company gave it a new formal name: the Weeks Division, a nod to James Weeks, a man few have heard of today, yet one who arguably did more than anyone to grow Hanes Hosiery into a global economic power.
Weeks, a cost accountant from New York state, came to town in 1915 at the behest of mill founder James G. Hanes to set up a "cost and management" system, another way of saying he was a consultant hired to help with an overhaul.
"My daddy said he came down to do the dirty work, fire the guys who were the problem," said Molly Johnson, one of Weeks' three daughters. "He went home, married my mother and moved back down here on their honeymoon. They never looked back."
Weeks immediately set to work, rising from that modest start to become the company's president from 1938 to '54 and chairman of its board from 1954 until he retired four years later.
"During the more than 40 years in which he was associated with the company, Hanes Hosiery grew from a small establishment of 200 employees to the ‘world's largest' distinction it holds today," reads an editorial published in the Winston-Salem Journal shortly after his death Sept. 27, 1962. "Indeed, it might be said that without him, Hanes Hosiery might never had need for the $26-million division that now bears his name."
‘A sad time'
When Johnson heard that the plant that bears her father's name would close for good at the end of 2010, she wasn't particularly surprised.
If the news was upsetting, the graceful and dignified Johnson didn't let on too much.
"It's a sad time for all of us," she said. "It won't be referred to as the Weeks Division for much longer, will it?"
Asked about the end of her father's legacy, Johnson recalled a sports-mad patriarch who furthered Hanes' community roots by sponsoring highly competitive company baseball and basketball (for men and women) teams.
Jim Weeks loved North Carolina, his adopted hometown, his company and its employees, she said.
A portrait of Weeks once hung in the division that carried his name for more than 40 years. One of Johnson's relatives saw the portrait during a tour and asked a little mischievously who the man was.
The guide replied with something along the lines of "I dunno; I guess it's some old guy who worked here for a long time."
Though Johnson much preferred talking about the man rather than the company whose name graced one of its largest plants, she nevertheless believes her father would have lamented its closing.
"He would have been sad about the changes," she said. "He was a very modest person who wouldn't have put a lot of stock in the plant being named for him. He was satisfied in doing a job he loved to do."
ssexton@wsjournal.com
(336) 727-7481
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