“One of the things that's immediately striking about Lodge,” I say to Millhiser, “is that, typically, when you have a company that's making a product that is so widely consumed, sold in different countries, usually what happens is investment bankers from Wall Street show up.”

“They've tried,” Millhiser replies, the faintest air of disdain in her tone.

“Well, how did the family resist?” I ask. “What was it that made everyone want to keep running the company as a family company?”

“I don't know,” she says. “We just …” She pauses for a moment, then says, “It was in our ethic. Not only are we fourth-, going on fifth-generation owners, but the employees are also third- and fourth-generation employees. You know, we're part of the fiber of this town. We're the only real business that's been here for a long time. We're the only one that's really left, and I don't think we've ever thought about selling. It's made a living for the people that were working here and those of us who lived away and have some ownership through stock. It hasn't been a necessity.”

She pauses again, then asks me, “Do you know what I'm trying to say?”

I think I do. Millhiser is trying to say that for five generations, her family has been more interested in this question …

What will it do to South Pittsburg?

… than it has been in this one:

How much money can we make?

Don’t get me wrong. I am sure the members of the Lodge and Kellermann families live well, and I’m not naive enough to think there haven’t been squabbles among the members over the past 120 years as they discussed those two questions. But throughout their company’s history, the family, as a group, chose its hometown over the gleaming, Wall Street vision of wealth, in which too much is never enough.

I had intended to come to South Pittsburg to write a story about the peculiar romance Southerners have with their cast-iron skillets — how these inexpensive, utilitarian objects are handed from one generation of family cooks to the next with a reverence typically accorded only to objects of much greater economic value. But the truth is, I’m not sure I could capture that better than these two sentences from John T. Edge’s 2002 book, “A Gracious Plenty”:

“Each time a Southern cook hefts a skillet to the stovetop, he or she is not alone. Trapped within the iron confines of these skillets and stewpots are the scents and secrets of a family’s culinary history.”

And anyway, when I asked Carolyn Millhiser about the skillet-as-heirloom thing, she pretty much nailed it in one line: “That's because of the good food that the cooks made in it.”

So I decided to tell a different story. For about five years of my life, I wrote about big corporations as a journalist, and for another 15 or so, I worked as a writer or consultant for quite a few of them. I’ve written about CEOs, and I’ve written for CEOs. I’m no master, but I know enough about how big corporations work to see another story to be told: the one about how two families could grow a global business in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, across five generations, all the while resisting the lure of Wall Street because selling out would kill their hometown.

I know enough about big business to know this: What Lodge Manufacturing Co. has achieved, in today’s business world, is just a damned miracle.