A Secret Gift Page 10

  Though their marriage was tested by adversity, they saw it through and in June 1980 celebrated their fifty-seventh anniversary. Alverna died in Florida on February 11, 1981, at age seventy-nine. Noble died seven years later, in 1988, at age eighty-six. They are buried side by side in Calvary Cemetery, between Canton and Massillon, Ohio, their simple flat gravestones flush with the grass. They are interred in the section marked “Joyful Mysteries.”

  Their grandchildren are a living postscript to what they endured. Daughter Miriam and her husband, Joseph Watters, inherited little but the lessons in frugality, but that was enough for them to provide a home for eleven children—four others died in infancy. They kept a journal of every expenditure right down to the penny. Not even the purchase of a three-cent stamp went unrecorded.

  Miriam died on August 5, 1999, at age seventy-three, and is also buried in Calvary Cemetery.

  Nearly all of Alverna and Noble’s eleven grandchildren chose to remain near Canton. Among them are a postal worker, three nurses, and a businessman. And if railroads provided Grandfather Noble Wright a way out of poverty, it also provided his family and descendants a ticket to a better life. His son-in-law, Joseph, started as a railroad brakeman and rose to superintendent. A granddaughter, Deborah, worked as a railroad stenographer; her brother Joseph helped pay for college with a railroad job; and two of Noble’s grandsons work for Norfolk Southern to this day. John Watters is a locomotive conductor who, like his father and grandfather, came under the spell of train and track.

  As stunned as family members were to learn of Noble Wright’s criminal record, they are no less protective of his good name. Whatever Noble Wright did, they say, he did out of desperation and for those he loved. They understand that the times were punishing, and their admiration for him is undiminished. “It was probably just a survival-type mode that got him into trouble,” says grandson Joseph.

  Today, the dark gothic Mansfield Reformatory where Noble Ebenezer Wright was held some seventy-five years ago is familiar to many. It was where the 1994 movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed, and each Halloween, fright seekers pay fifteen dollars per person for a “Haunted Prison Experience” billed as “Hell on Earth.”

  As for the last lines of Alverna Wright’s letter to Mr. B. Virdot, they are the closing to the poem “The Vision of Sir Launfal” by James Russell Lowell. In the poem, a disillusioned knight of King Arthur’s Round Table searches for the Holy Grail but finds only a beggar with whom he shares his food and drink. The beggar, he discovers, is Jesus Christ.

  A Lynching

  I don’t know if Sam was a man of great faith in any traditional sense, but he believed deeply that everyone had a right to a second chance. He’d made his own mistakes and gone on to prove that he could make something better of himself. He was proud to have risen above others’ expectations of him, and his frequent references to having graduated from the “School of Hard Knocks” were a celebration of that institution, not an apology. He was eager to prove the distinction between the uneducated and the uneducable. He championed the underdog and forgave the fallen, having been both.

  My mother has said he was a poor judge of character. It’s true. He looked beyond a person’s past to see their prospects, and in so doing ignored many a warning sign. He would never condone crime but he was slow to condemn the man, having witnessed in himself and others the lengths to which a person will go to survive. He understood that having a stain on one’s record sometimes said more about the times than the man. That was doubtless how he would have seen the blemish on Noble Wright’s record and how he would have viewed George Carlin, who also wrote to him. Carlin’s letter began: Mr. B. Virdot

  Dear Sir,-

  After reading your article in the Canton Repository I decided to write you.

  Personally I’m very much adversed to charity in any form although I’m getting relief from the family Service since the first of this month.

  Have tried every place to find employment but have not been successful, I would be very greatful if you could in some way find me a place to work.

  I could use two dollars Xmas so that my wife & I could go to her home in Alliance, but as a loan.

  Will add information concerning myself. Feb 23rd 1930, I was sentenced to the Reformatory at Mansfield, O. Have been home since Sept. 15, 1933 am on parole now & lots of places will not give a man a chance to work when they know it. There is just my wife & I and we will appreciate anything that you can do for us. Am 32 years old.

  GEO CARLIN

  921 PROSPECT AVE. SW

  CANTON, OHIO

  That same evening, from the same address, perhaps unknown to George Carlin, someone else was writing to Mr. B. Virdot—his mother, Florence. Her letter read: Dear Sir-

  I saw your very nice offer to help 75 poor needy familys. We are sure in need of a little help. Just now my husband got injured 2 years ago and has been unable to work since he will never be able to work any more. He had been getting compensation up till the 21 of October but they have [not] sent it yet. But we are all sure will get it in the near future we would not ask you to give it to us but just loan it to us till we receive our from Columbus we have a little girl 9 years old. she won’t have any Xmas and I no you will for any one that would think of giving that much money away would be happy.

  MR. MRS. L. H. CARLIN

  921 PROSPECT AVE SW

  CANTON, OHIO

  That letter was from Lawrence Henry Carlin and Florence Maude Carlin, but most folks in Canton knew them as Henry and Maude. Today that nine-year-old daughter, Valerie—the baby in the family—is eighty-five, but she still remembers well what she got that Christmas of 1933: an orange and a little powder-blue change purse adorned with silver metallic beads that opened and closed with a drawstring. The orange was the first fresh fruit to touch her lips in memory. Both likely came from the five dollars Mr. B. Virdot sent her parents that week. But Valerie never knew of the B. Virdot letter. (Another five dollars arrived for George Carlin.)

  Valerie’s mother and father tried to protect her from the stresses and strains of their circumstances. “You were kind of shut out of the room when the conversations were going on,” she recalls. But no amount of closed doors and whispers could conceal their dire situation. The career-ending injury to her father, Henry Carlin, was an accident in a brickyard in Bolivar, Ohio, that destroyed his back. Even years later, the only income the Carlin family could expect was the forty-nine dollars a month in workmen’s compensation.

  The Carlins rented a house at 921 Prospect Avenue in 1933. It was the landlady’s responsibility to pay the utilities. She did not, and the power was cut off. After that, Valerie did her homework by candlelight. Some nights she went to bed both cold and hungry. Without power, the Carlins had to improvise. Emblazoned in Valerie’s childhood memory is a picture of her father and brother-in-law heating a pot of beans in the coal furnace. It seemed to take forever. Bean soup was a near constant, and she swore she would never eat it again, that is, until hunger gnawed at her. To keep the furnace going, her brother-in-law was dispatched to collect coal that had fallen off the coal cars along the railroad tracks. The apartment was sparsely furnished. At nine, Valerie still slept in her parents’ bedroom in her baby crib.

  The Carlins were people of faith, but only Valerie went to Sunday services at the Methodist church on Dueber Avenue. “My parents never attended church,” she remembers, “but they made sure that I did. I think it was because they didn’t have the clothes to wear.”

  The Carlins were often unable to make the rent and were forced to move from place to place in what for many children of the Depression era became a nomadic, rootless life. “I went to every grade school in Canton,” remembers Valerie. She attended McKinley High School and was in her second semester of her senior year when she dropped out to help support the family. She went to work at an ice cream parlor on East Tuscarawas, making sandwiches and scooping ice cream for twenty-four cents an hour. (At forty she earned her General Educationa
l Development diploma.) The constant moving, the disruption of schooling, the early imperative to support family—all this described Sam Stone’s childhood as well.

  But all was not bleak in the Carlin home. “There was always something to laugh about,” recalls Valerie. And her father, despite his injuries and his struggles, remained a jolly man who always believed that “there was a light at the end of the tunnel.” Some evenings, family and friends would gather to play cards by candlelight.

  In the months and years thereafter, as the New Deal took shape, the Carlins, like thousands of others across the country, took advantage of the work it provided, reinvigorating the economy and transforming the nation as it slowly emerged from the Depression. One of Valerie’s brothers went into the Civilian Conservation Corps. Another, James, joined the WPA and helped build dams. The toughness, the self-sacrifice, the readiness to take collective action—all hallmarks of the Depression years—later found expression in World War II and the Greatest Generation. Valerie married Robert Naef, who joined the army, was awarded a Purple Heart, and came home with shrapnel in his right foot. He made the shell fragment into a key chain for his wife. It was friendly fire and not something he talked about. In his absence, in 1943, Valerie became a true Rosie the Riveter, shooting rivets into the stabilizers of countless B-24 Liberator bombers at the Berger Aircraft plant just outside of Canton. In her sewing box, she keeps a single rivet, a token of those times.

  OTHER MEMORIES OF the Carlin home come from eighty-year-old Lheeta Carlin Talbott, the Carlins’ granddaughter, and one of eleven children. Her father was James, Valerie’s older brother. For a time Lheeta and her family lived at the Prospect Street apartment with her grandparents. She remembers that there were times she could not go to school because she didn’t have shoes. Even today that memory stings. She asks that I not mention it, then relents.

  Her reluctance to speak of such remote events may be hard for some Americans today to understand. Clearly the memories remain sensitive, but the discomfort in speaking of such matters is also deeply rooted in the mores of those times. Poverty was widespread and afflicted even the most resourceful, but it was still a source of embarrassment. The closest word we have for it is shame but it was more than that, just as the pride ascribed to that generation was more nuanced. Both oversimplify the emotional landscape of those times. In their letter to B. Virdot, Donavon Brown, a mechanic, and his wife Mabel, wrote: “We cannot all have money, but to be honest and poor is not a disgrace, and cleanliness is something we can all have at little cost.”

  It was a different world, one in which the disgrace came not so much from being poor as from the implicit suggestion that the burdens of others were less onerous than one’s own. To gain another’s pity at the expense of self-respect was a bad bargain. Poverty was viewed not as an individual burden but a societal scourge. In such times, it was often considered self-centered to call attention to one’s own predicament, as if one were oblivious to the circumstances of all those around them.

  It was part of a wider communal code that applied to the individual, the family, and the community. To capitulate to self-pity or public plaints not only exposed weakness in one’s own character but threatened to unravel the composure of others. It was like a team that carried a terrible load evenly distributed across many shoulders. Each looked to the other for support. To break emotional rank only added to the burden of others. It was fine to vent in a political sense, to march on Washington or rail against the banks. But it was expected that one and all would maintain a certain grit and stoicism. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on,” Roosevelt is said to have counseled. For some, it may have been no more than keeping up a front, but the mere ability to do even that said something about their inner reserves. So deeply ingrained was that mind-set that even three-quarters of a century later, Lheeta Carlin Talbott can barely bring herself to speak of the hardships.

  In such an environment the offer by Mr. B. Virdot presented the rarest of opportunities—someone to whom they could unburden themselves as individuals without violating the social compact. Anonymity insulated them and provided them with an emotional refuge that Sam Stone himself never had in such times. He was an intensely social being, but, out of pride or a desire not to dredge up a painful past, he compartmentalized his own years of suffering and shared them with no one. About those early years, he maintained a perfect silence. I call it secrecy, being the product of an age that promotes revelation and conflates privacy with repression. My grandfather never shared anything of his childhood. What I would come to know of it was passed on to me by others decades after he died. It is the same reluctance that Lheeta Carlin Talbott feels in revealing that there were times she could not go to school for lack of shoes.

  And like Sam, Lheeta Carlin Talbott’s painful memories date back even before she was old enough to go to school—back to the period when her grandparents wrote to Mr. B. Virdot. Her mother and father had bought a bedroom suite of furniture—beds and a dresser and a mirror. They had it for a time but could not keep up with the payments. Lheeta remembers men coming upstairs into the bedroom and carrying the furniture off, repossessing it. But her mother held on to one object—the mirror, convinced that after so many payments she was entitled to keep it. “They are not getting the mirror,” she heard her say. Her mother apparently hid it from the men that day.

  “My dad kept that mirror and it was always in our living room,” says Lheeta. When her father died and his possessions were divided among the children, the one thing Lheeta’s daughter, Kathryn, asked for was the mirror, knowing the story behind it. “And now,” says Lheeta, “that mirror is in our daughter’s house, and it makes me cry.” The mirror that held her mother’s image now holds for her all that she endured. Today Lheeta wonders what she and her family slept on after their beds were taken. Of this she has no recollection. For her grandparents, the Depression never really ended. Tough times dogged them to the end.

  Lheeta’s memories of the Depression, like those of the rest of her family, are mired in contradiction. “It was a remarkable time,” she says, “but even though it wasn’t, it was a better time. It was better because people were more kind.”

  BUT WHAT OF the Carlins’ son George, and the letter he wrote that same December night in 1933? Just behind the Carlins’ house, on the same lot, was a smaller cottage, and it was there that their son George Carlin lived with his wife, Irene. And it was there that he wrote his own appeal to Mr. B. Virdot.

  George Carlin never did say in the letter what landed him behind bars. For that, one must look to the state’s archives of prison records. Those accounts show that George Carlin was born on August 31, 1901, in Bolivar, Ohio. One of at least six children, he had finished one year of high school, but since the age of fifteen had been largely on his own, working as a mechanic and a painter. Under “associations,” meaning who he hung out with, it says simply, “Good and bad.” The latter would cost him dearly.

  On the evening of September 9, 1930, he and two friends drove the six miles from Canton to Louisville and held up Jonas Miller, a gas station attendant. They took the cash—about thirty-five dollars—as well as the register and divided up their take on the road. They then drove to Akron, where, that same evening, they were arrested by detectives and promptly pled guilty. George Carlin was then twenty-nine, stood five feet seven, and weighed 145 pounds.

  On September 13, 1933, he was paroled into a world that was in its way as harsh and forbidding as the one he was leaving. The Depression had ravaged the economy, and not even the best of men with clean records could find work. His prospects were bleak. And yet, somehow he managed. On October 20, 1934—more than a year after being paroled—his probation officer wrote, “The man has been in no trouble since his return and is working hard every day.”

  George Carlin and his wife, Irene, divorced. George later met Hazel Winterhalter, or “Tootie,” as he called her. Hazel, now ninety-seven, is quick-witted and protective of her late
husband’s good name. Born on the evening of November 5, 1912, Hazel Carlin is the daughter of the stableman who tended the horses and carriages of one of Canton’s true millionaires, industrialist Frank E. Case, manufacturer of dental chairs. (Case was wiped out in the crash of 1929 and died four years later.) Hazel Carlin says her family was largely immune to the Depression, having an already modest lifestyle and but one child to feed.

  George and Hazel were married on June 26, 1941, in the Zion Lutheran Church. With the coming of war, forty-year-old George Carlin was required to register for the draft. It was then that he told his new bride for the first time that he had a criminal record. “He offered to dissolve the marriage if I wasn’t satisfied,” she recalls. “But I loved him and it made no difference to me.” I imagine that my grandmother Minna responded similarly, as Sam came to trust her enough to confide in her and tell her some, if not all, of his secrets.

  The subject of prison would never again come up between George and Hazel and never again would George Carlin cross the law. “He learned,” she said. The one good thing that came of his time in prison was that it was there that he learned to be a first-rate mechanic, a skill that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life. He could repair anything.

  In 1946, George and Hazel Carlin left Ohio and moved to Pima, Arizona. Lung problems eventually forced George to quit working as a mechanic, but his good nature and solid reputation in the Gila Valley of southeast Arizona led to his being offered a job managing first a movie theater and later the drive-in in Safford. Carlin was a fan of Johnny Cash, could not get enough of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and took endless photos and slides of the family. In 1960 he purchased a new Chrysler Valiant with a push-button transmission, mostly in an effort to conserve his energy as his lungs failed. But two weeks later, he died.