A Secret Gift Read online

  Catherine Miller, the mother of two children, a daughter aged seven and a son aged four, faced the bleakest of holidays. “I have to support myself and they are both in school,” she wrote to B. Virdot. “They have never known what Christmas is. My husband is in a penal institution at present in York Pa. The children are both in need of clothing and I don’t get any help from any Society.” Days later, her check from B. Virdot arrived.

  Wrote another woman, intent upon not throwing herself on the mercies of charity, “I am a widow with an only child, a daughter, and have been struggling to send her to school, and feed her and myself, and often I have gone with nothing to eat, as long as she, who is growing gets it, for she needs it worse than I do. As long as I know my little girl is not hungry it’s all right even though I am.”

  These women shared the men’s disdain for charity and the dole. They were no less proud. But in the depths of the Depression, they had fewer options than men. Unlike their male counterparts, few had served apprenticeships or acquired the skills sought by Canton’s mills and factories. They were the first to lose their jobs, as companies, assuming that men were the families’ primary breadwinners, furloughed en masse all married women. It was a sign of how different the times were that there were no uprisings or challenges to such edicts and that these measures were generally greeted as prudent under the circumstances. For these women, such decisions were devastating. Those who made their way through the Depression on their own without recourse to charity or Family Services were a special breed—tough, resourceful, and resilient. B. Virdot’s offer was addressed not only to the men of Canton but to the families that allowed for women too to come forward, and they did.

  My grandmother Minna would not have had it any other way. As a teenager and an only child, she provided essential support to her mother and father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who returned with a disabling case of malaria. Minna would never have allowed Sam to ignore the appeals of women, even if he were inclined to do so, and he was not. Sam had known nothing but strong and independent-minded women in his family. His mother was not to be trifled with, and two of his three sisters had wrenching struggles with poverty. Minna was a feminist with a fierce social conscience whose influence over Sam in such matters could not be overstated. She would have read every incoming letter, doubtless helped him triage the worthiest from the rest, and championed the case of the women. She knew exactly what they were up against.

  Years later, in World War II, as men marched off to war, women like the much-celebrated “Rosie the Riveter” filled the industrial ranks. But it was not for lack of ambition or need that the women of the Depression eyed those same positions. Given half a chance, the generation of Rosie’s mother would gladly have rolled up their sleeves in Canton’s mills and factories, and no one thought less of those who were able to do so. In Canton, the fortunate found work as nurses, secretaries, shopgirls, and maids, and did piecework in factories. But as the Depression deepened, they were the first to be let go.

  A photo from the 1920s taken at the Hoover vacuum plant shows a vast room filled with women sitting row upon row at sewing machines. But in March 1931, the order went out—all married women must go. No inquiry was made as to whether their husbands had jobs or whether they were their family’s sole support. The next year, Hoover launched a national ad campaign “based on the powerful appeal that the Hoover was the one possession which enabled the women of modern means to enjoy equal luxury with their wealthier sisters.” The appeal fell flat. In 1933 the company began a marketing drive built around the slogan “Elmer is the key to ’33.” The idea was that in Hard Times, Hoover’s sales force should concentrate on the husbands—the “Elmers”—who alone had the authority to purchase costly items like sweepers. Sales sank even further. The company had failed to show women due respect, either as employees or as consumers.

  Gumption

  For many women the Great Depression represented a bewildering descent into poverty. Many had been working even before they reached puberty. Their struggles echoed those of their mothers, whose hardships became templates for their own lives. Childhoods, such as they were, had been cut short by the demands of family and their own survival. In Canton, as across the country, there was nothing novel about the idea that a woman would have to support herself and others, but opportunities were rare.

  So it was with Rachel DeHoff, who was among those who reached out to B. Virdot. She never enjoyed any delusions that life was going to be easy. The daughter of William and Elizabeth Davis, she was born in August 1897. Her father, William, the son of Welsh immigrants, was a gritty-faced coal miner, a veteran of the Civil War who was born in 1836, already sixty-one when daughter Rachel was born. Her mother was a Scottish immigrant, twenty-nine years younger than her husband. Their bare-bones home in the rural coal-mining village of Somerdale, Ohio, relied on an outside pump, an outhouse, and a crudely dug-out fruit cellar. In 1905 her father died, leaving Elizabeth, then a forty-one-year-old widow, to house and feed her three daughters on her husband’s meager Civil War pension.

  School was a luxury Rachel DeHoff could not afford. After the fourth grade, she had to look for work. Not long after her elder sister Esther moved to Canton, Rachel joined her. At thirteen she was working in Canton’s massive Dueber-Hampden watch factory, one of three thousand employees in what was then one of the world’s largest makers of pocket watches. Since the plant’s arrival in Canton in 1888, it had been a magnet for labor and one of the driving forces in Canton’s rapid growth. The sprawling industrial edifice, with its turrets, clock towers, formal gardens, and fortresslike presence, dwarfed the little girl from the village of Somerdale. Three years later, at sixteen, she married Howard DeHoff, who would become a machinist with Timken Roller Bearing Company, another of Canton’s gargantuan employers. The couple saved and built a new home in 1927, had two sons, and appeared well on their way to living out the American dream. Then the bottom dropped out of Rachel DeHoff s world.

  First came the Depression. Then, in 1932, Howard fell ill. His urine turned dark and smoky-colored, his back ached, and he was feverish. Something was wrong with his kidneys. Returning by train from the Mayo Clinic, he crawled into bed. Two days later, on March 1, 1932, he died. They said it was Bright’s disease. Howard DeHoff was forty-two. Into the hands of the Great Depression fell his thirty-five-year-old widow, Rachel, and two sons, along with a crushing mortgage and little or no savings. For Rachel, history had repeated itself.

  Less than two years later, as Christmas 1933 approached, Rachel DeHoff noticed the B. Virdot ad in the Canton Repository. She waited a day to respond. On December 19, she took up a fountain pen and, across a small pad of lined manila paper, wrote these words: Dear Mr. B. Virdot

  I saw in last nights paper the most human thing I have ever seen in print before. Instead of giving to some church or organization to have your name mentioned over the pulpit, or in the news paper, you have chose the silent way of celebrating Christs birth, which you surely will be repaid. No wonder prosperity has returned to you, and yours. May it never look dark again for you is my prayers—Well I will write a few things about my circumstances. You mentioned men—but I am not a man but I am taking the Responsibility of a man. As Father + Mother. My husband died 2 yrs ago this March left me with 2 Boys to support one in McKinley High another 9 yrs old -I have worked every day at Real Estate, and you know what a uphill job that has been, but I have been able to keep my home & Boys with food & clothing by the effort I have put forth. It looks pretty dark sometimes but we still hold on to that ray of hope—that this terrible depression will soon be over—and I want to state that I have never received charity of any kind or have never complained to anyone before but after I read your letter I made up my mind to write to you, not asking, just telling you my circumstances, but if you think I am deserving of part of your Xmas cheer that you are giving I assure you it will be greatly appreciated & spent for the right kind of things for my boys & myself.

  May G
od Bless you & Wishing you a Merry Xmas & a prosperious new years- I remain—

  MRS. R. DEHOFF

  3039 9TH ST

  CANTON

  Days later, she received a check for five dollars signed by B. Virdot. To what use she put the money is not known, but there was little reason to fret for Rachel DeHoff. She was hell-bent on providing for her small family. In the months before her husband died, she had begun to study for the real estate test and to prepare herself for a career. She was one of the first women in the state to become a real estate agent and she shrewdly navigated the harshest of markets. In those dire times, few homes were sold. Many had been foreclosed on and were owned by the banks, which feared nothing as much as vandals in the empty houses. DeHoff understood that and initially focused on renting the houses, thereby assuring the bank that someone was there to watch the property. She arranged to take half the first month’s rent in such homes, giving her an income stream that allowed her to hold on to her own house even as she provided other families with at least temporary housing. She was tough and tireless and, notwithstanding a mere four years of schooling, deft at running numbers, calculating mortgages, and projecting her financial needs.

  And she was compassionate. Just as her sister had taken her in, so she took others into her home. One of these was a childhood friend in need of shelter. Nola Walters would live with the family for years, and in return for cooking and cleaning she was given not merely lodging but a family to call her own. Christian spirit or not, no one got something for nothing. That was the singular axiom of the Great Depression. Hoboes would come to Rachel DeHoff’s back door, as they did to so many homes, and offer to shovel coal or, in winter, clear the sidewalk, and in return they received a sandwich they would eat on the back porch—a scene repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the nation. And such generosity was repaid in kind by neighbors and shop owners.

  In her field, Rachel DeHoff would prove herself the equal of any man. She made a name for herself in the industry, paid off her mortgage, vacationed in Cuba, and eventually became successful enough to open another real estate office in Phoenix, Arizona, where she wintered. She was always frugal, but the Hard Times she had twice endured—once as a child and later as a widow—were forever behind her.

  But it was her sons, Howard Ellsworth and Harold, upon whom she lavished the most attention and for whom she sacrificed much. Rachel DeHoff endowed them with an appreciation for education and a keen sense of service to community and country. Like so many children of the Depression, they were grateful for the sacrifices made on their behalf but grateful too to the nation that provided them with prospects brighter than any their parents could have imagined. The fusion of sacrifice and gratitude was later put to the test on the battlefield.

  DeHoff’s sons both served in World War II. Howard was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces. Harold became an infantry platoon sergeant, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine at Remagan. He came away with a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. Both men not only finished high school but got college degrees. Howard had a long and solid career with Hoover.

  Son Harold got a law degree, and became the city prosecutor and then a distinguished judge on the Common Pleas Court. His life intersected with much of Canton’s history. As a prosecutor in the late 1950s, he helped shut down the city’s teeming trade in prostitution, padlocking some nineteen brothels and bringing to an end a decades-long stain on the city’s reputation. Today, at eighty-four, he is a last living link to what was. He remembers well the city’s corruption.

  To outsiders vice and graft may have smacked of hypocrisy, but in Canton, corruption was seen as something of a homegrown industry, not unlike Timken, Hoover, or Diebold. They may have been the wages of sin, but they were still wages. The furniture stores furnished the brothels’ waiting parlors and sold them hundreds of mattresses, the doctors examined the girls and collected their fees, the laundry gathered their soiled sheets, and the police took their cut of the action in envelopes in exchange for keeping out-of-town girls from encroaching and making sure the johns and ladies carried on their business safely.

  Decades later, a well-known madam married a vice-squad cop without raising an eyebrow. A mayor had been dismissed for “inefficiency,” a polite word for graft, and, as the New York Times duly noted, Canton’s police chief had been suspended amid accusations that he had sold protection to gangsters.

  Such corruption went way back. In September 1905, William S. Couch wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “For a lurid little city, commend me to Canton.” He described Canton as a “monument to present day Ohio politics built by the present day Ohio politicians, who have piled gambling hells [sic] and Parisian music halls on a foundation of other iniquities in their effort to attain such immortality of memory as may be derived from public office and political power. . . . Fluttering, tawdry rags, faded tinsel, leering faces and satyrs’ figures, a frieze of poker decks and roulette wheels, these predominate in the design and decoration of the other memorial [President McKinley’s monument], the flimsy whole lit with red lights by night and covered from sight by day.” Whiskey Alley, then one of Canton’s more notorious sections, was “lined with gambling dens, each located above a saloon. During a moment’s quiet, when the music machines are still, the rattle of ivory chips reaches the ear on the street.” And for half a century, Canton’s brothels operated with a brazenness that attracted patrons, gawkers, would-be soul savers, and, of course, fallen women.

  Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold, both as prosecutor and as judge, was one of those who helped put an end to all that, or at least reduce it to a scale befitting Canton’s size. He was too young to remember when in 1926 the mob gunned down Don Mellett, the city’s corruption-fighting editor, but he remembers when, as prosecutor thirty years later, two trustees from the Ohio State Penitentiary delivered his prison-made desk. One of the two men was a former Canton police detective who was convicted for his role in Mellett’s murder.

  Service continues to run in the DeHoff family. Rachel’s granddaughter Rachelle Martin became a commander in the U.S. Navy, retired as a deputy inspector general, joined the gubernatorial administration of George W. Bush as commissioner of a regulatory agency in Texas, and later headed a rape crisis center in New Bern, North Carolina. She remembers her grandmother Rachel DeHoff helping her with college tuition and making it clear that nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of her getting an education. Today she has her grandmother’s fine Haviland china, a mark of the better times she came to know. Granddaughter Rebecca J. Canoyer also pursued a career of service, first with the Red Cross, then as an oral interpreter for the deaf, and today as a management and program analyst for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.

  She too feels a close affinity to her grandmother. To her two sons, Rachel DeHoff passed on what Rebecca calls “a tremendous feeling of patriotism for the country and a need to give back.” They in turn passed that feeling on to the grandchildren. I read her Rachel DeHoff’s letter from 1933. She cried. Later that day Rebecca and her fourteen-year-old son were to volunteer at a shelter.

  Many of the landmarks of Rachel DeHoff’s life are now gone or unrecognizable. Dueber-Hampden, the giant watch factory that first employed her as a young girl, went out of business in the late 1920s, largely a casualty of the advent of the wristwatch. In March 1930, industrialist Armand Hammer sold the watchmaking machines to the Soviet Union. They were loaded onto twenty-eight railroad cars and transported to Moscow, where they became the First State Watch Factory.

  Along with the equipment went twenty-three of Canton’s finest watchmakers and engravers, who, under contract, worked in Moscow for a year or more, setting up the plant and training Russian workers. There were, after all, no jobs to be had for them in America in 1930. Each of the workers received passage aboard the SS Aquitania, a Moscow apartment, a cook, and a waiter. They were paid a daily wage and, at the completion of their contract, a princely five thousand d
ollars a year to be deposited in a New York bank. Well into the twentieth century, the equipment from Canton was used at the now renamed First Moscow Watch Factory and continued to turn out as many as now renamed six million watches a year. One of those watches was reportedly given by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to President Ronald Reagan. Some of the Canton machinery was even spotted in China in the mid-1980s.

  The twenty-acre industrial site in Canton fell to weeds and broken glass. As a child I remember them taking down the massive Dueber-Hampden factory in 1958 to make way for Interstate 77. The site is also home to the Trinity Gospel Temple. But before the buildings were torn down, workers vacuumed under the floors to retrieve the gold shavings that had accumulated over the decades. Today, Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold still has the Dueber-Hampden gold watch his mother wore around her neck. To her, it symbolized the distance she had come.

  As for Somerdale, Ohio, where she grew up, it bears little resemblance to the place Rachel DeHoff knew. It was swept away by the Great Depression—literally. In the 1930s, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the Dover Dam was built upstream across the Tuscarawas River. Somerdale was moved in its entirety from what became known as “The Bottoms”—periodically washed out as a flood-control area—to higher ground. Even Somerdale Cemetery, where Rachel DeHoff’s parents were buried, was dug up and relocated above the flood plain. Today the population stands at 242, the sole business is a bar, and the coal shafts that Rachel DeHoff’s father, William, once worked are now exposed to the skies and reworked as strip mines.

  Rachel DeHoff died on January 27, 1974, at the age of seventy-six. She is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, among so many others who weathered the Great Depression. She lies not far from the graves of James Brownlee, Allen Bennafield, and others who, that dark Christmas of 1933, reached out to B. Virdot.