A Secret Gift Read online

  “As Good as the Best”

  As the letters addressed to B. Virdot began to pour into the post office, it was clear to Sam and to Minna just how fortunate they were. Christmas 1933 put enormous strains on families. But, as is often the case in crises, those very strains, for some, helped define and clarify the importance of family. Mothers and fathers who had little for themselves wrote to B. Virdot hoping that they might have something to give their children for Christmas. So it was with Mattie Richards, wife of Joseph Richards.

  Kind Sir, am writing to you in regards to your statement i read in the paper. i did not know if it would be alright or not but here is the true facts of our circumstance. you are welcome to come visit our home. i live in an apartment of 3 rooms- 917 4st SW but we each furnish our own coal, lights, gas. my husband is working a little but it does not mean a thing in the way of Xmas. He only makes 37 cents an hour just part time. we have 3 little children, 2 undernourished, the baby has been sick every since she was 3 weeks old. we lost 2 little boys one 11 years old, one 7 months. we are just simply up against it in plain words for clothes and anything in the way of Xmas. he only makes $12-14 a week when our rent gas coal and just the cheapest of food is bought we have nothing left. if you care to take this letter in consideration I am sure it will be apperecated i don’t care for myself but i would love to see the children made Happy at Xmas for we have had so much bad luck. last year they had no Xmas- the oldest Mary 8 years Betty 5 years. Emma 21 months they each wrote a letter to Santa Claus and are expecting a great time a Xmas but i am afraid they will be dissipointed unless someone is kind enough to take them on thair heart I have never ask any one or told them our needs for i did not think it would do any good. i can not write very good but mayby you can read it. if you care to come to the house i can talk better than i can write.

  May the Lord Bless you.

  And prosper you, in every thing you undertake. Wishing you a Mery Xmas a Happy and proserous new year.

  RESP.

  MRS. J. RICHARDS

  917 4TH ST. SW

  NORTH SIDE APT

  At the time she wrote the letter, Mattie Richards was thirty. She was part Native American, a descendant of the Wyandot, or Huron, tribe, as it is sometimes called. Mattie Wogan had married Joseph “Joe” Richards when she was twenty-one. His parents were Welsh immigrants. His father was a miner. They had settled in Glouster, the coal country of southern Ohio. By six, little Joe Richards was himself working full-time in the mines, carrying the tools and fetching water for the miners. He had no education and could write and recognize only his own name. Mattie went as far as elementary school. “Since my father was totally uneducated,” said Kenneth Richards, “my mother had to explain a lot of things but my father never took that as debasing—he understood she was trying to help him.”

  They were a couple of few words and were not given to displays of affection. But the children knew how they felt about each other and about them. They were the centers of their hardscrabble lives. “He believed in taking care of his own and he did it with the sweat of his brow and the muscles in his back,” recalls his son Kenneth. “Family was everything. It was their life. My parents had a lot of love to give. They showed it by what they did.”

  At mealtime, the children ate first. After they were put to bed, Joe and Mattie would eat whatever was left, whatever they could find. Joe was a hunter and would sometimes return with a rabbit or pheasant for supper. Daughter Beverly wore gaily decorated print dresses her mother had made for her from the feed sacks of the pigs and chickens they kept. “Daddy built us a house,” says Beverly. “We lived in the garage until the basement was built, then we moved into the basement until the house was built.” The house in East Canton still stands. The Richardses had an acre that they planted. Joe butchered the pigs, Mattie canned the fruits and vegetables. Nothing was wasted.

  The Richardses were a deeply religious family, Pentecostals who read the Bible and gave thanks for whatever they had. Whatever they lacked they could live without. Joe and Mattie were determined not to let the hardships cloud their children’s lives. “My mother was very religious and spared us from most things,” says Beverly. “She didn’t want us to know how bad things were.”

  The Richardses were strict, but on Friday nights the children were permitted to read and swap comic books with the other children in the neighborhood. Kenneth was allowed to hunt, but had to conserve on shells, and if he missed, his father put the gun up for a week. “I taught you better than that,” Joe Richards would say. And he did. Kenneth would later become a crack shot as a sniper in Special Forces. (Kenneth retired in 2003 after forty-one years as a long-haul trucker carrying Canton’s steel across the country.)

  But there was no hiding the heartache in the Richards family. Joe Richards’s namesake, Joseph Richards Jr., was born in October 1927. Seven months later he died of acute gastroenteritis. In September 1932, a year before Mattie wrote her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, they lost son Donald Dale Richards, a student at Canton’s Wells Elementary School. He was eleven. He had long suffered from rheumatic heart disease and ultimately fell to septicemia. And then there was the reference in the letter to the baby who had been sick ever since she was three weeks old. That was Erma June Richards, born on March 16, 1932. Less than fourteen months after writing the letter, on February 16, 1935, Erma too died. The cause: bronchopneumonia. She was two years and eleven months old.

  During the Depression, Joe Richards took work wherever he could find it. If that meant filling up buckets of glass on the railroad track, so be it. He never complained. In the years after, he drove a forklift at Republic Steel and, to supplement their income, held a second job in a junkyard and worked weekends. Mattie too would work, at Republic Steel’s roundhouse and at the Fame Penn Laundry. But though their work was menial and their education limited, the Richardses always held their heads high. “We are as good as the best and better than the rest,” Joe Richards would tell his children.

  But the years exacted a toll on Joe and Mattie Richards. They looked much older than their ages. Their son Kenneth was somewhat uncomfortable having his friends meet them. “At first I would disassociate myself from them,” he recalls. “I would tell my friends my parents were killed in a car accident and that I was being raised by my grandparents.”

  But as the years passed, Kenneth came to respect his parents, who they were and what sacrifices they had made on behalf of the family. “Listening at the crack of the door, I learned a lot about them and I learned to understand them,” he says. “The first part of my life I always feared I’d grow up to be like my dad, and the second part, I knew I could never be like him, not the man he was. You would have had to know him to appreciate him.”

  Decades later, as an adult, son Kenneth accompanied his mother to Forest Hill Cemetery to help her find the graves of her little ones, those who had died in childhood. She carried a pad of paper and a pencil with notes to help her find the graves. Hours passed and she had been able to find only two of them. Mattie told her son she had to rest. She sat down under a tree and sobbed. “It was the most emotion I ever saw from her,” says Kenneth. Eventually they found the third grave. “She never mentioned that again. She knew where her children were. She was at peace.”

  Joe Richards died in 1982 at the age of eighty-four. Mattie died at home twelve years later. She was ninety-one. They are buried where their little ones are buried, in Forest Hill Cemetery.

  To their living children, they didn’t leave much in the way of material possessions. But what they hoped to pass along they did. “I think we got their strength, their determination,” says their daughter Beverly. “They just never gave up.”

  That indomitability and self-sacrifice became the hallmarks of that generation. The Richardses were hardly alone in placing family above self. It is one of the grace notes of the Depression that the worse things got, the less some people worried about themselves and the more they fretted for their loved ones. Many of those who appealed to B
. Virdot that week of Christmas 1933 made their pleas on behalf of others who were too proud to do so for themselves. And so it fell to loved ones to make the appeals for them.

  The Pump

  Among the many who asked for nothing for themselves was Ruby Blythe. Her letter on behalf of a “veary Dear friend” was simple and to the point:CANTON OHIO

  DEC. 18TH 33

  Dear Sir:

  Read your announcement in this evenings Repository, saying you would help for the answering of the announcement. Now I am not asking for myself even though I want to have a happy Christmas myself. But I have a veary Dear friend that can’t afford to get a paper to even see your add. As she never gets a paper unless we take her them.

  This family lived in town 1 year ago but Mr. Long got layed off where he was making a small income at the Kholers Shovel shop on East Tusc. He is 52 yrs. of age or somewhere near that, if not over. Well they would not take him on at another shop on account of his age anyhow.

  So things got worse than ever for them. They had to coax for a little off of his boss that layed him off. They were good friends before he went to work there. You might know this boss at Kholer’s Shovel Factory, Paul Holms. Well, this Mrs. Long’s father gave Mrs. Long enough to move out on a small farm, but after they did move, they never got enough to plant gardens. They have a daughter living in Akron Ohio that helped them a little, kept them in eats, only just plain stuff. But guess she is getting low on money too. And he has tried to work a little on farms but only takes eats. They need clothes to send their 3 children to school. I got a letter a few days ago from Mrs. Long saying she’d be lucky to have bread for her Christmas dinner. Now it will be nice of someone to help them and if you can send them a little I know they will be glad and will feel like carring on. Mrs. Long never has had a very happy Christmas since I met her 18 yrs. ago. They have tried hard to save, but what little he did save was lost in the American Exchange Bank. They put it in the bank instead of having nice things like most people want, but they knew they were getting old. And their three children needed the savings after they were gone. But it done either of them any good, as they never got any of it yet. I hope my writing you will let you know your money will be needed for them. I cannot help as I just can get what clothes I need and eats myself. Mr. Blythe is working.

  But he don’t only make veary little and if you will help this family which I hope I have plainly told you of it will make me as happy if I got it myself. As I always share what I can and whenever I can with them and others, but as I am poor myself I can’t help them much.

  I hope this help out of the city will not make any difference. This family lives just a small ways out of Middle Branch, Ohio.

  YOURS TRULY,

  MRS. RUBY BLYTHE

  2104 EAST TUSC. CANTON, O.

  Just mail the money to address on opposite side. Address of folks in need—

  MR. MRS. DAVID LONG

  MIDDLE BRANCH OHIO

  R.F.D. #1

  Days later, Mr. B. Virdot sent a check for five dollars to the Long family.

  But there was something Ruby Blythe neglected to mention in her letter to Mr. B. Virdot: Mr. and Mrs. Long—her “very good friends”—were in fact her mother and father, David and Nellie Long. Everything else Ruby Blythe said of them was true. They were indeed hurting and the Blythes were in no position to help. The Longs had raised eleven children and three of them were still at home. Why Ruby Blythe concealed the truth of her relationship to her own parents is not clear. Perhaps she feared that Mr. B. Virdot would expect family to take care of family and not seek outside help. That was a common enough presumption during the Depression. There was also the very real possibility that had the Longs known that their daughter played a role in securing the gift, they would not have accepted it, any more than if they had written to B. Virdot themselves. As it was, it appears that they never did learn of their daughter’s appeal on their behalf.

  Just as their daughter Ruby Blythe had said, David and Nellie Long had moved out of Canton to a farm outside of town. Their home had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Grandpa Long, as he was known to the children, plowed the field using a Model A Ford. He read by kerosene lamp. The path to the outhouse was made of rubber—a worn-out belt from a grain elevator. The sole source of water was a hand pump and the cold water that issued forth flowed into a trough that served as the Longs’ refrigerator. Long’s grandson Richard will never forget that pump. While playing tag with his cousin, he rounded the corner a little too close, grabbed the pump handle to steady himself, and it broke off in his hand. He was ten or eleven years old. For that his father, Clarence, took the strop to him. “I couldn’t sit down for a while,” recalls Richard.

  The pump had to be fixed if Grandpa Long were to have water. So Clarence Blythe and his son Richard drove into town and loaded a small forge onto their car and returned to the farm, where they melted a brass coat hanger and used it to reattach the pump handle. During the Depression, there was little money for others to provide a fix. You did it yourself, or you did without.

  But for the Long family and the Blythes as well, the Great Depression did not come to a neat end with the New Deal, or even with World War II. As it was with many families, the Longs and Blythes would know nothing else but hardship for at least another generation. Those who toiled in the shadow of that Depression were barely aware that there was another way to live because despite the emerging prosperity for many, little had changed for them. David Long’s farm never did get electricity, not even in the 1950s.

  In 1944, his daughter Ruby and son-in-law Clarence, together with their four sons, moved to a tiny farm outside Canton. Son Richard was six. Among his jobs, Clarence Blythe drove a truck and hauled coal to the Firestone plant. Their humble frame house was constructed of wood planks scavenged from homes that had burned down, and the boards still showed the char marks of their earlier use. The kitchen, such as it was, was in the basement on wooden boards that rested atop a clay floor. It was there that water drawn from a well was set in a big galvanized washtub to heat for baths. “That was Saturdays only,” recalls Richard. “The rest of the time you sponged off or just stank.”

  Nor was a bath anything to look forward to. This was coal country, and the water from the well was yellow and smelled of sulfur. It made all their clothes smell of sulfur and turned them yellow. Years later, when things were better, the family put in a concrete basement and dug a well four hundred feet deep to get to the good water.

  This was the house in East Canton that the Blythe family called home for fifty years. And for all its shortcomings, it was indeed a home, a place where family counted for much and comforts were neither missed nor coveted. It is strange to hear the Longs’ grandson say of the Depression, “I have no knowledge of what they went through,” given that his own early years were little different.

  As with many families of that day, children looked after their parents. Two years after she wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, Ruby’s mother, Nellie, died. When Grandpa Long became a widower unable to care for himself, he moved into a trailer in the rear of Ruby’s home. David Long died on September 15, 1968. He was eighty-five, and, as his obituary in the Repository noted, he left behind, in addition to his three surviving daughters and six sons, some twenty-six grandchildren, forty great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. When, as a widow, Ruby could no longer care for herself, she moved in with her son Richard. Ruby Blythe passed away on February 5, 1997, in Florida at age eighty-seven.

  If there was love in the Long house, there was also some conflict. During the Depression, David Long’s son Melvin left home at age ten and found himself living the life of a hobo, riding the rails and sharing the fires and stews of other men in search of a job, food, and adventure. At twenty-one, he found that adventure for a time out West, working in 1933 on a bridge that was to span a scenic bay. The Golden Gate Bridge, it was called. Later Melvin Long returned to Canton, settled down, and worked for Hercules Motors and Timken. His so
n Marvin would work in the junk business and for car dealerships.

  Marvin’s thirty-seven-year-old son, Jason—great-grandson of David Long—grew up hearing little of the Great Depression, and he failed to heed his father’s words “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” He spent ten years in customer relations with Chase Manhattan in the credit card division. That job and his own credit problems gave him a sobering insight into the American character and what he believes led the nation into the recession of 2008 and 2009. “Greed got us here,” he says. “Nobody ever wants to say no. Basically ‘no’ is not even in the culture. The hole in the heart will never be filled no matter how much crap you have.” In the difficult months that followed, as the Great Recession claimed more jobs, upended retirement plans, and altered the economic landscape, many Americans said they were reviewing their priorities and finding that materialism no longer held so central a place in their lives. As Jason Long had suggested, self-restraint and discipline were slowly making a comeback, both in his own life and in that of the nation.