A Secret Gift Read online

  Carl Joseph Burnbrier died on January 31, 1958. A year later, on May 4, 1959, Maude Burnbrier died.

  William Lewis and Mary Brigham are buried side by side in the Georgia soil he so loved, at the Bethany United Methodist Church Cemetery, a couple of miles down the road from his ancestral farm, Stanley—as close he would ever get to returning to it. The plantation has long since been divided up and sold off. Lewis Brigham’s lone surviving child, the twin Doris Jean, finds it difficult to speak of what has become of that cherished tract of Georgia soil. A part of it is now a row of apartments, low-income government housing. Once called “the plantation,” it is now known locally as “the projects.”

  Asylum

  The bond between sisters Maude and Mary had moved the Burnbriers to help the Brigham family that Christmas of 1933. Others were moved by parental instinct to write to B. Virdot. And in at least one case, it appears that only that single-minded determination to provide for the children rescued the parent, pulling him back from the abyss of depression and self-pity.

  John Gissiner wrote his letter on December 18, 1933, from his home at 816 Marion Avenue Southeast. Gissiner enjoyed a reputation as an honest and generous man. He had put on the roofs of many of Canton’s public schools and until the Depression had prospered. Coming from humble roots in rural Tennessee, he had made something of himself. But as his letter makes clear, he was now a triple casualty of the Depression, losing his money, his wife, and, for a time, his mind.

  MR. B. VIRDOT

  Dear Sir, having read of your wonderful way of spreading Christmas cheer and after a short outline of my misfortune if you feel as though I am worthy of your help no one would appreciate it more than myself and may god bless you in your endeavors to make others happy. Oct -11 -1931 I had a nervous breakdown from over work. Although I blame no one but myself having had many reverses in business. November 10-1931 while I was in Massillon hospital my wife died. I was only in that hospital two months but shortly after being away I began to hemorrhage so I went to Molly Stark San [Sanitarium]—I have come back home but am not able to take care of my business in my line which is sheet metal work. I have two small sons, one thirteen &, one eight. I am trying to keep them in school. At present we are keeping a bachelors hall and trying to keep the home fires burning. You are at liberty to look up my past record. I am a member of Dueber Ave—M.E. Church and the faithful Man Bible Class. Have been having lived in Canton for the past twenty two years and have always payed my debts & have not and enemy. Never played the stock market. Not a drinking man. Just another victim with to much real estate dealing and uncollectibal book accounts. Hoping this letter meets with favor. And wishing you a Merry Xmas & a prospris new Years.

  RESCTFULLY YOURS

  J. S. GISSINER

  John S. Gissiner and his wife, Evelyn, were the parents of one daughter and four sons, the youngest then but three years old. John was a small man, starting to lose his hair. He wore glasses and spoke softly, never raising his voice and never swearing. They were both homebodies—“gentle and meek” is how their ninety-seven-year-old former daughter-in-law Betty remembers them.

  Gissiner had no history of mental illness or emotional imbalance. One day he just snapped. He leaned against his bedroom wall and refused to let his wife enter. From there, he was taken to a mental hospital. What set him off, recalls Betty, was a trip to the Dime Savings Bank on Walnut and East Tuscarawas. In that bank, Gissiner had his account, representing years of roofing and tin work. It was an opulent structure with Italian marble floors inlaid with green and gold. Its doors first opened in January 1895, and its motto, “Safety for Canton Savers,” had persuaded many to entrust the bank with their life’s savings. A 1928 county history notes, “It’s like a government bond—it assures the highest degree of security for their many patrons. Experienced management and conservative loaning policy are major safeguards for the funds entrusted to The Dime Savings Bank.”

  But when Gissiner arrived at the bank, standing beside its Doric columns, he discovered that, without any warning, it had simply closed and locked its doors. Betty remembers Gissiner’s shock. Her own father made the same grim discovery that day at the doors of the Dime Savings Bank. On October 5, 1931, the story made the front page of the Canton Repository. The headline said it all: DIRECTORS PLACE DIME SAVINGS BANK IN HANDS OF STATE: ACTION TAKEN FOR PROTECTION OF DEPOSITORS. Just six days later, John Gissiner had his nervous breakdown. Across the nation, it was no better. In the first two months of 1933, 4,004 banks closed their doors. By then, Gissiner was one of millions of Americans who had lost their savings.

  While Gissiner was in a mental ward, tragedy struck again. His daughter-in-law Betty was in the living room with Gissiner’s four sons and forty-eight-year-old wife, Evelyn, who was sitting in a chair. One minute she was knitting and talking, and the next, she was dead. Now her husband, still hospitalized with a breakdown and mourning the loss of his life’s savings, had to be told that he had also lost his wife.

  But John Gissiner could not let himself unravel. He had his three-year-old son, Merle, to think of, and the other boys. As soon as he returned from the hospital, he set about preparing meals for his sons. As a single parent, his new duties taxed him, but also perhaps rescued him from plunging into depression. From the endorsement on the back of the check, it appears that he used the B. Virdot gift to pay off the Canton Pure Milk Company.

  For all his own worries, he never ceased to extend a hand to others. His son Karl’s family was invited to move into the other half of Gissiner’s duplex, rent-free. Later, when his son’s father-in-law lost his job, that family too moved into the duplex, again, rent-free. Gissiner had long made a living putting roofs over people’s heads, and now, in the worst of times, he had put a roof over the heads of his extended family.

  Gissiner was also a peaceful man. Throughout the thirties he struggled to keep his roofing business going, but the advent of war brought other opportunities. He was offered a job with DuPont working on the construction of a munitions plant. He declined, apparently uncomfortable with the idea of contributing to the armaments industry. Instead, he and his son Karl went to work on a massive new construction project in Tennessee, Gissiner’s native state. Gissiner worked on the air-conditioning system. Then, one day, Karl returned to Canton and told his wife, Betty, that he had been given the month off, that he had been exposed to some toxic fumes or substance and had been advised to rest and make sure he was okay. Not even he knew the purpose of the facility he was working on, though he knew its location—Oak Ridge. Only after the war did Gissiner learn that the facility, called the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made the enriched uranium that powered the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. So much for Gissiner’s reservations about working with munitions.

  Years later Gissiner and his sons moved to Florida. There, at age ninety, John Gissiner died. He is buried in Canton’s West Lawn Cemetery—not far from the grave of his long ago benefactor, Sam Stone.

  There was a certain paradox to the lesson of John Gissiner’s life and that of his family. He worked so hard it nearly killed him. But it was hard work that pulled his daughter-in-law Betty through those most difficult years. All around her others were laid off, but she had made herself indispensable. There was also some luck involved. At Stark Dry Goods, she worked from eight to six, six days a week. Her salary: eight dollars a week. “I was the only one they kept,” she said. Later she went into real estate and excelled as a salesperson.

  Even John Gissiner’s great-grandchildren got the message about taking pride in one’s work. Among them is his fifty-four-year-old great-grandson Jeffrey Gissiner, who today is senior vice president of Key Bank, the successor to the George D. Harter Bank, located where it was when my grandfather opened the account in the name of B. Virdot that week before Christmas, 1933.

  The Harter Bank had been closed from October 1931 until August 24, 1932. On that day, aided by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the bank began releasin
g some $750,000 to fourteen thousand depositors. The money went first to children with school savings accounts, holders of Christmas savings accounts, and account holders of less than fifty dollars each. Checking accounts were limited to a 10 percent withdrawal. The rest would have to make do for the time with certificates pledging to honor 85 percent of account values at some future date.

  That was then. Today, with a staff of 120 people reporting to him, Jeffrey Gissiner heads the Direct Loan Center, overseeing all lending to consumers. In December 2008, Key Bank asked for and received some $2.5 billion from the Troubled Assets Recovery Program, or TARP, one of many banks around the nation intent upon not letting history repeat itself.

  GRIM AS THE Great Depression was, Gissiner’s indefatigable daughter-in-law, Betty, was determined not to let it get her down. Through the entirety of the Hard Times, she not only held on to her job but also enjoyed herself. She knew Marjorie Gray, the lovely daughter of “Gray the Painter.” They were classmates at McKinley High. More than that, Betty wooed Marjorie’s boyfriend away from her. She was tall with dark hair, high cheekbones, and a knack for finding a good time even in the worst of times.

  In 1933, the year her father-in-law wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, Betty was twenty-one. She and her husband, Karl, refused to surrender themselves to the economic pall. They were young and full of life, the Depression be damned. On weekends, she and Karl and a merry band of friends took the trolley to Canton’s Meyers Lake Park with its celebrated Moonlight Ballroom and rides. Laffing Sal was one of the park’s star attractions, a ride in the dark where lovers cuddled in two-seated cars and stole kisses as it careened around one steep curve after another, all to the ceaseless cackling of a woman’s laugh.

  Misery and entertainment converged on the floor of the park’s Moonlight Ballroom, where those whose backs were against the wall competed in the notorious marathon dance, a dance-till-you-drop elimination in which the last couples standing won cash prizes. The marathon of 1933 began on June 7 with seventy-seven couples. The jobless, teenagers out of school and unable to find work, and professional marathoners all took to the floor that day in the midst of a record heat wave. They were given five-minute breaks every fifteen minutes, twenty-four hours a day. For the surviving three couples, the purse was a kingly fourteen hundred dollars. Spectators paid ten cents during the day, thirty cents in the evening, and forty cents on weekends to watch the ordeal.

  Betty Gissiner, her husband, and their friends would show up around midnight and stay until three in the morning, taking a forty-cent seat in the spectators’ gallery. “Those dancers would just sort of hang on to each other, their heads on each other’s shoulders, and stumble around, and we would sit there like fools and watch them. It was a crazy time,” she remembers. Crazy, indeed. The ordeal went on for 3,450 hours—some 144 days. It was hailed as a world record.

  In the end, three couples were left standing, and after they were declared winners, they collapsed from exhaustion within minutes of one another. Canton’s mayor, James Seccombe, handed out the prize money. First place went to Bob “Popeye” Everhard and his partner, Betty Lee Doria. It was to be the last marathon dance held in the Moonlight Ballroom. Conscience and concern for the dancers ended it, a pitiable benchmark of desperation during the Great Depression.

  The marathon said something of the Depression that few wished to acknowledge: that if the Hard Times produced countless examples of selflessness and compassion, like those of Mattie and Joseph Richards, or Maude Burnbrier and Mary Brigham, they also gave rise to a passivity in which the eye became increasingly accustomed to the sight of human suffering and the heart grew calloused to the anguish all around it. In a city like Canton—and there were many Cantons, factory towns where industries limped along—want became the norm, and while few were indifferent, many became inured to the pain of others and resigned to their own. In each there was a measure of altruism and courage, and in each, frustration, melancholy, and resentment.

  It was not coincidental that the sight of couples too exhausted to hold their heads up was transformed into a spectator sport. The marathon competitions reflected both the best and the worst of that era—the stamina and the resignation, the cooperation and the growing isolation. Hour after hour, day after day, those on the dance floor came to represent the anguish of ordinary individuals and families propping one another up, incapable of going on and unable to quit. The marathon turned misery into entertainment and rewarded the few survivors with a handsome prize, demonstrating what one and all already feared—that the sacrifices of the rest had all been for naught. Those who paid to watch fastened their hopes onto one couple or another, cheering them on as they would have had others cheer them on. It was the truest rendering of the times in which they lived, and the cruelty of the event was not so much witnessed as experienced. Those out on the ballroom floor were proxies for a town and a nation so down on its luck that even the romance of music and dance could be transformed into a trial of will. Perhaps the marathon was banned not only because of its inhumanity to the dancers but because of the toll it took on those who watched them.

  VI.

  Families

  The Crisis That Pulled Them Apart

  Black Hand Gang

  Only in hindsight could one be tempted to romanticize the Depression, to imagine it as a kind of ritualistic purification of the American soul. It is impossible to count the casualties—physical and psychological—or to assess the damage done to the individual spirit over the course of that decade. Those who survived were often of extraordinary mettle, as evidenced by the Greatest Generation. But there were also the many who might be counted among the emotionally missing in action, those who did not recover from seeing a lifetime’s work erased, their possessions scattered, or their families dissolved.

  That was what made the Christmas of 1933 so special and so painful for so many. Though it was a time for families to gather together, many families were disintegrating under the financial and emotional stresses. It was a story as tragic as it was common. As the numbers of children “orphaned” by poverty grew, so too did the place of Canton’s orphanage, the Fairmount Home. For others, the dissolution of one family gave rise to the birth of another, as others came forward to provide for them. Often these were not people of great means, but working-class neighbors barely able to keep their own heads above water.

  One need look no farther than Bender’s tavern—not the dining room that catered to Canton businessmen like my grandfather, but behind the dark oak swinging doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen—the divide between white collar and blue. There worked a man named Frank Nicholas Margo. At fifty-six, he was a devout Catholic, a member of St. John’s Church, the League of the Sacred Heart, and the Altar Society.

  Once, before the Hard Times, he had had his own restaurant. Now he wielded the cleaver as Bender’s meat cutter, trimming prime ribs, sirloins, and flank steaks that ended up on the plates of men like my grandfather and, in better times, such distinguished diners as George Monnot and Frank Dick.

  But in 1933, though Frank Margo barely had enough to feed himself, he and his wife, Louise, had taken it upon themselves to provide for others, especially orphans. But by Christmas 1933, Frank Margo was largely incapacitated by a stroke.

  On the evening of December 18, 1933, Louise noticed B. Virdot’s ad in the Canton Repository. She took up a pencil and wrote this note:Dear Sir

  I noticed in this evening’s paper that you want to help unfortunate families for Christmas.

  During the depression our business failed and we lost our home. Three months ago my husband had a stroke. His right arm and leg is paralyzed. His mind is also affected and he cannot talk. We are wondering will this be the last Xmas our little family will all be together. We have two adopted daughters. The youngest 11 and the other 14 . . . frequently I visit two orphan children at Fairmount Childrens home. The one girl is 14 and stayed with us one year, her little sister is 9 and I cared for her for 6 years. Last month


  I visited them and they asked me if I couldn’t come and get them and let them spend their Xmas vacation with us. I told them if it was at all possible for me to come after them I would do so but I do not even have car fare to go after them and take them back and buy them a few little things for Xmas. It would make them so happy to be with us and in our sorrow make us happy to—to think that some kind hearted person made it possible for us to bring joy and happiness to others. God has given you a noble and good heart and I am sure he will reward you. May you continue to prosper even more so in the future that you have in the past is my earnest wish.

  WILL YOU KINDLY THINK OF

  US AND MAKE US HAPPY ON

  THAT GREAT DAY. I REMAIN

  VERY TRULY YOURS,

  MRS. L. MARGO

  800 9TH ST. N.W. CANTON, O.

  Days later, a check for five dollars arrived in the mail signed by B. Virdot. On December 31, 1933, Louise Margo wrote again: MR. B. VIRDOT.

  Dear Sir,

  Please accept my sincere thanks for the check which you sent me. The children sure are enjoying their vacation. I am taking them back tomorrow. Our little girl has been seriously ill for the past week but today made a change for the better. May God give you good health, happiness and Prosperity in the New Year and all your life. Again I thank you and will remember you in my prayers.