A Secret Gift Read online

  Charles Winters and his descendants have never had it easy, but they didn’t expect it to be otherwise. Tragedy, illness, layoffs—and big hearts—run in the family. (One of Winters’s sons, Arthur, was killed in World War II.) Charles Winters’s son Charles Jr. had five children—four biological, one adopted. But he could never afford a car—he walked or took the bus everywhere. He was often furloughed from his job, even when it seemed the rest of the country prospered. He worked at Canton Drop Forge, grinding steel for a living. He never fully recovered from an industrial accident there that shattered his leg.

  His daughter Sandra, now sixty-seven, manages a convenience store and filling station, and is saving money to visit her son in Dallas. “My husband worked at a steel mill and got laid off quite often,” she says. “I just learned to live frugal. Most of my kids are the same way. They have learned when there are hard times you got to be careful.”

  Like many children whose parents grew up during the Depression, sisters Sandra and Carol inherited a scaled-down map of life. Christmas in the Winters home was special, never because of the volume of presents but because it was time shared. “What we got was enough for us,” says Carol.

  Enough was a byword of the Depression. It was less a measure of what one had than what one was made of. It was about conservation, not consumption. Enough was a word around which an entire family could rally, a gesture of faith but also of defiance. It was to count one’s blessings aloud, to shore up the soul, and to hold despair at bay.

  “We had a good life, whether my dad was out of work or not,” remembers Carol. “We are happy. We have each other. We love each other. We survive, we survive.”

  It was and is enough.

  Shipmates

  Sam learned many lessons in the first years of the Depression when he saw his business wither, his debts deepen, and his way of life imperiled. None was more important than the realization that the town’s survival and return to prosperity was tied to the well-being of the entire community. The old clannish alignments by class, ethnic group, and national origin would no longer suffice. No one, not the Timkens, the Hoovers, or the Beldens, was immune to the poverty and despair engulfing the city. Like rising waters, it threatened to wash away one and all. The storefronts would remain vacant, the mills and plants nearly deserted, the town an economic wasteland, as long as so many were down-and-out. There was a new imperative emerging and it was based on community. B. Virdot’s gift, while voluntary, recognized that something was both expected of every citizen and due every citizen. Before the Depression drew to a close, the generation that came of age in the Hard Times would soon be called upon to make extraordinary sacrifices, but they had already come to appreciate both the importance of individual courage and the indispensability of common purpose.

  Such values were a part of everyday life in the home of Nora Romesberg. Her letter to B. Virdot:Dear Sir, a kind neighbor showed me this article in the paper and I believe in prayers being answered.

  My husband has been out of work, he even applied on the CWA thinking he could get a pay check before Christmas but it is of no avail. My children are like any other children but instead of toys they need clothing.

  If you doubt this statement come down and investigate because if you see our living conditions you will certainly understand. . . . Sorry to say but I do not know where my next month’s rent is coming from. If you don’t help us in this way maybe you could aid in getting my husband some kind of employment.

  SIGNED

  MRS. NORA ROMESBERG

  Nora Romesberg lived to be ninety-four. Her son Clyde, now eighty-eight, was thirteen that Christmas of 1933. Always when he returned home from school he took off his shoes to conserve the soles. The boys slept on the floor—there were no beds or mattresses, just blankets. At night before the kerosene lamp was doused, their mother and father would take turns reading to them from the Bible. Clyde remembers being embarrassed by the bright patterns in the shirts he wore to school, cut from his mother’s worn-out dresses. He remembers that his birthday was an occasion for joking, not presents. But as part of his job for Western Union, he would bicycle to the city’s outskirts, a telegram in his hat, and sing “Happy Birthday” to wealthier citizens. Dressed in a snappy uniform, he also worked as an usher, taking patrons down the aisles of the fabulous Palace Theater.

  He remembers too how neighbors pulled together to get through those times. The homes were heated by coal, but there was seldom enough money to buy it. So the neighborhood boys would go down to where the B&O Railroad ran and search along the tracks for coal that had fallen off passing trains. They carried burlap sacks and divided among themselves what they could scavenge. “We all worked together,” recalled Romesberg. “You had certain obligations.” A policeman was stationed at the rail yard to ensure that no one took coal off the open cars, though he often pitied the boys and, with his arm, appeared to “accidentally” bump a few extra lumps of coal onto the tracks. They quickly disappeared into the closest burlap sack.

  For Clyde Romesberg and his family, the desperate search for coal to keep warm carried with it a personal irony. Clyde Romesberg’s father was an out-of-work coal miner.

  The hardship Clyde Romesberg experienced and the fellowship that was borne of sharing those hardships with so many others defined him as a man and prepared him to endure with quiet dignity even the worst travails of World War II. During his two and a half years in the navy, Romesberg served on an aircraft carrier, the USS Santee. At 7:40 A.M. on October 25, 1944, a Japanese suicide bomber carrying a 63-kilogram bomb hit the Santee’s flight deck. Romesberg took shrapnel to the head and hand. Blood poured from his wounds. Sixteen minutes later, a torpedo fired from a Japanese sub struck the ship, flooded compartments, and caused it to list 6 degrees. Flames erupted and crew members were burned clear down to the bone. Romesberg, the shrapnel still in his forehead, found himself applying ointment to other men’s burns and dressing their wounds. They were worse off and needed tending, and only by acting together could the ship be righted and the crew saved.

  Today Romesberg is said to be a part of the Greatest Generation, but it is a generation whose cohesiveness and grit took shape during the Great Depression. Romesberg saw his actions aboard the Santee not as heroism but as an extension of the lessons he learned along the railroad tracks. “There was a different feeling then,” he says. “You felt united. You endured the same thing.” He is a humble man, but unable to resist an observation about the present. “We were made of better stuff,” he says.

  Doctors

  Whatever could befall a soul in good times—illness, loss of loved ones, disabling injuries—did so in bad times as well. No one understood that better than Florence Cunningham, unless perhaps it was the doctor who tended to her family. On December 19, 1933, she took out half of a sheet of lined paper and a pencil and wrote to B. Virdot:I am righting in regards to the piece in the Repository about helping some unfortunate people. I am a widow with 5 small children. My husband has been dead a year last Aug. He had no work for two years before that and I was left pennyless no insurance. I am not able to work myself. For the last 8 weeks have had sickness. The children have had chicken pox. The one child had pneumonia. 3 boys yellow jaundice and now 2 are down with the gripp. Dr. Werley has taken care of them. And so far I have not had any income for a year and it surly is heart breaking to have children whom is use to having a nice Xmas and to no that so far There is no signs of any here this Xmas. The Family Services gives us grocers and coal and god no’s I am glad for that but the help you offer would be a god send to us or any one in my condiction.

  You can investicate as far as you’d like. My husband was a painter contractor and we saw better days but I have had to sell most everything I had for help.

  MRS. JOS. CUNNINGHAM

  CITY, 1030 CHERRY AVE, N.E.

  At the time Florence Cunningham wrote her note she was thirty-eight. Her husband, Joseph, who had helped paint the interior of the Palace Theater, was forty-
seven when, on August 29, 1932, he succumbed to kidney failure. Now widowed, Florence was left with daughters Margaret, eleven, and Virginia, five; and sons Joseph, ten, Willard, eight, and Robert, three.

  To her aid came Dr. Lloyd H. Werley, a Canton physician and surgeon who, like many of his peers, ministered to the poor knowing payment was unlikely. Amid such emotional and financial desolation, Florence Cunningham and her children looked to Dr. Werley for more than just medical care. He and his kind provided sorely needed evidence that someone cared about them.

  OTHER PHYSICIANS TOO donated their time to the needy. In the early years of the Depression, the Stark County Dental Society repeatedly hosted clinics to treat the poor in Canton’s municipal auditorium. Several times a year, dentists walked away from their private practices and devoted afternoons to seeing those unable to pay for such visits. In 1932, physicians saw some twenty-three thousand patients at a Canton city clinic—seven thousand more than the year before.

  During those toughest of days in 1933, thousands of surgeries were performed across Canton without any prospect of payment—and there was no Medicaid reimbursement. There were many such unheralded heroes, and their names crop up in letter after letter. Among these was Dr. Guy B. Maxwell. He died three years later. Other physicians too were appreciatively mentioned in the B. Virdot letters for tending to those who had no means of paying for their services. Among these were Dr. John H. Underwood and Dr. Zadock Atwell.

  Deep into the Depression, Dr. Atwell was overcome by debt, and he and his wife sought to collect from those whom he had treated without payment. Atwell’s wife, May, called upon the homes of those whose babies he had delivered for free. But the families had nothing to pay her with, and Atwell ultimately lost his own home. It was a crushing blow. In 1933, at the time the letters cited his kindness, he was sixty-seven.

  BUT FOR THE small acts of kindness by ordinary citizens, whether the dogcatcher, the dairyman, or the doctor, the Depression might well have been insufferable. Every family that endured the Hard Times had a memory of someone who took a chance on them, carried them on credit, or looked past their tattered coats and overalls and treated them as they would have wished to be treated. That was the message B. Virdot sought to send that Christmas, that even those most down on their luck were part of the community and that the well-being of one was of concern to all. It was the message Clyde Romesberg carried with him from the Depression—the fate of his embattled ship rested in the hands of the entire crew.

  For Sam Stone, unlikely Santa that he was, the B. Virdot gift was, I believe, a reflection not merely of a Yuletide spirit but of what he had come to believe was part of the character of the nation that had taken him in. In the Old World, no one had been less wanted than the wandering Romanian Jews, but even they had found a home here. Reaching out to the dispossessed was a quintessentially American act, and though Sam never acknowledged that he was himself an immigrant, he often cited the country’s willingness to take in those of other lands. By extending a hand to the needy that Christmas, I believe he was both making a payment on an old debt and participating in a distinctly American rite—that of sharing the bounty of the new land with others.

  His faith in America could only have been reaffirmed by the selflessness of the letters addressed to B. Virdot. Many came from those who had little themselves but sought help only for others—neighbors, friends, family. Frances Lindsay, whose husband, James, was a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, hoped B. Virdot would help out their neighbors, the family of Willis and Minnie Evans, who for years had put away every spare penny in the bank only to lose it all when the bank failed. Evans was a carpenter who’d been out of work for three years. Her letter concluded, “folks like us have no reason to ask for help . . . but you can inquire anywhere here and you’ll find these folks ‘All Americans.’ ” So genuine was their concern for others that the Lindsays did not even include their own return address.

  Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: A Second Gift, 1940

  There was little Sam Stone wanted more than to be a part of his adopted country, but perhaps he did not always understand or appreciate what that required of him. America was a country of laws and processes. It offered a clear path to naturalization. But he had come from a place where the rights of citizenship could be conferred or withdrawn at the state’s whim. Generations could live on the same plot of land, and, in the time it took to sign an edict, be reduced to trespassers and aliens. His early years had taught him to distrust the state. I can’t say with certainty what was in his mind when he chose to create that fictional autobiography. It was clearly unlawful, but it may have had some rationale rooted in the insecurities of his youth. If the state could take away so much with the stroke of a pen, why should he not be able to restore it with the stroke of his own pen?

  In 1921, Sam Stone had persuaded suspicious government bureaucrats to issue him a passport. At the time, it seemed a triumph. The matter of his citizenship had been disposed of once and for all, he thought. After all, a passport is proof of citizenship—unless it’s obtained by fraud. For two decades the matter of his citizenship went unquestioned. Sam was living an exemplary American life, a good and loving father and husband, a veteran, a solid provider to his family—immediate and extended—a highly respected member of the community, a man of deep patriotic feeling.

  But not even snug little Canton provided safe haven from the events unfolding a world away. In 1940 the specter of another cataclysmic war crept across the Old World. Sam had hoped he had left such horrors behind. Now those same forces threatened to unravel all that he had won—his position, his identity, his honor, and even his freedom.

  In June of that the year the United States enacted the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act, as it was known. Coming on the heels of the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, it criminalized calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. But it also required all those of foreign birth over fourteen years of age and residing in America for thirty days or more to register and be fingerprinted. Failure to comply meant prosecution, fines, and up to six months in prison. Those who were found to make false statements on the forms and had been in the country for five years or less faced deportation. The provisions sent a chill through the immigrant community. Within four months of its passage, 4.7 million aliens had registered.

  But Sam Stone was not among them. He had let the four-month window come and go, undoubtedly tormented by the dilemma he now faced. It was a situation entirely of his own making. If he continued to ignore the registration requirements and cling to the fallacy of his Pittsburgh birth, he risked being found out, prosecuted, and jailed. But if he came forward and admitted that all the affidavits, birth records, and passports were the products of his own deception, he would have to face possible legal consequences as well as public humiliation.

  Either way, the stakes were enormous. How would he explain himself to his three young daughters, to his wife, to the community? And just as weighty, after so many years, would he find himself reduced once again to Sam Finkelstein, the penurious Romanian refugee, the undesirable? There was that word again—alien—the word that Romania used to strip the Jews of all rights and legitimacy. Now it was the U.S. government that used the word and threatened to take away all that he had.

  It is not clear how much even his wife, Minna, knew. Given her legal acumen and ability to slice through deception, it is likely that she knew at least some elements of the truth. The protective way in which she responded to my questions decades later—her demand that I drop my inquiry—was further evidence that even if she did not know the particulars of Sam’s deception, she knew something was amiss about his past. Whatever she knew would have made her profoundly uncomfortable. She vigorously defended and supported Sam, but she was also a stickler for the truth. When I was five or six, I once told her a lie and was found out. She marched me into the bathroom and washed my mouth out with Ivory soap while lecturing me on the corrupt
ing nature of lies.

  And yet, from the correspondence that was discovered among her personal papers in 2009, it is clear that she played a role in counseling Sam and acted as a liaison between him and the lawyers he retained to help him decide a course of action. In 1940, after the four-month registration deadline had passed, Sam retained a Dayton, Ohio, attorney named Samuel Finn. He was a perfect choice—the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and just far enough removed from Canton so as to not attract his neighbors’ attention or suspicion. In the succeeding months Finn would meet privately with the Immigration commissioner exploring Sam’s options, but without revealing

  Sam’s identity. The commissioner told him a legitimate passport was itself proof of citizenship. The operative word was legitimate.

  Apparently unaware of Sam’s innumerable deceptions, Finn attempted to track down the proof that Minna and Sam had provided him documenting Sam’s birth in Pittsburgh. The chief piece of evidence was an official-looking birth certificate, which had been signed April 25, 1921, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The record gives his name as “Sam Stone,” and says that he was born at 29 Gum Street in Pittsburgh on March 9, 1889. His parents are listed as Jacob and Hilda Stone, both born in Russia. It even lists the midwife who delivered him—“H. Sandusky.” Three weeks after his birth, on April 1, 1889, the record indicates that he left America with his parents and returned to Europe. At the bottom of the document appears the name of “J. H. Harkins, Clerk, Department of Public Health, who attests that the record is to be found in the Birth Register.” The record even included the exact site of the original document—volume 376, page 291.