A Secret Gift Read online

  “What became of that doll?” she mused aloud. “I wondered that so many times. The only thing I can think of is when my mother divorced my father it got left behind. When we left we took just the clothes on our back.”

  Her mother had married Paul Hillman, the son of German immigrants, when she was seventeen. Not long after she wrote the letter to B. Virdot she left him and moved into an apartment with the two children, Gerry and Paul Jr. They had but one bed to be shared by the three of them. In some ways it was fortunate that they had one another to stay warm. It was often cold enough in the bedroom to see their own breath. Each morning at four-thirty Olive would quietly get up, get dressed, and walk several miles in the dark from their home to the Timken plant on Dueber Avenue, where she worked as an assembler in the roller bearings department and where she would continue to work for twenty-nine years.

  Before leaving she would make sure the alarm clock was set for the children to get up in time to walk to school. Gerry had two blouses and two skirts, which she wore over and over. It was her responsibility not to soil them. Their breakfast, their lunch, and their dinner took on a grinding monotony. There were beans, there was milk—canned, never fresh—and some hamburger.

  “I remember one time when things were really, really bad and she didn’t know where she was going to get enough money till the next pay day and as she was walking she found a dollar bill on the ground. She went to the store and bought some bread and lunch meat and came home. She was very happy that she had enough to feed us.”

  Throughout Gerry’s childhood, there was never a car, a telephone, or a refrigerator—just a wooden “window box” that was placed on the outside sill in the cold months and kept things chilled (or frozen).

  There were a few bright spots in her early life. One of these was Meyers Lake Amusement Park, a place where many Depression-era children had their best moments. Each year, as a Timken employee, Olive Hillman and her two children were invited to a picnic there. They packed a lunch, swam in the lake, and all the rides were free. Gerry never tired of watching the antics played out on Monkey Island.

  Gerry knew little about her father. Her mother rarely spoke of him. He drank, and he could be abusive. At one time he had a good job, but he lost it. As for the cause of his crippling injuries, Gerry knew nothing until many years later, when her older brother, Paul Jr., dying from cancer, told her that their father, at age twenty-two, had closed himself inside a closet and shot himself in the head with a rifle. But the suicide attempt went awry and he was left paralyzed. He lived another forty-eight years in that condition, dying on May 28, 1970.

  In 1946, Olive remarried. Her husband, Lawrence Gipe, worked in a foundry and wielded tongs handling steel and working around the blazing furnaces. It was a good marriage, and Olive put the Hard Times behind her.

  Her son Paul Jr. would find work with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Washington State, join the navy, and later find work in one of Canton’s steel mills.

  Gerry’s life too took a very different turn. She graduated from Timken Vocational High School in 1943 and went to work in Canton’s Hercules Motor Plant. There she met a coworker named Romain “Bud” Fry, whom she would marry in June 1945. She was twenty; he was thirty and had two children. But Fry was an ambitious man and soon left Hercules Motor to try his hand in business. He began in the furniture business, became a developer, built a golf course, and founded a community bank. He became president and chairman of the board of Consumers National Bank, based in Minerva, Ohio, and presided over its expansion to seven branches. Gerry Fry, who had grown up with so little, was now a millionaire, a banker’s wife. The Frys enjoyed fifty-four years of marriage and four children.

  “I never really thought of myself as being rich, because of my background,” Gerry says. “I always appreciated everything I got. I am not a big spender. I hate to spend money.”

  The dark Christmas of 1933 and the doll that was part of it seem taken from another life. In 2009 she watched over a family whose relative abundance she can scarcely believe. It is one of her great pleasures to do the Christmas shopping early. By mid-November she had already purchased a gift for her one-year-old great-granddaughter, Ivey Julia Rettig, and hid it in the basement. All that remained to be done was to wrap it. It is a lifelike baby doll, something, Gerry says, “she can cuddle.”

  A Special Time

  It would be hard to say just when Elizabeth Bunt’s childhood ended, if ever it began. One of three children, she experienced an early life that was pocked with hardship. Even the joys were snatched away. On July 20, 1930, when she was eleven, her mother gave birth to a baby boy, named after her father—Martin William Bunt. But two months and three days later, on September 23, 1930, the child died. The death certificate notes, “hare lip & cleft palate, unable to eat.” The infant was buried in Canton’s West Lawn Cemetery.

  Barely a year later, on October 13, 1931, Elizabeth’s father succumbed to liver cancer. A Dr. G. B. Maxwell—the same doctor who signed his son’s death certificate—noted cause of death as “general exhaustion.” Bunt was buried alongside his namesake and infant son in West Lawn.

  Widowed at thirty-eight, Delia Bunt and her children, Elizabeth, George, and Thelma, moved in with her parents on a rented farm on the edge of Canton. They lived in the summer kitchen, a tiny two-room structure they used to can vegetables and cook in summer. There was no indoor plumbing, just a pump and an outhouse. No electricity, just oil lamps. To bathe, they relied on rainwater they collected and heated over a coal-burning stove that often went out in the middle of the night, leaving them shivering. Elizabeth shared a bed with her mother and sister.

  Later they moved into the city of Canton and the children attended a one-room schoolhouse, with eight classes divided into two groups by a black curtain. In winter, when the snow was deep, Elizabeth’s older brother, George, led the way and the two girls followed in the footsteps he’d left for them.

  There were no presents at Christmas, at least not at home. At school, Elizabeth was given a small bag of Hard Tack candy (a mix of sugar, corn syrup, and food coloring) and an orange. But as Christmas 1933 approached, Elizabeth hoped for something more. And when she saw Mr. B. Virdot’s offer of help in the newspaper, she could not resist. She took out a pencil and manila paper and secretly wrote this letter:Dear Mr. B. Virdot

  My father has been dead 2 yrs ago last October. We get $3 a wk from the County. There is 4 of us.

  My brother tried to get a job from the CWA but is to young. He is only 16. and my mother can’t get no work. We live in my Grandmother’s summer kitchen. We would appreciate whatever you give us.

  YOURS TRULY

  ELIZABETH BUNT

  AGE 14

  WARNER RD. S.E.

  R. 5.

  CANTON, OHIO

  A few days later, Mr. B. Virdot’s check for five dollars arrived in the mail. It is not known what Elizabeth Bunt did with the money. Her sister, Thelma, has no recollection of that Christmas and had no knowledge of her sister’s letter to Mr. B. Virdot. What is known by everyone who knew Elizabeth Bunt was that she would come to regard Christmas as her special day and the high point of her year. Perhaps it was just that her fortunes improved modestly over the years. No one can say. But after years of holidays more hollow than happy, she came to embrace that day, to prepare for it long in advance. She believed that God would provide.

  And he did. Throughout the year she would play bingo at area churches and stash away her winnings as her Christmas fund. Christmas was a pleasure she shared with everyone. When she married Bernard Haren in June 1941, it continued to be the pivot around which her entire year revolved. And there was no need to explain to Bernard what the Great Depression had meant to her. As one of fourteen children, he understood only too well. Because Elizabeth did not drive, Bernard, and later the children, would be asked to make endless trips with her to the store to gather presents for an ever-expanding brood.

  Even when her own shopping was done, she liked nothing
better than to go out among the crowds on Christmas Eve and bid strangers a merry Christmas.

  From out of the Great Depression, Elizabeth carried with her a faith that things would work out but also a determination to help them along, to conserve and make use of whatever was at hand. Her children recall being deployed each spring to gather up the dandelions in the yard. She would mix them with vinegar and bits of bacon and it would be dinner. “She could make dinner out of nothing,” recalls her son William. And during the Depression, nothing was often all there was. Like so many of her generation, she was frugal and insecure about the future. Two years after she died, son Bill removed a huge painting of sunflowers from her living room wall. Behind the painting, he discovered a twenty-dollar bill taped to the back.

  And yet, when it came to Christmas, the purse strings came undone. Son James can still reel off the Christmas gifts that spanned the years: a Schwinn bike, a Lionel train, an Erector Set. And it was not only her own family that concerned her. She wept to read in the newspaper of children who endured hardships. For years, her son James and she arranged for a Christmas turkey or ham to be taken to a needy family and she prided herself on learning the names of their children and having small gifts for them.

  Elizabeth Bunt Haren’s last Christmas was in 2005. Stricken with pancreatic cancer, she insisted on celebrating the holiday as she had every year. She died on October 20, 2006, at the age of eighty-eight. To her son James Haren she left her Christmas china decorated with holly berries. At her funeral a niece named Laura read a letter in which she spoke of Elizabeth’s singular passion for Christmas. As they sat there in St. Louis Catholic Church listening, Elizabeth’s son and others say they imagined Elizabeth sitting on a sofa, surrounded by her family and handing out presents one by one, making sure no one was left out. That was quite a feat. When she died, she left behind her husband, two daughters, five sons, a sister, twenty-two grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. None of them ever wanted for a gift.

  The Pony

  Just outside of Canton, on a tumbledown farm, lived Edith May, her husband, James, and their three young children.

  “Mr. B. Virdot,” thirty-nine-year-old Edith May began her letter, dated December 18, 1933:Maybe I shouldn’t write to you, not living right in Canton, but for some time I have been wanting to know somebody who could give me some help.

  We have known better days. Four years ago we were getting 135 dollars a month for milk. Now Saturday we got 12. This12 has to go as follows: Pay for the gas to hall the milk, get chopping, pay for coal we had to trust—during the cold spell, buy an axe to make wood, buy a tire for a dollar & I had two dollars to buy grocery. Imagine 5 of us for a month. If I only had five dollars, I would think I am in heaven. I would buy a pair of shoes for my oldest boy in school. His toes are all out & no way to give him a pair.

  He was just 6 in October. Then I have a little girl will be 4 two days before Xmas + a boy of 18 months.

  I could give them all something for Xmas + I would be very happy. Up to now I haven’t a thing for them. I made a dolly for each to look like Santa + that’s as much as I could go. Won’t you please help me to be happy?

  Have you got any ladies in your family could give me some old clothes.

  We all took a cold by not having anything warm to wear—it is the children’s first cold & my first in ten years. So you can imagine our circumstances.

  My husband is a good farmer but we have always rented & that keeps us poor. When we were making good money he bought his machinery & paid for them, so we never wasted anything. He is only 32 & never had anyone to give him a help in starting.

  We now live on the “Hills and Dale road” and close to Massillon. The buildings are unpainted. We are supposed to pay 20 dollars a month & since we can’t we are ordered off the place—we could just get a place to farm on the shares we could make a go of it—the trouble with us is that lots of people think we don’t need anything & if Mr. was to apply on the CWA to get a few hours work a week they would say we don’t need it.

  And oh my I know what it is to be hungry & cold. We suffered so last winter & this one is worst.

  Please do help me! My husband don’t know I am writing & I haven’t even a stamp, but I am going to beg the mailman to post this for me.

  OBLIGE

  YRS TRULY

  MRS. EDITH MAY

  Edith May was one of a half dozen African Americans to write to Mr. B. Virdot. But her story begins far from the cold of the Midwest and far from the hardscrabble farm where she and her family scratched out a living in the winter of 1933. Her story begins in 1925. Edith May—then Edith Thompson—was a thirty-two-year-old Jamaican teacher and governess, the daughter of a teacher and one of seven sisters, all of whom worked in the classroom. For many months, she had been pen pals with an American named James May, eight years her junior and the grandson of Virginian slaves. Over time, they shared their lives in letters, exchanged photographs, and imagined a future together. In October 1925, twenty-four-year-old James May went to Kingston, Jamaica, to meet this intriguing older woman with whom he had already shared much. They married there, and though James returned to America, it was understood that his bride, Edith, would soon follow.

  Two months later, on December 11, 1925, Edith May boarded the SS Santa Marta, waved good-bye to Kingston, its sunny climes, and a life of relative comfort, and headed first for New York and then the Midwest, where her husband, a farmer, awaited her. She arrived in America on December 17, 1925, and made her way to Ohio.

  Even in the best of times, their lives were difficult, but by the time the Depression descended upon Edith and James May and their little family, there was no margin of error, no buffer to keep out the cold and the hunger. Felice May, their daughter, remembers the wind whipping the snowdrifts and burying the narrow lane that led to their rented farm. She remembers her father hoisting her upon his shoulders and carrying her for a mile to where the school bus stopped. She remembers him chopping firewood and loading it into the back of a Model T and driving off to sell what he could to the few who could afford to buy it. The vehicle’s canvas roof was torn and leaked, and icy water spilled down upon him.

  And she remembers how the smell of skunk was the smell of money. He would trap skunk and sell the pelts for food, clothing, and feed for the animals. “We could smell him coming because he had a skunk in the back,” recalls Felice. “Back then a skunk hide was worth a lot of money. The smell would sting your eyes in the house if they got him good. One time his eyes were all shut and he wanted my mom to get a pan of water to wash his eyes out. He came in the house half-blind and the house was permeated by the smell.”

  What lessons Felice May learned from the Depression and the farm did not prepare her fully for what existed beyond its confines. She knew she was “colored,” but she did not understand what barriers that would create for her. An A student in high school and a voracious reader, she applied for many jobs for which she was qualified, but never did she get a call back.

  Instead she resigned herself to working as a live-in housekeeper, and after graduating from high school in 1948 she did just that, working for eight dollars a week. But as rough as her time was on the farm, she gravitated back to a country lifestyle, and the pattern she chose for herself—or perhaps that was chosen for her—was the same, often harsh struggle on the land. She worked for years heading a nutrition program for the elderly, but even today she has supplemented her living with the same resourcefulness that her mother and father exhibited. For years she trapped animals—raccoons, fox, mink, possums.

  Today she has a bakery called Mom’s Kitchen, and each Saturday she takes her banana and honey wheat breads, cookies, and cupcakes to shops and fairs. And at eighty, she still traps an occasional raccoon at her rural home outside Bowerston, Ohio, and sells the pelt. Nor does anything get thrown away. Old clothes become rags to keep the draft out of the barn. The daughter of a teacher, she remains an avid reader. In winter she reads
scores of books.

  The life of James May, Edith’s husband, never did get any easier. A swarm of yellow jackets stung him in the leg, which turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. He died in 1975 and is buried in Canton. As for Edith, she developed diabetes and went to live in California with one of her sons. That is where she died in January 1975 and where she is buried.

  There was some irony that Edith May could not afford even a postage stamp to mail her letter to Mr. B. Virdot: her aunt Grace was the postmaster of Kingston, Jamaica. How different her life might have been had she remained there. A taste of that other life arrived in the mail from time to time—a box of cashews from a sister.

  The descendants of Edith and James May have many memories of hardship and struggle, but they also have memories of mutual support and pride and of triumphs large and small. From her Depression-era childhood, difficult as it was, Felice has one memory in particular that is almost magical. It was the week before Christmas 1933. She was to turn four years old on that December 23. Ordinarily, neither Christmas nor a birthday would have been occasion for much celebration. But something unexpected happened that day. It was dark and the farm chores had been done, but instead of turning in early, Edith and James May piled the family into their rickety old car and drove into the town of Massillon. The streets were brilliant with Christmas lights, and Edith and James May ushered their daughter into a five-and-dime.

  “My eyes bugged out,” remembers Felice. “I had never been in anything like that before and she took me back in that toy store and she said I could have my choice between the horse on a board that you pulled with a string or a doll. I chose the horse.” It would become her most prized possession. “I pulled that horse up and down the lane.”