A Secret Gift Read online

  In August 2008, Forbes magazine listed Canton among the ten fastest dying cities in the nation. In the Canton News Depot on Market Avenue, where decades earlier I had purchased the Harvard Classics, there were few books, but shelves of Dream Books—pamphlets used by those who play the illegal numbers racket and seek to convert their dreams into a winning combination of numerals. These Dream Books are one more sign of Canton’s hard-luck history, in which gambling and superstition seem as likely a course of salvation as any. Allen Bennafield, the dry-cleaner-turned-bookie, would have felt right at home.

  Empty storefronts abound. At night, Bender’s still prospers, but much of the downtown is what one local banker calls “a dead zone.” Canton’s prostitutes never left, but they no longer claim entire streets. And if education is one of the paths out of difficulty, Canton has a ways to go. Only one in ten adults living there holds a bachelor’s degree.

  Dollar stores, evangelical halls, bail bondsmen, vacant houses, and boarded-up storefronts proliferate. More than seventy-five years ago the Canton Repository ran B. Virdot’s offer and made its own appeal to help the needy. Now it is doing so again. In December 2008, the newspaper began a feature called “Community Help” that lists clothing giveaways, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters. As Christmas 2008 approached, more than three thousand people contacted the Salvation Army in search of shelter, food, and help with paying for heat and lights. Like those in 1933, the anguish and humiliation was written on their faces. In the lobby of the Salvation Army a part-time chef and father of six-year-old twin boys sat and wept, in part out of embarrassment, in part out of gratitude, as he waited to receive toys for his sons and food for his family.

  Plants closed, factories cut back on hours, benefits were reduced or eliminated, and the growing uncertainty of continued employment took its toll. In March 2009, the posting of a single janitorial position at a junior high school drew 835 applicants. The one-year contract paid fifteen to sixteen dollars an hour. The Repository hailed the winner as possibly “the luckiest man in Stark County.” By early 2010, Canton’s unemployment rate was approaching 15 percent. The only thing that seemed to be expanding was the anger aimed at politicians of both parties at all levels of government.

  One of the large downtown storefronts on McKinley Avenue is boldly called “The Recovery,” but it has nothing to do with the city regaining its economic standing, and everything to do with serving the growing number of addicts and alcoholics. The old McKinley High School still stands, but is now a nursing home. The first floor once hosted wedding receptions and parties and featured a restaurant. No longer.

  Still, it is remarkable how, even today, so much of Canton’s landscape and life are defined by the Depression. Fawcett Stadium, where the National Football League kicks off its season each fall and where for generations high school teams have battled under the lights and families cheered, was itself a creation of the Depression and the Works Progress Administration. And much of Canton’s parks system owes its existence to the WPA.

  Canton’s arts also took root during the Depression. The Canton Players’ Guild, a theatrical company, came into being in 1932, the Canton Art Institute in 1934, and the Canton Symphony Orchestra in 1936. Thirteen prized murals that glorify the steel industry and its workers inside Canton’s Frank T. Bow Federal Building were done by artist Glenn Moore Shaw under the Works Progress Administration.

  But the Depression also scarred this city. At one time, no building was more precious to Canton than the home of President William McKinley. From the front porch of his house at 723 North Market Avenue, he launched his 1896 campaign for the White House. But eventually the house was moved to make room for the expansion of a hospital. During the Depression the home was neglected and became an eyesore. One attempt after another to solicit public and private funds for its restoration during the Hard Times failed. A grainy photo shows a sign in the window of the home that reads, SAVE THIS HOUSE. But there was no savior. Ultimately, the Health Department condemned it. In January 1935 the McKinley home rendered its last pitiful act of service to the city, providing jobs to a Federal Transient Service Bureau crew who tore the dilapidated house apart and hauled it away. The wood that was usable went to building shelters, picnic tables, and benches in the city parks.

  Where the McKinley house originally stood, the Stark County Library now stands. It is where, day after day, I pored over old documents and directories, searching for what became of the descendants of those who wrote to B. Virdot.

  Canton still has its Jewish community, but it too is smaller and older than the one Sam Stone knew. It was not anti-Semitism but assimilation, not poverty but opportunities elsewhere, that siphoned off the young. In June 2008, Canton’s Temple Israel agreed to be acquired by a Christian college, though Jewish services will continue to be hosted there. The Jewish country club, opened because Jews had been shunned by others, became a public golf course.

  Canton remains a place of considerable diversity. The descendants of Germans, Italians, Irish, English, French, Greek, sub-Saharan Africans, Polish, and a dozen other nations have made it their home, just as Sam Stone did nearly a century ago. He would have drawn comfort to learn that, according to one survey, the most common place of birth for the foreign-born—11 percent—is Romania.

  The house where Sam and Minna lived, 2129 Market Avenue Northwest, is now the home of Larry and Carol Williams. I knock on their door and introduce myself as the grandson of Sam Stone. His name means nothing to them. Carol Williams was born in 1942. But even now, she says, the Depression is a presence in the house and in her life. She knows that in the Hard Times her family had lived off the land and that her grandfather Clem Huth had gone off to work with little more than potato peels in his lunch box.

  “My character has been formed and molded partly through the Great Depression, my lifestyle, how I choose to purchase things,” she says. “It does shape our character and the way we think. I can’t say it’s been a bad thing. My parents were able to teach me how to get by, how to manage money. It was one of the gifts they gave me. It was a gift in disguise, how to make the best of what you have. It was a terrible time and yet it was a good time, and I feel like we are maybe coming into that time again because we lost some of the understanding.”

  I tell her she and Sam would have gotten along just fine. Later I return with my mother. We walk through the house as she narrates from memory. Little has changed. We have lemonade and fruit on the patio and say good-bye.

  Beyond the door of that home, in what had once been the industrial strength of Canton, little is the same. The fortunes of the Hoover Company, whose products Raymond Beggs sold, had always been inextricably linked with those of Canton itself. By 1933, Canton produced more vacuum sweepers than any other city in the world and “Hoover” had become synonymous with “sweeper.”

  For generations, the company’s sprawling plant in North Canton defined the landscape, economically and culturally. Some twenty-five hundred residents worked there. Today, Hoover is part of a Hong Kong-based firm, Techtronic Industries. In September 2007, the massive one-million-square-foot plant was closed. Today, the sweepers are assembled in Juarez, Mexico. The towering smokestack still carries the name Hoover in white bricks, and massive letters along the front of the building still proudly proclaim it to be THE HOME OF HOOVER APPLIANCES.

  Timken, where Donald Jury and countless others had worked, has gone through its own wrenching changes. Seventy-seven years after B. Virdot’s gift, the company boasted sales of $5.7 billion and 25,000 employees, with 61 plants and 103 sales offices and warehouses across six continents. But in May 2004 it announced it was closing three plants in Canton. Together, they employed 1,300 people. In April 2009, the company announced that worldwide it was slashing its work force by 25 percent, eliminating 7,000 jobs. “Here we go again” was a phrase that came to the minds of many who had grown up in the Hard Times.

  In 1933, no tour of Canton would have been complete without a visit to the Palace The
ater and Meyers Lake Amusement Park, the two great escapes from the Great Depression. Today the theater enjoys a place in the National Register of Historic Places, but it is ailing. Once it was the most ornate edifice in the city. Even at ninety-six, Marjorie Markey, daughter of “Gray the Painter,” remembers the fabulous organ rising out of the pit, Banks Kennedy playing the keys. But today, at eighty-two, the theater’s plaster is falling, the tapestries are tattered, the furniture is broken, and the marquee has been allowed to go dark—deemed too expensive to feed its forty-eight hundred lights. An appeal to passersby for contributions to help with the utilities is posted on the door.

  Meyers Lake Amusement Park, which hosted the dance marathon and was where Betty Gissiner and her beau would find relief and laughter, was itself not immune to the Depression. When business fell off, its owner, George Sinclair, secretly extended a plank across the moat to Monkey Island and let the monkeys escape, then breathlessly phoned in the story to the Canton Repository. “I don’t know how they got out,” he told the paper. The next day, attendance at the park soared as people came to watch monkey mayhem. Today, nothing remains of Meyers Lake Park except the lake for which it was named and the cottages and condos that sprang up around it.

  But even today, B. Virdot’s gift enjoys a half-life in Canton. At Christmas 2008, following my discovery of the suitcase, the Repository ran an editorial citing Sam Stone (a.k.a. Mr. B. Virdot) and his generosity:

  “Stone himself was not a wealthy man, but he had done well enough for his time. He also had experienced the loss of a business and had benefited from the help of others in getting back on his feet. And so, just before Christmas in 1933, Stone reached out to help others, with no wish for acclaim. Our own time is tough enough. There is no better role model than Samuel J. Stone.”

  And as Sam Stone himself would have been the first to note, numbers themselves do not tell the whole story. Five dollars was so little and yet so much. Today’s unemployment numbers are real enough, but so too are the character and resilience of Canton’s people. Hard Times come and go, but even in these difficult days they are showing the same grit, compassion, and resourcefulness that have always defined the city and held out the prospect of better days ahead.

  Acknowledgments

  The place to begin dispensing thanks is with the descendants of those who wrote to B. Virdot that Christmas of 1933. Children and grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews—all who allowed me to enter their lives and the memories of those who were loved (and, more difficult still, those who were not). To you, I owe much. You gave me not only a book but a lesson in both history and the character of the country. For most Americans, 1933 was not a good year, and, though hardly comparable, neither were the years in which this book took shape. Still, your courage and humor were themselves a powerfully needed stimulus package for trying times. I defy anyone to spend time with you and not emerge an optimist.

  To my many relatives—all those (especially Shirley Cohen) who helped me piece together the riddle of Sam’s life but also shared with me the stories of his siblings—I want to say thank you. Their story is not always pretty, and I have made no attempt to gussy it up. It is what it is. That we as a family, the descendants of two displaced Romanian immigrants named Jacob and Hinde, have come into such a life is a testament to their dream of what could be and also what we ourselves have made of it. It is my hope that whatever bad blood stood between our forebears, founded or not, is finally consigned to the past. Consider this a belated olive branch.

  To the many good and gracious people in Canton—shopkeepers, steelworkers, city officials, police, social workers, retirees, and the unemployed—who spent innumerable hours with me, your contributions to this story were invaluable. Though I have not lived in Canton for decades, you made me feel as though I were home again.

  Deepest appreciation must go to the staff of the genealogical division of the Stark County Public Library, without whose tireless support and resourcefulness this book would have been vastly more difficult and less complete. Lauren Landis was the consummate professional.

  I am also indebted to Char Lautzenheiser of the Classic Auto Museum both for her insights into Canton and for her research aids that made it possible for me to track the descendants of those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot.

  At the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum, curator Kimberly Kenney and librarian Karl Ash were of immeasurable help. For her valuable assistance and indefatigable research—and for introducing me to Nicholas Lane, my fabulous guide to the city—I thank Susan M. Melnick, archivist of the Rauh Jewish Archives at Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center.

  Thanks too to any number of friends and family whose suggestions and enthusiasm were invaluable, and whose tolerance in hearing me prattle on about these stories was heroic. A few deserve special mention: Mike Riley, Katie Jordan, Alex Jones, Howard Landau, Thrity Umrigar, Cyrus Taylor, Bill Siebenschuh, Doug Struck, Regina Brett, my thanks to each of you. Thanks too to Jared Bendis, whose tech savvy was exceeded only by his patience with me. And to the late “Bidey” Bryant, who lovingly introduced me to a Canton I might otherwise never have known.

  To my many mentors—Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Len Downie—special thanks. To Terry Oblander, for helping me find a place in journalism, for taking my pencil and forcing me to learn to type, and for showing me what a lede should look like, I will be forever grateful. To the legions of others—the late and beloved Frank Longstreth, Eleanor Roundy, Allen Grossman—abiding appreciation. I am particularly indebted to my dear friend Peter de Roetth, whose insights and texual questions proved invaluable.

  To the late Susan Tifft, dearest of friends, a note to say your confidence in me made all the difference. Your friendship was itself “A Special Gift.”

  To my agent, David Black, thank you hardly seems adequate. That he is a superlative agent is well known. That he is a friend, a demanding editor, and a thinly disguised psychologist on constant call makes him so much more than an agent. And to Susan Raihoffer, who works with David, my gratitude for your belief that such an account was not meant for American eyes alone.

  To my editor at Penguin, Eamon Dolan, who made sense of my words, there are no words adequate to express my debt. From our first conversation, I knew the book was in the best of hands, that I could trust his judgment, and that his insights and instincts would enrich the book immeasurably. For stretching me to the limits of my capabilities, I say thank you. A nod too to Penguin’s Nicole Hughes, whose close reading of this manuscript was deeply appreciated.

  The list of those who contributed to this project is longer than time or space allows, but no one was of greater help than my wife, Peggy Watts Gup, whose counsel and guidance left an indelible impression on the book. With candor and passion she influenced the project from initial proposal to final draft, helping me select which letters to include, and creating spreadsheets and organizational systems to manage the information. She asked the questions that ultimately helped shape the narrative. Thanks too to my two teenage sons, David and Matthew, for sleeping late and letting me work.

  This book owes everything to my mother, Virginia, and not just for giving me birth and then handing me the suitcase with the B. Virdot letters, but also for teaching me (contrary to prevailing parental wisdom) that I should always talk to strangers, that there is no such thing as too many questions, and that sticking my nose in other people’s business could be turned into a gratifying and even lucrative profession. My father’s hand was in this too, though he has been gone for decades.

  For Dorothy, my mother’s sister, thank you for fielding endless questions, sharing your memories, and combing through mountains of old photographs, legal documents, correspondence, and yellowing newspapers in aid of this story. Thank you for not throwing out the suitcase and its letters while they were in your possession. Without your enormous help, this book would have been much diminished.

  Deep appreciation for my sister, Audrey, whose support and enthusiasm mean so much to me.
/>
  The final thanks go to my grandparents, Sam and Minna Stone. Though they both passed before they could have possibly imagined their grandson undertaking such a project, it is their hands, their hearts, their words, and their genes that gave life to this book.

  Twenty-eight years after Sam Stone left us, I still cannot quite bring myself to believe he is gone. A part of me imagines that, as he did so often, he is merely holding his breath under the water, ready to explode on the surface, expelling a spume of water and a hearty laugh. Sam Finkelstein, Sam Stone, Mr. B. Virdot, Sambo—whatever name you went by, we, your descendants, thank you for your gift.

  Author’s Note

  Digital copies of the letters to B. Virdot are to be given to the William McKinley Presidential Library and Stark County Historical Society in Canton, Ohio, as well as to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. A Web site features more of the letters as well as additional photos, research materials, and links to related sites and upcoming public appearances by the author. It is hoped that the Web site will be of use not only to the citizens of Canton but to students and scholars who study the Great Depression. Please visit www.asecretgiftbook.com.

  —T.S.G.

  Mr. B. Virdot: A Timeline

  CIRCA 1859

  Sam’s father, Janne, or Jacob, Finkelstein, is born in Romania.

  CIRCA 1863

  Sam’s mother, Hilda, or Hinde, Bacall, is born in Romania.

  1888

  Sam is born in Romania. He would variously give his birth year as 1888,

  1889, or 1890, but nearly always listed the date as March 2..