A Secret Gift Read online

  My grandfather often quoted lines of verse and aphorisms that expressed both his optimism and his determination to let go of the past. In 1959, when my grandmother was ill, he wrote her: “More than ever, I tried to bring to life my old slogan that you are familiar with—‘Each night I bury the record of today, for every morning a soul is born anew, and I do not permit the disappointments of today or yesterday to reflect on the possibilities of tomorrow.’ ”

  When my grandparents passed they left to my mother odds and ends of furniture, some miniature silver pieces, a bottle of forbidden absinthe, and a bronze sculpture of an athlete in midjump clearing a hurdle. The latter, titled The Jumper, was one of Sam’s prized possessions, one that he had as long as anyone could remember. Standing about eighteen inches high, it is a handsome piece, the figure muscular and balletic. It was prominently displayed in Sam’s office in Canton. It followed him through a succession of offices, homes, and apartments, through up times and down, first in Canton, and later in Florida. We knew nothing of its origins or its sculptor. But wherever Sam went, it was there on display. I admired it even as a child.

  I came to believe that for Sam, who was not a collector of art, the sculpture represented his personal triumphs over so many hurdles. I had not yet discovered that the sculpture had a deeper, more personal link to Sam, that it was yet another of those clues to an encrypted life. In my mind I revisited all his stories and toasts, reexamined the few possessions he’d left behind, reread his letters and postcards, and still I had the sense that the jovial and mischievous Sambo I knew was a man of secrets. Indeed, as it would turn out, finding the identity of B. Virdot was the easy part. Discovering the true identity of Sam Stone would put my sleuthing skills to the ultimate test.

  IN THE WEEKS and months after I had been given the suitcase, I found myself repeatedly returning to its contents. I would withdraw the B. Virdot letters by the handful and lose myself in their words. These were the voices of my hometown speaking from the depths of the Great Depression. All but one were handwritten, some in pen, others in pencil. Some letters, like that from the painter Bill Gray, were six pages long; others, like that from fourteen-year-old Helen Palm, were just a few lines on a single page, a simple plea for food and clothing. Anna DeWalt sought money to pay for her husband’s funeral. (In Canton, there were both a commercial building and a street named for a DeWalt family.) August Liermann hoped Christmas dinner for his eight children might be more than what little he had—“two string ends of ham.” Fourteen-year-old Betty Taylor had gone without a winter coat. Hazel Baum hoped to buy milk and fresh eggs to soothe her husband, Edward’s, ulcers. Frances Lindsay secretly sought help for the family of Willis Evans, which, though down on its luck, had taken others in. And forty-three-year-old Lloyd Stover, once a skilled ironworker who built bridges and now a part-time janitor, would put the money toward feeding his family of four.

  Most were from the city, but some were from the farms and rural reaches just outside town; many wrote in secret, lest their families discover their desperation; some notes were barely literate and written on irregular scraps of paper or envelopes steamed open to create a page; Clara Brenner, a mother of seven and wife of an out-of-work railroad brakeman, wrote hers on a postcard; others were written on the formal stationery of long-defunct businesses. The latter came from onetime executives with polished prose and perfect penmanship. Their names and titles were embossed at the top of the pages, but their words described paupers’ lives. George D. Coldren, once a prominent real estate agent, wrote his letter on the back of an “Application to Purchase” that carried the name of his company, whose offices had been in the First National Bank Building. Black and white, foreign-born and native alike, the scions of privilege and privation—all of them leveled by the same Hard Times.

  My grandfather kept only those 150 letters to whom he had sent checks. (The others would doubtless have weighed upon him.) How many letters he may have received is unknowable. I searched for some hint of how he had triaged the mass of appeals, how he decided who would get relief and who would not. There was nothing. Among the letters was a smattering of thank-you notes as well as pages from a typed ledger, a detailed account of each dispersal. If words of encouragement had accompanied the outgoing checks, as was suggested in some of the incoming thank-you notes, there was no record of them in the suitcase.

  I wondered why, given all the secrecy surrounding this gift, he and my grandmother had taken the trouble to save the letters. Again, they left no clues. Did they see in them some historical value, wishing to preserve the voices of a struggling town? Was it a matter of routine record keeping? Did they foresee the day when a curious grandchild might stumble upon them? All unanswered questions. But it was my good fortune that the suitcase found its way into my hands. I was the author in the family. A former investigative reporter with the Washington Post, I had always been drawn to the extraordinary lives of “ordinary people.” I was fascinated with history, and felt an attachment to my hometown undiminished by thirty-five years’ absence. And the discovery could not have been more timely.

  As I read the letters, America was descending into the worst economic times since the Great Depression. Canton was once again suffering double-digit unemployment, its soup kitchens and shelters overwhelmed. Unable to provide for all the needy, shelters were giving the homeless bus tickets out of town in the hopes that someone down the line could help. It was no accident that candidate Barack Obama would choose Canton as the location to deliver his campaign’s closing argument on October 27, 2008, telling the stricken community what it already knew too well: “We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

  In reading the letters, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was peering into the past or glimpsing the future. As the specter of new Hard Times gripped Canton and the nation, as the ranks of the needy swelled, the benevolent spirit of Mr. B. Virdot reappeared with the discovery of this weathered old suitcase. It was as if some genie in a bottle had simply been waiting for his time to come round again, waiting for a grandson and another generation, hard-pressed, to summon him.

  As a student of history, I thought I understood the Great Depression. I had seen the black-and-white photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, read Steinbeck and other writers of the period, and knew the outlines of the New Deal. For me the Depression was a series of disjointed images—breadlines; soup kitchens; the Dust Bowl; FDR in an open car, teeth clutching a cigarette holder. The Depression I knew was a chapter in a history book, fertile ground for scholarship and film. But it had been sapped of its immediacy.

  That was before I read these letters. It would be some months before I recognized what a rare, perhaps unique, historical trove had literally been placed in my hands. There are many extant letters from the period, and oral histories aplenty that record the trauma of those years, but here before me was a contemporaneous account of an entire community, written with an intimacy and candor that only the perpetual assurance of secrecy could have produced. Because these letters were never intended for the public eye, they are among the most unvarnished and compelling accounts of those years. Collectively they preserve the struggle not merely of an individual or a family but of an entire town at the very time that it was being ravaged by the harshest poverty America had ever known. In the minute details of their lives can be seen the stirrings of vast societal and political changes that would reshape the nation, and the emergence of a generation so respected that three-quarters of a century later its descendants would hail it as “the Greatest.”

  But early on, I saw in the letters only the suffering of my hometown. Some of the signatures—Haverstock, DeHoff, Dick, Vogt—were names that were known to me. The return addresses framed the universe of my childhood. And yet the landscape was barely recognizable. Such desolation as the letters described seemed light-years from the tree-lined streets and manicured lawns of my upbringing. Born in 1950, I had grown up in an America where there was always a net benea
th my feet, where recessions were hailed as “buying opportunities,” and where euphemisms pillowed every fall from fortune. I had come to view the Depression as a historical blip, as when a plane in an otherwise cloudless sky hits a small pocket of bad air.

  But true “Hard Times,” the ones severe enough to be capitalized, meant more than declining wealth or momentary setbacks. The B. Virdot letters were a portal into a Dantean landscape. Here, there was no bottom, no cushion to the fall, just an abyss threatening to swallow loved ones whole. These letters were the entrance to that netherworld. This chorus of plaintive voices, long stifled, were again vying for the attention of a stranger—this time, the grandson of B. Virdot.

  I read them and reassured myself that I did so from a safe distance. Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and unemployment were there to catch us if we fell. As a child of prosperous times, I believed that there could be no second Depression. Like polio, it was a thing of the past. Mine, I believed, was an age in which regulation moderated risk—only the rash and the reckless had anything to fear, and I was neither.

  But in absorbing the news, it was impossible not to hear at least a faint echo of Hard Times in my own—the layoffs, the foreclosures, the bank failures, the bankruptcies, the swooning stock market, the Ponzi schemes and speculators. Iconic industries collapsed. A new vocabulary took hold, one that included TARP and toxic assets. By June 2009, two million more Americans were out of work than in the depths of 1933. Granted, the percentage was smaller—10 percent versus 24 percent—but that was little comfort to the sixteen million jobless. By year’s end, 140 banks had failed, another 500 were on the precipice, and the FDIC was running on fumes. “Too big to fail” had become an ironic epitaph.

  How long the aftereffects of the Great Recession would last, no one knew, and even many of those who had seemingly outrun the storm were faced with preparing for its longer-term consequences. Reading the letters put things in perspective. They reminded me of the difference between discomfort and misery, between the complaints of consumers forced to rein in their spending and the keening of parents whose children went hungry night after night.

  That evening of June 24, 2008, when my mother handed me the suitcase, she had no idea its contents would touch so many lives—hers, mine, and the descendants of those who had written the letters. To us, it seemed, at the very least, fortuitous that the letters should surface after a seventy-five-year repose, and that the gift that illuminated a community in need so long ago might do so once again. But though I am an author, it did not yet occur to me that this was a story for a wider audience. It was about my grandfather, my neighbors, my hometown. I saw it all in personal terms.

  The letters helped me understand what our neighbors had endured and how the legacy of their suffering shaped the character of my community and my family—why it was that grace was said before meals, why the chance to work overtime was seen as a blessing, why sacrifice was the only thing to be taken for granted. I read the letters as the backstory to my own life and that of my hometown, not yet seeing in them the backstory of a nation.

  And even if the B. Virdot letters were worthy of being shared with those beyond Canton, I felt chastened by the secrecy that sealed them and my grandfather’s role. Promises had been made. How could I, even after so many decades, dishonor him and them by making it all public? The right of privacy may have ended with the writers’ deaths, but should not their pride and dignity outlive them?

  Late in the summer of 2008 I put the suitcase away and forgot about it. In the ensuing months, America’s economy cratered. My family too was touched. My sister lost her job. My mother’s travel business collapsed. The house across the street was foreclosed and vacant. And once again, neighbors began to reference the Great Depression. By late 2008, Americans began to provision themselves financially and emotionally against something they had only heard about—“the Hard Times.”

  Then, one night at three in the morning in mid-November 2008, I sat up in bed and recognized the letters for what they were—not a dusty archive but a time capsule addressed to the present, one that had taken on a sense of urgency. And so I got out of bed and wrote about B. Virdot’s gift. The next morning I hesitantly e-mailed the story to the New York Times, fearing they would dismiss it as too parochial or personal. The response from the editor was immediate: “Remarkable. How do we know it’s true?” I offered proof—photocopies of the letters. The piece ran on the op-ed page three days before Christmas, on December 22, 2008—seventy-five years to the day when the B. Virdot checks arrived in Canton’s neediest homes. Within twenty-four hours it was the second-most e-mailed story in the New York Times and drew e-mails from as far away as England, China, Italy, Japan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. Only then did I begin to grasp the power of B. Virdot’s gift.

  In America, President George W. Bush and then Barack Obama would pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the wilting economy, prop up megacorporations, and invoke lofty Rooseveltian rhetoric. But it was the smallness of B. Virdot’s gift—a mere five dollars—that was its magic, not an act of governmental grandiosity but a gesture of human compassion. In a country reeling from the likes of Bernie Madoff, the avarice of hedge fund managers, and the potentates of failed financial institutions, the story of B. Virdot’s gift came as welcome relief.

  It stood as a rebuke to those whose creed had been “More is better.” Against the billions being doled out, the B. Virdot dollars were dwarfed, and would have been lost in the first rounding off of even the most modest relief effort. It was precisely that, its puniness and its purity, which gave it its transformative power, then and now. It was too small to put even a dent in the Great Depression but just enough to fend off the sense that no one cared and nothing could be done. For one moment, in one forgotten town, one man managed to shrink the vastness of the Depression to a human scale.

  Reading the letters to B. Virdot also reminded me that community is more than collective self-interest. The Depression was a calamity that brought incalculable suffering to the greedy and the innocent alike. There is no romanticizing the wreckage it wrought. But it also rid us of our sense of entitlement and made us take inventory of our intangible wealth. The Depression was like a great anvil upon which our national character was beaten into shape. It forged an indomitable spirit we later recognized as “the Greatest Generation.”

  Still, I was unsure if writing for the Times had been the right thing to do. I worried that my grandmother would not have approved. The day the Times story ran I returned home and found phone messages from readers. But first I had to wade through old messages that had to be saved or erased. One of these was from my grandmother. She had passed away three years earlier, but I had not been able to bring myself to erase her voice. Now, on this day, she spoke to me again—this time, from the grave:

  “Dearest Wonderful Ted . . . I am so proud of you. . . . Thank you for your wonderful love of me and your devotion. God Bless you. . . . I love you, darling . . . Minna.” Once more I saved the message. I could not help but feel she had given me her blessing to continue. And so I did.

  Over the ensuing year I combed through thousands of pages of documents in an effort to track down the descendants of those who had written to B. Virdot. I wanted to know what had become of them. Did they survive? Did they go on to prosper? Did they become part of some permanent underclass? Did they know about the B. Virdot gift, and if so, did it make a difference in their lives?

  I began my research by reading all the letters, then focused on about fifty that seemed representative of the rest. Over time, I developed a methodology that served me well in locating the descendants of those who wrote to B. Virdot. I began with the Canton city directory from 1933 that alphabetically listed the residents, their trade, employer, spouse, and sometimes their children. From there I searched by name in the U.S. Censuses for 1910, 1920, and 1930. This provided me such vital information as age, family members, place of birth, national origin, date
of naturalization, native language, and level of literacy. It also gave me a snapshot of the immediate community, listing the same information about their neighbors. I combed through World War I draft registration forms and land records. In Canton’s probate court, I searched wills, death records, and marriage licenses. The latter allowed me to trace the lives of daughters who later took their husbands’ last names.

  Death records provided me not only the cause of death and place of burial but the names of the attending physician and the parents of the letter writers. Parents’ names allowed me to track family histories going back in time. Taking the date of death from the death certificate, I could find the person’s obituary in the newspaper, and that gave me a condensed life story of the deceased, and, even more important, the names of surviving family members, which allowed me to come forward in time to the present. I also pored over ships’ passenger lists and naturalization records and microfilmed copies of the Canton Repository. I was given access to the county’s orphanage records and the state’s prison records.

  There my work ended—with regard to documents—and began with regard to people. Using various online search sites and telephone directories I tracked down the survivors. Over the course of the next sixteen months, I interviewed about five hundred descendants, many of them multiple times. To my surprise, seventy-five years after B. Virdot made his offer, nearly all the descendants still called Canton “home.” Many lived within five miles of where their parents or grandparents had written their letters during the Great Depression.