A Secret Gift Read online

  I read them the letters. Many wept. They provided me with personal stories and family albums, and helped me trace lives across the generations. They shared with me what wisdom, if any, had been handed down from that awful time. I walked the streets and alleyways of my hometown seeing them with new eyes, guided by the voices of the letters. My years as an investigative reporter prepared me well for such a quest.

  But I was not prepared for what I was to learn about my grandfather, the man they knew as “B. Virdot.” The same suitcase that contained the letters held tantalizing leads to the identity of Sam Stone, a man whose background was as mysterious to his own family as it was to the recipients of his largesse. For his children and grandchildren, the revelations related to B. Virdot were just the beginning. The same repositories of public records that helped me track down the descendants of those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot also yielded clues about my grandfather’s past. It took months to clear away decades of fabrication and deception—even today, given my feelings for the man, it is hard for me to utter the word lies—before I could begin to understand what drove him to make such a gift.

  For a year I imagined myself on two parallel pursuits—the one to track down the identities of those who wrote to B. Virdot, the other to discover the true identity and motivation of my grandfather. But over time I came to see the two quests converge. The more I discovered of Sam’s secret past, the better I understood the struggles of those he helped. Conversely, the more I learned of those whom he had chosen to aid, the more insight I gained into Sam himself. Only when I could step back far enough was I able to see that the tiny pixels of these myriad individual lives all came together in the face of my grandfather, and that pieces of Sam’s own fragmented and secretive life were reflected in each of their stories.

  II.

  In Consideration of the White Collar Man

  It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

  - HARRY S TRUMAN

  A Man of Means

  Sam, the inveterate prankster, had a favorite trick, one that amused him well into his eighties. He would tape a thread to a dollar bill and leave it in the middle of the hallway outside his apartment, the other end of the thread extending under his door and resting in his hands. His eye would be fixed to the peephole until someone came upon the bill and stooped to pick it up. Then he would give the thread a swift jerk and snatch the bill away before the passerby could lay a finger on it. He could scarcely control his laughter.

  In an envelope, I have one of those dollar bills, the long thread still taped to its underside. Like many of his tricks, this one was rooted in Sam’s own life. Time and again the prospects of good fortune and better times had been cruelly snatched away from him. But by 1927, he had finally established himself as a respected merchant. He was then thirty-nine. His Canton store, Stone’s Clothes, provided him and his new bride with a solid living. He had investments in real estate, and a lifestyle he could never before have imagined. Then came the crash of ’29 and it nearly wiped him out. He had allowed himself to become overextended in real estate, the clothing store that he had nurtured was failing, and, like so many businessmen of that period, he stood on the brink of bankruptcy. It was a severe setback, but he’d endured worse. Through it all he did what he could to insulate his wife from financial worries, holding to his routine and concealing whatever doubts he had. A few years later he would recognize that same trait in many of those who wrote to his alias, B. Virdot.

  After the reversals of 1929, it took Sam three years to get back on his feet. He worked frightful hours, saved what he could, and turned customers’ sensitivities to price to his advantage with promotions such as “Buy a suit and get an extra pair of pants free.” His own rough edges, his lack of pretension, and his empathy for their struggles helped him win over the workingman and those just eking by. In him, they recognized one of their own. Like them, he was scrappy, determined to keep what was his, and to win back that which had been lost—even if it meant giving chase to a shoplifter and tackling him blocks away, as he was known to do.

  By the fall of 1933 Sam had reestablished himself and his business. Like many businesses that survived those years, his store had become not merely a place to shop but a refuge where men fatigued by years of disappointment and rejection could engage in friendly banter and be valued for more than what was in their pockets. He had a gift for drawing laughter from the dourest of circumstances. It proved to be no small asset in those years.

  By late 1933, he was in the enviable position of being able to take advantage of business opportunities others could not. Stores were closing all around him, and retail chains, desperate to raise cash, sought to unload their marginal operations at a fraction of their worth. On September 1, 1933, Sam purchased the Kibler Company and its nine menswear stores in Ohio, Illinois, and West Virginia. But even in the depths of debt, he had sworn that he would repay his creditors, and even those willing to have accepted fifty cents on the dollar were paid in full, though it took years.

  As the decades passed, Sam continued to enjoy a life of comfort and luxury, pocked with intermittent setbacks. At home he had a private stash of Beluga caviar, but nothing, in his view, beat the hot dogs served at Woolworth’s lunch counter. In later years, when he belonged to the Jockey Club, he drove such a clunker that he was mistaken for the help. It was always as if he were straddling two worlds, prepared to exit one or the other at a moment’s notice. To the end, he imagined himself a peasant, unable to swallow his own good fortune. And the way he said the word peasant commanded respect. Even in the best of times he saw himself as the man who came upon the dollar bill with the unseen thread attached.

  Sam knew the value of hard work but also the caprice of fortune. It was reason enough for his alter ego, B. Virdot, to focus on other “white collar men” whose fate so mirrored his own. He understood them as well as he understood himself. These were men who had invested much of their lives in their work and whose businesses, like his own, carried their names, elevating their personal success in the good times, but exposing their failure to public scrutiny.

  Looking out across Canton that Christmas of 1933, what Sam saw resembled nothing so much as a dark version of Monopoly, the board game invented by an out-of-work heating engineer named Charles Darrow and first distributed in 1933 in Philadelphia. But instead of expansion, the sole object was survival. Where one landed in life seemed to have less to do with strategy than with dumb luck and a roll of the dice. Men of means—financial and social pillars of Canton—were brought low, their possessions sold off one by one, their grand homes vacated, their office suites traded in for a broom, a paint brush, or a snow shovel. One minute they were at the pinnacle of success, the next, holding their hand out to a stranger named “B. Virdot.” Sam Stone knew firsthand about such vulnerability and what such a fall truly meant—a loss measured not only in dollars and cents but also in self-esteem.

  OF ALL THE letters, none would have resonated more with Sam than the one from George Monnot, who, like Sam, was self-made, a family man, and someone who cared deeply about his community. Their paths doubtless crisscrossed countless times, making it all the more imperative to the success of the B. Virdot offer that Sam’s true identity be veiled.

  Monnot’s name appears in a multivolume history of Stark County that contains sketches of Canton’s most prominent and privileged citizens. Published in 1928—a year before the stock market crash and the cascading events that became the Depression—it offers a freeze-frame of Canton at its financial apogee, a time when fortunes and positions seemed secure. The names that appear both in this celebratory volume and on the list of Mr. B. Virdot’s checks provide an index of who fell the furthest. When B. Virdot addressed his offer to the “white collar man,” it was the likes of George Monnot that he had in mind.

  The trajectory of Monnot’s career and life closely tracked that of industrial America. In 1905, just two years after Henry Ford incorporated the company t
hat would bear his name, a prescient George W. Monnot looked beyond his modest Canton bicycle shop and opened the city’s first Ford dealership. From there his fortunes would rapidly ascend along with Ford’s. By 1920, half of all cars in the United States were made by Ford. The first transcontinental highway—the Lincoln Highway—built in 1928, passed right through Canton, running one short block from Monnot’s Ford showroom, and bringing with it a constant flow of traffic. But Monnot’s success had not just been a matter of luck. Like Sam, he had proven himself to be a shrewd businessman, surviving when so many lesser rivals did not. In 1916, Canton boasted some twenty car dealerships. Eight were gone before World War I ended. Only three outlasted the depression of 1921.

  By 1928, Monnot was accorded three full pages in the History of Stark County Ohio and a full-page formal portrait. Dressed in suit and tie, a perfect part in his hair, he looked like the exemplar of corporate America. By that year, his Ford dealership, bearing the name Monnot & Sacher, occupied an entire city block and had a cavernous showroom. The company even had its own eleven-person band that dressed in tuxes and performed under the name of The Monnot & Sacher Serenaders.

  In Canton, the Monnot name was well known, the family pedigree widely respected. George Monnot was born in Canton on September 29, 1878, of French stock. His family had helped settle the county a generation earlier. His father, a councilman active in the city’s political and religious life, had two sons—George and Richard, and two daughters—Barbara and Joan.

  George’s wife, Alice, was a socialite and belonged to the Canton Women’s Club. Monnot was a prominent member of the Better Business Bureau, the Canton Chamber of Commerce, the Canton Club, and the Brookside Country Club. (As a Jew, Sam Stone was barred from belonging to the last two.) The county history said of Monnot that “he is keenly and helpfully interested in everything that pertains to the welfare and progress of the city and his cooperation can at all times be counted upon to further any plan or measure for the general good. He finds his diversion in golf and hunting and is a lover of all outdoor sports, but he never allows these to interfere with the conduct of his commercial interests.”

  The fawning portrait noted that “he has developed an enterprise of mammoth proportions. He deserves much credit for what he has accomplished, for he started out in the business world without financial aid soon after entering his teens and has steadily worked his way upward through determination and ability until he is now numbered among the foremost business men of his native city.”

  To an outsider, he seemed to have it all. Each day Monnot would lunch at Bender’s, a fashionable downtown tavern and restaurant where Sam Stone also lunched daily, then stop for a fine cigar at Simpson’s and play the tip sheets. Monnot also had a summer home and a thirty-five-foot yacht at nearby Turkey Foot Lake—not far from where my grandfather had a cottage. It was likely that the two businessmen knew each other, as they traveled in the same orbit. Only one block separated Monnot’s dealership from Sam Stone’s clothing store.

  But just one year after that county history celebrated Monnot’s achievements, the stock market crashed. It was 1929. Henry Ford furloughed between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand workers. The Great Depression was making itself felt everywhere, and Canton was no exception. His grandchildren were told that Monnot’s reluctance to lay off some of his employees, notwithstanding his own dire straits, hastened his financial failure. In 1931 Monnot lost his business and his splendid brick home in the upscale Ridgewood neighborhood—the same neighborhood where Sam Stone had lived before business reversals had forced him out of his home. Monnot moved himself, his wife, and his four children into cramped quarters on Woodward Place, more alley than street. His neighbors—the few who could find jobs—were steelworkers and tradesmen.

  One of the city’s most admired businessmen, he was now struggling to feed his family. He had nothing but his pride and now he was even prepared to put that at risk by reaching out in response to an offer he read in the newspaper from a man named B. Virdot. That day he picked up a pen and wrote these words: CANTON O. DEC 18-1933

  B. VIRDOT GEN. DEL.

  Dear Sir:

  Your interesting and benevolent article appearing in the Repository prompted me to write and advise how the depression left the writer.

  For 26 years was in the Automobile business prosperous at one time and have done more than my share in giving at Christmas and at all times. Have a family of six and struggle is the word for me now for a living.

  Xmas will not mean much to our family this year as my business, bank, real estate, Insurance policies are all swept away.

  Our resources are nil at present perhaps my situation is no different than hundreds of others. However a man who knows what it is to be up and down can fully appreciate the spirit of one who has gone through the same ordeal.

  You are to be congratulated for your benevolence and kind offer to those who have experienced this trouble and such as the writer is going through.

  No doubt you will have a Happy Christmas as there is more real happiness in giving and making someone else happy than receiving. May I extend to you a very Happy Christmas.

  GEORGE W. MONNOT

  1329 WOODWARD AVE. NW

  CANTON O.

  Three days later, on December 21, 1933, check number 22 for five dollars, signed by “B. Virdot,” was sent to George W. Monnot. A thank-you note soon followed:CANTON, OHIO DEC. 27-1933

  My Dear Mr. B. Virdot,

  Permit me to offer my sincere thanks for your kind remembrance for a Happy Christmas.

  Indeed this came in very handy and was much appreciated by myself & family.

  It was put to good use paying for 2 pairs of shoes for my girls and other little necessities. I hope some day I have the pleasure of knowing to whom we are indebted for this very generous gift.

  At present I am not of employment and it is very hard going. However I hope to make some connection soon.

  I again thank you on behalf of the family and an earnest wish is that you have a most Happy New Year.

  SINCERELY YOURS

  GEORGE W. MONNOT

  1329 WOODWARD AVE NW

  CANTON OHIO

  Beyond that letter, George Monnot could never bring himself to speak of the losses he had suffered. Nor did he ever recover. He refused to declare bankruptcy and, like Sam, insisted that he would repay his debts no matter how long it took. It would, by family accounts, take a decade—well into the 1940s. Even after his business failed, George Monnot remained an inveterate inventor and dabbler. From the Ford dealership, he had salvaged his massive workbench and great wooden tool chest. In the basement of his home he spent endless hours working on projects and schemes, hoping that one or another might restore him and his family to a measure of financial security and position. He was always just one invention away from making it again. The army, in World War I, had been poised to buy the “Hydrocar,” an amphibious vehicle he had designed, but the military lost interest with the signing of the armistice.

  In short order, Monnot went from owning a thousand cars to owning none. He and his wife had to travel by city bus. He worked until age and health forced him to stop. At seventy-five he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died two months later, on February 27, 1949. On a chill Tuesday morning, March 1, 1949, a Requiem High Mass was sung in his honor at Canton’s St. John’s Catholic Church and the following morning he was buried in the church cemetery.

  But the real epitaph to this once shining career was written on his death certificate. Under “Occupation,” he is listed as “Stock Clerk, Hercules Motor.” He had indeed become a casualty of the Great Depression, a grand entrepreneur now working as a clerk. As for the giant Hercules Motor plant on the edge of Canton, it was once the world’s largest maker of combustion engines and supplied the power to Willys jeeps, landing craft, armored cars, picket boats, and trucks that helped win World War II. The 600,000-plus-square-foot plant sat on twenty-six acres and during the war years operated twenty
-four hours a day, seven days a week, employing fifty-eight hundred men and woman. The company produced eighteen thousand engines a month. Monnot, in his own small way, was a part of that effort.

  Monnot’s precipitous fall from fortune was particularly hard on Alice, his widow. For her, the Depression never ended. For decades after, she was forced to face not only the loss of wealth and position but that of identity and friends as well. She was no longer a part of that elite social circle in which she had long been the center. Instead of vacations in Cuba, a summer home by the lake, and exquisite furniture, she had social security checks. Instead of the grand home, she had a dismal basement apartment. Few visitors ventured down the stairs past the exposed pipes into the spartan one-bedroom apartment where she lived out her life.

  But it was perhaps Monnot’s eldest son, George E. Monnot, who paid the steepest price during the Depression. A superior student, he yearned to go to college to become an engineer. Instead, to help support the family through those years, he wielded a broom at Weber Dental Manufacturing Company and watched as some of his well-heeled peers went off to college and pursued professions. But over time Monnot rose through the ranks and became a company executive. Later, he wintered in Florida, but the memories of pre-Depression wealth persisted. In his 1994 obituary, it is said of his son George E. Monnot that “He spent much of his youth enjoying the Turkey Foot Lake area and sail boat racing at the South Shore Yacht Club.”

  The younger son, Richard J., would also reflect back on the earlier days of comfort. When peeved with his wife, Jeannette, he would say, “When we had a maid . . .” But she would cut him off midsentence. Richard Monnot spent thirty-three years working the furnaces at, of all places, Canton’s Ford plant, which as late as 1986 employed some nine hundred workers. In 1988 the plant was shut down.