A Secret Gift Read online

  Grief

  I did not need to know the story of his life to know that Sam had suffered. His childish jokes were often the only glimpse we would get of his childhood. “I am on a seafood diet,” he used to say, then pause. “I eat all the food I see.” As he delivered the punch line, he would rub his ample belly. Sam was amused by the very notion of a diet and the idea that one might be in so privileged a position as to be able to choose what one eats. We, his family, understood without his ever having to say so that behind the joke was a memory of hunger. When, in his ad, he wrote the words “the bread of tomorrow,” he was not speaking metaphorically. In the world from which he came and the one to which his appeal was addressed, bread was the answer to many a prayer. In December 1933 there was real urgency in the words “Give us this day our daily bread . . .”

  Many of the letters to B. Virdot refer to bread. For them, it was the focus of their days, upon which they and their loved ones depended. Sixteen-year-old Dorothy Clark, in her letter to B. Virdot, penned, “where you wrote in your column ‘The bread of today is the question of tomorrow’ was surely true of us this last couple weeks. Sometimes we just eat oats to save bread for the next day for our school lunches.” She was one of four children, her thirty-five-year-old father, Clyde, an out-of-work crane operator in a steel mill, so sick he could barely walk.

  This was not a classical famine brought on by locusts or crop failure (though the Dust Bowl hardly helped) but an economic drought. The famine it produced was no less harsh—the slow and relentless drain on energy and will that comes from being underfed day in and day out, the stunted growth of the young, the sunken look of the old. It was a cruel form of starvation that lacked finality, withering the spirit as much as the body. In some, it bred resignation and paralysis. In others, it created resentment and even a willingness to break the law.

  Those who endured the Depression and saw their children go to bed hungry night after night understood how desperate times could sometimes give rise to desperate actions. Prolonged hunger and want fed into Canton’s seamy underbelly of crime, pitting the haves against the have-nots, and fueling a growing perception that the laws were there to protect property not people. That December of 1933, the simple phrase “the bread of tomorrow” was enough to telegraph to one and all the depths to which so many had sunk.

  Forty-year-old Paul Kendzora, a onetime coal miner and son of German immigrants, wrote, “There is seven in the family and one working part time so you can realize what our Christmas will be. I guess we will have to hunt rabbit for dinner . . . I worry until I have the headache all the time.”

  Bread was also on the minds of Chester and Nancy Young when, on the evening of December 18, 1933, Nancy wrote to B. Virdot. Three years earlier, Chester Young had lost his job. He was also partially blind. They shared their cramped home with their son Robert, twenty-one; his sixteen-year-old wife, Dorothy; a son Chester Jr., age fourteen; a son Alvah, age six; and a daughter, Betty Jane, age four.

  Their circumstances continued to spiral downward. Nancy Ellen Young took up a pencil and wrote to B. Virdot:Dear Sir:

  I was just sitting in my room this evening looking upon my family and knowing I did not have a cent to my name to even buy them bread, all though they were asking about Santa Claus. My husband is a Parscal Blind and has had no work for about three yers. A $1.00 now and then. There is a family of five. 3 children. And I have ask for help and Mr. Young has try to get work from the Government but can’t get it so far. But God only knows the best. We have allways try to be Honest in every way. And I was reading in the paper where you like to help a Poor and needed family out for Xmas. Well I can’t get much poor off than I am. Last week we did not have bread for two days. May god bless the giver to help my poor little children out. Now in the God do not think I am lying as you are welcome to come and see me Mr Chester A.Young 1111 3rd St SW Canton Ohio I sure will thank you very much for Help and to make my children a Merry Christmas. God bles you and family. And Merry Xmas & Happy new Year. Answer please thank.

  Nancy Young had good reason to fret about her family. She knew the true depths of personal loss, though she made no mention of it in her letter. It was yet another example of the trauma of life in those years and the culture that kept its sorrows to itself. To have fully unburdened herself to Mr. B. Virdot, or to anyone, for that matter, would have been deemed unseemly. No one wanted another’s pity, and even in the poorest and hardest hit of families, notions of dignity and privacy were not compromised. As secretive as Sam was about his own past—especially viewed from the vantage point of today—he reflected a broader norm in which that generation seldom shared its woes with the next, perhaps hoping to escape their own grief or provide their offspring with a clean slate, unencumbered by such grimness. Today, in an age of celebrity, where anguish and loss are routinely the stuff of autobiography, we are mystified by that generation’s reticence to share its stories. They would have been no less taken aback by our lack of inhibition and disregard for privacy. And what I take to be Sam’s secrecy, he and his generation might have seen as their gift to us, fulfilling the dream that we, their descendants, might be liberated from such hardships as they endured.

  But there was no such escape for Nancy Ellen Young. What she omitted from her letter was boundless grief. The twenties had brought one funeral after another. The death certificates record a succession of tragedies. On May 1, 1921, they lost their seventeen-day-old infant, Orville. He was born premature and died at home. A year later, on September 27, 1922, their two-month-old daughter, Margaret, died of what was called “inanition”—the fatal exhaustion that comes from lack of nourishment. On August 13, 1925, they lost their six-year-old son, Donald. The cause: acute gastroenteritis. On May 18, 1928, their eight-day-old son, Arnold, also premature, died at home. Four times in eight years, they made the trek to Westlawn Cemetery to bury their children.

  Against such losses, the opening sentence of Nancy Young’s letter to B. Virdot takes on a more ominous tone: “I was just sitting in my room this evening looking upon my family and knowing I did not have a cent to my name to even buy them bread . . .” In the Young home, food was always an issue, except perhaps for those few days before Christmas when the check from B. Virdot arrived. Whatever transient relief it provided did not end the sorrows in the Young household. Seven years after writing to Mr. B. Virdot, Nancy Ellen Young was dead. She was fifty-one. The cause: pneumonia. In Westlawn Cemetery, she joined the children she had lost.

  For the surviving members of the Young family, the prosperity that came to others in the forties and fifties passed them by. Charles Young, a grandson, recalls that as a seven-year-old he visited his grandfather, who was then living in a dingy apartment over a coal company. The man he called “Grandpa” was frail and thin and nearly blind. The poverty that Chester and his wife endured did not end with them. Decades later, their son Alvah was buried in one of Canton’s pauper graves. Five of Chester and Nancy Ellen’s grandchildren also endured turbulent and impoverished childhoods. Charles Young remembers that in 1956, following his parents’ divorce, he and his brothers and sisters were placed in the Fairmount Children’s home, an orphanage, for a year and eight days.

  The saga of the Young family would have struck home with Sam Stone. Though he never spoke of it, he too had lost a sibling in infancy—perhaps more than one—and in later years, the grandchildren of his brother were found so malnourished and living in such squalor that they had to be rescued by city workers. But that too was a story I would discover only later.

  Bad Company

  The Youngs suffered in silence, praying for better times. But for others, want fueled resentment and desperation.

  Many who had lived an exemplary life—hard work, family, and church—went hungry. Living by the rules offered few tangible rewards. Prohibition came to an end on December 5, 1933—two weeks before Sam Stone placed his ad in the paper. But long before that event and long after, many in Canton had surrendered themselves to corruption
.

  Neither the law nor city officials were held in high esteem in those days. Canton’s police crowed about their “Goon Car,” a four-ton bulletproof vehicle, more a tank than a car, with portholes for tommy guns. It was always ready to battle mobsters, though it was seen more as a departmental trophy than a vehicle of enforcement. Too many police were in the pocket of those they were supposed to be locking up. The city was rife with speakeasies, numbers rackets, loan sharks, and prostitution. It was impossible for a man to walk down some of Canton’s streets without being propositioned from entire rows of nearby windows. Public corruption was widespread. Many in the trough of the Depression secretly cheered on the likes of Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and John Dillinger. The banks, they reasoned, had it coming to them.

  For the ordinary fellow, out of work and unable to put bread on the table for his wife and children, there was the ever-present lure of crime—not the great heist, but a petty score to see a family through the worst of it. These were not hardened criminals looking for an easy score, but men who had exhausted every legal way, who were willing to take any job, who had stood in endless lines, filled out countless applications, walked themselves out of their shoes, and still came up empty-handed. The crowded Mansfield Reformatory that served Canton was living proof that good men had their limits. The vice-ridden culture of Canton, the complicity of city officials and police, and the near total absence of either work or public relief collectively created an environment in which crime became, for some, the last and only option.

  Sam was not a man to judge others. He had made his own mistakes, and understood that nothing was more precious than a second chance. As B. Virdot he was only too ready to help those who, like himself, had strayed. He might even have felt a tinge of envy for those who had “paid their debt to society.” At least now they could put it behind them. His actions were such that the most severe punishment that would be meted out was his own decades-long dread of being discovered.

  Among the letters that came to him as B. Virdot was one from Alverna Wright. Today she is best remembered by her grandson, fifty-eight-year-old Joseph Watters. He had spent much of his early life with her and his grandfather, Noble Wright. They were loving people, doting grandparents, and generous to a fault. And though they didn’t talk about it, he knew they had endured much during the Depression. “I knew my grandfather very well,” Joseph Watters told me, speaking on a cell phone as he drove along a highway in Medina County, south of Cleveland. “My grandfather was a very decent, gentle person.” But before I read him the letter his grandmother Alverna had written to B. Virdot on December 18, 1933, I felt obliged to warn him that it might not be easy for him to hear its contents. It contained what I suspected would be a painful secret and he would do well to ready himself. This he did.

  “Dear Sir,” the letter began,Considering your spirit of giving I will not be afraid to write to you because I know you have real charity. I have felt like I would like to do just what you are doing but I have not been so favored.

  The depression has affected me from the very beginning. Work not being steady, then no work at all. We were too proud to ask for help but went on from day to day saying tomorrow we will ask for help. My husband said he was able bodied and willing to work and didn’t want charity.

  Becoming restless my husband went from place to place looking for work. Some times walking for miles always in hope of finding work. We were very unfortunate as none of our relation could help us at all.

  Finally after every effort was exhausted he fell in with some bad company and finally landed in the Mansfield reformatory where is listed as a depression inmate.

  This left me to look after my little girl alone. Where we were living and couldn’t pay the rent in furnished rooms, we had lost all our furniture because we couldn’t pay the storage bill. The water was shut off, the gas turned off, and then the city came to my rescue. I receive $6.00 every two months from the state out of which I buy some groceries & the rest shoes & necessaries.

  My husband has been transferred to Applecreek with some of the trusted inmates but I do not know definitely when he will be home.

  This letter finds me without any money at all to get anything for my little girl for Christmas. I am not asking for myself but I would appreciate it if I would have the pleasure of giving even $5.00 worth of useful things to my little girl and husband and mother & mother-in-law who have been unfortunate too. My mother-in-law lost her home & is seventy years old.

  Even if you do not consider me worthy of your kindness I want to say that you will be rewarded at least three times for your charity in some way for as the saying is:

  “He who gives himself with his alms feeds three,

  Himself, his hungering

  Neighbor and Me. (meaning God)”

  SINCERELY YOURS,

  MRS. A. WRIGHT

  1527 FRAZER AVE.NW

  Joseph Watters was at a loss for words. He had not known that his grandfather had done time in prison, nor the depths of his grandparents’ anguish. I understood well what he was feeling, having only recently discovered that my grandfather too had crossed the line. His grandmother, Alverna Coombs Wright, was thirty-one when she wrote the letter, the mother of a single child, Miriam, then seven. She lived with her seventy-two-year-old mother, Sarah, a widow; an older sister, Anna Belle; and a boarder named Frank Grissard.

  A decade earlier, in June 1923, she had married Noble Ebenezer Wright, a man who could build anything with his hands. But even such talent as his was no shield from the Depression. All around him honest and industrious neighbors failed, engulfed in a misery seemingly oblivious to skills or virtue. Decent men and women not otherwise predisposed to a life of crime faced choices no one should have to make.

  By all accounts Noble Wright was an honorable man, but driven by need, he broke the law. State archives record that on September 20, 1932, he stole a car from a garage, a Hudson Brougham valued at $250. Noble Wright didn’t make much of a criminal. He was arrested the next day and confessed to taking two other cars. He was thirty years old, stood five feet eight, weighed 152 pounds, had a sixth-grade education, and worked for a time at a dairy. All this is on his prison record, along with the fact that he had been married for nine years. His only vice—aside from stealing cars—was smoking an occasional cigar.

  He was sentenced to 360 days in the Ohio State Reformatory, one mile from Mansfield, Ohio. With a prison population of some thirty-five hundred men ranging in age from sixteen to thirty, it was one of the nation’s largest such facilities, a step between reform school and the penitentiary. In the depths of the Depression it became a holding tank for the desperate.

  Of the 1,245 prisoners received in 1933, nearly all were there for so-called “property crimes.” As the reformatory noted, “It is here that men hear the first clang of steel bars behind them; and here that they lose their identity as citizens. Here they cease to be names and become numbers.” Noble Wright became inmate number 29448. It was his first time behind bars and it did not suit him. In February 1933, Noble Wright escaped. He did not get far. He was captured the next day and brought back to the reformatory, where, for his escape attempt, another 130 days were tacked onto his sentence.

  On May 1, 1934, four months after his wife had written to Mr. B. Virdot, Noble Wright was paroled. When he left the facility he entered an environment no less desperate, only now he had a record. Exactly how Alverna and Noble weathered the Depression is not known, but that they did is beyond doubt. Their only child, Miriam, would marry Joseph P. Watters and have fifteen children—including two pairs of twins who died in infancy.

  The Wrights’ lives improved so much in the years after the Depression as to have been scarcely recognizable to them. Noble became an engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad and crisscrossed the country delivering coal and iron ore and all manner of raw materials that helped fuel the recovery and gave rise to the great industrial boom that brought prosperity to Canton and the nation.

  Of cou
rse, that’s not what his grandson Joseph recalls. He remembers Grandpa with his engineer’s cap taking him for rides in the yard engine, the great diesel barreling down the tracks on Canton’s south side. He remembers that his grandpa transformed a garage into a home with his own hands, added to it, and made it into a warm and welcoming place. They never went out to restaurants, and Grandfather Wright tended his modest garden producing tomatoes and corn and rhubarb, which he shared with the grandchildren. Joseph Watters remembers how, through that frugality that was the hallmark of Depression-era survivors, his grandparents saved enough to buy a vacation home in Melbourne, Florida, where they wintered.

  Alverna, the writer of the letter, had been the first in her family to graduate from high school. As an adult, she proudly hung her diploma from McKinley High on her wall. (My grandmother Minna Adolph went to school with her.) She became president of Canton’s Poetry Society, and left to her grandson notebooks of poetry she had penned that he hopes to have published someday. And in her later years she was a part of the YMCA Kitchen Comedy Club, where she and others played kazoos and washboards and took their places alongside a float in the annual Football Hall of Fame Parade.

  But neither Alverna nor her husband, Noble, ever forgot the hardships they endured. Like many of their faith, they sent envelopes with offerings to Catholic missions. But they did more. A grandson, Michael, recalled the time when Noble was walking down the street in Coshocton, Ohio, and came across a nun who had a hole in her shoe. Noble insisted she come with him to a shoe store, and there he bought her a new pair.