A Secret Gift

by Ted Gup

  There was still among some a lingering illusion that poverty was associated with a lack of character or sloth. Mrs. Edna Schaub, hoping to put B. Virdot’s check toward an overcoat for her husband, felt compelled to explain that her thirty-three-year-old husband—out of a job for four years but once an employee in one of Canton’s steel mills—“has always been a good worker and provides, but when there is no work to be had he can’t work. Now we are not the kind of people who are shiftless poor.” Schaub’s letter reflects a pre-Depression prejudice that was sorely tested in those years. Before the Depression, there was less sympathy for the chronically out of work. The employed were sometimes hasty to dismiss them as “shiftless,” suggesting they had brought their circumstances upon themselves. The Hard Times forced people to take a second look, to not be so cavalier in their dismissal of “the kind of people” that were out of work. It ushered in a sea change in societal attitudes toward the needy, lifting some of the blame from the victims and directing some of the remedial responsibility to government and society at large.

  Many of the letters were written without the knowledge of other members of the family. Often it was the wife who wrote the letter, not wanting to run afoul of the husband’s pride. George Saal had been one of the leading salesmen in the local office of the Metropolitan Insurance Company, then lost everything during the Depression. He did not object to his wife, Fern, writing to B. Virdot, but he was not privy to the note on the back of her letter: “Mr. Saal read this,” she wrote, “but what he doesn’t know is that today I went to D. Grigsby to get $5.00 on my engagement ring.” David Grigsby was a pawnbroker. It appears that Fern Saal used the B. Virdot money to purchase bread or, more likely, to pay off a debt for such past purchases. The check is endorsed to Nickles Bakery.

  The Seeds of Resentment

  In some cases it was a wife writing without the knowledge of her husband, who was unwilling to admit his inability to provide for the family. Myrna Jury, wife of Donald Jury, was such a case:B. VIRDOT

  CANTON, OHIO

  GENERAL DELIVERY

  CANTON, OHIO

  Dear Sir

  I read your add in todays paper and I talked it over with my husband and he decided that we would not write and therefore some other family would get help. But I feel we need a few things.

  My husband was out of work almost three years (prior to July 11,1933.) Since then he had been employed at Timken Roller Bearing Co. At present he is making 40 cents and we’re in debt and are trying hard to get out. Our money doesn’t reach from one pay to the other. Of course if we could let our bills go for a while we could get along fairly well. The only reason I am writing this is to get warm clothes for the children for this winter. We have the following children, Virginia aged 9 Charles 7 Alvin 3, Helen 1. They all need shoes and clothes and Charles needs an overcoat. My husband will not let me go to see the Family Service bout clothes. We were on the Family Service list 17 months and he was so glad to get away from there that he doesn’t want to go back. He said that “we will get along somehow”—But it is awful hard sometimes. My husband lived in Canton since 1915. We have been married almost 11 years. I would and I know my husband would be very glad for anything you could do for us. Whether you help us or not I think you are doing a wonderful and noble deed. Wishing you a Merry Xmas and a happy New Year.

  I remain Yours Truly, Mrs. Donald R. Jury P.S. I decided to write without telling my husband. I tried to write our circumstances hoping that you will see fit to help us- Mrs. Jury

  MRS. DONALD R. JURY

  1326 44TH ST N.E

  CANTON. OHIO

  IT IS CHRISTMAS Eve, 2008—nearly seventy-five years to the day that Mrs. Jury wrote that letter—when I finally track down one of her descendants. I read her the letter. In Jury’s letter, Charles’s mother had said he was in need of an overcoat. But there was more to the story than that. Though Charles was only seven at the time, as the eldest son it often fell to him to contribute food for the family. His father, Donald, refused all outside help. So, Charles was dispatched to find food for the table. With each passing month, as circumstances grew more desperate, his responsibilities increased.

  He routinely brought with him a 16-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber pistol, boarded a city bus, paid the five cents (except when the driver took pity and let him ride for free), and rode the bus to the end of the line and out into the countryside. There he scoured the fields and woods for rabbits and pheasants. But the cost of the shells and bullets was so dear that he dared not miss. Every shot had to produce a kill. Whatever he brought down became the meal that day. And the overcoat? It was to keep him warm so that he might stay out longer and kill more game—a success upon which the lives of others might depend.

  When the state offered the Jury family a packet of seeds for their vegetable garden, Donald refused to accept, even though son Charles pleaded with him to do so. But Charles found other ways to keep the family fed. He was not above stealing vegetables from neighbors’ gardens, and each time he did, his father scolded him. Over time, Charles came to bear a deep and abiding resentment toward his father, and to loathe his pride—obstinacy, it seemed to him—and his refusals to reach out for help. That pride, he felt, added to the family’s misery and created a chasm between father and son that would linger throughout their lives. We know this today because Charles’s son, Charles Jr., and his sister, Elizabeth, recall their father telling them of the constant conflict between Donald and Charles over whether to accept outside help.

  The scarcity of meat in the Jury household and the memories of hunger left their mark on Charles. As an adult he insisted on having a table full of food at every meal and he often would have steak two and even three nights in a row, perhaps to remind himself that he was now a safe distance from the past. He often talked about the Depression as if it were a parable with a lesson. He told and retold the story of his mother making a birthday cake and the two precious eggs rolling onto the floor and breaking. His mother knelt and wept at the sight.

  The legacy of the Great Depression and what the Jury family endured continues to play out. “Even third generation, it’s funny how things follow you,” says Donald Jury’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, now fifty-eight and a systems analyst in Illinois. “Though I do shop, sometimes I feel so wasteful, that we indulge ourselves a lot. You don’t really need it. I have this guilt feeling about Christmas.”

  After the Depression, Donald Jury found work as a cabinet-maker at the Walker Lumber Company in Canton. One of the lessons he learned from the Depression was the need for labor to organize. He became president of the Carpenter’s Local 2092 and did not retire until 1968. He died two years later, at seventy. Donald Jury’s son Charles—the boy who hunted—left Canton at nineteen and headed for Florida, where he dived for seashells (another kind of hunting) in the Keys off Seven Mile Bridge and created one of the largest seashell businesses in Florida. Later, he made and lost a small fortune in the roofing business during Florida’s midfifties housing boom. Charles is buried in the Dominican Republic. His grave overlooks the sea. His son, Charles Jr., now runs the family’s seashell business.

  When Myrna Jury wrote to B. Virdot in December 1933, she referred to her husband’s disdain for Family Services. In this he was hardly alone. Across Canton, those who wrote to Mr. Virdot shared that feeling.

  It was made all the worse by the often degrading circumstances that awaited those who could bring themselves to swallow their pride and apply to Family Services. The agency was woefully underfunded and unable to provide aid to all who were eligible for relief. To winnow down the pool of deserving applicants, the review process got longer and ever more intrusive. The worse things got, the more hoops the desperate were asked to jump through, and the less was left of their self-esteem.

  For many, it appeared that was precisely the intention of the process—to frighten away would-be applicants and reduce the numbers facing a bureaucracy that was, like an overcrowded lifeboat, already swamped. By then, it had gai
ned a nasty reputation, its screening process so invasive that many said they would sooner die than face such indignities. Some administrators were deeply resented. They were seen as imperious and arbitrarily wielding the power over the decision as to who ate and who starved. In the midst of such economic turbulence, they alone seemed to enjoy the sinecure of a secure position. It was a combustible mix, made all the more so by the perception that these bureaucrats were untouched by the plight of so many. More likely, it was a necessary professional distance they maintained, lest they become overwhelmed by the suffering all around them.

  But for some, unable to watch their loved ones waste away, there was no choice but to run the gauntlet of Family Services. A commissary and a network of Canton merchants and grocers of all ethnic backgrounds—Italian, Jewish, Anglo-Saxon—were affiliated with Family Services and offered the agency goods at a deep discount. Those items were then provided free to Canton’s neediest, or at least those who had endured the screening process.

  In 1931, grocer Felicia DiGianantonio offered Family Services a loaf of bread for ten cents; Charles Strasser of Canton Poultry sold the agency a pound of lard for nineteen cents; Joseph W. Farwick & Sons sold them navy beans for twelve cents a pound; Wagner Provision offered them soup meat for nineteen cents a pound. Similarly, Family Services had outlets providing clothing, shoes, and coal. The week of Christmas 1933, recipients, often mothers and their small children, could be seen trudging through the snowy streets of Canton, stooped beneath the load provided by Family Services.

  The list of foods available at the Family Services “Community Store” reflected the influx of foreigners and African Americans drawn by the city’s once-expanding industrial base. There was hominy and turnips, sauerkraut and spaghetti. But among the African American population of Canton, as among all Cantonians, there was a strong preference for making it on their own. During the Depression, the city’s Urban League borrowed some fifty-two acres north of Canton, which was used as a vegetable garden for the African American community. In 1932, a coalition of dairies built six cheese factories to process their surplus milk. Everyone who was able had a private vegetable garden, but with mixed results.

  Compounding their misery, the growers of 1932 discovered that more than half of the area’s wheat production was infested with the Hessian flies, whose greenish-white maggots concealed themselves under the sheaths of the leaves. Prices for farm produce in 1930 fell to levels not seen since 1910, and over the next three years plummeted to lows last reached in 1900. Farm foreclosures accelerated, and hunger spread.

  On December 7, 1932, the year before B. Virdot’s gift, some three thousand “hunger marchers” gathered in Washington, D.C., to call attention to their plight. Among them were two from Canton, Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Austin. They were discovered in an unheated and vacant two-room house, hungry and suffering from influenza. A Washington rescue squad raced them to Gallinger Hospital. Their discovery and that of two dozen others in the abandoned house triggered a single paragraph in the Washington Post that ran under the headline, HORRIFIED.

  In the forty years leading up to 1933, Canton’s population quadrupled, but its capacity to provide for the needy had not kept pace. When the Depression struck, Family Services was hit by a tsunami. In December 1929 it provided relief to 188 families. In 1930, the number was 1,324. In 1931, it was 3,128. By 1932, it had risen to 3,511. The number could have soared far higher but resources were exhausted.

  In August 1933, the once-private Family Services, no longer able to cope with the demands made upon it, became a public agency under the Stark County Relief Administration, and in 1935 came under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, or FERA. But no change of administration could overcome the reluctance of Donald Jury or thousands of other Cantonians raised to believe that a man who could not support his family was not a man at all. That was in part the genius of Roosevelt’s New Deal, that it understood and took stock of how down-and-out Americans were feeling, offering them the three things they hungered for most—a job, self-esteem, and a second chance. The hope that Roosevelt kindled was reflected in the names of some of Canton’s businesses: The New Deal Lunch, New Deal Oil Company, and New Deal Tavern.

  In the fall of 1933, the Roosevelt administration created the Civil Works Administration, or CWA. It was the first of the New Deal’s public jobs programs, and though it lasted only until the following spring, it led the way for Americans to both provide for their loved ones and preserve their sense of self-worth. Letter after letter to B. Virdot refers to the CWA and the hope that it might come through with a job.

  Charles Minor, a father of five, was out of work and in dire need when his wife, Mary, wrote to B. Virdot. “While a steeple jack by trade not turning down digging a ditch. While some of the children needing shoes others needing clothes and unless some Good Person sends us a dinner haven’t got a thing in sight. In the past three weeks had many meals on bread and coffee.” But this was not the first such letter she’d written. Earlier she had written Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s federal relief administrator, hoping he might persuade the CWA to find her husband a job. His response had arrived in that morning’s mail: “said he would try to take it up with head of the CWA here but don’t know when that will be.” Still, it offered a glint of hope.

  In its brief time, the CWA put some four million Americans to work, and is credited with building some half a million miles of roads, as well as work on thousands of schools, playgrounds, airports, and other public facilities in which individual workers and entire communities could take pride. Its successor agencies, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), understood that to restart America, it must offer a hand up, not a handout.

  The County Poorhouse, which took in the homeless from Canton and the surrounding area, like Family Services, underwent a succession of names, each reflecting an attitudinal shift—from County Poorhouse in 1837 to County Infirmary in 1850 to County Home in 1924. Its purpose remained largely unchanged. But during the Depression its meager capacity to hold a few hundred homeless men and women was no match for the numbers in need. Ironically, it provided shelter and sustenance in another, less direct way: one of the jobs the WPA came up with for the unemployed was archiving the records of the poorhouse.

  But for many in need that December of 1933, Roosevelt and the promises of a New Deal were still just that, mere promises. The day the B. Virdot offer appeared in the Canton Repository, Roosevelt amended yet again an executive order related to the National Emergency Council. To the hungry in Canton who even bothered to follow such bureaucratic minutiae, such news only fed their suspicions that help was still a ways off. Frank Walker, a wealthy lawyer for Anaconda Copper, was named acting executive director of the council, and Time magazine on December 18, 1933, noted wryly: “To outsiders this looked like a new title for an old job. . . . On a nation-wide scale his Council’s representatives were to steer befuddled citizens through the fog of new Washington agencies to the particular bureau that could supply the relief needed.”

  Compared to such shuffling and reshuffling of the bureaucratic deck and the growing proliferation of agencies and boards, there was something utterly refreshing about B. Virdot’s offer. It was direct, free of politics, and immediate.

  Left Behind

  It was an intense source of pride among even the neediest that winter of 1933 that they had not given in and sought help from Family Services. As long as they had the strength to resist that temptation they could claim that they were not yet defeated. For some, even Sam Stone’s anonymous offer of help was too close to a handout. What they wanted was work.

  George Hensel wrote, “We have asked for no charity all through the depression. . . . I would like to have work for a Christmas present for I have no shoes. You may think I have nerve writing this, but if you have been in need as long as my wife and I have you know how it feels to eat only one meal a day. . . . I walk so much every day and come home hungry and not much to eat. It makes you feel pretty bad. . . .”
In a postscript he added, “There will be no Xmas for us.”

  Before the Depression, Hensel had worked for years in a steel mill. Now he was going door-to-door peddling his wife’s doughnuts and cupcakes, but almost no one had any money to buy them. It was all made that much more uncomfortable wearing a pair of shoes he’d long since worn out. In the fierce competition for jobs, employers often looked to hire those who most needed work, but need was defined in ways that disadvantaged the likes of George Hensel, who had only his wife and himself to support. That put him at the back of every line. “We have no children,” he wrote, “and folks thinks we do not have to live.”

  Such triaging for work was common during the Depression. Alwyn C. McCort, who had long worked on Canton’s streetcars and in a steel mill, had been out of work for three years and was trying to provide some support to his aging parents, Henry and Anna. From B. Virdot, he wanted only a job. “Now I am not asking for charity,” he wrote, “but thought since you are interested in unfortunate people you might be able to help me get a job. I get turned down again and again because I am single but my parents need my help very badly and I would like to be able to help them and know once more what money looks like.”

  But it was the women, married, widowed, and unmarried alike, who often had the most difficult time during the Depression. Employers large and small presumed, often wrongly, that men were the principal supporters of families and women merely supplemented their incomes. But many of the letters to B. Virdot were from women who had no other support than whatever they earned, and on whom others—fatherless children, aging parents, and disabled spouses—counted for their survival.