A Secret Gift (10 page)

T
o many, like my grandfather, who entered the Depression as adults, it was neither the first trial they faced nor even the most severe. Their lives had already been tested by tragedies and terrors that now seem remote: influenza that wiped out millions, the Great War (ghastly even by modern standards), Old World pogroms, deadly workplaces, all created the expectation that life would be short and trying. Many of those who wrote to B. Virdot, even those who had enjoyed a measure of success, had come of age in a time so pocked with hardship that it did not even merit a mention in their letters. To dwell on such specifics would have been beneath them. Their creed was self-discipline, not self-indulgence.

This too my grandfather would have understood. Aside from a few carefully selected stories, Sam Stone never said a word of the true conditions of his youth. Men and women of that era were eager to distance themselves from the duress of their early lives. It was part of the allure of America that the past could be left behind, that men and women could reinvent themselves. Besides, it was a given that others had suffered similarly. There was little therapeutic value to be gained from opening up old wounds, and it was impolite to pry. Nothing in my grandfather’s day was as out of fashion as self-pity. Only to later generations, coddled by prosperity, analgesics, and concerns over leisure and longevity, would such flinty self-reliance seem extraordinary or explorations of one’s sorrows become so common as to be featured on daytime TV
.
Those who grow up in today’s society, determined to snuff out risk and surrounded by smoke detectors and seat belts, may find it hard to imagine the perilous lives their grandparents faced.

Coming of age in America, even before the Depression, meant running a gauntlet of hardships that for many included outrunning persecution, poverty, infant mortality, diseases (tuberculosis, polio, influenza, malaria, typhus, dysentery, and cholera), industrial accidents, and a world war. In 1900, when much of the Depression-era generation was still young, only one in twenty-five could look forward to reaching sixty-five. One in five newborns died before the age of five and the average life span of a male infant born that year was forty-eight years. It was a nation without antibiotics, Social Security, or Medicare. Against such a backdrop, one’s familiarity with tragedy and expectations of life were dramatically different from those of today. People were not unconscious of their burdens but, having known little else, could barely imagine being free of them. So fraught with risk and hardship was their world that the idea of voicing one’s particular plight would have struck many as curious, even presumptuous. After all, what did they expect?

Georgianna Pryor, in her letter to B. Virdot, wrote: “We do not come within the class of those who have had and lost. It seems we’ve never had anything to lose. My husband has tried hard, but we are still just a poverty-stricken family, not unlike countless others.” At the time she wrote the letter her six children were all quarantined with whooping cough.

Charles Stewart’s early exposure to hardship scarred him literally but did not even warrant a mention in his letter to B. Virdot. He wrote:

Stewart’s eloquence was matched by his penmanship. Each letter was formed with a spare upright discipline, the writing of a proud man. But what he doesn’t say reveals most about himself and his times.

For that, one must speak with the only child of Charles and Gertrude Stewart, Ruth Brown. She was eleven at the time her father wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, but knew nothing of the letter or the five dollars that her father received days later. But she does know her father’s story. One of six children, he was born in 1896 and raised on a farm in tiny White Fox, Ohio. Sometime in 1917 or 1918 he married Gertrude Wilson, who was thirteen years his senior.

On April 29, 1918, at twenty-two, Charles Stewart volunteered for service in the army and was assigned to Company F, 112th U.S. Engineers. On July 10, 1918, he joined the American Expeditionary Force. He soon found himself in the midst of World War I’s deadly trench warfare. One evening, he and a dozen others were ordered to go over the top, crossing no-man’s-land in the face of heavy gun-fire. They seized two German machine-gun nests and returned to the trench. Stewart’s hand was bloodied from shrapnel. He refused to be taken to the hospital.

But the date he would never forget was September 26, 1918. That was the day the Allies advanced against the Germans in the Argonne Forest; for Americans, one of the bloodiest of all battles. Within six weeks, more than 26,000 members of the Allied Expeditionary Force were dead. Another 96,000 were wounded. In the early bombardment some 800 mustard gas and phosgene shells rained down on the Germans.

During the battle, Stewart himself was exposed to mustard gas. The powerful agent seared his lungs and incapacitated him. On October 18, he found himself in an army base hospital in Toul, France. When the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, Stewart was still unable to get out of bed. Thanksgiving came and went. His unit went home, but he could not. In January, he was moved to yet another hospital, where he remained until January 21, 1919. It was not until four months after he was first hospitalized that he was fit enough to come home. On February 10, 1919, Stewart was honorably discharged. He had survived the war, but he would never escape it.

Even when he returned to America, he carried with him the damage to his lungs. Immediately following the war, he moved to Canton and worked as a clerk in a factory and later as a bookkeeper. He lived a quiet life, lost himself in Zane Grey novels, tended his garden, and provided for his family, his wife, Gertrude, and daughter, Ruth. But he lost his job during the Depression and thereafter took whatever work he could find—which in his increasingly fragile condition was not much. In 1930, he worked as an enumerator for the U.S. Census. The Stewart family had an apartment they enjoyed rent-free in exchange for the couple cleaning and maintaining the building. But even with Gertrude working as a maid in other people’s homes, they came up short.

Their daughter, Ruth, was hardly aware that they were poor. Still, she could not afford a movie at the Palace Theater or an evening at Bender’s fashionable tavern. But eighty-seven-year-old Ruth Stewart Brown insists she never suffered or wanted for anything. She hopscotched and roller-skated her way through the worst days of the Depression, and in the evenings enjoyed games of euchre with Mom and Dad in the apartment. “You survived and that was it,” she says. Like so many during the Depression, Ruth did not have far to look to see others in worse shape, and the few who enjoyed a measure of luxury or ease were too distant to see and, if they were sensitive at all, too discreet to put their good fortune on display.

Over time, and long after the Depression lifted, the Stewarts managed to get their feet on the ground somewhat. Charles kept the books for a printing company and later clerked for the Canton Police Department. Ten years after writing to Mr. B. Virdot, the Stewarts purchased their own home at 814 High Avenue Southwest. But through it all, Charles Stewart had to cope with his exposure to mustard gas. He had a constant sinus condition and was forever blowing his nose. His wife, fearing germs, would boil his handkerchiefs. But the source of his distress was rooted in events that occurred decades earlier. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and until his final labored breath on July 20, 1955, at age fifty-nine, not a year passed when he was not in and out of veterans’ hospitals as doctors tried to attend to his lungs.

Decades later, a descendant of Charles Stewart, his great-grandson Evan Jet Brown, is a sheet-metal worker who has had his own taste of both economic hard times and war. These days, like many in Canton—and across the country—he is caught up in a constant scramble to find work to support his young family. In the early summer of 2008 he was helping to rebuild a local high school but facing an imminent layoff—and not his first. Not long after speaking with me, he was out of work for months—but at least there was unemployment. A father of two, he now commutes two hours to a job in Wooster, Ohio. When we last spoke he was standing on a twelve-foot ladder, keyhole saw in hand, cutting a hole in drywall to make way for a heating duct at Wooster Hospital, and knowing that a month from then he would be out of work yet again.

Half a dozen years earlier he was serving on the front in the war on terrorism. The former marine sergeant, in five years of service, was deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, and the Horn of Africa, and was even on the USS
Nassau
when, in December 2002, it boarded a North Korean ship carrying SCUD missiles to Yemen. Like his great-grandfather, he is reluctant to speak of his time in the service. “We don’t really talk about it,” he says. “We just did it, that’s all. I don’t tell anybody.” Charles Stewart would have saluted such silence.

FOR SOME THE decline from positions of stature to empty pockets and worn-out shoes was almost more than they could bear. It was not merely the loss of possessions, nor even the years of work and sacrifice with nothing to show for it. For some, it was also the humiliation that came with failure, made all the worse for those whose lofty expectations of themselves had been realized and then dashed by the Depression and circumstances over which they had no control. Those who had enjoyed prominence now had to cope with the loss of self-esteem, the severing of bonds with established social circles, and the lack of prospects that stretched before them. There are no figures in Canton for how many took their own lives during the Depression, but it is certain that some did commit suicide and others at least contemplated it. The B. Virdot gift did not restore fortunes or friendships, but it may have convinced some not to give in to despair. For some, it appears the offer by B. Virdot may have been enough to restore confidence and counter the daily barrage of bills and bad news.

J. L. White lived on Tuscarawas Avenue, just four doors away from what had been the Dick family mansion. He had owned two stores and lost them both in 1929, the same year Sam Stone nearly lost his. He had diligently saved his money only to discover, like so many others, that his savings were lost when his bank failed. “If I [had] only known at that time,” he lamented. Now he was unsure how he was going to feed his seven children. In his letter to Mr. B. Virdot, he wrote: “Your encouraging letter and generous offer in Repository of 18 December has again given me the courage to try again. Yesterday evening just before I read your letter was thinking of things that no person should. Four years ago I was a successful business man. . . . I am down flat. But since reading your letter will say that I am not out yet.”