A Secret Gift (6 page)

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 that 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:

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:

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.