A Secret Gift (13 page)

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.

T
he 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,

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 course, 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.

Though their marriage was tested by adversity, they saw it through and in June 1980 celebrated their fifty-seventh anniversary. Alverna died in Florida on February 11, 1981, at age seventy-nine. Noble died seven years later, in 1988, at age eighty-six. They are buried side by side in Calvary Cemetery, between Canton and Massillon, Ohio, their simple flat gravestones flush with the grass. They are interred in the section marked “Joyful Mysteries.”