A Secret Gift (14 page)

Their grandchildren are a living postscript to what they endured. Daughter Miriam and her husband, Joseph Watters, inherited little but the lessons in frugality, but that was enough for them to provide a home for eleven children—four others died in infancy. They kept a journal of every expenditure right down to the penny. Not even the purchase of a three-cent stamp went unrecorded.

Miriam died on August 5, 1999, at age seventy-three, and is also buried in Calvary Cemetery.

Nearly all of Alverna and Noble’s eleven grandchildren chose to remain near Canton. Among them are a postal worker, three nurses, and a businessman. And if railroads provided Grandfather Noble Wright a way out of poverty, it also provided his family and descendants a ticket to a better life. His son-in-law, Joseph, started as a railroad brakeman and rose to superintendent. A granddaughter, Deborah, worked as a railroad stenographer; her brother Joseph helped pay for college with a railroad job; and two of Noble’s grandsons work for Norfolk Southern to this day. John Watters is a locomotive conductor who, like his father and grandfather, came under the spell of train and track.

As stunned as family members were to learn of Noble Wright’s criminal record, they are no less protective of his good name. Whatever Noble Wright did, they say, he did out of desperation and for those he loved. They understand that the times were punishing, and their admiration for him is undiminished. “It was probably just a survival-type mode that got him into trouble,” says grandson Joseph.

Today, the dark gothic Mansfield Reformatory where Noble Ebenezer Wright was held some seventy-five years ago is familiar to many. It was where the 1994 movie
Shawshank Redemption
was filmed, and each Halloween, fright seekers pay fifteen dollars per person for a “Haunted Prison Experience” billed as “Hell on Earth.”

As for the last lines of Alverna Wright’s letter to Mr. B. Virdot, they are the closing to the poem “The Vision of Sir Launfal” by James Russell Lowell. In the poem, a disillusioned knight of King Arthur’s Round Table searches for the Holy Grail but finds only a beggar with whom he shares his food and drink. The beggar, he discovers, is Jesus Christ.

I
don’t know if Sam was a man of great faith in any traditional sense, but he believed deeply that everyone had a right to a second chance. He’d made his own mistakes and gone on to prove that he could make something better of himself. He was proud to have risen above others’ expectations of him, and his frequent references to having graduated from the “School of Hard Knocks” were a celebration of that institution, not an apology. He was eager to prove the distinction between the uneducated and the uneducable. He championed the underdog and forgave the fallen, having been both.

My mother has said he was a poor judge of character. It’s true. He looked beyond a person’s past to see their prospects, and in so doing ignored many a warning sign. He would never condone crime but he was slow to condemn the man, having witnessed in himself and others the lengths to which a person will go to survive. He understood that having a stain on one’s record sometimes said more about the times than the man. That was doubtless how he would have seen the blemish on Noble Wright’s record and how he would have viewed George Carlin, who also wrote to him. Carlin’s letter began:

That same evening, from the same address, perhaps unknown to George Carlin, someone else was writing to Mr. B. Virdot—his mother, Florence. Her letter read:

That letter was from Lawrence Henry Carlin and Florence Maude Carlin, but most folks in Canton knew them as Henry and Maude. Today that nine-year-old daughter, Valerie—the baby in the family—is eighty-five, but she still remembers well what she got that Christmas of 1933: an orange and a little powder-blue change purse adorned with silver metallic beads that opened and closed with a drawstring. The orange was the first fresh fruit to touch her lips in memory. Both likely came from the five dollars Mr. B. Virdot sent her parents that week. But Valerie never knew of the B. Virdot letter. (Another five dollars arrived for George Carlin.)

Valerie’s mother and father tried to protect her from the stresses and strains of their circumstances. “You were kind of shut out of the room when the conversations were going on,” she recalls. But no amount of closed doors and whispers could conceal their dire situation. The career-ending injury to her father, Henry Carlin, was an accident in a brickyard in Bolivar, Ohio, that destroyed his back. Even years later, the only income the Carlin family could expect was the forty-nine dollars a month in workmen’s compensation.

The Carlins rented a house at 921 Prospect Avenue in 1933. It was the landlady’s responsibility to pay the utilities. She did not, and the power was cut off. After that, Valerie did her homework by candlelight. Some nights she went to bed both cold and hungry. Without power, the Carlins had to improvise. Emblazoned in Valerie’s childhood memory is a picture of her father and brother-in-law heating a pot of beans in the coal furnace. It seemed to take forever. Bean soup was a near constant, and she swore she would never eat it again, that is, until hunger gnawed at her. To keep the furnace going, her brother-in-law was dispatched to collect coal that had fallen off the coal cars along the railroad tracks. The apartment was sparsely furnished. At nine, Valerie still slept in her parents’ bedroom in her baby crib.

The Carlins were people of faith, but only Valerie went to Sunday services at the Methodist church on Dueber Avenue. “My parents never attended church,” she remembers, “but they made sure that I did. I think it was because they didn’t have the clothes to wear.”

The Carlins were often unable to make the rent and were forced to move from place to place in what for many children of the Depression era became a nomadic, rootless life. “I went to every grade school in Canton,” remembers Valerie. She attended McKinley High School and was in her second semester of her senior year when she dropped out to help support the family. She went to work at an ice cream parlor on East Tuscarawas, making sandwiches and scooping ice cream for twenty-four cents an hour. (At forty she earned her General Educational Development diploma.) The constant moving, the disruption of schooling, the early imperative to support family—all this described Sam Stone’s childhood as well.

But all was not bleak in the Carlin home. “There was always something to laugh about,” recalls Valerie. And her father, despite his injuries and his struggles, remained a jolly man who always believed that “there was a light at the end of the tunnel.” Some evenings, family and friends would gather to play cards by candlelight.

In the months and years thereafter, as the New Deal took shape, the Carlins, like thousands of others across the country, took advantage of the work it provided, reinvigorating the economy and transforming the nation as it slowly emerged from the Depression. One of Valerie’s brothers went into the Civilian Conservation Corps. Another, James, joined the WPA and helped build dams. The toughness, the self-sacrifice, the readiness to take collective action—all hallmarks of the Depression years—later found expression in World War II and the Greatest Generation. Valerie married Robert Naef, who joined the army, was awarded a Purple Heart, and came home with shrapnel in his right foot. He made the shell fragment into a key chain for his wife. It was friendly fire and not something he talked about. In his absence, in 1943, Valerie became a true Rosie the Riveter, shooting rivets into the stabilizers of countless B-24 Liberator bombers at the Berger Aircraft plant just outside of Canton. In her sewing box, she keeps a single rivet, a token of those times.

OTHER MEMORIES OF the Carlin home come from eighty-year-old Lheeta Carlin Talbott, the Carlins’ granddaughter, and one of eleven children. Her father was James, Valerie’s older brother. For a time Lheeta and her family lived at the Prospect Street apartment with her grandparents. She remembers that there were times she could not go to school because she didn’t have shoes. Even today that memory stings. She asks that I not mention it, then relents.

Her reluctance to speak of such remote events may be hard for some Americans today to understand. Clearly the memories remain sensitive, but the discomfort in speaking of such matters is also deeply rooted in the mores of those times. Poverty was widespread and afflicted even the most resourceful, but it was still a source of embarrassment. The closest word we have for it is
shame
but it was more than that, just as the pride ascribed to that generation was more nuanced. Both oversimplify the emotional landscape of those times. In their letter to B. Virdot, Donavon Brown, a mechanic, and his wife Mabel, wrote: “We cannot all have money, but to be honest and poor is not a disgrace, and cleanliness is something we can all have at little cost.”

It was a different world, one in which the disgrace came not so much from being poor as from the implicit suggestion that the burdens of others were less onerous than one’s own. To gain another’s pity at the expense of self-respect was a bad bargain. Poverty was viewed not as an individual burden but a societal scourge. In such times, it was often considered self-centered to call attention to one’s own predicament, as if one were oblivious to the circumstances of all those around them.

It was part of a wider communal code that applied to the individual, the family, and the community. To capitulate to self-pity or public plaints not only exposed weakness in one’s own character but threatened to unravel the composure of others. It was like a team that carried a terrible load evenly distributed across many shoulders. Each looked to the other for support. To break emotional rank only added to the burden of others. It was fine to vent in a political sense, to march on Washington or rail against the banks. But it was expected that one and all would maintain a certain grit and stoicism. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on,” Roosevelt is said to have counseled. For some, it may have been no more than keeping up a front, but the mere ability to do even that said something about their inner reserves. So deeply ingrained was that mind-set that even three-quarters of a century later, Lheeta Carlin Talbott can barely bring herself to speak of the hardships.