A Secret Gift (20 page)

Until then, it seemed to some that poverty afflicted only a particular class—those born into hardship . . . It was a kind of negative inheritance, not something that randomly befell the frugal and hardworking. But Mrs. Bessie King, a forty-three-year-old widow and mother of a ten-year-old boy, was caught in the same vortex of poverty that held those she had always viewed as apart from if not below her. Suddenly she found herself applying for assistance. “Oh how it goes against the grain.” she wrote, “to have to go up and sit among the foreign element, and Negroes from 1 to 2 hours, sit there and wait for your turn just like a barber shop . . .”

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.

I
n 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:

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 gained 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.