A Secret Gift (26 page)

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s the letters addressed to B. Virdot began to pour into the post office, it was clear to Sam and to Minna just how fortunate they were. Christmas 1933 put enormous strains on families. But, as is often the case in crises, those very strains, for some, helped define and clarify the importance of family. Mothers and fathers who had little for themselves wrote to B. Virdot hoping that they might have something to give their children for Christmas. So it was with Mattie Richards, wife of Joseph Richards.

At the time she wrote the letter, Mattie Richards was thirty. She was part Native American, a descendant of the Wyandot, or Huron, tribe, as it is sometimes called. Mattie Wogan had married Joseph “Joe” Richards when she was twenty-one. His parents were Welsh immigrants. His father was a miner. They had settled in Glouster, the coal country of southern Ohio. By six, little Joe Richards was himself working full-time in the mines, carrying the tools and fetching water for the miners. He had no education and could write and recognize only his own name. Mattie went as far as elementary school. “Since my father was totally uneducated,” said Kenneth Richards, “my mother had to explain a lot of things but my father never took that as debasing—he understood she was trying to help him.”

They were a couple of few words and were not given to displays of affection. But the children knew how they felt about each other and about them. They were the centers of their hardscrabble lives. “He believed in taking care of his own and he did it with the sweat of his brow and the muscles in his back,” recalls his son Kenneth. “Family was everything. It was their life. My parents had a lot of love to give. They showed it by what they did.”

At mealtime, the children ate first. After they were put to bed, Joe and Mattie would eat whatever was left, whatever they could find. Joe was a hunter and would sometimes return with a rabbit or pheasant for supper. Daughter Beverly wore gaily decorated print dresses her mother had made for her from the feed sacks of the pigs and chickens they kept. “Daddy built us a house,” says Beverly. “We lived in the garage until the basement was built, then we moved into the basement until the house was built.” The house in East Canton still stands. The Richardses had an acre that they planted. Joe butchered the pigs, Mattie canned the fruits and vegetables. Nothing was wasted.

The Richardses were a deeply religious family, Pentecostals who read the Bible and gave thanks for whatever they had. Whatever they lacked they could live without. Joe and Mattie were determined not to let the hardships cloud their children’s lives. “My mother was very religious and spared us from most things,” says Beverly. “She didn’t want us to know how bad things were.”

The Richardses were strict, but on Friday nights the children were permitted to read and swap comic books with the other children in the neighborhood. Kenneth was allowed to hunt, but had to conserve on shells, and if he missed, his father put the gun up for a week. “I taught you better than that,” Joe Richards would say. And he did. Kenneth would later become a crack shot as a sniper in Special Forces. (Kenneth retired in 2003 after forty-one years as a long-haul trucker carrying Canton’s steel across the country.)

But there was no hiding the heartache in the Richards family. Joe Richards’s namesake, Joseph Richards Jr., was born in October 1927. Seven months later he died of acute gastroenteritis. In September 1932, a year before Mattie wrote her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, they lost son Donald Dale Richards, a student at Canton’s Wells Elementary School. He was eleven. He had long suffered from rheumatic heart disease and ultimately fell to septicemia. And then there was the reference in the letter to the baby who had been sick ever since she was three weeks old. That was Erma June Richards, born on March 16, 1932. Less than fourteen months after writing the letter, on February 16, 1935, Erma too died. The cause: bronchopneumonia. She was two years and eleven months old.

During the Depression, Joe Richards took work wherever he could find it. If that meant filling up buckets of glass on the railroad track, so be it. He never complained. In the years after, he drove a forklift at Republic Steel and, to supplement their income, held a second job in a junkyard and worked weekends. Mattie too would work, at Republic Steel’s roundhouse and at the Fame Penn Laundry. But though their work was menial and their education limited, the Richardses always held their heads high. “We are as good as the best and better than the rest,” Joe Richards would tell his children.

But the years exacted a toll on Joe and Mattie Richards. They looked much older than their ages. Their son Kenneth was somewhat uncomfortable having his friends meet them. “At first I would disassociate myself from them,” he recalls. “I would tell my friends my parents were killed in a car accident and that I was being raised by my grandparents.”

But as the years passed, Kenneth came to respect his parents, who they were and what sacrifices they had made on behalf of the family. “Listening at the crack of the door, I learned a lot about them and I learned to understand them,” he says. “The first part of my life I always feared I’d grow up to be like my dad, and the second part, I knew I could never be like him, not the man he was. You would have had to know him to appreciate him.”

Decades later, as an adult, son Kenneth accompanied his mother to Forest Hill Cemetery to help her find the graves of her little ones, those who had died in childhood. She carried a pad of paper and a pencil with notes to help her find the graves. Hours passed and she had been able to find only two of them. Mattie told her son she had to rest. She sat down under a tree and sobbed. “It was the most emotion I ever saw from her,” says Kenneth. Eventually they found the third grave. “She never mentioned that again. She knew where her children were. She was at peace.”

Joe Richards died in 1982 at the age of eighty-four. Mattie died at home twelve years later. She was ninety-one. They are buried where their little ones are buried, in Forest Hill Cemetery.

To their living children, they didn’t leave much in the way of material possessions. But what they hoped to pass along they did. “I think we got their strength, their determination,” says their daughter Beverly. “They just never gave up.”

That indomitability and self-sacrifice became the hallmarks of that generation. The Richardses were hardly alone in placing family above self. It is one of the grace notes of the Depression that the worse things got, the less some people worried about themselves and the more they fretted for their loved ones. Many of those who appealed to B. Virdot that week of Christmas 1933 made their pleas on behalf of others who were too proud to do so for themselves. And so it fell to loved ones to make the appeals for them.

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mong the many who asked for nothing for themselves was Ruby Blythe. Her letter on behalf of a “veary Dear friend” was simple and to the point:

Days later, Mr. B. Virdot sent a check for five dollars to the Long family.

But there was something Ruby Blythe neglected to mention in her letter to Mr. B. Virdot: Mr. and Mrs. Long—her “very good friends”—were in fact her mother and father, David and Nellie Long. Everything else Ruby Blythe said of them was true. They were indeed hurting and the Blythes were in no position to help. The Longs had raised eleven children and three of them were still at home. Why Ruby Blythe concealed the truth of her relationship to her own parents is not clear. Perhaps she feared that Mr. B. Virdot would expect family to take care of family and not seek outside help. That was a common enough presumption during the Depression. There was also the very real possibility that had the Longs known that their daughter played a role in securing the gift, they would not have accepted it, any more than if they had written to B. Virdot themselves. As it was, it appears that they never did learn of their daughter’s appeal on their behalf.

Just as their daughter Ruby Blythe had said, David and Nellie Long had moved out of Canton to a farm outside of town. Their home had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Grandpa Long, as he was known to the children, plowed the field using a Model A Ford. He read by kerosene lamp. The path to the outhouse was made of rubber—a worn-out belt from a grain elevator. The sole source of water was a hand pump and the cold water that issued forth flowed into a trough that served as the Longs’ refrigerator. Long’s grandson Richard will never forget that pump. While playing tag with his cousin, he rounded the corner a little too close, grabbed the pump handle to steady himself, and it broke off in his hand. He was ten or eleven years old. For that his father, Clarence, took the strop to him. “I couldn’t sit down for a while,” recalls Richard.