A Secret Gift (36 page)

That Charles Winters could not say no to his neighbors in need is no surprise to his surviving grandchildren, who remember him as a man of meager means but a bountiful heart. Sandra Jordan considered herself one of his favorite grandchildren. “I walked to his house every Sunday after church and he always gave me a silver dollar,” she recalls. “I still have them to this day. I would never spend those.”

Charles Winters couldn’t help but identify with those in need. His father, Amos, was a cobbler who, according to the 1900 U.S. Census, at thirty-five could neither read nor write. But a decade later, he could proudly check “yes” to both reading and writing. Perhaps he had been tutored by his literate wife, Alice. Son Charles was born in July 1892 and married Florence Bair when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one.

Florence wore braces on both legs, having been stricken with polio as a child. She limped, but there was nowhere she couldn’t reach. She was stern, not the softy that her husband was, and the children and grandchildren gravitated to Charles for affection. They muddled through each setback and difficulty, determined to keep the family together. In the midst of the Depression, Charles’s widowed father lived with the family, still working as a cobbler and taking in repairs until his death.

It could be said that Charles’s willingness to help others eventually cost him his life. He had a severe heart condition but insisted on pitching in to paint his son’s new home on Tyler Avenue. It was then, in 1959, that he was felled with a heart attack, from which he died soon after. “Grandpa had a big heart,” says his granddaughter Sandra.

Charles Winters and his descendants have never had it easy, but they didn’t expect it to be otherwise. Tragedy, illness, layoffs—and big hearts—run in the family. (One of Winters’s sons, Arthur, was killed in World War II
.
) Charles Winters’s son Charles Jr. had five children—four biological, one adopted. But he could never afford a car—he walked or took the bus everywhere. He was often furloughed from his job, even when it seemed the rest of the country prospered. He worked at Canton Drop Forge, grinding steel for a living. He never fully recovered from an industrial accident there that shattered his leg.

His daughter Sandra, now sixty-seven, manages a convenience store and filling station, and is saving money to visit her son in Dallas. “My husband worked at a steel mill and got laid off quite often,” she says. “I just learned to live frugal. Most of my kids are the same way. They have learned when there are hard times you got to be careful.”

Like many children whose parents grew up during the Depression, sisters Sandra and Carol inherited a scaled-down map of life. Christmas in the Winters home was special, never because of the volume of presents but because it was time shared. “What we got was enough for us,” says Carol.

Enough
was a byword of the Depression. It was less a measure of what one had than what one was made of. It was about conservation, not consumption.
Enough
was a word around which an entire family could rally, a gesture of faith but also of defiance. It was to count one’s blessings aloud, to shore up the soul, and to hold despair at bay.

“We had a good life, whether my dad was out of work or not,” remembers Carol. “We are happy. We have each other. We love each other. We survive, we survive.”

It was and is enough.

S
am learned many lessons in the first years of the Depression when he saw his business wither, his debts deepen, and his way of life imperiled. None was more important than the realization that the town’s survival and return to prosperity was tied to the well-being of the entire community. The old clannish alignments by class, ethnic group, and national origin would no longer suffice. No one, not the Timkens, the Hoovers, or the Beldens, was immune to the poverty and despair engulfing the city. Like rising waters, it threatened to wash away one and all. The storefronts would remain vacant, the mills and plants nearly deserted, the town an economic wasteland, as long as so many were down-and-out. There was a new imperative emerging and it was based on community. B. Virdot’s gift, while voluntary, recognized that something was both expected of every citizen and due every citizen. Before the Depression drew to a close, the generation that came of age in the Hard Times would soon be called upon to make extraordinary sacrifices, but they had already come to appreciate both the importance of individual courage and the indispensability of common purpose.

Such values were a part of everyday life in the home of Nora Romesberg. Her letter to B. Virdot:

Nora Romesberg lived to be ninety-four. Her son Clyde, now eighty-eight, was thirteen that Christmas of 1933. Always when he returned home from school he took off his shoes to conserve the soles. The boys slept on the floor—there were no beds or mattresses, just blankets. At night before the kerosene lamp was doused, their mother and father would take turns reading to them from the Bible. Clyde remembers being embarrassed by the bright patterns in the shirts he wore to school, cut from his mother’s worn-out dresses. He remembers that his birthday was an occasion for joking, not presents. But as part of his job for Western Union, he would bicycle to the city’s outskirts, a telegram in his hat, and sing “Happy Birthday” to wealthier citizens. Dressed in a snappy uniform, he also worked as an usher, taking patrons down the aisles of the fabulous Palace Theater.

He remembers too how neighbors pulled together to get through those times. The homes were heated by coal, but there was seldom enough money to buy it. So the neighborhood boys would go down to where the B&O Railroad ran and search along the tracks for coal that had fallen off passing trains. They carried burlap sacks and divided among themselves what they could scavenge. “We all worked together,” recalled Romesberg. “You had certain obligations.” A policeman was stationed at the rail yard to ensure that no one took coal off the open cars, though he often pitied the boys and, with his arm, appeared to “accidentally” bump a few extra lumps of coal onto the tracks. They quickly disappeared into the closest burlap sack.

For Clyde Romesberg and his family, the desperate search for coal to keep warm carried with it a personal irony. Clyde Romesberg’s father was an out-of-work coal miner.

The hardship Clyde Romesberg experienced and the fellowship that was borne of sharing those hardships with so many others defined him as a man and prepared him to endure with quiet dignity even the worst travails of World War II. During his two and a half years in the navy, Romesberg served on an aircraft carrier, the USS
Santee
. At 7:40 A.M. on October 25, 1944, a Japanese suicide bomber carrying a 63-kilogram bomb hit the
Santee
’s flight deck. Romesberg took shrapnel to the head and hand. Blood poured from his wounds. Sixteen minutes later, a torpedo fired from a Japanese sub struck the ship, flooded compartments, and caused it to list 6 degrees. Flames erupted and crew members were burned clear down to the bone. Romesberg, the shrapnel still in his forehead, found himself applying ointment to other men’s burns and dressing their wounds. They were worse off and needed tending, and only by acting together could the ship be righted and the crew saved.

Today Romesberg is said to be a part of the Greatest Generation, but it is a generation whose cohesiveness and grit took shape during the Great Depression. Romesberg saw his actions aboard the
Santee
not as heroism but as an extension of the lessons he learned along the railroad tracks. “There was a different feeling then,” he says. “You felt united. You endured the same thing.” He is a humble man, but unable to resist an observation about the present. “We were made of better stuff,” he says.

W
hatever could befall a soul in good times—illness, loss of loved ones, disabling injuries—did so in bad times as well. No one understood that better than Florence Cunningham, unless perhaps it was the doctor who tended to her family. On December 19, 1933, she took out half of a sheet of lined paper and a pencil and wrote to B. Virdot:

At the time Florence Cunningham wrote her note she was thirty-eight. Her husband, Joseph, who had helped paint the interior of the Palace Theater, was forty-seven when, on August 29, 1932, he succumbed to kidney failure. Now widowed, Florence was left with daughters Margaret, eleven, and Virginia, five; and sons Joseph, ten, Willard, eight, and Robert, three.

To her aid came Dr. Lloyd H. Werley, a Canton physician and surgeon who, like many of his peers, ministered to the poor knowing payment was unlikely. Amid such emotional and financial desolation, Florence Cunningham and her children looked to Dr. Werley for more than just medical care. He and his kind provided sorely needed evidence that someone cared about them.

OTHER PHYSICIANS TOO donated their time to the needy. In the early years of the Depression, the Stark County Dental Society repeatedly hosted clinics to treat the poor in Canton’s municipal auditorium. Several times a year, dentists walked away from their private practices and devoted afternoons to seeing those unable to pay for such visits. In 1932, physicians saw some twenty-three thousand patients at a Canton city clinic—seven thousand more than the year before.