A Secret Gift (39 page)

Years later, the Kenilworth fell to the wrecker’s ball. I made no attempt to conceal my pleasure to know that the building had been reduced to rubble. Much has changed. In 1990, La Gorce Country Club admitted its first Jews. Today the club is 40 percent Jewish, and in 2008 it hosted its first Seder dinner.

For Sam and Minna, memories of the Depression and their years in Canton gradually faded, though their friendships there did not. Even after so many years, neither of them shared with me the story of B. Virdot. There were occasional vague references to Sam’s generosity, and in later years I was told of his gift of wool coats to the British in World War II, but nothing of B. Virdot. The passage of time also wiped away Cantonians’ memory of that gift. It seemed obvious that all those who wrote the letters had since gone to their graves. But the years have yet to fully erase the last vestiges of the good that B. Virdot did.

I
t is hard to measure the impact of even the smallest unexpected gift on a child who has nothing. Against the dire landscape of the Depression, holidays often went unmarked, and were occasionally marked by violence. At Easter of 1930, a ten-year-old Canton boy was shot to death by an eleven-year-old playmate in a dispute over a chocolate bunny. Such treasures were all but unheard of in many homes. For hundreds of parents and children that Christmas of 1933, B. Virdot was their only hope of having something on the Christmas dinner table, in the stockings, or under a tree. Twenty-eight-year-old Olive Hillman asked for little and had even less. She wrote:

B. Virdot’s check arrived just days later and Olive Hillman sat down on Christmas Day and wrote this note in response:

Today, that little girl is eighty-four. Her name is Geraldine Laura Hillman Fry and she lives just eighteen miles east of where she lived as a child, in the hamlet of Minerva, Ohio. “Gerry,” as she is called, knew nothing of her mother’s letter to B. Virdot, but she does remember the doll—it was to be the only doll she would have as a child. She remembers its arms and legs of leather and its porcelain face. That surprise gift could hardly have been forgotten in such a childhood as hers. The only other gift she could hope for came from the mission—some candy and a few oranges.

“What became of that doll?” she mused aloud. “I wondered that so many times. The only thing I can think of is when my mother divorced my father it got left behind. When we left we took just the clothes on our back.”

Her mother had married Paul Hillman, the son of German immigrants, when she was seventeen. Not long after she wrote the letter to B. Virdot she left him and moved into an apartment with the two children, Gerry and Paul Jr. They had but one bed to be shared by the three of them. In some ways it was fortunate that they had one another to stay warm. It was often cold enough in the bedroom to see their own breath. Each morning at four-thirty Olive would quietly get up, get dressed, and walk several miles in the dark from their home to the Timken plant on Dueber Avenue, where she worked as an assembler in the roller bearings department and where she would continue to work for twenty-nine years.

Before leaving she would make sure the alarm clock was set for the children to get up in time to walk to school. Gerry had two blouses and two skirts, which she wore over and over. It was her responsibility not to soil them. Their breakfast, their lunch, and their dinner took on a grinding monotony. There were beans, there was milk—canned, never fresh—and some hamburger.

“I remember one time when things were really, really bad and she didn’t know where she was going to get enough money till the next pay day and as she was walking she found a dollar bill on the ground. She went to the store and bought some bread and lunch meat and came home. She was very happy that she had enough to feed us.”

Throughout Gerry’s childhood, there was never a car, a telephone, or a refrigerator—just a wooden “window box” that was placed on the outside sill in the cold months and kept things chilled (or frozen).

There were a few bright spots in her early life. One of these was Meyers Lake Amusement Park, a place where many Depression-era children had their best moments. Each year, as a Timken employee, Olive Hillman and her two children were invited to a picnic there. They packed a lunch, swam in the lake, and all the rides were free. Gerry never tired of watching the antics played out on Monkey Island.

Gerry knew little about her father. Her mother rarely spoke of him. He drank, and he could be abusive. At one time he had a good job, but he lost it. As for the cause of his crippling injuries, Gerry knew nothing until many years later, when her older brother, Paul Jr., dying from cancer, told her that their father, at age twenty-two, had closed himself inside a closet and shot himself in the head with a rifle. But the suicide attempt went awry and he was left paralyzed. He lived another forty-eight years in that condition, dying on May 28, 1970.

In 1946, Olive remarried. Her husband, Lawrence Gipe, worked in a foundry and wielded tongs handling steel and working around the blazing furnaces. It was a good marriage, and Olive put the Hard Times behind her.

Her son Paul Jr. would find work with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Washington State, join the navy, and later find work in one of Canton’s steel mills.

Gerry’s life too took a very different turn. She graduated from Timken Vocational High School in 1943 and went to work in Canton’s Hercules Motor Plant. There she met a coworker named Romain “Bud” Fry, whom she would marry in June 1945. She was twenty; he was thirty and had two children. But Fry was an ambitious man and soon left Hercules Motor to try his hand in business. He began in the furniture business, became a developer, built a golf course, and founded a community bank. He became president and chairman of the board of Consumers National Bank, based in Minerva, Ohio, and presided over its expansion to seven branches. Gerry Fry, who had grown up with so little, was now a millionaire, a banker’s wife. The Frys enjoyed fifty-four years of marriage and four children.

“I never really thought of myself as being rich, because of my background,” Gerry says. “I always appreciated everything I got. I am not a big spender. I hate to spend money.”

The dark Christmas of 1933 and the doll that was part of it seem taken from another life. In 2009 she watched over a family whose relative abundance she can scarcely believe. It is one of her great pleasures to do the Christmas shopping early. By mid-November she had already purchased a gift for her one-year-old great-granddaughter, Ivey Julia Rettig, and hid it in the basement. All that remained to be done was to wrap it. It is a lifelike baby doll, something, Gerry says, “she can cuddle.”

I
t would be hard to say just when Elizabeth Bunt’s childhood ended, if ever it began. One of three children, she experienced an early life that was pocked with hardship. Even the joys were snatched away. On July 20, 1930, when she was eleven, her mother gave birth to a baby boy, named after her father—Martin William Bunt. But two months and three days later, on September 23, 1930, the child died. The death certificate notes, “hare lip & cleft palate, unable to eat.” The infant was buried in Canton’s West Lawn Cemetery.

Barely a year later, on October 13, 1931, Elizabeth’s father succumbed to liver cancer. A Dr. G. B. Maxwell—the same doctor who signed his son’s death certificate—noted cause of death as “general exhaustion.” Bunt was buried alongside his namesake and infant son in West Lawn.

Widowed at thirty-eight, Delia Bunt and her children, Elizabeth, George, and Thelma, moved in with her parents on a rented farm on the edge of Canton. They lived in the summer kitchen, a tiny two-room structure they used to can vegetables and cook in summer. There was no indoor plumbing, just a pump and an outhouse. No electricity, just oil lamps. To bathe, they relied on rainwater they collected and heated over a coal-burning stove that often went out in the middle of the night, leaving them shivering. Elizabeth shared a bed with her mother and sister.

Later they moved into the city of Canton and the children attended a one-room schoolhouse, with eight classes divided into two groups by a black curtain. In winter, when the snow was deep, Elizabeth’s older brother, George, led the way and the two girls followed in the footsteps he’d left for them.

There were no presents at Christmas, at least not at home. At school, Elizabeth was given a small bag of Hard Tack candy (a mix of sugar, corn syrup, and food coloring) and an orange. But as Christmas 1933 approached, Elizabeth hoped for something more. And when she saw Mr. B. Virdot’s offer of help in the newspaper, she could not resist. She took out a pencil and manila paper and secretly wrote this letter:

A few days later, Mr. B. Virdot’s check for five dollars arrived in the mail. It is not known what Elizabeth Bunt did with the money. Her sister, Thelma, has no recollection of that Christmas and had no knowledge of her sister’s letter to Mr. B. Virdot. What is known by everyone who knew Elizabeth Bunt was that she would come to regard Christmas as her special day and the high point of her year. Perhaps it was just that her fortunes improved modestly over the years. No one can say. But after years of holidays more hollow than happy, she came to embrace that day, to prepare for it long in advance. She believed that God would provide.

And he did. Throughout the year she would play bingo at area churches and stash away her winnings as her Christmas fund. Christmas was a pleasure she shared with everyone. When she married Bernard Haren in June 1941, it continued to be the pivot around which her entire year revolved. And there was no need to explain to Bernard what the Great Depression had meant to her. As one of fourteen children, he understood only too well. Because Elizabeth did not drive, Bernard, and later the children, would be asked to make endless trips with her to the store to gather presents for an ever-expanding brood.