A Secret Gift (9 page)

Bill Gray was a prominent figure in the community, active in its social life and its many clubs and societies. He was a bon vivant who counted his membership in such clubs among his most prized possessions, and his fellow members felt the same way about him. He drove an Essex hardtop, rented a lakeside cottage, and moved to Willowdale Lake, a private club where he won prizes for ballroom dancing. A 1927 article in the
Canton Daily News
featured his daughter Marjorie, then fifteen, who each day would swim a half mile from the cottage dock across Willowdale Lake to a bakery, and then a half mile back, returning with a perfectly dry loaf of bread to be toasted for breakfast. Bill Gray was a regular at Bender’s, and surely dined in easy sight of George Monnot and Sam Stone. He was tall and thin and jolly, and, busy though he was, his surviving daughter remembers him making time to tell his children stories.

Business was so good that he let the paint companies he represented persuade him to expand into a second major store. That was on the eve of the crash of 1929. Five years later, he had next to nothing.

His December 18, 1933, letter to Mr. B. Virdot chronicles his decline in excruciating detail—but also his resolve to climb back out of the economic crevasse into which he had fallen. That was exactly the sort of grit that would have instantly won over my grandfather. Gray was a workingman who had elevated himself to the ranks of the city’s business class, as Sam Stone had done. His six-page letter was written in ink on the very stationery—“Gray the Painter”—that had once been synonymous with entrepreneurialism, and was now reduced to carrying his appeal for help. Sam Stone’s offer forged an instant bond with such men, who saw in the words of Mr. B. Virdot a kinship and shared experience. In the wasteland of the Depression, when men rarely felt free to truly open up to one another and share their doubts, Sam Stone had created a rare comfort zone. Those who had long guarded their feelings could finally release them without fear of disappointing others or humiliating themselves. Such trust showed itself in the very first words of Bill Gray’s letter.

“Dear Friend,” it began:

B. Virdot’s check for five dollars arrived four days later, on December 22, and on that day, Bill Gray wrote:

Bill Gray, like so many who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, wanted not a handout but a job. It was the hope of many that in reading their letters the mysterious B. Virdot would reach out to them with an offer of employment, a part-time position, or someone to contact who might know Someone. During the Depression, that “Someone” was capitalized because he or she might have an inside track on a possible job. In those leanest of days a job went unfilled only as long as the time it took for someone to get wind of it.

Many of those who wrote to B. Virdot invited him to their homes. “Here it is,” wrote Bill Gray, “all these facts above mentioned are true & real & you can check me up on same.” In an era of scams, Gray and scores of others wanted the donor to see for himself that things were as described—or worse. In the Canton of the 1920s and the Depression, a fellow couldn’t be too careful, and the well meaning and trusting were prime targets for the unscrupulous. Those who wrote the letters were constantly exposed to flimflammers and schemers. Sam Stone was not a child himself, and it may well be that among the many considerations that led him to operate behind the mask of B. Virdot was this: its anonymity shielded him from the connivers who would have been eager to make his acquaintance. But those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot inviting him to inspect their homes and their lives had a purer aspiration—they hoped that if he visited and attached a face to their hard-luck stories he might find work for them. His gift was most welcomed, to be sure, but the relief it brought was transient and their misery was not.

Bill Gray was the son of Urias, a cigar maker, and Catherine Gray. He was the oldest of four children. He had a brother Charles, who worked as a foreman on the large painting jobs; a brother Roy; and a sister, Carrie, a nurse. Gray and his wife, Viola, had four children, Marjorie, Robert, Betty Jane, and Grace Ruth. In 1933, at the time he wrote to B. Virdot, he was forty-seven.

But even today, three-quarters of a century later, there are more than dusty memories from those Hard Times. Bill Gray’s eldest child, Marjorie Markey, turned ninety-seven on October 10, 2009. She lives in the County Home in Ohio’s rural Wyandot County, 108 miles due west of Canton. She remembers the Depression only too well. She was forced to drop out of high school after the crash of ’29 to help support the family. In 1933, she was twenty-one and had long been working as “Gray the Painter’s” bookkeeper, so she saw firsthand the economic maelstrom and what it meant for her father.

She remembers how he did all he could to protect the family from the worries that consumed him, but she also remembers the sound of his steps late at night pacing across the bedroom floor above. She remembers the terrible headaches that afflicted him, how underneath his straw hat he concealed a white kerchief he had soaked in cold water and tied around his head to relieve the throbbing ache. And she remembers how a lifetime of business acumen counted for nothing, how the steady flow of income was reduced to a trickle, and then, nothing. On top of the losses he suffered, there was the embarrassment, the sudden unseemly slide from prominence to subsistence, and all of it so terribly public.

But Bill Gray was determined to provide for his family, and if it meant finding another path, so be it. He picked up any odd job he could find. From the Amish, he bought Old Trail sausage and rounds of cheese that he cut into smaller sections. A first-class salesman even in the worst of times, he found just enough buyers for these foods to keep his own family fed. He would dig for potatoes at a farm, for himself and his aging parents and neighbors. That too would have touched Sam Stone, who shared whatever good fortune he had with those of his siblings in need. Another of Bill Gray’s daughters, Gloria Hawkins, now eighty-eight, still remembers the big iron skillet and the dinners of fried potatoes and eggs. Another Depression-era supper at the Gray home was mush—a porridge or pudding made from cornmeal that was allowed to set, then sliced and served with a bit of syrup over top. “We ate a lot of mush,” recalls Marjorie, suggesting that the sweetness of the syrup more than made up for the repetitiveness of the meal.

But it was not enough for Bill Gray that he could feed his own family. He also went door-to-door soliciting canned foods for others—“the poor.” It was a tradition in his family. His mother, Katy, had always put together baskets of provisions for the needy, and Bill Gray carried on the tradition even when he had little himself. (His daughter Gloria later volunteered for Meals On Wheels, and today her daughter, Connie, devotes her Thursdays to delivering Meals On Wheels.)

Groceries were sold a mere five doors away at Youngen’s, at the corner of Rowland Avenue and Ninth Street. The Grays rarely had the money to pay for them, but a routine evolved whereby on Saturday evenings, Bill Gray and his father, Urias, would stop in and pay off what they owed or at least what they could afford, hoping to start a fresh tab come Monday. John Youngen lived above the grocery and was liked by the Gray children, who would often poke their heads in the door and ask, “Would you give us a weenie?” Mr. Youngen obliged. The hot dog was eaten on the spot and added to the tab. Dr. Kelly, who made house calls to the Gray family and had delivered the children, knew he would have to be patient if he was to receive some semblance of payment, but some was better than none.

It seemed that winter mornings in Depression Ohio were particularly cold. Precious coal had to be conserved. The Gray children dressed in front of the oven, which was fired up just before school. In 1933 Marjorie Gray got married. Also that year her mother-in-law, Jennie Markey, inherited a sizable sum of money that was placed in a Fort Wayne bank for safekeeping. The bank failed and the entire inheritance was lost.

Bill Gray did eventually get back on his feet, though never to the degree he enjoyed before the Depression. He found work with American Oil and Paint, a Cleveland roofing company headed by millionaire C. D. Rogers. Gray covered much of the state selling tar and other roofing materials. And he did well enough that fifteen years after his letter to Mr. B. Virdot, he could afford to retire to a modest home in Ohio’s rural Wyandot County. There he pursued his hobbies: hunting rabbits and pheasants, fishing, and baseball. He volunteered to announce the evening games of the adult softball league and sometimes even sold snacks to those who had come out to watch.

To his grandson, William Markey, he was a hardworking man who never spoke of the Hard Times. Bill Gray enjoyed a long and peaceful retirement. One day in 1959, while driving down Route 23, a country lane south of the county, he pulled off onto the side of the road, shut off the engine, put his head back, and died right there. He was seventy-six. Bill Gray’s beloved business—“Gray the Painter”—is long since forgotten, but there remains one curious testimonial to him and to his painting skills. It is there in the tiny town of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and is painted in his own hand, in huge black letters against the white outside wall of the Elks Club on Route 30. It says, simply, HELLO BILL. It was once a customary greeting among Elk Club members nationwide, a practice that goes back to the turn of the last century, but which has long since fallen into disuse. Bill Gray painted the sign in the late 1940s. Today it’s a kind of local landmark in Upper Sandusky, visible to passersby from far off. But to the descendants of Bill Gray, it is also the final salutation to “Gray the Painter.”