A Secret Gift (35 page)

S
am Stone was a silent and minor hero against the vast backdrop of the Great Depression, but he was hardly alone. Among those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot was Lloyd B. McLain, an out-of-work executive with Ervin Manufacturing, an upholstery company. For five months in 1930 he and his wife, Florence, had taken in a family of five, providing them food and shelter. “Our happiness was greater for it,” McLain wrote on stationery that listed him as the company’s secretary-treasurer. Every street in Canton—and across the land—had families who put themselves at financial risk for others and who asked for little or nothing in return.

In the absence of cash, a barter system evolved. Goods and services of all kinds were freely exchanged without a dollar changing hands. Shopkeepers, physicians, butchers, bakers, plumbers, shoe repairmen, all traded their talents and goods. And it wasn’t only the merchants who came to accept the bartering of goods and services. One of those who wrote to B. Virdot was fifty-three-year-old Clifford P. Boylan, a landscaper and grading contractor who was falling behind in his mortgage payments. In lieu of interest payments, the bank allowed him to spend the summer working on improving its property. Otherwise, wrote Boylan, “I would have lost everything.”

Across Canton—across the country—this ad hoc system was built upon mutual trust and mutual need. (Leading economists of that era even proposed a federal barter scheme, so paralyzed were businesses and banks.) But it was the informal system that evolved, bonding neighbor to neighbor, and creating personal loyalties that long outlasted the Depression. Such a system helped form the dense core of community that became a hallmark of the Hard Times.

By extending credit, indebtedness of another kind was created. Earl J. Billings, a forty-seven-year-old unemployed plasterer, wrote: “If it was not for my grocery man J. E. Grove to carry me, would be on charity now as I can’t make ends meet. There is six in my family and that means something.” The grocer, James Groves, was sixty and lived above the store along with his wife, Mary, three children, and a grandchild. His grocery on Eleventh Street Southwest was but a few doors away from the home of Earl Billings. Many of the letters to B. Virdot are oblique tributes to such individuals:

The letter was written by Ora Beggs. She and her husband, Raymond, like everyone they knew, were struggling. The letter refers to a home on Frazer Avenue that they had hoped to buy, but after years of making payments on the property they simply had no more money and were forced to let it go—with a mere nine hundred dollars remaining before it would have been theirs. Raymond Beggs continued to struggle as a Hoover sweeper salesman, going door-to-door at a time when no one was buying and even repairs were out of reach for many.

Not long after the Beggses wrote to Mr. B. Virdot they decided to call it quits in Canton and moved out to the country, to Middle Branch. There they had no indoor plumbing. In winter the water pump froze and would function only after they poured a teakettle of boiling water into it to free it up; son Don, now eighty-one, remembers that he had to grow up fast. At seven, he and his older brother Dale took a job with the farmer across the street and put in a full day picking corn, gathering potatoes, milking cows. For twelve hours’ work he was paid one dollar. It went to helping the family make do. When the farm chores were done, he delivered newspapers—the
Canton Repository
—for a penny a copy. He sometimes supplemented the route by selling skinned and cleaned rabbits and big Red Rock chickens he’d raised and killed and cleaned and wrapped in wax paper. He carried them in the basket of his bike, along with the day’s newspapers, delivering them to the few who could afford a whole chicken or a rabbit.

Like many of those who appealed to B. Virdot, the Beggses’ letter is replete with mention of merchants who carried them or accepted meager monthly payments of a dollar or less. Around the city, doctors delivered thousands of babies with little or no prospect of payment. Just as many caskets and funerals were provided with the thinnest hopes of being repaid. The Beggses’ letter refers to the Jacobs Funeral Home. “It was a little brother of mine,” says son Don Beggs. “He had a name but I haven’t thought of it for so many years, I can’t remember his name.” The death certificate shows it was “Jerry G. Beggs.” He was born on September 11, 1932, and died the next day. The death certificate lists the cause of death as “premature—8 mo.”

In countless cases, those in business risked all to help those who could not help themselves. Desperation spawned creativity. Once the Beggses had moved out of the city to Middle Branch, their milk was delivered by Firestone Dairy. But once again the Beggses fell behind in their payments. Don Beggs remembers: “The bill got up to twelve dollars and my mother’s father had an old Model T sitting in a barn in Marlborough Township and it would barely run but we went up and got it running—you had to crank it—and drove it down and put it in front of the house, and the next morning ‘Cap’ Firestone, who owned Firestone Dairy—he was delivering milk—he saw the old Model T and said, ‘What do you want for that?’ Mother and Dad heard him say it. They said, ‘We want twelve dollars so we can pay you.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll just take the car and the bill’s paid,’ and that’s what they did.”

But earlier, while they were still in Canton, the milk had been delivered by Superior Dairy. The letter mentions both their indebtedness and their gratitude to the company. It deserved special mention because nothing was more indispensable to a growing family than milk. Superior Dairy extended credit to many such families, and in so doing reserved for itself an esteemed place in the hearts of many of Canton’s neediest.

The founder and owner of Superior Dairy was Joseph Soehnlen. An immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine, he had come to America at age eighteen and with his brother founded a wine and brandy import business that flourished until Prohibition, when revenue agents uncorked his casks of brandy. Decades later he told a grandson that watching his brandy being poured out was like watching his life go down the drain. In 1922, he lost his wife, Anna, to tuberculosis and was left with five children. Unable to support them, he farmed them out to relatives across the region. That same year, he bought a dairy route from a farmer, some empty bottles and brushes to clean them out with, a horse, and a milk wagon. Over the years his children returned to him and his business prospered. But even in the depths of the Depression, when longtime customers could not pay their debts, he did not lose faith in them.

His grandson Joseph remembers his grandfather telling him that during the Depression many families couldn’t pay for their milk, but he would not allow the deliveries to be interrupted. A family needed its milk. But families like the Beggses eventually made good on their debts. In the 1950s, Joseph Soehnlen received a payment for several weeks’ milk delivery that had been in arrears since the Depression—a debt long since forgotten and forgiven.

Call it solicitude or faith or simply shrewd business, Superior Dairy later reaped the benefits of its largesse in unexpected ways. In March 2005, it was struck with a devastating fire that destroyed its original building. Some twenty-nine firefighting units responded, retirees came forward offering help, the company received a tax break to rebuild, and a competitor, Smith Dairy, even stepped forward and provided milk under the Superior name to protect the company’s customer base while it rebuilt itself. True to its character, though the company struggled in the aftermath of the blaze, it let none of its employees go.

Today the company is run by the grandsons of Joseph Soehnlen, serves eleven states, and employs more than 250 people. Its innovative ways have been written up in the
New York Times
. And in these difficult times it continues to help soup kitchens and other organizations providing for the needy. “What we do we do very, very quietly and we seek out people who need it most,” says Soehnlen’s grandson Dan, Superior’s president.

M
any of those who wrote to B. Virdot, though barely able to pay their own bills, had routinely extended credit to desperate neighbors. My grandfather had been both a lender and a creditor during the hard years. Were it not for several large clothing suppliers extending him credit in the depths of the Depression, his business wouldn’t have survived. They carried him well beyond what prudent business practices might have dictated, but it was predicated upon a belief in his character. That was often all a person had left. If there was an aversion to charity, there was also a predisposition to leniency in collecting what was owed. Such compassion helped the neediest survive, and in better times sometimes laid the foundation for financial recovery for the business.
Sometimes,
but not always. There were also times when such shows of compassion pushed the benefactors over the precipice themselves. Charles Winters knew about this.