In her field, Rachel DeHoff would prove herself the equal of any man. She made a name for herself in the industry, paid off her mortgage, vacationed in Cuba, and eventually became successful enough to open another real estate office in Phoenix, Arizona, where she wintered. She was always frugal, but the Hard Times she had twice endured—once as a child and later as a widow—were forever behind her.
But it was her sons, Howard Ellsworth and Harold, upon whom she lavished the most attention and for whom she sacrificed much. Rachel DeHoff endowed them with an appreciation for education and a keen sense of service to community and country. Like so many children of the Depression, they were grateful for the sacrifices made on their behalf but grateful too to the nation that provided them with prospects brighter than any their parents could have imagined. The fusion of sacrifice and gratitude was later put to the test on the battlefield.
DeHoff’s sons both served in World War II. Howard was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces. Harold became an infantry platoon sergeant, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine at Remagan. He came away with a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. Both men not only finished high school but got college degrees. Howard had a long and solid career with Hoover.
Son Harold got a law degree, and became the city prosecutor and then a distinguished judge on the Common Pleas Court. His life intersected with much of Canton’s history. As a prosecutor in the late 1950s, he helped shut down the city’s teeming trade in prostitution, padlocking some nineteen brothels and bringing to an end a decades-long stain on the city’s reputation. Today, at eighty-four, he is a last living link to what was. He remembers well the city’s corruption.
To outsiders vice and graft may have smacked of hypocrisy, but in Canton, corruption was seen as something of a homegrown industry, not unlike Timken, Hoover, or Diebold. They may have been the wages of sin, but they were still wages. The furniture stores furnished the brothels’ waiting parlors and sold them hundreds of mattresses, the doctors examined the girls and collected their fees, the laundry gathered their soiled sheets, and the police took their cut of the action in envelopes in exchange for keeping out-of-town girls from encroaching and making sure the johns and ladies carried on their business safely.
Decades later, a well-known madam married a vice-squad cop without raising an eyebrow. A mayor had been dismissed for “inefficiency,” a polite word for graft, and, as the New York Times duly noted, Canton’s police chief had been suspended amid accusations that he had sold protection to gangsters.
Such corruption went way back. In September 1905, William S. Couch wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “For a lurid little city, commend me to Canton.” He described Canton as a “monument to present day Ohio politics built by the present day Ohio politicians, who have piled gambling hells [sic] and Parisian music halls on a foundation of other iniquities in their effort to attain such immortality of memory as may be derived from public office and political power. . . . Fluttering, tawdry rags, faded tinsel, leering faces and satyrs’ figures, a frieze of poker decks and roulette wheels, these predominate in the design and decoration of the other memorial [President McKinley’s monument], the flimsy whole lit with red lights by night and covered from sight by day.” Whiskey Alley, then one of Canton’s more notorious sections, was “lined with gambling dens, each located above a saloon. During a moment’s quiet, when the music machines are still, the rattle of ivory chips reaches the ear on the street.” And for half a century, Canton’s brothels operated with a brazenness that attracted patrons, gawkers, would-be soul savers, and, of course, fallen women.
Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold, both as prosecutor and as judge, was one of those who helped put an end to all that, or at least reduce it to a scale befitting Canton’s size. He was too young to remember when in 1926 the mob gunned down Don Mellett, the city’s corruption-fighting editor, but he remembers when, as prosecutor thirty years later, two trustees from the Ohio State Penitentiary delivered his prison-made desk. One of the two men was a former Canton police detective who was convicted for his role in Mellett’s murder.
Service continues to run in the DeHoff family. Rachel’s granddaughter Rachelle Martin became a commander in the U.S. Navy, retired as a deputy inspector general, joined the gubernatorial administration of George W. Bush as commissioner of a regulatory agency in Texas, and later headed a rape crisis center in New Bern, North Carolina. She remembers her grandmother Rachel DeHoff helping her with college tuition and making it clear that nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of her getting an education. Today she has her grandmother’s fine Haviland china, a mark of the better times she came to know. Granddaughter Rebecca J. Canoyer also pursued a career of service, first with the Red Cross, then as an oral interpreter for the deaf, and today as a management and program analyst for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.
She too feels a close affinity to her grandmother. To her two sons, Rachel DeHoff passed on what Rebecca calls “a tremendous feeling of patriotism for the country and a need to give back.” They in turn passed that feeling on to the grandchildren. I read her Rachel DeHoff’s letter from 1933. She cried. Later that day Rebecca and her fourteen-year-old son were to volunteer at a shelter.
Many of the landmarks of Rachel DeHoff’s life are now gone or unrecognizable. Dueber-Hampden, the giant watch factory that first employed her as a young girl, went out of business in the late 1920s, largely a casualty of the advent of the wristwatch. In March 1930, industrialist Armand Hammer sold the watchmaking machines to the Soviet Union. They were loaded onto twenty-eight railroad cars and transported to Moscow, where they became the First State Watch Factory.
Along with the equipment went twenty-three of Canton’s finest watchmakers and engravers, who, under contract, worked in Moscow for a year or more, setting up the plant and training Russian workers. There were, after all, no jobs to be had for them in America in 1930. Each of the workers received passage aboard the SS Aquitania, a Moscow apartment, a cook, and a waiter. They were paid a daily wage and, at the completion of their contract, a princely five thousand dollars a year to be deposited in a New York bank. Well into the twentieth century, the equipment from Canton was used at the now renamed First Moscow Watch Factory and continued to turn out as many as now renamed six million watches a year. One of those watches was reportedly given by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to President Ronald Reagan. Some of the Canton machinery was even spotted in China in the mid-1980s.
The twenty-acre industrial site in Canton fell to weeds and broken glass. As a child I remember them taking down the massive Dueber-Hampden factory in 1958 to make way for Interstate 77. The site is also home to the Trinity Gospel Temple. But before the buildings were torn down, workers vacuumed under the floors to retrieve the gold shavings that had accumulated over the decades. Today, Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold still has the Dueber-Hampden gold watch his mother wore around her neck. To her, it symbolized the distance she had come.
As for Somerdale, Ohio, where she grew up, it bears little resemblance to the place Rachel DeHoff knew. It was swept away by the Great Depression—literally. In the 1930s, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the Dover Dam was built upstream across the Tuscarawas River. Somerdale was moved in its entirety from what became known as “The Bottoms”—periodically washed out as a flood-control area—to higher ground. Even Somerdale Cemetery, where Rachel DeHoff’s parents were buried, was dug up and relocated above the flood plain. Today the population stands at 242, the sole business is a bar, and the coal shafts that Rachel DeHoff’s father, William, once worked are now exposed to the skies and reworked as strip mines.
Rachel DeHoff died on January 27, 1974, at the age of seventy-six. She is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, among so many others who weathered the Great Depression. She lies not far from the graves of James Brownlee, Allen Bennafield, and others who, that dark Christmas of 1933, reached out to B. Virdot.
So Little for Women
Rachel DeHoff’s life was a testament not only to the virtues of hard work but to the promise and reality of social mobility that had drawn so many to America. She had lifted herself out of the ranks of the poverty-stricken, where she had been born, and provided her children with lives of promise. As a woman, her achievements were all the more noteworthy, having overcome not only a lack of formal education, the Depression, and widowhood, but the many societal obstacles placed before her gender. But for every Rachel DeHoff there were many more women, no less intelligent or industrious, who could not surmount the barriers before them, barriers made all the more formidable by the Depression and the scramble for jobs and scarce resources.
Many of these women, talented and willing to work long hours under wretched circumstances, came to resent the unfairness of an economic system that was rigged against them. For a woman to succeed it was not enough for her to be a man’s equal. She must be better than him—or find another way around the system. Many of the women who wrote to B. Virdot faced just such a challenge.
Edith Marie Saunders, like Rachel DeHoff, was a woman of great determination, not someone who was looking for, or willing to take, a handout. She was born on May 12, 1909. Her early life was fraught with emotional and financial setbacks that toughened her up but also left her resentful. Her parents divorced when she was a child. She dropped out of school and at sixteen entered into a miserable marriage that lasted only a few months—just long enough for her to contract a venereal disease that left her unable to have children. She was struck by a car, which broke her collarbone and so damaged her leg that the doctor told her she would never walk again. She proved him wrong.
Edith was the oldest of three children and the only girl. Her childhood was briefer than most. Following her parents’ divorce, she found herself burdened with adult responsibilities. Something of a tomboy, she played ball with her brothers in the alley, but books were her refuge and her salvation, as they were for her mother, Minna. After the divorce, Minna sold the children’s literature series “My Book House” door-to-door. Minna Saunders wrote of her own childhood, “I used to go into the apple orchard, put apples in my pockets, and climb a tree and read Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”
She passed that passion on to her daughter, Edith. “I loved to read and always had books hidden in my room,” Edith Saunders wrote years later. “When I thought everyone was asleep, I would turn my light on and read for a long time.”
Independent, strong-willed, and miffed that what few breaks there were in this life favored men over women, Edith Saunders steered her own course. In 1932, as the Depression deepened, she left New York City and returned to Canton to help support her mother and younger brother, Jim. She invested her savings in a small mom-and-pop grocery store and for a time did well enough. The three of them lived in an apartment in the rear of the store. But the Depression caught up with them. At the time she wrote to B. Virdot, Edith Saunders had nothing.
504 NEWTON AVE. NW
CANTON, OHIO
DEC. 18, 1933
Dear Mr. Virdot:
I think that what you are doing this Christmas is a very beautiful and fine thing. It is something I had often wished I could do too.
It isn’t very easy to tell anyone about one’s misfortunes, except in just the manner you have suggested.
Of course, I may not be considered as a businessman, but I have had to bear all the responsibilities of a man during the greater part of this depression. Anyway—may I tell you about myself?
Over a year ago, I was living in New York City and was earning quite good money. Just about that time everything began to go wrong for my family here in Canton, my two brothers and mother.
I knew that I could not possibly support a family in New York on the salary I was making.
But I had saved some money and I returned to Canton and invested it in a small business.
My youngest brother worked with me, and together we managed to build up our business to the point where it was supporting all of us.
But just when everything was progressing beautifully, I lost my little business through the unscrupulous methods of another business man here in town. I was only twenty-three years of age and of course, too I tried it again but eventually lost everything except for about $50.
It broke up my family. One brother is in Michigan, the other in St. Louis Missouri. They are practically living on charity, and earn so little there is nothing to give to help mother and I.
But both mother and myself have always worked at direct selling, and together we have managed to scrape up a few dollars on commissions now and then, but always such a constant strain I fear that sometimes it becomes almost too great for us to bear.
We do not own a home here, nor furniture, tho we once did, like many others and we have no relations—only each other. Recently we were unable to pay any rent for five weeks and were ordered to move. A friend gave me money to pay a week’s rent at the address given but my new landlord found out about what happened, and I have been asked to move again.
It seems strange to think that probably some of the money I brought to Canton and invested or some of the money which passed through my hands while I was in business may have found its way into the pockets of the same landlord.
So much is done for men—so little for women who need it often worse than a man.
Many girls might have drifted into dreadful things to keep from starving—even suicide perhaps.
But that is such an ugly thing to do.
Tho I confess often I have thought how sweet it would be to lie down to rest, and feel my work was done, and that I never need face another day of fear again.
But that is dramatic and I am not a bit like that really. Only just once in a while, deep inside me. I have usually managed to find some humor in this tragedy.
I wonder what ten dollars would do for me—it has been such a long time since I had that much.
Pay rent for two weeks—or one week and buy food with the rest, or stockings, those pesky things that will wear out no matter how neatly one tries to keep them darned. And it does make a girl look so poor. Thank heaven I have decent enough clothes otherwise—and so do my brothers and mother.
Or best of all I could buy some gifts for those who are dear to me and whom I have always managed to remember—until this Xmas.
