IN CONSIDERATION OF
THE WHITE COLLAR MAN!
Suppose if I were confronted with an economic situation where the bread of tomorrow is the problem of today—there is a question in my mind if I would accept charity directly offered by welfare organizations. I know there are hundreds of men that are confronted with economic problems and think, feel and act the same way.
To men or families in such position the maker of this offer, who will remain unknown until the very end, will be glad if he is given an opportunity to help from 50 to 75 such families so they will be able to spend a merry and joyful Christmas.
To such men or families that will request such financial aid, the writer pledges that their identity will never be revealed. Please write:
B. VIRDOT,
GENERAL DELIVERY,
CANTON, OHIO
In writing, please familiarize me with your true circumstances and financial aid will be promptly sent.
Even before the ad appeared, it created such a stir in the newsroom that the editors decided to write a front-page story about the offer, assuring it citywide attention. The headline read: MAN WHO FELT DEPRESSION’S STING TO HELP 75 UNFORTUNATE FAMILIES: ANONYMOUS GIVER, KNOWN ONLY AS “B. VIRDOT,” POSTS $750 TO SPREAD CHRISTMAS CHEER. The story noted that five years earlier—before the crash and the Depression—the benefactor had enjoyed all the comforts of life and “money poured in.” Then the Hard Times caught up with him. Two years earlier—1931—he was broke and “headed into bankruptcy.
“But there were friends who believed in him,” the story went on, “and creditors who had confidence that he would come back. He hung on, and fought.” The story was a Depression-era parable of the Good Samaritan and a plea to others not to give up. There was also an ominous reference to the donor’s “remembrance of much darker days.” Just how the writer knew this much of the donor is unclear. Perhaps he was privy to the secret, or perhaps some intermediary shared this information with him.
The gift, the paper explained, was meant for those who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.” Such hesitation went beyond the stigma attached to accepting charity. Canton’s streets, like those of other Depression-era towns, teemed with grifters and con artists. An offer like B. Virdot’s was sure to draw as much suspicion as hope. Was this stranger who hid behind a false name really on the up-and-up? To the skeptics, the paper offered words of reassurance: “This is a genuine Christmas gift, involving no strings and no embarrassment to the recipients.”
“The name, ‘B. Virdot,’ is of course, fictitious,” the paper observed. “Perhaps the name ‘Kris Kringle’ is fictitious too, but the genuineness of the spirit of giving he represents has never been questioned.”
Not surprisingly, within two days, the post office was deluged with letters addressed to “Mr. B. Virdot, General Delivery, Canton, Ohio.” And though the offer was specifically addressed to the “White Collar Man,” it ignited a wave of appeals from men and women alike, from the elderly and from children. There was Harry Stanley, a blacksmith out of work for two years, who hoped his five small children might have something for Christmas; there were James Burson, a cook whose last job was in July 1931, and Dan Jordan, a Timken Company policeman whose pay and hours had been slashed and who fretted about his four children, two of whom were deaf; there was Joe Rogers, an unemployed janitor, and Charles Minor, a jobless steeple-jack living on bread and coffee; there was Ervin Neiss, a pipe fitter swamped by hospital bills and locked out from his own life savings by the American Exchange Bank, and Ethel Dickerhoff, a mother of nine whose husband was a plumber with no work in sight.
The letters came from every walk of life—from a roofer, a car dealer, a locksmith, a millworker, a carpenter, a stonecutter, a musician, a grocer, a farmer, an ex-con, a butcher, a bell captain, a roofer, a railroad man, a cobbler, a bricklayer, a bookie, a pastor’s assistant, and an array of fallen executives that read like a Who’s Who of city notables. In a postscript, former bookkeeper Richard E. Anderson wrote, “I am an office man.” But by then he’d been reduced to years of odd jobs. And there were children who secretly took up their pens and pencils and asked on behalf of parents too proud to seek help themselves, children like twelve-year-old Mary Uebing, whose widowed mother was trying to feed six.
How many letters came in—whether it was hundreds or thousands—no one knows. And true to his word, within days, the shadowy B. Virdot sent out the promised checks, all of them arriving before Christmas. Initially he had intended to send ten dollars to some seventy-five families, but he found himself unable to turn away so many worthy appeals, so he doubled the recipients and halved the amount to five dollars. Today, five dollars doesn’t sound like much, but back then, it would have been worth closer to one hundred dollars. For many, it was more than they had seen in a long time. In 1933, you could get a loaf of bread for seven cents, a pound of ground beef for eleven cents, a dozen eggs for twenty-nine cents. Eighteen cents bought a gallon of gas. The newly passed minimum wage was thirty-three cents, but many counted themselves lucky to make a dollar a day.
B. Virdot never imagined his modest checks would reverse the course of the Great Depression, but they did allow for many a child to go to bed with a full stomach, for presents to miraculously appear, for enough coal to heat the house that week and into the next, and some token payment for the family doctor who’d looked after a son’s polio, a daughter’s jaundice, or a father’s tuberculosis. Given that many families had six, seven, or eight children, the 150 checks cumulatively reached a wide swath of Canton’s neediest.
But B. Virdot’s gift was more than just a long shot at a lottery. It raised the spirits of thousands with the knowledge that someone—one of their own—cared. He had invited them to share with him their years of pent-up grief, disillusionment, and feelings of worthlessness, burdens that could not be shared with loved ones without the risk of breaking their spirits. That Christmas, even those B. Virdot did not choose received more than a glancing blessing from his gift.
But who was this B. Virdot? There must have been rampant speculation. Perhaps the donor was one of Canton’s millionaires, a Hoover, a Timken, or some other highborn son of privilege able to ride out the Depression in style. But they had not known any such “darker days,” as hinted at in the Repository. Perhaps, then, he was a man of the people, someone more like themselves who had also suffered. Had he perhaps been sitting there amid the congregants of the First Presbyterian Church, himself moved by Dickens’s tale of redemption? Perhaps he belonged to St. John’s, the nearby Catholic church. The deed itself shed little light on the man. But it was so Christian an act, this gift, with its wish that its recipients have a “merry and joyful Christmas.” Whoever he was, he must surely be a person of faith to shore up the faith of so many. And what had he endured—again, that reference to “darker days”—that he could understand so well what so many in government and charities did not—that those without were not without pride?
For seventy-five years, B. Virdot’s identity remained a secret. The letters seemingly vanished and B. Virdot went quietly to his grave, joined in time by all who had written to him. But the mystery surrounding his gift lingered: Who among so many needy had been chosen for such a gift? Did it make any difference in their lives? Who was B. Virdot and why all the secrecy? Finally, what in his own life had so moved him to make such a gift?
In the decades that followed, Canton once again enjoyed the blessings of prosperity. The factories boomed once more, the forges glowed, and the vacant storefronts came back to life. For many, Christmas became a time of overindulgence, when presents were piled high and food and drink were in abundance. Memories of the Hard Times grew mercifully dim, but so too did its lessons. Three generations later, it was as if none of it had happened—the Great Depression and B. Virdot’s gift both seemed beyond remote, mere figments of that collective imagination called “history.”
And there, this tale might well have ended, but it did not.
Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Suitcase
June 24, 2008. That day, my son Matt and I drove three hours from our log cabin in Bucksport, Maine, south to Kennebunk, to surprise my mother, Virginia. It was her eightieth birthday. After dinner, she took us to her storage room under the attic eaves. There was something she said she wanted me to have. I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the artifacts of her downsized life—a century-old brass cash register, a bronze stand for umbrellas and walking canes, an ivory mah-jongg set, a crated chandelier. She made straightaway for an old black suitcase that lay on a shelf, wedged between Grandfather’s adding machine and some Pyrex dishes. On top of it was a box of memorabilia and a wooden case of serving cutlery.
Mother freed the suitcase from its niche and set it on the floor. Inside, she said, were some “old papers”; exactly what, she did not know. But she knew about my interest in family history and my passion for research and, eager to clear out storage space in the cramped attic, she’d decided to make a present of the suitcase. Twice widowed, she had begun to pare away her belongings, not wishing to leave my sister Audrey and me with the sort of monumental cleanup she’d faced when her mother, Minna, passed three years earlier.
Like me, Minna was a pack rat. Both of us were teased for our inability to throw anything away. We were the family archivists. For us, every old scrap of paper—be it a canceled check, the stub of a movie ticket, a book of unused World War II ration stamps—held a narrative that could fill an afternoon. Clearing out the detritus of Minna’s ninety-seven years fell to her two surviving daughters, who had neither the time nor the patience to sift through the thousands of pages she’d accumulated. Much of it went out with the trash. That the suitcase and its contents escaped this fate was something of a miracle.
The next morning I loaded the suitcase, unopened, into the car, along with our backpacks and gear, and returned to the cabin. I slid the suitcase under my bed, where it remained for days. Then, one evening, I remembered it, and placed it on my bed. I studied it for a moment. But for a few bruises, it looked to be in decent shape. The corners were frayed and there were places where the faux leather had been scraped clean down to the gray boarding underneath, but the hinges were strong and the latches retained their snap. The suitcase measured eleven by eighteen inches and was six inches deep, with a black leather handle, pebbled to the touch. It was too big to be a briefcase, too small to be of much use as luggage.
Taped to the top of the suitcase was a four-by-six-inch piece of paper, with notes written in faded blue ink in my grandmother’s hand: “Memoirs: Minna’s Baby Book, etc., Mother and Father, Sam’s Clippings and Pictures, Sampler, Baby Dress, Wedding Book, Family Misc.” Beside one latch was a blue tag, evidence that it had once been shipped by Allied. It was one of a dozen moves the suitcase had endured on its journey from Canton to Miami to Kennebunk.
I popped open the latches. It released a musty smell, a mix of old papers, decayed suitcase lining, and air long trapped within. The top inside of the case had five yellowed pockets of varying sizes, each with a snap. I imagined what each might have held in its day—perhaps a brush, a comb, a mirror, a nail file, tweezers. The suitcase was crammed with old papers, stacked tightly, one upon the other.
On top was a large and tattered ten-by-thirteen-inch yellow envelope written in my grandfather Sam’s hand: “PERTANING XMAS GIFT DISTRIBTION.” He never was much for spelling.
Inside the packet was a tight sheaf of letters. I withdrew a handful. All of them were dated December 18, 1933—the week before Christmas. Among the letters I found a tiny black passbook from Canton’s George D. Harter Bank. It recorded a single deposit of $750. There were also some 150 canceled checks, each neatly signed “B. Virdot.” I had no idea what to make of any of it. The name “B. Virdot” sounded vaguely familiar, but why, I did not know. Even by my grandmother’s standards of hoarding, this collection of papers—canceled checks, all of them for five dollars, the passbook with an account opened and emptied within a week, the mass of letters—seemed unworthy of saving. Perhaps, I speculated, they were remnants of some exotic Christmas promotion my grandfather had staged at his clothing store.
I skimmed the first lines of a few of the letters but the handwriting was poor and put me off. I soon lost interest in them, distracted by more recognizable treasures—my grandmother’s baby book, letters from Sam and Minna’s courtship, dozens of faded black-and-white photos from the 1920s and 1930s, files from my grandfather’s business. The hours passed. It grew late and I was tired. I gathered up the contents of the suitcase, which now lay scattered across my bed, and set them back in the suitcase in the order in which I had found them, placing the packet of letters to this stranger, Mr. B. Virdot, back in its original position on top of all else. I then closed the suitcase, fastened the latches, and slid it back under my bed. I promptly forgot about it.
Then, some days later, I found myself again sorting through the suitcase, but this time I was drawn to the envelope marked “PERTANING XMAS GIFT DISTRIBTION.” This time I withdrew all the letters. There appeared to be a couple hundred. They were in no particular order, but someone—presumably my grandmother—had gone to some trouble to keep them all carefully together and safe. I began to read through them, beginning with those that looked most legible. They spoke of hunger and cold, of endless searches for work, of dead ends and growing doubts. I was startled by their candor and disturbed by the grim terrain they described. The street names and landmarks were all familiar to me. The writers poured their hearts out to this B. Virdot, describing their anguish in such detail that it made me uncomfortable, as if I were peering through a keyhole into the misery of strangers, or eavesdropping on others’ prayers. How, I wondered, had these letters and their appeals found their way into my grandparents’ hands?
It was then that I found, folded into quarters, a front-page section of the Canton Repository dated December 18, 1933. The paper was yellowed and torn at the edges. I gently unfolded it and set it on the bed, searching the page for some reference to my grandparents. There was none to be found. There was a story about a fatal car crash and another about two freighters caught in a Pacific gale. There was an account of a steel strike and a brief note about a burglary that netted the robbers twenty-five dollars. But there was nothing to link any of this to my grandparents.
