There was a certain paradox to the lesson of John Gissiner’s life and that of his family. He worked so hard it nearly killed him. But it was hard work that pulled his daughter-in-law Betty through those most difficult years. All around her others were laid off, but she had made herself indispensable. There was also some luck involved. At Stark Dry Goods, she worked from eight to six, six days a week. Her salary: eight dollars a week. “I was the only one they kept,” she said. Later she went into real estate and excelled as a salesperson.
Even John Gissiner’s great-grandchildren got the message about taking pride in one’s work. Among them is his fifty-four-year-old great-grandson Jeffrey Gissiner, who today is senior vice president of Key Bank, the successor to the George D. Harter Bank, located where it was when my grandfather opened the account in the name of B. Virdot that week before Christmas, 1933.
The Harter Bank had been closed from October 1931 until August 24, 1932. On that day, aided by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the bank began releasing some $750,000 to fourteen thousand depositors. The money went first to children with school savings accounts, holders of Christmas savings accounts, and account holders of less than fifty dollars each. Checking accounts were limited to a 10 percent withdrawal. The rest would have to make do for the time with certificates pledging to honor 85 percent of account values at some future date.
That was then. Today, with a staff of 120 people reporting to him, Jeffrey Gissiner heads the Direct Loan Center, overseeing all lending to consumers. In December 2008, Key Bank asked for and received some $2.5 billion from the Troubled Assets Recovery Program, or TARP, one of many banks around the nation intent upon not letting history repeat itself.
GRIM AS THE Great Depression was, Gissiner’s indefatigable daughter-in-law, Betty, was determined not to let it get her down. Through the entirety of the Hard Times, she not only held on to her job but also enjoyed herself. She knew Marjorie Gray, the lovely daughter of “Gray the Painter.” They were classmates at McKinley High. More than that, Betty wooed Marjorie’s boyfriend away from her. She was tall with dark hair, high cheekbones, and a knack for finding a good time even in the worst of times.
In 1933, the year her father-in-law wrote to Mr. B. Virdot, Betty was twenty-one. She and her husband, Karl, refused to surrender themselves to the economic pall. They were young and full of life, the Depression be damned. On weekends, she and Karl and a merry band of friends took the trolley to Canton’s Meyers Lake Park with its celebrated Moonlight Ballroom and rides. Laffing Sal was one of the park’s star attractions, a ride in the dark where lovers cuddled in two-seated cars and stole kisses as it careened around one steep curve after another, all to the ceaseless cackling of a woman’s laugh.
Misery and entertainment converged on the floor of the park’s Moonlight Ballroom, where those whose backs were against the wall competed in the notorious marathon dance, a dance-till-you-drop elimination in which the last couples standing won cash prizes. The marathon of 1933 began on June 7 with seventy-seven couples. The jobless, teenagers out of school and unable to find work, and professional marathoners all took to the floor that day in the midst of a record heat wave. They were given five-minute breaks every fifteen minutes, twenty-four hours a day. For the surviving three couples, the purse was a kingly fourteen hundred dollars. Spectators paid ten cents during the day, thirty cents in the evening, and forty cents on weekends to watch the ordeal.
Betty Gissiner, her husband, and their friends would show up around midnight and stay until three in the morning, taking a forty-cent seat in the spectators’ gallery. “Those dancers would just sort of hang on to each other, their heads on each other’s shoulders, and stumble around, and we would sit there like fools and watch them. It was a crazy time,” she remembers. Crazy, indeed. The ordeal went on for 3,450 hours—some 144 days. It was hailed as a world record.
In the end, three couples were left standing, and after they were declared winners, they collapsed from exhaustion within minutes of one another. Canton’s mayor, James Seccombe, handed out the prize money. First place went to Bob “Popeye” Everhard and his partner, Betty Lee Doria. It was to be the last marathon dance held in the Moonlight Ballroom. Conscience and concern for the dancers ended it, a pitiable benchmark of desperation during the Great Depression.
The marathon said something of the Depression that few wished to acknowledge: that if the Hard Times produced countless examples of selflessness and compassion, like those of Mattie and Joseph Richards, or Maude Burnbrier and Mary Brigham, they also gave rise to a passivity in which the eye became increasingly accustomed to the sight of human suffering and the heart grew calloused to the anguish all around it. In a city like Canton—and there were many Cantons, factory towns where industries limped along—want became the norm, and while few were indifferent, many became inured to the pain of others and resigned to their own. In each there was a measure of altruism and courage, and in each, frustration, melancholy, and resentment.
It was not coincidental that the sight of couples too exhausted to hold their heads up was transformed into a spectator sport. The marathon competitions reflected both the best and the worst of that era—the stamina and the resignation, the cooperation and the growing isolation. Hour after hour, day after day, those on the dance floor came to represent the anguish of ordinary individuals and families propping one another up, incapable of going on and unable to quit. The marathon turned misery into entertainment and rewarded the few survivors with a handsome prize, demonstrating what one and all already feared—that the sacrifices of the rest had all been for naught. Those who paid to watch fastened their hopes onto one couple or another, cheering them on as they would have had others cheer them on. It was the truest rendering of the times in which they lived, and the cruelty of the event was not so much witnessed as experienced. Those out on the ballroom floor were proxies for a town and a nation so down on its luck that even the romance of music and dance could be transformed into a trial of will. Perhaps the marathon was banned not only because of its inhumanity to the dancers but because of the toll it took on those who watched them.
VI.
Families
The Crisis That Pulled Them Apart
Black Hand Gang
Only in hindsight could one be tempted to romanticize the Depression, to imagine it as a kind of ritualistic purification of the American soul. It is impossible to count the casualties—physical and psychological—or to assess the damage done to the individual spirit over the course of that decade. Those who survived were often of extraordinary mettle, as evidenced by the Greatest Generation. But there were also the many who might be counted among the emotionally missing in action, those who did not recover from seeing a lifetime’s work erased, their possessions scattered, or their families dissolved.
That was what made the Christmas of 1933 so special and so painful for so many. Though it was a time for families to gather together, many families were disintegrating under the financial and emotional stresses. It was a story as tragic as it was common. As the numbers of children “orphaned” by poverty grew, so too did the place of Canton’s orphanage, the Fairmount Home. For others, the dissolution of one family gave rise to the birth of another, as others came forward to provide for them. Often these were not people of great means, but working-class neighbors barely able to keep their own heads above water.
One need look no farther than Bender’s tavern—not the dining room that catered to Canton businessmen like my grandfather, but behind the dark oak swinging doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen—the divide between white collar and blue. There worked a man named Frank Nicholas Margo. At fifty-six, he was a devout Catholic, a member of St. John’s Church, the League of the Sacred Heart, and the Altar Society.
Once, before the Hard Times, he had had his own restaurant. Now he wielded the cleaver as Bender’s meat cutter, trimming prime ribs, sirloins, and flank steaks that ended up on the plates of men like my grandfather and, in better times, such distinguished diners as George Monnot and Frank Dick.
But in 1933, though Frank Margo barely had enough to feed himself, he and his wife, Louise, had taken it upon themselves to provide for others, especially orphans. But by Christmas 1933, Frank Margo was largely incapacitated by a stroke.
On the evening of December 18, 1933, Louise noticed B. Virdot’s ad in the Canton Repository. She took up a pencil and wrote this note:
Dear Sir
I noticed in this evening’s paper that you want to help unfortunate families for Christmas.
During the depression our business failed and we lost our home. Three months ago my husband had a stroke. His right arm and leg is paralyzed. His mind is also affected and he cannot talk. We are wondering will this be the last Xmas our little family will all be together. We have two adopted daughters. The youngest 11 and the other 14 . . . frequently I visit two orphan children at Fairmount Childrens home. The one girl is 14 and stayed with us one year, her little sister is 9 and I cared for her for 6 years. Last month
I visited them and they asked me if I couldn’t come and get them and let them spend their Xmas vacation with us. I told them if it was at all possible for me to come after them I would do so but I do not even have car fare to go after them and take them back and buy them a few little things for Xmas. It would make them so happy to be with us and in our sorrow make us happy to—to think that some kind hearted person made it possible for us to bring joy and happiness to others. God has given you a noble and good heart and I am sure he will reward you. May you continue to prosper even more so in the future that you have in the past is my earnest wish.
WILL YOU KINDLY THINK OF
US AND MAKE US HAPPY ON
THAT GREAT DAY. I REMAIN
VERY TRULY YOURS,
MRS. L. MARGO
800 9TH ST. N.W. CANTON, O.
Days later, a check for five dollars arrived in the mail signed by B. Virdot. On December 31, 1933, Louise Margo wrote again:
MR. B. VIRDOT.
Dear Sir,
Please accept my sincere thanks for the check which you sent me. The children sure are enjoying their vacation. I am taking them back tomorrow. Our little girl has been seriously ill for the past week but today made a change for the better. May God give you good health, happiness and Prosperity in the New Year and all your life. Again I thank you and will remember you in my prayers.
I REMAIN TRULY YOURS,
MRS. L. MARGO
800 9TH ST. N. W.
THREE YEARS BEFORE Louise Margo wrote her letter, the 1930 U.S. Census records that she and husband Frank owned their own restaurant. Frank was listed as proprietor, Louise as the waitress. But in the Hard Times that followed, they lost the restaurant and much more. The census shows they had not two but five children living with them at 1009 Troy Place Northwest. Eleven-year-old Mary and eight-year-old Annie were listed not as adopted children but simply as daughters. At the time, the two girls were unaware that they were adopted. The Margos had no biological children of their own.
In addition, the census records that Dorothy Shingle, age five; Bobby Shingle, age two; and Martha Shingle, an infant, lived with the Margos. They are listed as adopted. What became of the Shingle children is not known except that following Frank Margo’s stroke, the Margos were no longer able to feed and clothe so large a family and took the Shingle siblings to the orphanage. There is no mention of them in subsequent Canton city directories, telephone books, marriage or probate records, or county orphanage records. They simply vanished. Perhaps they moved away. Perhaps they were adopted by another family and changed their names.
The story of how the other two daughters, Mary and Ann, came to be in the Margo home begins even before the Great Depression. Glimpses of the story can be gleaned from orphanage records and from the memories of Mary’s seventy-one-year-old daughter, Shirley.
That story begins on March 29, 1910, when an eighteen-year-old farm laborer named Antonio Sabelli, from the village of Agnone in southern Italy, set out from Naples aboard the SS Madonna bound for America. He traveled by himself. On the manifest he listed that he was headed for Canton, Ohio, to join Gelsomina Gualfieri, who would become his wife. She would later be known as Susie. In 1922 he and Susie and their four children—Joe, Nicholas, Mary, and Ann—purchased a farm just outside Canton. Eight decades later Mary’s daughter, Shirley Crew, would pass on the story as it was told to her—that Antonio Sabelli abandoned the family and returned to Italy, leaving a distraught and crazed wife to try to feed and provide for their four children.
It is undisputed that Antonio Sabelli disappeared in 1922, but the records, sealed for nearly ninety years, tell a different story. An October 13, 1932, memo from the Catholic Community League to the Fairmount Children’s Home reports that no sooner had Antonio Sabelli purchased the farm than the notorious Black Hand Gang attempted to shake him down, threatening to harm him or his family if he did not make payments to them. Coming from the region of southern Italy where Sabelli had, he was no stranger to the Mafia or its tactics. He knew the first payment to such gangsters would not be the last.
Instead of meeting their demands he secretly went to the Canton police and set up a sting operation. When the mobsters came for their money, the police were waiting. Four gang members were convicted of extortion and sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary.
But not long after that, Antonio Sabelli disappeared. The memo speculates that he either ran away to escape the Mob or, more likely, was kidnapped and murdered. In either case, no trace of him has ever been found. In September 1923, the Catholic Community League, in a final effort to locate Sabelli, placed an ad in three Italian-language newspapers in New York soliciting information about him. There was no response.
He left behind his wife, Susie, two little girls, Mary and Ann, and two sons, Nicholas and Joe. Susie was in dire condition when the authorities found her. She had no job, spoke no English, and was found alone in a farmhouse with four hungry children living in squalor. She had retreated into her own little world, neglecting both herself and her children.
A 1932 family history written by the Catholic Community League describes the Susie Sabelli they found: “Patient is much reduced physically, probably gastric ulcer. Neglectful of personal appearance. Depressed and agitated. Talks of suicide and destruction of her children. Supposed cause of insanity is desertion of her husband, poverty and personal harm. Patient said she wished to destroy herself, did not wish to see her children live. . . . Intense abstraction exhibits much fear.”
