Gussie’s early life and Sam’s were marked by such losses. Their mother, Hilda, had suffered at least two miscarriages, and a daughter named Rozlah died as a child in Romania. The children were led to believe her death was the result of an evil eye put on the child by Gypsies. So when Shirley was pregnant with her daughter, Eva, Gussie insisted that red ribbons be placed all around the house to ward off evil. But the real curse on the family came from within—it was their iciness of heart. Upon the death of her son Meyer, Gussie declared, “Well, God punished him because he got married and left me alone.”
Shirley was the only relative of Sam’s he felt he could trust. She was a lifelong confidante of his and knew some of his secrets. When Shirley was a young girl living in the projects of Pittsburgh, Sam gave her a powder-blue Dan Millstein designer suit, which she wore to the few special occasions she attended in her early life.
Shirley is warm and caring, but she too inherited the familial insecurities rooted in the long-ago pogroms of Romania and reinforced by the Nazis. “Jewish people now think we’re good here in America,” she tells me. “Don’t believe it. All it takes is one rough leader and we are all gone.”
For many of the descendants of Jacob and Hilda Finkelstein, 107 years of relative safety and acceptance in this country counted for little. As eager as they were to put the past behind them, they do not let go of history. Gussie’s mother was part of the Finkelstein conspiracy that took an oath not to reveal the family’s past. Her daughter, Shirley, to this day remembers her words, spoken in Yiddish: “Don’t say anything. I was born in America. The whole family was born in America.” She also remembers her telling her never to utter the name Finkelstein or they might send her back to the world from which they had escaped. My own mother said that not once in her entire life did she hear her father say the word Romania.
Finally, there was Sam’s youngest brother, Al. On his August 31, 1934, marriage license, he lists his place of birth as “Pittsburgh, Pa.” But unlike Sam, in 1941 he applied for U.S. citizenship and disclosed that he had been born in Dorohoi, Romania. He had a son, Jack, and a daughter, Ferne. Al bore some of the same emotional scarring as his siblings. He never spoke of his father and rarely of his childhood. “They certainly were not emotionally healthy adults,” says Ferne. “I felt that my whole life, I fought to not be like my father who was—I was the apple of his eye—I loved him absolutely—he was an amazing father—but he was a workaholic. He could not easily be with other people. He really never had friends. His entire life was working.”
In time, the enmity that simmered between Sam and his siblings in the thirties passed. Over the years, Sam and his brother Al reached some reconciliation. His name appears on Minna’s gift list, as do Esther’s and Gussie’s and Sarah’s. But there was no armistice with Mack. It was as if he never existed. I never met any of Sam’s siblings and did not learn of their existence until well after they were all dead and gone. That decision had been made for me.
Somehow, Sam Stone navigated through all the same treacherous shoals—economic and emotional—that claimed his siblings. He did not emerge wholly unscathed. His attitude toward money, his determination to erase his childhood and place of birth, his fixation on anti-Semitism and the Nazis, were all vestiges of early trauma. And there were doubtless wounds of which even today I am unaware. But his capacity to feel and express love, his compassion and humor, these were largely intact.
To salvage these traits, he had had to reinvent himself, and not only by claiming to be native-born. “Mr. B. Virdot” was the gift he gave others, but it was also the gift he gave himself. It was the right to a second chance, to be reborn as someone else. He had spent his youth under the thumbs of two tyrants—the state and his own father. As a child and an adolescent, he had been largely impotent in the face of the terrible want and injustice that surrounded him. To finally be in a position to help others represented a sea change in his life. It was not external recognition that he hungered for, but the internal affirmation that such giving conferred upon him. It was a statement not of net worth but of his own personal worth, and the value of others with whom, despite a world of differences, he shared so much.
VII.
An Opportunity to Help
A Dog Named Jack
Mr. B. Virdot didn’t just spring into being that week of December 1933. He had been taking shape for decades, in the person of Sam Stone and, before that, the refugee Sam Finkelstein. Sam always believed in repaying his debts, and by 1933 he knew he owed much to his adopted country. He also was a man of some compassion, though its source is not so easily identified. As a child no one in his family showed affection or took care of him—even a broken leg did not command sympathy. He knew what it was to go it alone, to have the world rebuff him. For years it was all he knew. But instead of hardening his heart to the world, his own hardships seemed to have made him all the more open to treating the wounds of others.
Having endured so much himself, he developed a soft spot for anything that was unable to care for itself. In Canton, he once came upon a pigeon with a broken wing. He took it home, filled the tub with water, and over the course of many days nursed the bird back to health. As long as he tended to the bird, the bathroom was off-limits to family members. It was one of many such tender acts his children remember. He also brought home an array of stray dogs, mangy and unwanted creatures to which he devoted himself. Indeed, the more neglected they appeared, the more determined he was to make room for them. His favorite was a mutt named Trixie. He first found her in the middle of the road, bloodied from having been struck by a car.
He felt that same compulsion to reach out to people in distress. He knew how even the smallest of gestures of kindness could make an otherwise brutal landscape habitable. In this he was not alone. The more overwhelming the Depression grew, the more important became these myriad small acts of caring and giving. Every child of that era has a memory of someone doing something that lifted the pall, if only for a moment. Sometimes, it was something that was not done—an act of restraint—that counted for much. The children of Roy Teis would come to learn this.
In Roy Teis’s letter to Mr. B. Virdot, he wrote:
I have been out of employment for 15 months and I have a family of eight children ranging in age from 2 yrs. To 16 yrs. We have always had a nice Christmas for the children but this year seemed to be a bad one. . . .
In the end the Teis family could not sustain itself. The eight children were scattered among nearly as many foster homes, and would not see one another for a decade. But each of the surviving children says their lives were the better for it.
One of the daughters was assigned to a “foster farm” on the edge of town, where she and a dozen other girls “orphaned” by the Depression formed their own family. To this day, they, “the sisters,” gather to celebrate the good fortune that brought them together. Another sister enjoyed sixty years of a solid marriage and two children, one of whom is mentally disabled. But she has cherished caring for that son, and their relationship has come to define the meaning of family.
That was part of the legacy of the Depression, an appreciation of family that was more expansive than it had previously been. Families dissolved and reconstituted themselves sometimes years later. Neighbors, aunts and uncles, even complete strangers, stepped in to provide food, shelter, and stability to those whose own homes had not withstood the ravages of the Depression. And when the children of that era became parents themselves, they knew, having seen their own families scattered by want, not to take togetherness for granted.
But as the Teis children would be the first to admit, it was often the small acts of kindness that made all the difference in their lives. The children had a dog named Jack, a police dog that wasn’t much to look at but was all they had in those terrible years as the family was dissolving from poverty and marital disputes. Back then, there sometimes wasn’t enough food to go around for the children, much less for a dog, so pets were left to wander the back alleys and streets to fend for themselves, foraging among the trash.
A neighbor didn’t like Jack showing up on her property and notified the dog catcher, who promptly responded with a visit to the Teis home.
He searched for the vagrant mutt, but at first could not find him. The Teis children were hiding him in the dark under the front porch. One daughter secured his hind legs, another his front paws. A brother muzzled him with his hand lest he bark and give the hiding place away. The dog catcher thought he heard something stirring under the porch and bent down for a closer look. In the shadows of the porch he saw the children desperately trying to silence their beloved Jack. The children knew they had been discovered and braced themselves to lose the last thing they had left. But what the dog catcher could see in the children’s eyes, even in those shadows, convinced him not to do his duty and he pretended he hadn’t seen them. When he drove off down the street the children celebrated.
Sometime later, when the family collapsed and was parceled off among many different families across the city, Jack somehow disappeared, not to be seen again. It would have been a crushing blow for the young ones, but in their new homes awaited other dogs, and to them they gave the love they’d lost.
The Milk of Human Kindness
Sam 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:
DEC. 18, 1933
MR. B. VIRDOT:
Dear Sir:
After reading your article in the paper tonight, it seems too good to be true. Many a day in the last year we thought we must ask for charity but we managed to get by.
Mr. Beggs is a salesman and has been for seven years and we always made a good living until a year ago. We were buying our home in the N.W. end on Frazier Ave., but lost that. Then a year ago in September we lost a baby boy and I was sick nearly the whole winter which meant doctor bills. In April of this year our little girl 2 years old had to have a mastoid operation. Dr. Underwood was just grand and said he would operate and would wait on his money and we have been unable to pay him a cent yet. We do have a large Dr. bill at Dr. Maxwell, a hospital bill, grocery at Mr. Brown’s on Navarre rd. The last two I have been paying a dollar on whenever possible. Also owe $16 at Jacobs funeral home yet. The Superior Dairy was just wonderful and let us have milk for seven months without paying anything. We have been able to pay our monthly milk bill for the last six months but are unable to pay any of the back bill. We live in a Timken house and they have left us in a year without paying rent which we were surely thankful for but the first of September we either had to pay or move so we have managed to pay the last three months and sure do hope we are able to some day pay back the $260 we owe them. We have four children, three boys and a girl and it sure takes some managing to provide for them.
My husband is selling sweepers and he surely works hard and what he does make it is mostly on repair jobs.
It surely looked like we would have to disappoint our children on Christmas for we didn’t know where the money was coming from to buy them something. They wrote their letters to Santa Claus and it looks like he may be real and I am so sorry to burden someone else with our troubles.
We want to thank you for helping all these people and if we are not included in the 75 we will only be glad you are helping someone else. Sincerely Yours,
MR. & MRS. R. M. BEGGS
1390 ROSLYN AVE. S.W.
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.
