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.
“Too Big-Hearted”
Many 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.
CANTON OHIO
DEC. 19TH 1933
MR. B. VIRDOT:-
Dear Sir:-
I am writing you in regards to your piece you had in the Evening Paper that you were willing to help any Canton Families that were in need, and I feel as I am one of them and when you read this letter I think you will agree with me. I am a disabled American World War veteran; and I have a family of 5 to support but find it is very hard to do with the small income I have; let alone giving my children a Christmas which they are looking forward for. But they will be very much disappointed this Christmas unless the good lord gives me a way to give them a little something for Christmas if it is only a Dinner. Two years ago I was in business of my own. I had a grocery store at the corner of 7th st. and Correll Ave. N.E. But during this Depression I had to close the doors because I was too big hearted and could not tell my Trade No, and keep on carring [carrying] them on the books with the expectations that it would soon end and I would get my money back. But instead I went farther in debt and finely had to close my doors and then move. And I have not worked for one year until the C.W.A. put me to work three weeks ago at $15.00 a week of which I take $10.00 and pay on my bills I made while I was in the Grocery. For I don’t want to see anyone go through what I have in the last 2 years. And with the good lord’s help and my good health, I will struggle to get them paid weather my children have Christmas or not. Last July I spent in Aultman Hospital and several times I thought I would have to break up my family but with God’s help and my struggling I have held them together.
After reading this letter if you think I need your help it will be very much appreciated; And I thank you very much for helping me give my children a Happie Christmas.
I AM AS EVER YOURS,
MR. CHARLES. A, WINTERS
1016 6TH ST. N.E.
CANTON
OHIO.
That Charles Winters could not say no to his neighbors in need is no surprise to his surviving grandchildren, who remember him as a man of meager means but a bountiful heart. Sandra Jordan considered herself one of his favorite grandchildren. “I walked to his house every Sunday after church and he always gave me a silver dollar,” she recalls. “I still have them to this day. I would never spend those.”
Charles Winters couldn’t help but identify with those in need. His father, Amos, was a cobbler who, according to the 1900 U.S. Census, at thirty-five could neither read nor write. But a decade later, he could proudly check “yes” to both reading and writing. Perhaps he had been tutored by his literate wife, Alice. Son Charles was born in July 1892 and married Florence Bair when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one.
Florence wore braces on both legs, having been stricken with polio as a child. She limped, but there was nowhere she couldn’t reach. She was stern, not the softy that her husband was, and the children and grandchildren gravitated to Charles for affection. They muddled through each setback and difficulty, determined to keep the family together. In the midst of the Depression, Charles’s widowed father lived with the family, still working as a cobbler and taking in repairs until his death.
It could be said that Charles’s willingness to help others eventually cost him his life. He had a severe heart condition but insisted on pitching in to paint his son’s new home on Tyler Avenue. It was then, in 1959, that he was felled with a heart attack, from which he died soon after. “Grandpa had a big heart,” says his granddaughter Sandra.
Charles Winters and his descendants have never had it easy, but they didn’t expect it to be otherwise. Tragedy, illness, layoffs—and big hearts—run in the family. (One of Winters’s sons, Arthur, was killed in World War II.) Charles Winters’s son Charles Jr. had five children—four biological, one adopted. But he could never afford a car—he walked or took the bus everywhere. He was often furloughed from his job, even when it seemed the rest of the country prospered. He worked at Canton Drop Forge, grinding steel for a living. He never fully recovered from an industrial accident there that shattered his leg.
His daughter Sandra, now sixty-seven, manages a convenience store and filling station, and is saving money to visit her son in Dallas. “My husband worked at a steel mill and got laid off quite often,” she says. “I just learned to live frugal. Most of my kids are the same way. They have learned when there are hard times you got to be careful.”
Like many children whose parents grew up during the Depression, sisters Sandra and Carol inherited a scaled-down map of life. Christmas in the Winters home was special, never because of the volume of presents but because it was time shared. “What we got was enough for us,” says Carol.
Enough was a byword of the Depression. It was less a measure of what one had than what one was made of. It was about conservation, not consumption. Enough was a word around which an entire family could rally, a gesture of faith but also of defiance. It was to count one’s blessings aloud, to shore up the soul, and to hold despair at bay.
“We had a good life, whether my dad was out of work or not,” remembers Carol. “We are happy. We have each other. We love each other. We survive, we survive.”
It was and is enough.
Shipmates
Sam learned many lessons in the first years of the Depression when he saw his business wither, his debts deepen, and his way of life imperiled. None was more important than the realization that the town’s survival and return to prosperity was tied to the well-being of the entire community. The old clannish alignments by class, ethnic group, and national origin would no longer suffice. No one, not the Timkens, the Hoovers, or the Beldens, was immune to the poverty and despair engulfing the city. Like rising waters, it threatened to wash away one and all. The storefronts would remain vacant, the mills and plants nearly deserted, the town an economic wasteland, as long as so many were down-and-out. There was a new imperative emerging and it was based on community. B. Virdot’s gift, while voluntary, recognized that something was both expected of every citizen and due every citizen. Before the Depression drew to a close, the generation that came of age in the Hard Times would soon be called upon to make extraordinary sacrifices, but they had already come to appreciate both the importance of individual courage and the indispensability of common purpose.
Such values were a part of everyday life in the home of Nora Romesberg. Her letter to B. Virdot:
Dear Sir, a kind neighbor showed me this article in the paper and I believe in prayers being answered.
My husband has been out of work, he even applied on the CWA thinking he could get a pay check before Christmas but it is of no avail. My children are like any other children but instead of toys they need clothing.
If you doubt this statement come down and investigate because if you see our living conditions you will certainly understand. . . . Sorry to say but I do not know where my next month’s rent is coming from. If you don’t help us in this way maybe you could aid in getting my husband some kind of employment.
SIGNED
MRS. NORA ROMESBERG
Nora Romesberg lived to be ninety-four. Her son Clyde, now eighty-eight, was thirteen that Christmas of 1933. Always when he returned home from school he took off his shoes to conserve the soles. The boys slept on the floor—there were no beds or mattresses, just blankets. At night before the kerosene lamp was doused, their mother and father would take turns reading to them from the Bible. Clyde remembers being embarrassed by the bright patterns in the shirts he wore to school, cut from his mother’s worn-out dresses. He remembers that his birthday was an occasion for joking, not presents. But as part of his job for Western Union, he would bicycle to the city’s outskirts, a telegram in his hat, and sing “Happy Birthday” to wealthier citizens. Dressed in a snappy uniform, he also worked as an usher, taking patrons down the aisles of the fabulous Palace Theater.
He remembers too how neighbors pulled together to get through those times. The homes were heated by coal, but there was seldom enough money to buy it. So the neighborhood boys would go down to where the B&O Railroad ran and search along the tracks for coal that had fallen off passing trains. They carried burlap sacks and divided among themselves what they could scavenge. “We all worked together,” recalled Romesberg. “You had certain obligations.” A policeman was stationed at the rail yard to ensure that no one took coal off the open cars, though he often pitied the boys and, with his arm, appeared to “accidentally” bump a few extra lumps of coal onto the tracks. They quickly disappeared into the closest burlap sack.
For Clyde Romesberg and his family, the desperate search for coal to keep warm carried with it a personal irony. Clyde Romesberg’s father was an out-of-work coal miner.
The hardship Clyde Romesberg experienced and the fellowship that was borne of sharing those hardships with so many others defined him as a man and prepared him to endure with quiet dignity even the worst travails of World War II. During his two and a half years in the navy, Romesberg served on an aircraft carrier, the USS Santee. At 7:40 A.M. on October 25, 1944, a Japanese suicide bomber carrying a 63-kilogram bomb hit the Santee’s flight deck. Romesberg took shrapnel to the head and hand. Blood poured from his wounds. Sixteen minutes later, a torpedo fired from a Japanese sub struck the ship, flooded compartments, and caused it to list 6 degrees. Flames erupted and crew members were burned clear down to the bone. Romesberg, the shrapnel still in his forehead, found himself applying ointment to other men’s burns and dressing their wounds. They were worse off and needed tending, and only by acting together could the ship be righted and the crew saved.
