A Secret Gift (12 page)

You are doing a very good thing and I wish there were a lot more people like you. The people who are lucky enough to have no worry where the next meal is coming from don’t realize how it is to be like we are and a lot of others.

—LETTER FROM RUTH A MAN TO MR . B . VIRDOT

W
hen Sam Stone first appeared in Canton in 1918, he was thirty and living in a single rented room. He held at least two jobs, one in a clothing shop, the other as a freelance ad man. A 1920 magazine,
The Metro Annual,
features an oval photo of a young Sam Stone in cravat and coat, and says of him, “Samuel: This young man eats advertising, sleeps with it and works with it. Short of Stature with a winning smile that covers his entire face, he is a new member and will undoubtedly . . .” But the page is torn and the rest of the sentence is lost. The magazine was right. Sam got little sleep. His feverish schedule left him exhausted. To stay awake driving between jobs he would suck on lemon drops.

Sam was a young man in a rush, anxious to shed his past, impatient to prove himself. He’d come to the right place. Canton in the 1920s was full of just such people. The town welcomed newcomers and immigrants, no questions asked—the kind of place where one might even reinvent oneself. Those with rough edges and a penchant for cutting corners would have felt right at home. Bootleggers, bookies, prostitutes, officials on the take, and schemers of every description mingled freely with miners and millworkers and shopkeepers.

“Little Chicago,” as Canton was then known, was on the Lincoln Highway, at the crossroads of corruption between New York and “Big Chicago.” The
New York Times
, in July of 1926, offered its readers a sampling of the lexicon of Canton’s underworld: a plainclothes policeman “is a ‘sport,’ a uniformed officer is a ‘harness bull.’ Dope peddlers are known variously as ‘shovels,’ ‘reindeers’ or ‘angels.’ Likewise a pistol is a ‘silencer’ or a ‘six best friends’ if it happens to hold six cartridges.’ ” The portion of town where crime was most concentrated was “The Jungle.” There were plenty of honest, hardworking men and women living in Canton, but even they had grown blasé about the rackets and the vice, as long as they knew their place. “Public indifference” was the phrase cited by the
Times
. Unlike some cities, business in Canton’s many brothels was all but dead on the weekends. That was the customers’ family time. And if a john died in flagrante delicto, the police could be counted on to arrange for the body to be found in a more proper setting—they could do no less for the family. For all its flaws, the town was tolerant, forgiving, and oblivious to pedigrees.

In such a place, it took Sam little time to establish himself, acquiring a men’s clothing shop on Tuscarawas, one of the city’s main commercial streets. It proudly bore his name, Stone’s Clothes. Beside him was Petropoulos & Xynos, the shoe-shine business of two Greek immigrants; a confectionary run by Italian immigrants, the Marsinos; and a barbershop belonging to native-born Lester Link. From Sam’s store could be seen the imposing Stark County Court House with its four gilded angels blowing trumpets from a soaring bell tower. By the 1920s he was one of Canton’s up-and-coming merchants.

Evidence of Sam’s success is to be found in the suitcase that holds the B. Virdot letters. There is a menu dated July 10, 1922, from aboard the RMS
Majestic,
at the time the world’s largest ocean liner. Once Germany’s prized SS
Bismarck,
it had passed to the Brits under the Treaty of Versailles and was now the flagship of the White Star Line. That evening, Sam had a choice of “Sea Bass, Petits Paysanne, Roisettes of Mutton, St. Germain, or Philadelphia Chicken, Chipolata.” It appears that Sam also had a traveling companion, doubtless a lady friend. The personalized menu notes that it is for “Mr. Stone and Party.”

From another such card in the suitcase it seems that he had become a man not only of means but of some leisure as well. He did not return from abroad for at least five weeks. On a card dated August 17, 1922, he waxed poetic: “Grotesque and massive . . . wind tossed and rugged; limitless distances, blue waters bulwarked against the most wonderful ship in the world—and wine . . . and more wine—and life full of the gladness of living. That’s the night before the last night on board the steamer ‘Paris.’ ” During the voyage he was served his first artichoke. He attacked it with knife and fork until someone suggested it be taken apart delicately, leaf by leaf. That was not how Sam approached life.

On his passport application dated May 2, 1921, he wrote “I solemnly swear that I was born at Pittsburgh, on or about the 1st day of March, 1889, that my father Jacob Stone was born in Russia, and is now deceased. That he emigrated to the United States from the port of [unknown], on or about [unknown], 1875 . . .” He said his father had been naturalized as a citizen of the United States on May 15, 1883, as shown by the accompanying Certificate of Naturalization.

But in a thorough search of the records, I could find no evidence of his naturalization. I scoured the U.S. Census but could turn up no reference to the family living in Pittsburgh in that period. In my sweep of all documents, I found nothing to support any of the claims made on his passport application. That’s because, as I would discover over the ensuing months, it was all pure fantasy. There was no such naturalization in 1883. And contrary to Sam’s sworn statement, his father, Jacob, was not born in Russia and was still very much alive at the time he applied for the passport. Almost everything Sam Stone wrote and swore to was fictitious. It pains me to admit it, even now, but in so doing, he had knowingly committed a federal crime. If found out, it would likely have led authorities to a host of other misrepresentations and ultimately put him and his hard-earned reputation in serious jeopardy.

Sam had written that the purpose of his trip to Switzerland, Romania, France, Italy, and Jugo-Slavia was to explore the export and import business. But the State Department and Canton’s local postmaster general had their doubts. Their suspicions were piqued by a confidential interview with W. G. Saxton, a cashier with Canton’s First National Bank, who informed investigators that he suspected Sam’s true purpose was to visit relatives. It mattered because at the time the country was traumatized by the influx of poor immigrants and demanded of passport applicants that they swear their purpose was not to aid in bringing more foreigners into the country.

As the investigators eyed Sam’s passport application, his May 18 departure drew closer. Given the wealth of supporting documentation, including a birth certificate, they were unable to challenge it. Despite their suspicions, he was granted a passport, which arrived by special delivery just days before his scheduled departure. But the contradictions and inconsistencies in his story would surface again and again, and the lies would grow ever more convoluted until even when he wanted to tell the truth he could not. In a town like Canton in the 1920s, where the underworld flourished and the authorities took little note, taking such liberties with the truth might have seemed petty enough, but the potential consequences would weigh upon him for decades to come, and the more he gained in wealth and stature, the more he had to fear from the truth.

I
did not need to know the story of his life to know that Sam had suffered. His childish jokes were often the only glimpse we would get of his childhood. “I am on a seafood diet,” he used to say, then pause. “I eat all the food I see.” As he delivered the punch line, he would rub his ample belly. Sam was amused by the very notion of a diet and the idea that one might be in so privileged a position as to be able to choose what one eats. We, his family, understood without his ever having to say so that behind the joke was a memory of hunger. When, in his ad, he wrote the words “the bread of tomorrow,” he was not speaking metaphorically. In the world from which he came and the one to which his appeal was addressed, bread was the answer to many a prayer. In December 1933 there was real urgency in the words “Give us this day our daily bread . . .”

Many of the letters to B. Virdot refer to bread. For them, it was the focus of their days, upon which they and their loved ones depended. Sixteen-year-old Dorothy Clark, in her letter to B. Virdot, penned, “where you wrote in your column ‘The bread of today is the question of tomorrow’ was surely true of us this last couple weeks. Sometimes we just eat oats to save bread for the next day for our school lunches.” She was one of four children, her thirty-five-year-old father, Clyde, an out-of-work crane operator in a steel mill, so sick he could barely walk.

This was not a classical famine brought on by locusts or crop failure (though the Dust Bowl hardly helped) but an economic drought. The famine it produced was no less harsh—the slow and relentless drain on energy and will that comes from being underfed day in and day out, the stunted growth of the young, the sunken look of the old. It was a cruel form of starvation that lacked finality, withering the spirit as much as the body. In some, it bred resignation and paralysis. In others, it created resentment and even a willingness to break the law.

Those who endured the Depression and saw their children go to bed hungry night after night understood how desperate times could sometimes give rise to desperate actions. Prolonged hunger and want fed into Canton’s seamy underbelly of crime, pitting the haves against the have-nots, and fueling a growing perception that the laws were there to protect property not people. That December of 1933, the simple phrase “the bread of tomorrow” was enough to telegraph to one and all the depths to which so many had sunk.

Forty-year-old Paul Kendzora, a onetime coal miner and son of German immigrants, wrote, “There is seven in the family and one working part time so you can realize what our Christmas will be. I guess we will have to hunt rabbit for dinner . . . I worry until I have the headache all the time.”

Bread was also on the minds of Chester and Nancy Young when, on the evening of December 18, 1933, Nancy wrote to B. Virdot. Three years earlier, Chester Young had lost his job. He was also partially blind. They shared their cramped home with their son Robert, twenty-one; his sixteen-year-old wife, Dorothy; a son Chester Jr., age fourteen; a son Alvah, age six; and a daughter, Betty Jane, age four.

Their circumstances continued to spiral downward. Nancy Ellen Young took up a pencil and wrote to B. Virdot:

Nancy Young had good reason to fret about her family. She knew the true depths of personal loss, though she made no mention of it in her letter. It was yet another example of the trauma of life in those years and the culture that kept its sorrows to itself. To have fully unburdened herself to Mr. B. Virdot, or to anyone, for that matter, would have been deemed unseemly. No one wanted another’s pity, and even in the poorest and hardest hit of families, notions of dignity and privacy were not compromised. As secretive as Sam was about his own past—especially viewed from the vantage point of today—he reflected a broader norm in which that generation seldom shared its woes with the next, perhaps hoping to escape their own grief or provide their offspring with a clean slate, unencumbered by such grimness. Today, in an age of celebrity, where anguish and loss are routinely the stuff of autobiography, we are mystified by that generation’s reticence to share its stories. They would have been no less taken aback by our lack of inhibition and disregard for privacy. And what I take to be Sam’s secrecy, he and his generation might have seen as their gift to us, fulfilling the dream that we, their descendants, might be liberated from such hardships as they endured.