A Secret Gift (22 page)

School was a luxury Rachel DeHoff could not afford. After the fourth grade, she had to look for work. Not long after her elder sister Esther moved to Canton, Rachel joined her. At thirteen she was working in Canton’s massive Dueber-Hampden watch factory, one of three thousand employees in what was then one of the world’s largest makers of pocket watches. Since the plant’s arrival in Canton in 1888, it had been a magnet for labor and one of the driving forces in Canton’s rapid growth. The sprawling industrial edifice, with its turrets, clock towers, formal gardens, and fortresslike presence, dwarfed the little girl from the village of Somerdale. Three years later, at sixteen, she married Howard DeHoff, who would become a machinist with Timken Roller Bearing Company, another of Canton’s gargantuan employers. The couple saved and built a new home in 1927, had two sons, and appeared well on their way to living out the American dream. Then the bottom dropped out of Rachel DeHoff s world.

First came the Depression. Then, in 1932, Howard fell ill. His urine turned dark and smoky-colored, his back ached, and he was feverish. Something was wrong with his kidneys. Returning by train from the Mayo Clinic, he crawled into bed. Two days later, on March 1, 1932, he died. They said it was Bright’s disease. Howard DeHoff was forty-two. Into the hands of the Great Depression fell his thirty-five-year-old widow, Rachel, and two sons, along with a crushing mortgage and little or no savings. For Rachel, history had repeated itself.

Less than two years later, as Christmas 1933 approached, Rachel DeHoff noticed the B. Virdot ad in the
Canton Repository
. She waited a day to respond. On December 19, she took up a fountain pen and, across a small pad of lined manila paper, wrote these words:

Days later, she received a check for five dollars signed by B. Virdot. To what use she put the money is not known, but there was little reason to fret for Rachel DeHoff. She was hell-bent on providing for her small family. In the months before her husband died, she had begun to study for the real estate test and to prepare herself for a career. She was one of the first women in the state to become a real estate agent and she shrewdly navigated the harshest of markets. In those dire times, few homes were sold. Many had been foreclosed on and were owned by the banks, which feared nothing as much as vandals in the empty houses. DeHoff understood that and initially focused on renting the houses, thereby assuring the bank that someone was there to watch the property. She arranged to take half the first month’s rent in such homes, giving her an income stream that allowed her to hold on to her own house even as she provided other families with at least temporary housing. She was tough and tireless and, notwithstanding a mere four years of schooling, deft at running numbers, calculating mortgages, and projecting her financial needs.

And she was compassionate. Just as her sister had taken her in, so she took others into her home. One of these was a childhood friend in need of shelter. Nola Walters would live with the family for years, and in return for cooking and cleaning she was given not merely lodging but a family to call her own. Christian spirit or not, no one got something for nothing. That was the singular axiom of the Great Depression. Hoboes would come to Rachel DeHoff’s back door, as they did to so many homes, and offer to shovel coal or, in winter, clear the sidewalk, and in return they received a sandwich they would eat on the back porch—a scene repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the nation. And such generosity was repaid in kind by neighbors and shop owners.

In her field, Rachel DeHoff would prove herself the equal of any man. She made a name for herself in the industry, paid off her mortgage, vacationed in Cuba, and eventually became successful enough to open another real estate office in Phoenix, Arizona, where she wintered. She was always frugal, but the Hard Times she had twice endured—once as a child and later as a widow—were forever behind her.

But it was her sons, Howard Ellsworth and Harold, upon whom she lavished the most attention and for whom she sacrificed much. Rachel DeHoff endowed them with an appreciation for education and a keen sense of service to community and country. Like so many children of the Depression, they were grateful for the sacrifices made on their behalf but grateful too to the nation that provided them with prospects brighter than any their parents could have imagined. The fusion of sacrifice and gratitude was later put to the test on the battlefield.

DeHoff’s sons both served in World War II. Howard was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces. Harold became an infantry platoon sergeant, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine at Remagan. He came away with a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. Both men not only finished high school but got college degrees. Howard had a long and solid career with Hoover.

Son Harold got a law degree, and became the city prosecutor and then a distinguished judge on the Common Pleas Court. His life intersected with much of Canton’s history. As a prosecutor in the late 1950s, he helped shut down the city’s teeming trade in prostitution, padlocking some nineteen brothels and bringing to an end a decades-long stain on the city’s reputation. Today, at eighty-four, he is a last living link to what was. He remembers well the city’s corruption.

To outsiders vice and graft may have smacked of hypocrisy, but in Canton, corruption was seen as something of a homegrown industry, not unlike Timken, Hoover, or Diebold. They may have been the wages of sin, but they were still wages. The furniture stores furnished the brothels’ waiting parlors and sold them hundreds of mattresses, the doctors examined the girls and collected their fees, the laundry gathered their soiled sheets, and the police took their cut of the action in envelopes in exchange for keeping out-of-town girls from encroaching and making sure the johns and ladies carried on their business safely.

Decades later, a well-known madam married a vice-squad cop without raising an eyebrow. A mayor had been dismissed for “inefficiency,” a polite word for graft, and, as the
New York Times
duly noted, Canton’s police chief had been suspended amid accusations that he had sold protection to gangsters.

Such corruption went way back. In September 1905, William S. Couch wrote in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
: “For a lurid little city, commend me to Canton.” He described Canton as a “monument to present day Ohio politics built by the present day Ohio politicians, who have piled gambling hells [
sic
] and Parisian music halls on a foundation of other iniquities in their effort to attain such immortality of memory as may be derived from public office and political power. . . . Fluttering, tawdry rags, faded tinsel, leering faces and satyrs’ figures, a frieze of poker decks and roulette wheels, these predominate in the design and decoration of the other memorial [President McKinley’s monument], the flimsy whole lit with red lights by night and covered from sight by day.” Whiskey Alley, then one of Canton’s more notorious sections, was “lined with gambling dens, each located above a saloon. During a moment’s quiet, when the music machines are still, the rattle of ivory chips reaches the ear on the street.” And for half a century, Canton’s brothels operated with a brazenness that attracted patrons, gawkers, would-be soul savers, and, of course, fallen women.

Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold, both as prosecutor and as judge, was one of those who helped put an end to all that, or at least reduce it to a scale befitting Canton’s size. He was too young to remember when in 1926 the mob gunned down Don Mellett, the city’s corruption-fighting editor, but he remembers when, as prosecutor thirty years later, two trustees from the Ohio State Penitentiary delivered his prison-made desk. One of the two men was a former Canton police detective who was convicted for his role in Mellett’s murder.

Service continues to run in the DeHoff family. Rachel’s granddaughter Rachelle Martin became a commander in the U.S. Navy, retired as a deputy inspector general, joined the gubernatorial administration of George W. Bush as commissioner of a regulatory agency in Texas, and later headed a rape crisis center in New Bern, North Carolina. She remembers her grandmother Rachel DeHoff helping her with college tuition and making it clear that nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of her getting an education. Today she has her grandmother’s fine Haviland china, a mark of the better times she came to know. Granddaughter Rebecca J. Canoyer also pursued a career of service, first with the Red Cross, then as an oral interpreter for the deaf, and today as a management and program analyst for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.

She too feels a close affinity to her grandmother. To her two sons, Rachel DeHoff passed on what Rebecca calls “a tremendous feeling of patriotism for the country and a need to give back.” They in turn passed that feeling on to the grandchildren. I read her Rachel DeHoff’s letter from 1933. She cried. Later that day Rebecca and her fourteen-year-old son were to volunteer at a shelter.

Many of the landmarks of Rachel DeHoff’s life are now gone or unrecognizable. Dueber-Hampden, the giant watch factory that first employed her as a young girl, went out of business in the late 1920s, largely a casualty of the advent of the wristwatch. In March 1930, industrialist Armand Hammer sold the watchmaking machines to the Soviet Union. They were loaded onto twenty-eight railroad cars and transported to Moscow, where they became the First State Watch Factory.

Along with the equipment went twenty-three of Canton’s finest watchmakers and engravers, who, under contract, worked in Moscow for a year or more, setting up the plant and training Russian workers. There were, after all, no jobs to be had for them in America in 1930. Each of the workers received passage aboard the SS
Aquitania,
a Moscow apartment, a cook, and a waiter. They were paid a daily wage and, at the completion of their contract, a princely five thousand dollars a year to be deposited in a New York bank. Well into the twentieth century, the equipment from Canton was used at the now renamed First Moscow Watch Factory and continued to turn out as many as now renamed six million watches a year. One of those watches was reportedly given by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to President Ronald Reagan. Some of the Canton machinery was even spotted in China in the mid-1980s.

The twenty-acre industrial site in Canton fell to weeds and broken glass. As a child I remember them taking down the massive Dueber-Hampden factory in 1958 to make way for Interstate 77. The site is also home to the Trinity Gospel Temple. But before the buildings were torn down, workers vacuumed under the floors to retrieve the gold shavings that had accumulated over the decades. Today, Rachel DeHoff’s son Harold still has the Dueber-Hampden gold watch his mother wore around her neck. To her, it symbolized the distance she had come.

As for Somerdale, Ohio, where she grew up, it bears little resemblance to the place Rachel DeHoff knew. It was swept away by the Great Depression—literally. In the 1930s, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the Dover Dam was built upstream across the Tuscarawas River. Somerdale was moved in its entirety from what became known as “The Bottoms”—periodically washed out as a flood-control area—to higher ground. Even Somerdale Cemetery, where Rachel DeHoff’s parents were buried, was dug up and relocated above the flood plain. Today the population stands at 242, the sole business is a bar, and the coal shafts that Rachel DeHoff’s father, William, once worked are now exposed to the skies and reworked as strip mines.

Rachel DeHoff died on January 27, 1974, at the age of seventy-six. She is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, among so many others who weathered the Great Depression. She lies not far from the graves of James Brownlee, Allen Bennafield, and others who, that dark Christmas of 1933, reached out to B. Virdot.