A Secret Gift (31 page)

But Mary and her family continued to live in one of Canton’s most run-down sections. The streets were riddled with drugs. Even as a widow, Mary, five feet tall and a sparrowlike ninety pounds, had little to fear from those around her. She was beloved and protected by the community. To those young neighborhood women who had infants or small children and were in need, she gave five dollars—just as Mr. B. Virdot had given to her adoptive parents. It was five dollars and not a penny more, at least until it was repaid.

“She said they had little ones in there and it was to go for bread and milk,” recalls her daughter, Shirley. Given her memories of childhood, Mary was determined to protect children in any way she could. She worked into her eighties as a crossing guard.

She had a neighbor, Dennis Griffin, an African American man who was disabled, but who looked after her in her later years, and when she knew her days were few she arranged to have her house at 1517 4th Northeast pass to Griffin as a way of saying thanks. Though she lived there for sixty-one years, it wasn’t much of a house. (After her death in 2005, it sold for four thousand dollars.)

But despite all she had been through, her spirits were buoyant. In nearly every picture she is smiling and clowning. One picture shows her with a baseball glove outstretched to catch an imaginary grounder.

On April 11, 1999, some 250 came to celebrate her eightieth birthday at the Bethel Temple Fellowship Hall. Among those in attendance was Canton’s mayor, Richard Watkins, who read a proclamation of appreciation and honored her.

Mary and Ann remained close. Ann was suffering from emphysema. Knowing that Mary was near death with cancer, Shirley chose not to tell her mother that Ann had died on February 20, 2005. Six days later, on February 26, 2005, Mary too died. She was eighty-five and is buried in Forrest Hill Cemetery beside her biological mother, Susie Sabelli.

MOST OF THE children who were “orphaned” by the poverty of the Depression ended up at the Fairmount Children’s Home. It had a long and not always lustrous history. During the Depression, many if not most of those in its charge were not true orphans but the children of families unable to provide for them. For some, the discipline and drudgery of its routine seemed a steep price for the certainty of a meal and a bed.

Opened in 1877, its children were called inmates and were expected to work the 154-acre farm. The boys tended the herd of Holstein cows, providing milk and butter; the girls were, to quote a publication of the day, “drilled in needlepoint,” and supplied all necessary clothing, as well as assisting in cooking and cleaning. All of Fairmount’s children had been required to attend Sabbath services, recite Scripture, and sing. The Fairmount Children’s Band became a familiar sight at each year’s Stark County Fair. The home was “designed to lay the groundwork of useful manhood and womanhood in the characters of those who have been deprived of their natural guardians and molders.” By the time the Margos adopted the Sabelli girls, more than three thousand indigent children had passed through the institution.

It was not always remembered fondly. Chester Young was another of those to have written to Mr. B. Virdot. His grandson, Charles, was seven when he and his four siblings were placed at the Fairmount Home. He was there from September 1956 to September 1957. He recalls lining up on Saturday and Sunday mornings, with all the other children, to wax and buff the orphanage’s floors. He also remembers that the penalty for wrestling with his sister was several lashes with a razor belt across his behind. Another favored punishment was placing the children on their knees with their arms aloft until they could hold them up no longer.

Two weeks before Christmas 2002, the Fairmount Children’s Home fell to flames. Some one hundred firefighters poured more than 2.5 million gallons of water on the blaze but could not save the 130-year-old structure.

Louise and Frank Margo, who had adopted the Shingle and Sabelli children and written to B. Virdot that Christmas of 1933, are interred beneath modest stones in Canton’s St. John’s Cemetery. They left no grand estate, but there is another monument of sorts to Frank Margo. Seventy-seven years after he trimmed his last tenderloin at Bender’s, the massive six-legged butcher block where his cleaver fell remains in the tavern’s cellar, virtually immovable, the consummate survivor of both fire and flood.

H
aving known little of my grandfather’s first decades, I never knew whether he faced anything that was more than he could stand. I used to watch him hold his breath underwater for better than two minutes. I was a competitive swimmer but he could easily stay down longer. I see now that it was less a test of lungs than of will. He simply refused to come up until he had outlasted everyone around him. Whatever discomfort he endured he never showed. He was tough that way. In his seventies, he surfaced into the stinging tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war and managed to drag himself back to his apartment. But he never could bring himself to speak of his childhood or his father. The absence of photos suggested how much it grieved him to remember.

So it is with the children of Oscar Compher. Almost nothing could have dispelled the gloom that hung over the home of Oscar and Harriet Compher that week of Christmas 1933. The letter he wrote to B. Virdot only hinted at the depth of their sorrows.

The losses of the past weighed heavily on the Compher family. There was Clarence Marion Compher, the little boy born on March 30, 1924. He died just five months and seventeen days later. The doctor said he died of “malnutrition” and “non-assimilation of food.” Then there was Norma J. Compher, the little girl born exactly two years after Clarence, on March 30, 1926. She died at age six months and 26 days. The cause of death: “bronchial pneumonia.”

Now, as Compher wrote his letter, his wife lay in bed, about to give birth to a seventh child, a daughter, Carol. Harriet’s thirty-four-year-old body was exhausted from childbirth and the stress of feeding the four surviving children—Dorothy, fourteen; Marjorie, twelve; Betty Jane, eleven; and Donald, four. It had taken a terrible toll on her, physically and mentally.

On August 13, 1935—less than two years after Oscar Compher wrote to Mr. B. Virdot—his wife, Harriet Jones Compher, died at the age of thirty-six.

A widower, Oscar now had five children, no prospect of a job, and a brood that was all but impossible to feed. With his wife’s death, he came unhinged. Increasingly, he lost himself in drink. Sometimes he targeted his wrath on the youngest and most vulnerable of the children, little Carol, the child born just three weeks after he had written his letter to B. Virdot. He seemed to blame her for his wife’s death, as if her tiny added weight had pushed his wife over the edge.

On May 20, 1941, six years after Harriet’s death, the Compher family dissolved. Son Donald and his sister Carol were placed in the Fairmount Children’s Home; the two other daughters, in the Alliance Children’s Home. Both were less orphanages than holding facilities for the children of the destitute. Those institutions would become the only homes the Compher children would know.

Donald Compher was six or seven when his mother died. He entered the Fairmount home a boy of thirteen and left a man of eighteen. “I never had no problems there,” said Donald. “And I got fed good.” When he left the institution on June 1, 1946, he went into the air force as a member of the 414th 9th Fighter Squad, working communications. He knows little of his father, and what he does know he chooses not to speak about.

Donald Compher has led a full life—thirty years as a welder with Diebold, five with Republic Steel, and five with Goodyear Aircraft working on navy blimps. He is married and has two sons and a daughter. But he is determined not to discuss his father or his childhood, something Mr. B. Virdot himself could identify with.

What became of the other Compher siblings is less clear. In 1941, twenty-one-year old Betty Jane married eighteen-year-old Roger Humphrey, telling him she was pregnant. It was a lie. The marriage lasted four years. Oscar Compher did not even make the wedding. In fact, Roger says he met Oscar only twice, and both times it was to bail him out of the county jail. Oscar Compher had become a drunk and was so poor that he deliberately broke windows and drank in public so that he could spend the night in jail.

No one had told Oscar Compher that the Depression was over. Even in 1941, some routinely broke the law to gain access to the local jail, where a cot and three meals awaited. “Last I heard,” says Roger Humphrey, “he was back in jail.” Exactly what became of Oscar Compher after he left Canton is unknown. His son, Donald, says he died in Chicago of a diseased liver. Donald did not attend the funeral. The Social Security Death Index records that an Oscar Compher died in Illinois in August 1962, apparently without an obituary.

After Roger and Betty divorced, Betty placed their daughter in the same orphanage where Betty had grown up. Betty would marry several more times and move to Lady Lake, Florida, where she died on December 17, 2007, at the age of eighty-five.

But the most tragic figure of the lot is Oscar Compher’s wife, Harriet. Married at sixteen, exhausted from back-to-back pregnancies, worn down by poverty and her children’s early deaths, she had, over the course of some twenty years, endured more than she could bear. Her obituary said she had died “from complication of diseases.” But her death certificate tells a different story. Under “Cause of death,” the doctor wrote: “General Peritonitis with gangrene of uterus.” The “contributing cause,” it noted grimly, “self-induced abortion, catheter was used.”

When he was in his twenties, Harriet’s son, Donald, got out of the service and made a trip to West Lawn Cemetery to pay his respects to his mother. Only, despite what her obituary had said, Harriet Compher’s grave was not to be found in Canton’s hallowed West Lawn Cemetery. Instead, Donald discovered she had been buried out in the country, in a single grave beside the 162-year-old St. Jacob’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. When he got there he found it was a pauper’s grave. In fact, he could not find the grave at all. Half a foot of top soil had been laid over it and the flimsy marker with the number and her name lay buried beneath. A gravedigger shoveled away the dirt and exposed the marker and the grave of the woman who had given him life and who had died so young. Donald later bought a proper stone to mark her resting place.