A Secret Gift (32 page)

F
or the Compher children, and indeed for many of the nation’s young, the Depression meant impermanence. For some it was the orphanage or a string of foster homes. For others it was being taken in by relatives or neighbors. If a single piece of paper could represent the anguish of these times, it would be the eviction notice. It could put a family on the sidewalk, their few belongings piled beside them. For many families, the Great Depression and the dreaded eviction notice were one and the same. It set a cadence to their lives, each successive notice meaning another move.

A Mrs. J. D. McCoy wrote, “Mr. Virdot our landlord came last eve and give us a three day notice to move. We have no money to pay rent as they all want it in advance. I have moved 4 times since August and now again. It is awful. No one knows only those who go through it.” Her husband was a bricklayer who’d been out of work for two years. With them lived their in-laws and a ten-year-old grandson, who themselves had been evicted.

Along with such failure came uncertainty, the sort that had defined Sam Stone’s own childhood—his escape from Romania, his journey across Europe, his crossing to America, his years of searching for a place to call home. He must have identified with the many who remember the Great Depression as nomadic years. Not all families survived intact. For so many, particularly the children, the constant moving left lasting scars. It meant that they could not complete their schooling, forge meaningful friendships, or find stability in their adolescent years. Many came to resent their parents for uprooting them and grew apart from their own siblings, who were often separated from them and placed in others’ homes. Like Sam Stone’s, their childhoods were deeply fragmented.

Ida Bailey’s family, like countless others, knew no other life. In her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, she wrote:

Ida Bailey was forty-four when she wrote to Mr. B. Virdot. Her husband, Fred, was forty-six. When he could get work, it was as a carpenter. She hired herself out as a laundress and maid. In all they would have twelve children. Unable to provide for them, the Baileys placed many of their children in the homes of others, where they grew up. The younger ones never quite understood what had happened to them or why they could not live with their family.

The Depression marked them for life, defining not only their values but those of their children as well. Their son Denzell Bailey was born on May 1, 1919, and was thirteen when his mother wrote her letter. By then the course of his life had literally been set in stone.

The Bailey family had never owned their own home, and never settled in. By his own count, Denzell moved twenty-eight times before he was out of the sixth grade—that was twenty-eight different apartments and boardinghouses and homes and nearly an equal number of schools, some of which he entered, exited, and reentered all within the same year. He never had a chance to make friends, to settle into a routine, or to absorb class lessons. He barely had time to unpack. His clothes were all hand-me-downs from older brothers and seldom fit his slender body.

After the sixth grade, he dropped out of school and went to work. The years ahead were sometimes no less trying than the years behind. At eighteen he married Velma Lillie, a girl whose background was similar enough to his own that he did not need to explain himself. Velma had endured the Depression, lost her mother at nine, been put up for adoption, and known little stability herself.

Without an education, Denzell Bailey had few career choices. He worked for years as a bricklayer, but ill health forced him to stop.

From out of the Depression he emerged with one all-consuming certainty: his children would not endure what he had. There would be no constant moving, no rootless existence. Whatever might be out of his control, this one thing he pledged to himself and to his loved ones: that they would have a home and one home only—that they would go to school and never be asked to move until their education was complete.

But no ordinary home would do. He wanted something solid and lasting, so he set about building his own house. It would be made of stone. Nothing less permanent would suffice. He scoured the area for sandstone blocks. Some he found in an old one-room schoolhouse that had burned down. Others came from an abandoned barn. Still others came from a nearby quarry. Anywhere and everywhere that he could find sandstone, he and his son, Dan, loaded it into his truck and drove it home. During the day he worked as a bricklayer, and later as a janitor at Trump Road Elementary—his children’s school. But at night, he and his son used a pick, chisel, and hammer to hew the stones to the size and shape needed.

Every evening and every weekend were spent cutting stone. A good day’s work might be three or four stones cut to size. The work stretched on for months, then years, then decades, and finally a lifetime. Denzell Bailey’s home took him some thirty years to complete, and though it was but a modest two-bedroom house—less than one thousand square feet—no one would or could move it, a testament to his determination.

Everyone knew of his work—his mission. And many across the town were eager to make their modest contributions to the house as it took shape. It was a tangible investment in a dream. People brought small stones from their travels and handed them over to Denzell, who always found a place for them. The stones came from across the country and around the world. It was Denzell’s house, but it belonged to everyone who had known what it was to be displaced by the Great Depression. A Methodist preacher brought a stone from the Holy Land. Another traveler brought a rock from the base of the pyramids.

And so, over time, the house at 3219 Fourth Street Southeast took shape. And there, with its one tiny bathroom and two bedrooms, the home of Denzell and Velma Bailey’s four children still stands. In 1997, after both Denzell and Velma had passed, the house was sold at auction. The price was forty thousand dollars. The buyer was Denzell’s son, Dan Bailey, who helped build it and who could no more let it go than see it torn down. The neighborhood has fallen on hard times and property values have declined, but the house that Denzell built is in its own way a lasting monument to the legacy of the Great Depression.

Today Dan Bailey works as a car mechanic just next door, in a garage he and his father built.

As an adult Denzell had occasionally visited his parents, Ida and Fred Bailey, but, as Deloris and the other grandchildren recall, there was little warmth between Denzell and his family. Fred, a tall, thin man, rarely said a word and resembled a scarecrow that had had the emotional stuffing taken out of him. On such visits the grandchildren were expected to sit quietly, say nothing, and ask for nothing.

Years after the Depression had lifted, it seemed that Ida and Fred Bailey were still on the move, though not by choice but out of necessity. One mark of the emotional distance that separated the grandchildren from Grandpa and Grandma Bailey—they do not know where their grandparents are buried.

But as Deloris Bailey surveys the landscape around her today in these troubled financial times, she finds it uncomfortably familiar. “I sometimes think we are ending up in the same way,” she says, fretting about our inability to provide stable homes for our children. For years she has worked as a nanny helping to raise others’ children. Five days and nights a week a little four-year-old girl is under her care, and has been since she was four months old. The mother, a flight attendant and single parent, can find no other job that will provide the benefits she needs. To Deloris Bailey, it feels as if history is repeating itself.

If Denzell Bailey’s house was a testament to the Depression, so too was his life. He worked as a bricklayer, a janitor, a candy salesman, and, finally, he sold Den-Vel Vacuum Systems that were installed in people’s homes. He worked up until a couple of months before he died at age seventy-eight, trying to ignore the stomach cancer that was consuming him. He died on November 23, 1997, surrounded by his four children, in the living room of the stone home that he had built by hand.

His obituary in the
Canton Repository
carried a picture of him, a distinguished-looking man. It spoke of his service in World War II, his membership in the United Bethany Methodist Church, his marriage of fifty-nine years, and his far-flung family, then numbering three daughters, a son, ten grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren. He was laid to rest in Canton’s Warstler Cemetery beneath one last block of stone.

B
y 1929, Sam Stone had weathered religious persecution, a frightful exodus, a home that was more like a sweatshop, a beating from union strikers and company guards, and more. But nothing prepared him for the anguish that would come at the hands of his own brothers.

It must be said that Sam was nearly impossible to work for. My own father worked for him for several years, loved him as a man, but hated him as a boss. He could be mercurial, demanding, and miserly. There is little question that the desperate days of his childhood left a mark on him, as it did on all his siblings. One minute, he could be magnanimous to family and strangers alike, and the next, stingy to the point of cruelty. There was a time in 1943 when he was so tightfisted with his own wife that she had no money whatsoever. For a time she worked as a newspaper reporter with the
Akron Beacon Journal
. Only after she threatened to leave him did he relent and grant her a modest allowance. There are other instances too where he used money as a kind of emotional weapon. He never forgave Minna’s mother, Rosa, for opposing his marriage to Minna and believing him unworthy of her. When, in the 1950s, Rosa was placed in a nursing home, Sam refused to pay for her care and Minna was forced to sell off some of her jewelry.

Once, in front of other employees, he fired his own daughter, Dorothy, then in high school. He expected anyone who worked for him to give their all, and his attitude toward money reflected a kind of pathology shared by all his siblings—that it was a way of controlling others. To his siblings he was often as demanding as he was generous. He had single-handedly brought his family out of the Pittsburgh ghetto, rescued them from a life of menial labor, delivered them to Canton, found them housing, and, in a very real sense, opened the door for them to enjoy the American dream. But as a boss he had also alienated them and set them against him. Whatever gratitude they once felt for him soured into resentment. Their falling-out was sordid and ugly.

From Sam’s perspective, it would have been insult enough that in the early 1930s, Al, Mack, and Dave, his brothers but also his employees, all walked away from Sam’s store and turned their backs on him. It would have been the height of gumption to imagine that they would go into direct competition with him, opening a store in the same small town. That they opened that store on the same block as Sam’s—just a few doors away—had to have been unbearable. But the affront did not end there.