Free A Secret Gift by Ted Gup

didn’t know her that way at all, so I think it probably did a job on her. It crushed her a little.”
    As a college student, Frank Dick’s grandson James corresponded with his grandfather, but he escaped the cycle of poverty. In some ways James Vignos’s career more closely resembles that of his great-grandfather, Joseph Dick. James went on to get a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University, and would teach at Dartmouth, later go into industry, and today enjoys retirement in a Boston suburb. Like his great-grandfather, he holds a number of patents.

Hello Bill

    W hen George Monnot needed his showroom painted, when Frank Dick considered painting an office or factory, when my grandfather Sam Stone needed someone to paint his store, it’s likely they would have turned to Bill Gray. Most of Canton’s leading businessmen relied on Bill Gray. He was one of them, a success story in his own right. Only a few years before 1933, he had had the most prosperous painting business in Stark County. At the pinnacle of his career, “Gray the Painter,” as he was known, counted sixty employees. He painted virtually every major business. To ensure that his customers did not have to disrupt their businesses or close shop, he sent his teams of painters in to work all night. He also painted many of the town’s homes and even had a man whose specialty was doing the detail work in Canton’s churches. Likely he did the First Presbyterian Church, where the Dickens reading was held. In those prosperous days, Bill Gray would take two hundred dollars off the painting bill for stores that sold women’s clothes, and in exchange his wife and daughters would be allowed to go in and get the season’s newest outfits.
    Bill Gray was a prominent figure in the community, active in its social life and its many clubs and societies. He was a bon vivant who counted his membership in such clubs among his most prized possessions, and his fellow members felt the same way about him. He drove an Essex hardtop, rented a lakeside cottage, and moved to Willowdale Lake, a private club where he won prizes for ballroom dancing. A 1927 article in the Canton Daily News featured his daughter Marjorie, then fifteen, who each day would swim a half mile from the cottage dock across Willowdale Lake to a bakery, and then a half mile back, returning with a perfectly dry loaf of bread to be toasted for breakfast. Bill Gray was a regular at Bender’s, and surely dined in easy sight of George Monnot and Sam Stone. He was tall and thin and jolly, and, busy though he was, his surviving daughter remembers him making time to tell his children stories.
    Business was so good that he let the paint companies he represented persuade him to expand into a second major store. That was on the eve of the crash of 1929. Five years later, he had next to nothing.
    His December 18, 1933, letter to Mr. B. Virdot chronicles his decline in excruciating detail—but also his resolve to climb back out of the economic crevasse into which he had fallen. That was exactly the sort of grit that would have instantly won over my grandfather. Gray was a workingman who had elevated himself to the ranks of the city’s business class, as Sam Stone had done. His six-page letter was written in ink on the very stationery—“Gray the Painter”—that had once been synonymous with entrepreneurialism, and was now reduced to carrying his appeal for help. Sam Stone’s offer forged an instant bond with such men, who saw in the words of Mr. B. Virdot a kinship and shared experience. In the wasteland of the Depression, when men rarely felt free to truly open up to one another and share their doubts, Sam Stone had created a rare comfort zone. Those who had long guarded their feelings could finally release them without fear of disappointing others or humiliating themselves. Such trust showed itself in the very first words of Bill Gray’s letter.
    “Dear Friend,” it began:
    Your word picture in tonights newspaper hit