A Secret Gift

by Ted Gup

  Ruby Blythe’s son Richard and his wife raised two boys and a daughter. Richard made a decent living, working for the Marriott Corporation and managing a Big Boy restaurant. “You always want your kids to have it better than you do,” he says. “Some of us made it . . . you still got to watch your pennies—you don’t know what’s down the road.”

  Today, Richard Blythe lives in Lakeland, Florida. He and his wife, Sandra, retired in 2003 and traveled the country in a motor home. She died in January 2009. But Richard’s life bears little resemblance to his poverty-stricken childhood. He lives beside an orange grove, and has a private swimming pool and a Jacuzzi, a far cry from the outhouse and sulfurous bath he knew as a boy.

  Still, there is something to remind him of that earlier life. In the 1980s, he returned repeatedly to walk the land that was his grandfather’s farm. He was searching for something in particular—that old pump, the one whose handle had cost him so dearly. He found it in a field and paid twenty dollars to the Mennonite farmer who now owns the property. It was a large ungainly pump, but he loaded it into his car and drove it off. Later, he converted it into a lamp for his home in Canton. And when he moved to Florida, he took it with him. Today, once again, water courses through that old pump, only now it has been made into a fountain in his garden of bromeliads and spider lilies. For my grandfather, it was the sculpture of the Jumper that linked him to his dark past. For Richard Blythe, it was a pump. For Lheeta Carlin Talbott, it was a mirror that was hidden from the repo men. Hard as their early lives had been, they each held on to some token of their past, a tribute perhaps to sacrifices made, or a reminder not to take anything for granted.

  Plantation

  The Blythes were not alone in appealing to B. Virdot for help for other family members in distress. Though she had little herself, Maude Burnbrier did just that:Dear Sir:

  I wonder if in your endeavor to help someone in need, that you would consider an out of town party? This family lives in Kentucky, and is oh so desperately in need. I have always sent them a box on Xmas, but now, since I myself have such depleted funds that I scarcely know how to turn I will not be able to send them even a small gift. They have not always been this way. Only the last two or three years, but this is the very worst winter of their lives. The father is a splendid salesman,—one out of the ordinary,—but because of such depressing times has been out of work only at intervals. He came of a prosperous southern family, pioneer Georgia Planters. The wife, the sweetest dearest saint like woman whose whole heart is given to her family and religious work. Five lovely children ages,—16 -13- twins 6 -3. Proud, well educated and refined hers has been a hard lot. A ten dollar gift would mean so much. W. L. Brigham is the name, but please if you feel like you can, make it to Mrs. Mary E. Brigham. I wish I could tell you what it would mean to her and those adorable children. She is my sister. Her prayers will certainly call down an unusual blessing upon you, and I myself will thank you. I know God does not overlook such kindness as yours,—its of the heart, and it makes me feel so good to know so many people will be made happy by you. Would to God I could do likewise.

  SINCERELY,

  (MRS.) MAUDE BURNBRIER

  3207 6TH ST. S.W.

  Mrs. Brigham is well known among the members of Dueber Ave. Church, having lived here [Canton] seven years ago. The address is London, Ky. Box 108.

  Maude Burnbrier was then forty-one, the wife of Carl Joseph Burnbrier, a plumber, and parents of three children. Maude and Mary, on whose behalf the letter was written, were not only sisters but inseparable friends. Mary was the older by three years. They had grown up in rural London, Kentucky, where the family had a farm—no indoor plumbing, no electricity. At fifteen, their mother, Sallie, had married a twenty-seven-year-old English immigrant whose visit to America was meant to have been only a brief apprenticeship as a stonecutter, but he fell in love and stayed. His name was Thomas Dennison, a devout believer and much in demand for the delicate angels and lambs he carved to adorn gravestones. He hand-cut the stone pillars that to this day mark the entrance to London, Kentucky. The Dennison home put a premium on education, and the girls, Mary and Maude, were raised to value both reading and the Christian spirit of giving to others in need.

  Maude had been named after the John Greenleaf Whittier poem “Maud Muller,” which begins:Maud Muller on a summer’s day

  Raked the meadow sweet with hay.

  Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

  Of simple beauty and rustic health.

  It was as good a description as any of the girls’ rural upbringing. Together, they attended a private Methodist preparatory institution in their hometown, a school that took in children from Kentucky’s backwoods and mountains and turned out more than its share of preachers, missionaries, teachers, and lawyers. When daughter Mary was young she contracted diphtheria. The fever turned her hair white. Sister Maude married an Ohio man who worked with his hands, Carl Joseph “Joe” Burnbrier. He was short, bald, incapable of sitting still, and rarely without a stogie. He tended twin boilers as the maintenance man at Canton’s cavernous Masonic Temple. Maude and Joe’s daughter Virginia learned to ride her bike in the dining room of the Masonic Temple. When people asked him how old his daughter was he would answer, “She was born the year before The Crash.” From the way it was said and how it was received, little Virginia Burnbrier assumed it had been a spectacular auto accident.

  In 1916, Mary married William Lewis Brigham, a portly figure of distinguished lineage—“a Southern gentleman” by all accounts—whose prospects for a comfortable life seemed assured. He was known as “Lewis.” A photo from the year they were married features Mary sitting on a porch in Georgia holding the top to a shipping barrel that contained her wedding china, newly arrived by boat on the Savannah River at Brigham’s Landing. Lewis Brigham was five years her junior, polished and, to some in blue-collar Canton, a little taken with himself. There’s a story that when he was driving through a small town he was stopped by a policeman and issued a ticket for speeding. Brigham told the judge he would be happy to pay not merely for the one ticket but for two, as he planned to speed through town again on his return in a few hours.

  He could trace his roots back to the Brighams of New England two centuries earlier. Before the Civil War, his grandfather William Brigham had purchased a plantation named “Stanley,” and throughout his life Lewis Brigham proudly spoke of how high the cotton grew there. There’s a picture of him at about age fourteen in a buggy with a team of horses. His daughter holds a mental picture of him as a man in a white suit on a horse. The book Men of Mark in Georgia devotes a chapter to one of his distinguished forebears.

  Brigham’s father, Charles, was a flamboyant man who also owned a three-story department store that had everything the people of Girard could imagine. When there were sales, the local paper reported, he would stand on the balcony tossing coins to the crowds below. But it was the land that Lewis Brigham knew to be his birthright that figured into all his calculations of the years ahead.

  But if on paper his prospects seemed enviable, his reality was not. He was two when his mother, Ada Mariah, then twenty-four, died of an unidentified disease, leaving him in the care of a governess, and later, a no-nonsense boarding school. “I think there was always a longing there,” said Brigham’s daughter Doris. He was nine when his sister Sarah died of disease. His father’s marriage to a “Miss Minnie” further confounded his destiny. His father died a gruesome death. It began with the removal of a corn from his toe and progressed to gangrene, which led to the amputation of his leg and, finally, his death in 1915, when Brigham was twenty. After that, the farm and its future rested exclusively in the hands of Miss Minnie, Lewis Brigham’s stepmother, and she had little use for him.

  A year later, in 1916, Lewis Brigham married Mary Dennison—sister of Maude Burnbrier, who wrote the letter to Mr. B. Virdot.

  For Lewis Brigham, ownership of the plantation hung like a mirage on the horizon, but until the plantation was his, he
had to find work elsewhere. By 1926 he was as far from his Georgia dreams as was humanly possible—in a gritty Canton, Ohio, steel mill. There a crane loaded with steel somehow ran amok and pinned him against the wall, crushing his ribs. Lewis Brigham’s tenure at the mill was just a few days shy of the time needed to be eligible for benefits. He would spend a long and painful period in bed convalescing, his prospects spiraling downward.

  Then, on May 11, 1927, Mary and Maude’s father, Thomas Dennison, died of “apoplexy.” Lewis Brigham’s wife, Mary, was pregnant. She was huge and feeling sick. Still coping with Lewis’s injuries and struggling financially, the Brigham family retreated from Canton and moved to London, Kentucky, where Mary’s widowed mother lived and where they could try to piece their lives together. In June of that year, twins Doris Jean and Kathleen were born to Mary. Then came the Depression.

  Maude would come to the aid of her sister, Mary, and her husband, Lewis, the scion of Southern privilege. In the letter to B. Virdot, Maude spoke of the boxes she would routinely send to the Brigham family. Maude’s daughter, Virginia, still remembers those boxes. “My mother would say ‘Aunt Mary needs help’ whenever she was getting a box ready. ‘The girls need clothes,’ ” she would say, referring to the Brighams’ twins, who were a year older than Maude’s daughter, Virginia. Maude Burnbrier would then go through Virginia’s clothes. “I was kind of chubby,” says Virginia, “and if anything was the least bit tight it went into the box. One year she put in a dress I liked and I saw it and cried and she said, ‘Shame on you, I can make you another.’ ”

  Maude’s caring went beyond family. When homeless and hungry strangers showed up at her back door, she shared with them food from her table, recalls Virginia. “I remember she had cornbread and it was hot out of the oven and this gentleman couldn’t believe he was having hot buttered cornbread.”

  Joe Burnbrier too cared about others. Each day he would look in on an old man, an invalid unable to raise himself out of bed.

  The Burnbriers were people of faith, and at least once it seemed that Providence repaid them for their kindness. In 1933, the year the B. Virdot letter was written, their decrepit icebox (a box that literally held ice) sprung one leak after another. “Joe,” Maude Burnbrier implored her husband, “you’ve got to do something with this icebox. It’s leaking again.” Time and again, he would tack a sheet of tin to the box, but not long after, a rivulet of water would snake its way across the floor.

  “I can remember my dad sighing,” recalls Virginia. But there was no money for a new icebox. Then one day a delivery truck pulled up to the Burnbrier house and workmen unloaded a dazzling new GE refrigerator with a circular motor on the top. “I can remember my mother screaming and starting to cry that they had a real refrigerator,” says Virginia. Her father, Joe, had won the appliance in a drawing at the local Kroger grocery store.

  But for Lewis and Mary Brigham, the Hard Times continued. “My mother named me ‘Bill’ because I arrived on the first of the month,” their son would laugh. It was years before the Brighams got on their feet. But if Mary was disappointed in her man or the road chosen for them, she never let on. “Mama was never one to put Daddy down for anything,” says daughter Doris, the surviving twin. “He worked so hard. My mother always held Daddy up to the children. She could serve grits and a fried egg for an evening meal with as much grace and glory as if it had been a banquet, whatever it was. And it was never discussed as being enough. I wondered how she did it.”

  Throughout the Depression, Lewis Brigham was on the road, selling insurance, venturing into mountain hollows seen by few salesmen. Three years running, he was named the state’s outstanding insurance salesman. But there were times when Brigham had to accept vegetables in lieu of cash for insurance, and when the family would dine on green beans and potatoes for the week. “Whatever we had, we ate, and nobody felt sorry for anybody,” said Doris. “They did not sit and pick at what had happened in their lives—the bad part. We never knew the bad part. I just thought everything was perfect as a little girl. I didn’t realize we were in hard times.”

  There was one Christmas that stood out. Doris remembers it because it was when she got long stockings and a dollar doll—a fat little baby—and her older sister Caroline made the clothes for it. That, she now believes, was 1933, the Christmas the family received B. Virdot’s gift.

  By all accounts, Lewis Brigham was a man of good heart, a keen sense of humor, and a willingness to follow the work wherever it took him. In the years after the first bout of Hard Times, he was known by his three-piece suit, his felt hat, and his Dutch Masters cigars—but not for his luck.

  On October 31, 1936, three years after his sister-in-law Maude wrote her letter to Mr. B. Virdot, William Lewis Brigham was driving through south Georgia between sales calls. A man beside the road flagged him down asking for a ride. Brigham could not bring himself to pass a fellow traveler.

  “Where you goin’?” Brigham asked.

  “Anywhere I want,” said the man, brandishing a pistol in Brigham’s face. From out of nowhere, two other men jumped into the car—escapees from a prison road gang in Treutlen, Georgia. Brigham had been kidnapped. For the next eighty-six miles they held a gun to his head and ordered him to make for the Florida line. He knew they had no intention of letting him go, at least not alive. When he entered Waycross, Georgia, he opened the door and jumped, rolling to freedom behind a pyramid of oil cans stacked in front of a filling station. The convicts got off two shots, but Brigham was unharmed—except for the bruises that came from tumbling onto the pavement.

  Some months later, after the prisoners had been caught, Brigham visited them in jail. He wanted to know what had happened to his summer and winter clothes, his keepsakes, and, most of all, the family Bible he had had since he was a boy. All that had been in the car. The convicts just laughed at him.

  After that, Brigham seldom went anywhere without a Smith & Wesson .38. He kept it in the glove compartment and dropped it into his valise before entering the hotel each night.

  By 1950, the family was living in Girard, Georgia, in a frame house with a front yard and a picket fence—no plantation, to be sure, but a long way from the depths of the Depression. The plantation was still in the hands of his stepmother, Miss Minnie, but he was determined to prove to her that he was worthy of his birthright, that the farm should be his. For three years he tirelessly worked that land, oversaw its operations, and tended to whatever needed tending. And for three years, she paid him nothing. Miss Minnie died in 1953, but Brigham had already resolved to move on with his life. The plantation would pass to her blood kin. Brigham retained an attorney, but, as he confided in his grandson, he knew the farm was lost to him forever.

  Lewis Brigham and wife, Mary; daughter, Caroline, recently widowed; and two sons moved to Roswell, New Mexico. Lewis Brigham was now a paint salesman in charge of an expansive western sales territory. Among the brands of paint he sold was one labeled “Plantation.”

  Brigham had developed a bad heart, and the frequent changes in altitude aggravated his condition. He had his fifteen-year-old grandson, Brigham “Brig” Knight, drive for him. Brig did not yet have a license, so Brigham propped him up on a pillow and set a man’s hat on his head to make him look more mature behind the wheel of his huge black 1958 Buick Roadmaster. Wherever Lewis Brigham went, so too did the oxygen tank and the Smith & Wesson.

  Over time Brigham and a partner built up a formidable business—the Southland Paint Company. Its products were sold in twenty states and afforded the Brighams a measure of comfort. But by then the demands of life on the road were taking their toll.

  “He wanted to keep working,” grandson Brig recalls. But all hint of smugness was long gone. “He was a little cocky, but I think he had it all rather cruelly taken out of him,” says Brig. “I don’t think he had it coming.” His wife at one time had every reason to expect a more gentrified life, but both Mary and Lewis Brigham adapted over time. “Nobody was going around licking their wounds
or feeling sorry for themselves,” says grandson Brig. “But there was always a sense our economic situation was temporary. It was as though we were the same as the people that had money but we temporarily didn’t have it—but we would have it again. Lewis always carried himself and looked like a man of means—he might not have had two pennies to rub together in his pocket.”

  Mary Brigham died in 1960. Then, late Sunday afternoon of March 2, 1964, Lewis Brigham sat in a rocking chair in the living room of his daughter’s Roswell, New Mexico, house, let out a groan, and died.

  The Brigham children referred to in the letter to B. Virdot would go on to live lives of public service and faith, guided by lessons learned during the Depression. Son William Lewis Brigham—“Bill,” as he was known, and thirteen when the letter was written—became a decorated paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in World War II. During the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, he helped liberate the town of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, one of the war’s most celebrated battles. He earned a Purple Heart in France when a bomb went off near him, damaging his aorta. Ten years later he dropped dead of a heart attack at age thirty-four.

  But even after three-quarters of a century, the Depression is neither remote nor abstract for the descendants of the Brigham and Burnbrier families, linked by blood and love and hardship. Sixty-eight-year-old Thomas Burnbrier, grandson of Maude, still remembers the Depression-era lessons passed down to him by example. He remembers his grandmother saving rubber bands on the doorknobs, and his grandfather removing the screws before discarding scraps of wood. That too is a legacy of the Great Depression.

  “I am still one of those guys,” he says, “who goes room to room and turns the lights out. I learned to make do with what I have. I have never forgotten. That’s how I was raised.” But Thomas Burnbrier can afford to leave the lights on if he so chooses. A former financial planner and broker, he employed some forty workers in his insurance business before selling it to Wells Fargo and retiring in 1997 at fifty-seven. “I did very well,” he says. Thomas Burnbrier says there was no secret to how his grandparents survived the Great Depression. “They just outlasted it.”