In December 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, a small advertisement appeared in the Canton Repository, a local newspaper in Canton, Ohio. Titled "In Consideration of the White Collar Man!", it was signed only by "B. Virdot" and promised financial help to families willing to write in and describe their hardship. The anonymous donor was Canton business owner Samuel J. Stone, who owned a menswear shop with his wife, Minna, and originally intended to send each of the seventy-five families ten dollars. So many letters of desperation arrived that he changed his mind and ended up giving five dollars to each of 150 families. He sent each of these donations via checks written at the same local bank and signed using the fake name he had created using the first names of all three of his daughters, Barbara, Virginia and Dorothy. The identity of Stone was kept anonymous and his secret remained hidden for seventy-five years until its revelation in June 2008. The secret was revealed by his grandson, writer Ted Gup, when he visited his mother for her eightieth birthday and took home with him an old suitcase filled with documents she thought he might be interested in looking at. He did not open the suitcase for months, but when he did, he found a bunch of tattered letters and bank statements dated December 1933.
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