John F Ward

Wednesday, March 5, 1930, the four 595-foot-high steel lattice towers of the George Washington Bridge dominated every view from the south- and west-facing windows of the 15-story Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

Work on the bridge had begun in 1928, the year the Harkness Pavilion was completed and dedicated. Now, workers were just beginning to stretch steel wire across the 3,500 feet of Hudson River between Fort Lee, N.J., and 157th Street in New York City’s central borough, Manhattan.

In time, there would be four main cables attached to huge anchors in the rock at both shores of the river and slung between the towers; each cable was to be twisted in place, made up of nearly 2,500 individual steel wires. From those cables, each about three feet across, other cables would be hung straight down to hold up the steel frame onto which would be poured concrete and asphalt to make the road surface that would carry eight lanes of vehicles: up to 8,000 vehicles per hour. Until now, the lone tunnel and all the ferries that shuttled back and forth across the Hudson could barely manage one-quarter to one-third that volume.

The bridge would give new dimension to the relationship between New York, where Helen and Carl had both grown up, and New Jersey, where they lived now. In short time it would become another artery in the growing metropolitan transportation system, straddling the river that had previously served as an almost effective barrier between the shores. Tens of thousands of suburbanites could travel in their cars to work in Manhattan’s brick and granite office buildings.

Still, the social implications did not shine more brightly than the technological ones. This was the longest suspension bridge that had ever been built, and the first time those massive cables would be twisted in place, hanging between the towers.

It was a feat supervised by a Swiss-born engineer, Othmar Hermann Ammann, who would celebrate his 51st birthday in exactly three weeks at his home at 272 Rockaway Ave. in Boonton, N.J.

It was from their own home at 234 Rockaway Ave. in Boonton that Helen, now 37, and Carl, now 35, had driven on the previous Thursday when Helen felt the early stages of labor. Why they chose Manhattan over the closer hospitals in New Jersey is not known, although for most of her life, Helen's life had centered around New York City.

What is fairly certain is that they had left their son, Kenneth Frederic Viard, two and a half, and their five-year-old Airedale, Lassie, at home, watched by Carl’s sister, Frida, and had sped along the highways to the Fort Lee ferry terminal, almost literally in the shadows of the towers of the still unfinished bridge.

From there, they probably took the boat to Manhattan’s Dyckman Street, then headed downtown to 165th Street, to the front door of the shiny new Harkness Pavilion. Their destination was the eighth floor, Sloane Hospital, a private clinic based in the medical complex.

It was on Friday — the very last day of a February in which the temperatures soared to summer-like levels and plummeted to midwinter extremes — that the Viards’ second child, Grace Elizabeth, was born into the waiting hands of Dr. Charles Caverly.

By all accounts, Grace’s birth was easier than Ken’s had been on June 27, 1927. Ken had also been born at Sloane’s – also with Dr. Caverly attending – but at its old location downtown, before the Harkness Pavilion had been completed. His delivery was a long and difficult process. He had been in the breech position — standing up in the womb, descending feet first, rather than headfirst as happens in more than 95 percent of births. The delivery probably should have been by Cesarean section, but by the time the breech was discovered, it was too late: Labor was under way.

Grace’s delivery on Feb. 28 had been routine in comparison. Now, mother and daughter were resting in the hospital, as mother and child would in 1930, for the better part of a week, before being sent home in the last month of winter.

March 5 was a cool, gray day, as mild as the end of February had been, and overcast. February had set weather records, high and low, in New Jersey. In Newark on Feb. 17, the temperature never got above 17 degrees, while eight days later it hit 75. February’s weather had been nearly as fickle as the nation’s economy.

Fast on the heels of the great stock market crash of Oct. 29, 1929, the United States was tumbling deeper into what would one day be known as The Great Depression. Perhaps it was triggered by the huge discrepancy between the real value of goods and the inflated value of the stock market; maybe it was driven by the gap between low wages and consumers’ intoxicating power to buy on unrealistically cheap credit. Whatever the reason, the economy was now struggling to recover against tremendously difficult market forces.

During the late 1920s, even before the stock market collapsed, companies and banks alike had failed — as many as 600 in one year. Unemployment grew on the rubble of the already-crumbling economy. By March 1930, about 3 million U.S. workers had lost their jobs and had little hope of finding new ones any time soon. Already, the effects could be seen on the streets on any American municipality: Boonton, N.J., or New York City.

In Manhattan, bread lines stretched for blocks. The Bowery Y.M.C.A. on the lower East Side was feeding 12,000 jobless men each day. Manhattan's Church of the Transfiguration — known as “The Little Church Around the Corner” — provided daily free meals for as many as 1,000 unemployed. Demands on charity organizations had doubled.

In Boonton, where the Viards now lived, the effects of The Depression were deeply felt, but they were not as visible as the bread lines in New York City. That could perhaps be explained by a superstitious reluctance to admit what was happening. Many Americans – Republican President Herbert Hoover among them – believed the nation would muddle through this crisis as it had previous ones. They feared that acknowledging the depth of the problem might worsen things by breaking the country’s spirit .

Consistently, the newspaper advertisements placed by Morris County banks made no mention of The Depression, although they subtly warned about trends associated with it.

This was an era of public panic, of runs on banks. Across the nation, depositors, made skittish by the many bank failures, were withdrawing their savings and hiding the cash in their homes, in their clothes, in cans in their backyards. The effect of taking all that money out of circulation – out of the banks which could otherwise loan the money back out to the public, at a profit – was to deepen the economic peril.

Banks were as fearful of their own failures as their depositors were; the banks that were still solvent seemed to brag.

The Morris County Savings Bank, for example, announced that it was paying 4.5 percent on savings accounts for the quarter that would end March 31. The bank boasted of $13.75 billion in assets, presumably to assuage public fears that it might join the list of failed banks.

The Boonton National Bank, with its offices right on Main Street – where Helen and Carl probably banked – announced 4 percent interest and promoted travelers checks, perhaps trying to stave off hoarding. Travelers checks were negotiable like cash, but the real money behind them remained in the banking system until they were turned in.

Life in Boonton was changing, both from the effects of The Depression and from the modernization that was arriving in an ever-lengthening parade of personal automobiles. Although most people in New Jersey’s northeast still traveled on mass transit – trains, buses, and the few remaining trolleys – that would not be true for long.

The Associated Railroads of New Jersey – a loose affiliation of carriers including the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Erie Railroad, the Lehigh and New England Railroad, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Redding Co., the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the New York Central, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway and the the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, which served Boonton directly – placed a newspaper ad that illustrated the changes that were under way.

The ad noted that highway traffic had increased more than 600 percent in 15 years, and predicted it would increase for years to come, while rail traffic was not above level of 1920. It warned residents to take responsibility for the 2,932 grade crossings, where roads crossed the train tracks. Those crossings were the sites of the collision between an older way of life and the encroaching modern one.

While the purchase and maintenance of all those autos, and the construction and maintenance of the roads to carry them, poured cash into the economy, it would also have the long-term effect of decimating the railroads and of elevating them – sometimes literally – out of the realm of the working class. What was at this time an affordable and convenient mode of travel would some day become another way for the affluent suburban commuter to shuttle between home and work in the cities.

Carl had been one of those commuters since 1924, when he and Helen moved to Boonton. He had traveled the roads between there and the factory in Newark for more than five years. In that respect, he and Helen were living the lives of suburbanites.

As a force in the economy and culture of the United States, the suburbs were entrenched in March 1930, a statement that new statistics could soon defend.

In April 1930, 81 census enumerators would begin sending out teams throughout Morris County, and many more across the nation, to take stock of how many people lived where and, roughly, what they did for a living. Boonton’s count would be led by Boonton resident Hazel L. Basch.

Although the purpose of the census was not to determine the number of Americans out of work, the results of the periodic accounting would confirm the changes in the design of American society. What had been, just two generations earlier, an agrarian society based in small towns, had shifted, a generation ago, to being solidly centered on manufacturing and metropolitan areas. But now, it was spilling out into the suburban realms. The country, which had once been peopled with farmers, was being gradually resettled – with commuters.

The rise of the suburbs, though, was not doing much to insulate towns like Boonton from the deep suffering of The Depression on March 5, 1930.

Frank N. Banta, for example, was doing a brisk business in his somewhat macabre line of work: auctioning off the contents of homes, such as one at 230 Madison St., which was now owned by the bank that held the mortgage. To be sold from the home, located in a modest neighborhood near downtown Boonton: living room suite, dining room suite in oak, china closet, chairs, oak rockers, Morris rocker, Morris chairs, piano with mandolin attachment, mattresses, beds, draperies, bicycle, washer, gas range — all the trappings of modern life halfway through Hoover’s presidency. There was no mention of who had owned the home, or where they had gone, but people knew what had probably happened.

Hoover was not exactly rushing to protect the families left without incomes; he believed – or he said he believed – the nation’s unemployment was not yet a critical problem. He said that, of the 3 million unemployed, 1 million were between jobs and half a million lived in America’s small towns, where family and friends would help them through the tough time. With only about 1.5 million actually unemployed, Hoover reasoned, there was no need for government intervention to ease the suffering.

Someone looking at Boonton from a short distance might have agreed with Hoover; at least on the surface, the town seemed to have no fear of the economy.

Charles B. Seabury certainly was not scared off. His home at the corner of Rockaway and Essex avenues – just half a block from the Viards – was being torn down to the foundation, to be replaced by a larger modern house with a garage.

Neither was George P. Werbel scared off. Soon, he would be inviting Boonton residents to visit Werbel’s Quality Delicatessen Store at 314 Main St.

And the State Theater, also on Main Street, was packing them in with its all-talking, all-sound motion pictures, using the Western Electric Sound System.

March 4 and 5, 1930, theater patrons could catch the Movietone newsreels which would give them updates from around the world: black-and-white images narrated by the dramatic oration of newsmen like Lowell Thomas.

Newsreels, invented in 1911 by a French photographer, were very popular in the early 1930s. Produced every few days by the major studios (less often by smaller firms), they were seen by as many as 40 million U.S. viewers a week. They would not be eclipsed by television news until after World War II.

After the news, patrons at the State were offered the Lone Star Ranger, an all-talking movie based on a story by the ever-popular Western author, Zane Gray, starring Sue Carroll and George O’Brien.

Zane Gray was himself a modern American institution. From his first book, published in 1905, until his death in 1939, Gray would churn out adventures set in the American west, in which a strong, independent hero would battle a diabolical opponent. His novels, and the movies made from them, seemed to reflect the U.S. innocence and the accompanying fear that “outsiders” would try to compromise that purity of spirit. It was this mix of national conceit and fear that had kept the U.S. out of the first World War until several years after it began in Europe.

Although the United States was growing in stature as an international power, the nation at home was still largely an amalgam of thousands of small communities with traditional local values.

That is why the Boonton High School Debate Club could fill the school auditorium for, “Resolved: National advertising does more harm than good.”

That is also why Boonton, and other communities in northern New Jersey, could maintain their unofficial but fierce segregation between the races.

Helen had grown up in the one U.S. city most deeply sculpted by immigration, foreign and domestic. New York was a city painted with cultural, ethnic and racial diversity, even though segregation was actively maintained in many neighborhoods.

So in Boonton in 1930, Helen was shocked one day when, during a visit to the pharmacy for some medicine, the man behind the counter told the minister from Boonton’s African Methodist-Episcopal church he could not sell him ice cream, “unless you buy it to take with you.”

She was equally shocked by the story she heard from Bob Terrell, husband of the Boonton artist, Mary Terrell, who delighted in sketching pictures of Ken.

Plane Street swept down the hill behind the stores on the south side of Main Street, and then climbed back up the slope to rejoin Main Street at the foot of Hill Street. Periodically in the summer, the residents would attend traveling revival meetings at tents set in the nearby flood plain, for hours of worship and song.

Bob Terrell and a friend of his wanted to attend one of those meetings, as much out of curiosity as out of any particular religious interest. So one evening they headed down the steep incline on Plane Street. When they were halfway down the hill, a group of men came out of the homes, blocking the road.

“Do you have business here?” the men asked Terrell and his friend.

“We would like to come and join your religious service,” Terrell replied.

“We do not welcome white people,” the men said. “Would you please turn around and leave.”

Helen was confused by that kind of disregard for a person’s soul: If a person believed in Christ, she reasoned, then that person shared something with other people who also believed in Him, regardless of their color.

In Newark, Helen had spent several years involved with the Episcopal Church Women, a missionary program in which women from one church would visit another church to speak on worship and how it related to their daily life.

Helen’s first experience in the program took her to St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church on High Street in Newark. The congregation was almost exclusively black. Since Helen did not drive, Carl took her there that night; he waited in their car. At the end of her talk, the rector – the Rev. Robert D. Brown – approached Helen.

“Oh, Mrs. Viard, thank you so much for coming and being with us,” he said. “Of course, now we have refreshments that we always serve. We would you like to stay.”

“Well,” she said, “my husband is out in the car–”

And the rector interrupted, “Oh, I see,” apparently expecting Helen to make an excuse and leave. But she made no such excuse.

“My husband is out in the car,” she said, “and if you don’t mind him coming in ...”

The Rev. Brown went out to the car and brought Carl in. Helen and Carl stayed until the end of the social time, at which point the rector approached Helen again and confided in her: “You are the first white woman to ever partake of our refreshments with us.”

That she and Carl had stayed and enjoyed the hospitality of other Christians, whatever their color, was always a source of pride for Helen; the Boonton incidents were always a source of shame.

Helen believed that, to be a good Christian, one must treat others the way one hopes they will treat us, the way Christ treated everyone He met. Helen and Carl lived their lives that way, even through the uncertainty and suffering of The Depression.

Actually, not everyone suffered in those early days. The Heller & Merz Colors Co., for example, was doing fine – better than fine, really.

In its factory at 338 Wilson Ave. in Newark, where Carl worked as assistant plant manager – and in its main offices at 505 Hudson St. in Manhattan, N.Y, and in sales offices in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass. – the family firm was booming.

The Newark factory had been founded in 1888 by Frederick Heller and Henry Merz, two German immigrant cousins who believed the United States should have its own domestic source for aniline dyes that were, until then, made only in Germany. They convinced a German chemist to immigrate to Newark to help them get started.

At the end of the 19th century, with murmuring of impending national conflicts in Europe and the threats of blockades, Heller & Merz salesmen were able to convince U.S. textile firms to try their domestic dyes. Though most of the threatened blockades never materialized, Heller & Merz managed to hold onto that new business and then to add to it.

By the end of the 1920s, the firm had grown to about 275 employees at the Newark plant, known locally as “the works.” The company was doing well, despite the deepening economic depression. In fact, it was doing well enough to attract the attention of a growing conglomerate corporation.

By 1929, American Cyanamid had 20 factories around the world generating about 150 chemical products, ranging from fertilizers to coal tar, smallpox vaccinations to horse serums. They also had divisions that made chemical dyes, similar to the ones made at Heller & Merz.

On March 5, 1930, August Merz — secretary of the company and the man chosen to be Grace Viard’s godfather — announced that Heller & Merz would merge with Cyanamid. “The works” would be operated by Calco Chemical Co., a competitor of Heller & Merz absorbed in 1929 by Cyanamid. August and his brother, Eugene, who had been treasurer of the corporation – the uncle who had loaned Helen and Carl the money for their Boonton home – received board positions in the merged firm.

The announcement was made in a memorandum posted at the Newark factory the same day it appeared in that city’s evening paper. Carl Viard, one of August’s nephews, was one of the 275 employees who learned about the sale from the memorandum. R.S. Jesscott, president of Calco, gave Carl 30 days severance pay and told him he could go home that day.

“Oh, Carl, how could they,” Helen would ask him. He would tell her it was nothing personal; they would be fine; he was sure the Lord had some plan for them.

He also told her he planned to stay on at the factory for those 30 days, to make sure his replacement knew what he needed to know. Carl was a tinkerer and, by several accounts, a brilliant engineer; there were some projects he had begun for his uncles, which he now wanted to see through. He also probably believed that if he were being paid for 30 days, he should work for 30 days.

“After what they’ve done to you,” Helen would say to her husband of nearly 12 years.

“Oh, it’s nothing personal,” Carl would tell her. “It’s only business.”