Christmas was lost! Christmas was lost!
The 19-year-old woman, a mother of two, slumped against a brick wall and sobbed uncontrollably while last-minute shoppers hurried along the sidewalks of downtown Akron.
At that moment, the Great Depression seemed completely overwhelming.
Mary Laria didn’t dare go home to face her children, so she stood at a busy intersection while tears streamed down her face. It was Christmas Eve 1933, a date that she never forgot.
Amid the gloom, she discovered that guardian angels really do exist — and sometimes they wear a badge.
Mary and her husband, James V. Laria, lived at 1062 Beardsley St. with their sons James, 3, nicknamed “Sid,” and John, 2, known as “Skip.” The family struggled to make ends meet, but the father was fortunate enough to land temporary work at the Akron Times-Press newspaper.
“Sometimes there wasn’t quite enough to eat or wear at our house,” Mary later recalled. “Jobs were few and far between, but my husband managed to get one for the holiday season. We happily planned to have a real nice dinner, trim a little tree and get a few toys and some much needed clothing for the kids. He didn’t get paid until Christmas Eve.”
That afternoon, Mary arranged to meet James downtown at the Walsh Bros. Restaurant at South Main and Exchange streets, a block away from his work. She walked two miles into town and mapped out her busy evening of shopping for Christmas gifts.
Mary arrived at the restaurant a little early and waited outside in the chill. She knew there was trouble the moment she spotted her ashen-faced husband pushing his way through the holiday crowd.
“When I saw him coming toward me, something about his appearance scared me because he looked so worried,” she recounted. “He blurted it out just as he came up to me: ‘I’ve lost my pay. I don’t know how or why but it’s gone. We’ll have to walk back home because I don’t even have a dime for bus fare.’
“I looked at him blankly for a minute, I guess, and couldn’t say a word. I just leaned up against the building and started to cry desperately, saying over and over again ‘I’m not going home without Christmas for my kids.’ ”
Stranded downtown
James, also despondent, tried to take his wife’s arm to go home, but she refused to move. She sobbed and sobbed, leaning against the restaurant’s exterior while merry shoppers strolled along the sidewalk, carrying packages and bags of newly bought gifts.
In a crowd of unfamiliar faces, only one pedestrian bothered to stop.
Officer Steve McCormick, 39, a World War I veteran who worked the traffic beat at Five Points, happened upon the pitiful scene and asked the couple what was wrong.
“I guess because he was a cop and we were in trouble, I poured out all my woe and despair to him,” Mary recalled. “When I had finished he said, ‘You kids need some hot coffee before you go home. It’ll help you pull yourselves together.’ ”
Officer McCormick took them into the restaurant and ordered two cups of joe for them.
“Now rest here a while,” he told them in a gruff voice. “I’ve got something to attend to but I want to talk to you some more when I get back.”
The frazzled couple sat and waited, lamenting their lack of joy at Christmas. About 30 minutes later, McCormick returned to the restaurant.
“He was carrying enough bundles for two people and he came over to our booth and without a word started unpacking such heavenly things as a great big roasting chicken, sweet potatoes, vegetables, candies, fruit, bacon, nuts, everything to make a wonderful dinner, and some toys, even some cigarettes,” Mary recalled.
“As I sat there stunned, he took my hand and pressed a $10 bill into it ‘for extras,’ he said.”
McCormick had hurried to Wagner Provision Co., 172 S. Main St., to buy groceries and then rushed to his North Hill home at 581 Marview Ave. to collect a few extra items he had stashed for his children, William and Kathryn. Somehow he battled through holiday traffic and made it back to the Walsh Bros. Restaurant in record time.
Happy realization
“It suddenly dawned on me that that wonderful rough, tough cop was sharing his family’s Christmas with us, and I looked through my tears into his eyes because he had been able to give the Christmas spirit back to two people who had lost it,” Mary recalled.
The kindness of a stranger turned a traumatic experience into a wonderful Christmas. Mary didn’t stop to ask the officer his name. She didn’t find out for another 25 years.
By then, she was Mary Richey, wife of Firestone worker Milo Richey. Her marriage to James V. Laria didn’t survive the Great Depression. After getting divorced in the late 1930s, they both remarried in the 1940s.
When the Beacon Journal sponsored a Christmas anecdote contest in December 1958, Mary Richey won the $25 first prize for her poignant story about the 1933 ordeal.
Reporter Herb Michelson did a little investigative work and discovered that Mc- Cormick was the unknown officer who had gone out of his way to help the couple that night.
McCormick, still a man of few words, confirmed the tale and added modestly: “It was just the kind of thing a cop learns to do on the side.”
After 36 years on the force, McCormick retired from the detective bureau in 1957 to become a bailiff for Akron municipal judges C.B. McRae and Thomas Powers. He died in 1966 at age 72.
Mary Richey worked in real-estate sales for 28 years with Seal Realty. She was a great-grandmother when she died in 1991 at age 76.
Reprinted twice before in the newspaper, the 1933 Christmas tale has been handed down for generations in the families of the officer and the couple he helped, and we’re sharing it again this season.
“No matter how many more Christmases I’ll be privileged to enjoy, I’ll never forget … the Christmas Eve of 1933,” Mary told the Beacon Journal in 1958.
“At the age of 19, I learned all over again there truly is a Santa Claus.”
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
