Mabel’s Memories: Epilogue

This sketch of the rest of the life of Mabel Wahlquist ends the story begun with my transcription and editing of her memories that she tape-recorded in the 1970s. Part 1 can be accessed here. Her tape-recorded story ends rather abruptly just as she left Minneapolis and her executive position at the L.M. Donaldson Department Store in order to serve a short-term mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have gathered this information from interviews with her niece Elizabeth and nephew Keith, from my own memories, and from diaries, photographs, and Mabel’s own papers.


Mabel’s mission was five months long, from the first of October 1951 through the 4th of March 1952. She worked mostly in Fort William and partly in Port Arthur, two close towns in Ontario on the shore of Lake Superior that years later in 1970 joined together to form the city of Thunder Bay. She was given high praise for her work by the mission president, and she investigated staying on for another six months but decided it would be better if she went back to Minneapolis and settled her affairs. Her mission had restored much of her strength of mind and self confidence. To solve the problem of Don having taken over her home, she had decided to sell the house and come home to Ogden. She couldn’t get a job in Ogden right away, so she went back to work at ZCMI Department Store in Salt Lake City. She lived in three different places in Salt Lake: the Belvedere Hotel was the nicest but really too expensive; the little place in the Avenues was too small; the Oxford Hotel turned out to be the most convenient and affordable. She would go to the bus station every Saturday night after work and go to Ogden to stay with Ruth and her family on Sunday and then take the bus back on Sunday night. She often took Ruth’s children to a movie on Saturday night, and Ruth would usually come too. Mabel was a department manager at ZCMI, doing drapery and yardage, which was new to her but which she liked and excelled at, as she had with everything she tried.

Ruth Wahlquist had to have some serious surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Mabel gave her the money to pay for it out of her savings from selling her house in Minneapolis. Mabel was still living in Salt Lake City then; it was 1952–53. Ruth’s son Joe was in the Air Force and got a hardship transfer to Hill Field because his siblings were alone.

One of the times that Ruth had to be at the Mayo Clinic was after Mabel had come back to Ogden. Mabel and the three younger children drove there because they had gotten word that Ruth was not doing well. They got lost in looking for a place to stay in the city the night they arrived, and Mabel got out at one corner and asked for directions, but there was no answer. When she got back in the car, all the children were giggling, because, they told her, she had been talking to a fence post!

Ruth and Mabel

In 1954 a job opened up at C.C. Anderson’s in Ogden, and Mabel took it immediately and moved home to Ogden, living with Ruth and the family in the Wahlquist home on Washington Blvd. She got Keith, who was in high school, a job delivering furniture. They had him drive the truck sometimes, but he wasn’t 18 yet and the police warned the company that they weren’t to have him drive that truck anymore.

Mabel was a department manager and was the buyer for several of her lines. At various times she had yardage (including draperies), china, gifts, linens, pillows, and things of that sort. Mrs. Islaub, the wife of the man who did the Wahlquists’ taxes, had the dresses; she would save out dresses for herself and mark them down at the end of the month and then buy them. Mabel didn’t approve of that. Mrs. Islaub got fired eventually. The head of the store was Norman Anda, a man Mabel liked and respected.

The store moved out of the old building and into a corner store at Washington Blvd. and 23rd. It was a smaller area and they were very cramped. The reason they moved into this small store was so that the company could tear down the old store and build a new one. When the new one opened, it was The Bon Marche. This was the mid-1950s.

Whenever there was a shortage of sales near the end of any month, the management would go to Mabel and tell her, “Why don’t you run one of your drapery orders through, and we can make up our numbers?” Mabel always had a lot of sales lined up.

One of the heritages the Wahlquist family has because of Mabel’s employment is fine linens. Mabel couldn’t stand to see some of the beautiful linens not sell. A few of them, after they had had to be marked down, Mabel bought when they had aged to the point that they were going to be bottom price. When she had draperies, she ordered new draperies for home. Up to then, the draperies hanging in the dining room were original to the building of the house in 1903.

Mabel finally learned to drive in the 1950s, but she was never a good driver. She especially hated making left turns against traffic and would drive out of her way to make all right turns in order to get where she wanted to go.

In church work Mabel went back to teaching a Sunday School class for the girls in the reform school.

Keith went on a mission to Germany in 1957 and met Heinz Christiansen in the town of Flensberg. Heinz had long wanted to come to America, and he asked Keith if there were any chance that his family would sponsor him. Mabel wrote back to Keith that she would be glad to do so. After Keith’s mission was over in the early spring of 1960, Mabel sent him some extra money so that he could travel for six weeks until Heinz would be finished with his apprenticeship in June and be free to go. The two young men traveled by ship and Mabel met them in New York. She took them to a show and got them on their train to Utah, and she flew home at the end of her buying trip, beating them home. She met them at the train and took them home.

Ruth signed Heinz up for classes at Weber College right away, and he had two months of summer to learn English. He did so by watching television, lots of television. Mabel got him a part-time job at the Bon. She sold her car to him for $1 and supported him when he was called to serve a church mission in Austria. Heinz was very bright and soon had a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s degree, then a doctoral degree. He had married Kathleen Heiner from Ogden, and they had four bright children. Heinz became a professor at the University of Chicago and then started a private business. He always credited Mabel for being his second mother.

Doug Dew trained under Mabel at The Bon and became good friends, staying in touch the rest of her life. In fact, Mabel trained a lot of executives. A Mr. Southwick was one that she trained. They were turning left into the driveway bringing her home one night when they were hit from behind and their car flipped over. Joe saw it and came running into the house yelling, “Call for an ambulance! That’s Mabel in that car upside down!” She went to the hospital and stayed a few days. Fortunately, there were no lasting injuries.

Mabel was always getting people jobs. She got Heinz another job at The Bon during his college years in Ogden, painting signs, helping with the advertising, and anything they could find for him to do. Later she got several grand-nieces jobs at The Bon.

Jim McEleney

She continued to correspond with Jim McEleney of Minneapolis, the man she had met in the 1930s when he was the North Star Blanket salesman who had come to Wright Brothers Department Store in Ogden. She was terribly grieved when she received the letter telling of his death in the mid-1960s.

Mabel continued her buying trips around the country until near the end of her employment. The stores then quit doing things the way they had always done, and the central company simply sent merchandise to stores without a buyer picking it out. Mabel didn’t like the way things were going; the merchandise she received wasn’t always what her customers wanted, and she had to get it sold somehow anyway. The quality of the merchandise was no longer what she had been used to; the layout was not as nice as it had been; the custom of making a nice package of the customer’s purchase was no longer done in favor of shoving things into a paper bag. The store managers no longer had much say about their departments; they had to do things the way the centralized management told them, whether it worked for their particular store or not. The last two years she worked, Mabel no longer enjoyed her work and retired as soon as she turned 65 in January 1969.

Mabel and Ruth always planned that they would retire together. Ruth, who was three years younger than Mabel, would be able to retire from teaching the same year at age 62 because she was a widow and the rules then were that widows could collect full Social Security and pension at 62. But when Ruth was a month from turning 60, she suddenly died from complications due to her longtime health problems. She had been teaching junior high school English and French, and the school year was very nearly over. Good friends of Ruth took over her classes those last few weeks. Mabel was very much grieved to lose her sister-in-law, who had been as close as any sister.

Ruth, Mabel holding Andy’s daughter, Myrna (Andy’s wife), Elizabeth
Taken in May 1967 two weeks before Ruth passed away

In retirement, Mabel did not get credit for the ten years before her mission that she worked for Allied. When she was hired again at C.C. Anderson’s after three or four years away from the Allied Company, the agreement was that management would go back and join those years to her later years in reckoning her pension and retirement. But when she retired, she discovered that this had never been done, and the management that had promised had died, and so she did not fight for it. She realized it would be a “He said, She said” type of argument, and she felt that she would not win, especially with the current management being so unsympathetic to her in general.

In retirement she continued to live at home on Washington Blvd. in Ogden, and she continued to help her brothers’ families, to meet with her club members every month, and to engage in such church work as she could. She was secretary of the Relief Society, something that gratified her since for so many years she had not been able to attend its midday meetings during the week. She also taught a young adult Sunday School class that Elizabeth was in.

She suffered with her leg pain. Her knees were bad, always swollen. She had probably spent too many years on her feet in heels. She had restless legs, which she called the “Wahlquist figits.” A lot of people in the family had the same thing.

The children of Roy and of Fred always said that they didn’t know who Santa Claus was; they had Aunt Mabel instead. Her brother Jack continued to call upon Mabel to come and help him through every crisis with Grace’s health until Elizabeth put a stop to it, being worried about the strain on Mabel of traveling to California, let alone of taking care of Grace and Jack. The last time Jack visited Mabel in Ogden, she got mad at him for saying he had supported her and their mother. She was never “not nice” to anyone and disliked arguing with anyone, but this time she let Jack know just what she thought. She told him he had never given them any money, and when he argued that he had loaned them a certain amount, she got her purse and wrote him a check and thrust it at him, saying, “Here. I’m paying back your loan.” Jack left very early the next morning, leaving the check and a note that said he knew where he wasn’t wanted.

Jack’s son Don continued to have problems until he was permanently committed to the psychiatric unit of the Veteran’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. Mabel’s nephew Max was committed to the same hospital, but he and Don didn’t visit together. Whenever Mabel or Ruth or Ruth’s children tried to take Don for an outing, they soon found that inevitably they lost him and would have to get the police to find him again. They stopped trying to take Don out after a time and eventually stopped visiting when Don became very abusive. Jack periodically went to Utah to visit Don; Grace never did. Don’s brother, Carl, did not visit. Jack did not give up visiting, but one of the nurses there was Elizabeth’s roommate, and she reported to Elizabeth one time that Don had attacked his father and scratched his face all up.

Max had had a nervous breakdown in the 1950s stemming from his medical problems that he had picked up during the War. He was never free of jungle rot, and he had a bad heart. His nervous condition led his wife to divorce him. As she put it to her in-laws, she could take care of Max or she could take care of the five children, but she couldn’t do both. She remained attached to Max the rest of his life. They often went to dinner together, or they’d meet to go shopping. While Max was still able to earn money, he paid many of the bills for his family. Max was a brilliant civil engineer and draftsman; he designed the enlargement of the railroad yards in Ogden. When he was committed to the hospital, Mabel and Ruth often had him out to spend the weekend with them. Each time Max would become stable and be able to get out of the hospital, the military at Hill Field was always eager to rehire him as his work was always excellent. Mabel was always fond of Max and tried to do all she could for him, but beyond moral support, there was not much she could do. Max died in 1975, during the time Mabel was taping her memories.

In the early 1980s a woman came to America who was the daughter of Don and a woman he had met during World War II in France. Don’s daughter’s name was Danielle, and she was the spitting image of Don. She visited with her grandparents in California, but Jack and Grace did not want to accept her. We are not sure of the reception she got from them, although we found out that they were the ones who had written to her mother to find out about her. She traveled back to Utah and spent some time with various members of the Wahlquist family, staying at the house with Mabel and Keith (who was living at home after a divorce). Danielle visited her father in the hospital, but the report is that he told her it was too late for any relationship between them. Don’s and Jack’s and Grace’s treatment of Danielle upset Mabel, but she was unable to do very much more than try to be as kind as she could to her.

Mabel’s brother Fred died in late 1984. She always said that Fred was the most righteous person she had ever known, and she missed him greatly. Roy had died back in 1971.

Mabel and her nephew Keith lived together in the Wahlquist house through the 1980s. Keith’s daughter was frequently there, and Mabel devoted herself to entertaining the little girl. They played together for hours and hours at a time. Mabel found purpose in cooking meals for Keith, doing his washing and ironing, and generally keeping house for him. In return, after work almost every evening from the spring through the fall, Keith worked in the yard (the yard work had not been done for years before Keith had come home). He also redid the shingles on the roof and made needed repairs that had been waiting for attention for quite some time. Elizabeth came home most weekends and did the weekly shopping for her brother and aunt. Mabel had sold her car some years previously; she did not like to drive and had had one too many close calls.

Elizabeth made dresses for Mabel after her retirement; Mabel stopped wearing dresses for everyday, so these were Sunday dresses, and there were just three of them. Elizabeth bought slacks for Mabel to wear every day, and Mabel was very happy to exchange dresses for slacks. She had worn slacks or trousers of some kind as early as it was starting to be acceptable for women to wear slacks, in the 1920s. But during most of her years of employment, of course she had to wear dresses to work, and she came home usually so late at night that she didn’t change before bedtime. She had not had a pair of slacks for many years and was happy to have them.

She loved to read and read lots in the extensive book collection in the Wahlquist home. During the time she was suffering from cataracts, though, she slowly stopped reading and began to watch tv more. She liked the Lloyd C. Douglas books and read them all. She read a lot of self-improvement books. She read a lot of material for her Sunday School class. She constantly read and studied the scriptures. She liked magazines, and Elizabeth subscibed to a lot of them. She did some handwork, crocheting blankets for each of Ruth’s children and more. She also made a quilt out of some of her old drapery material samples, which came in large squares.

In the fall of 1988 Keith moved into an apartment in the city where his daughter had been going to school in order not to make her change schools when she came to live with him. Mabel began to decline. She didn’t make herself meals; it seemed too much trouble just for one person. Her nephew Wayne’s wife, Elsie, who had been a nurse, kept a close watch on Mabel and decided she should have Meals on Wheels deliver a meal each day. But then Elsie would go over to the house and discover three meals piled up by the door; Mabel had not taken them in for three days. Elsie called the Meals on Wheels company and gave them a piece of her mind about the irresponsibility of drivers who see a meal from a day ago, let alone two, and who don’t notify anybody.

I met Mabel that Thanksgiving. I took to her, and she to me, right away. She loved my little green and yellow bird, Bucky, and told me stories of her Dickie birds that all seemed to have been eaten by cats. She played with Bucky, and she cornered Keith after the Thanksgiving meal to tell him that he was to marry me. (I heard about that conversation only months and months later; it helped that I had liked Keith right away too.) Mabel showed me a red leather autograph book that she was reading. It contained messages from all her friends in Minneapolis upon the occasion when she left for her mission to Fort William. She also told me the story about her first airplane ride, the one over Idaho in that tiny plane.

Right after Thanksgiving that year, Mabel had a fall in her room that broke her wrist and her hip. She lay on the floor for hours until Elsie came over to find out why she could not get through on the telephone. Mabel was taken to the hospital and then to a nursing home. She was never able to get well enough to live at home again, though often Elizabeth, or Wayne and Elsie, or Keith and I took her out. Elizabeth almost always brought her home for the weekend.

At Manor Care Mabel was extremely popular with both staff and residents. Two years in a row she was voted the Queen of the Senior Prom, an event held in conjunction with one of the local high schools, when the high school seniors and the Manor Care senior citizens would get dressed up in their finest and have a joint dance and celebration. The first year, Mabel found out that another lady had dearly wanted to be the Queen, and she made the staff give this other lady the honor. The staff decided that she was not going to be done out of her rightful honor the next year, so when she won again, they announced that the winner would be known only on the night of the ball. Then they phoned her family, and we all dressed up and went to the ball too. Mabel was crowned and was happy to serve as the Queen.

Right after that something very regrettable happened. Jack was found not to be able to live on his own anymore (Grace had died a few years earlier), and he was brought to Utah from California and put in Manor Care “to be with Mabel.” Mabel suffered a breakdown almost immediately. A lot of painful things came out: her grief at her father once boasting that his profession was “raising boys” without any mention of Mabel or ever an acknowledgement that he might be proud of her too; that Jack had always been their mother’s favorite and that everybody had had to accommodate him; that she had been forced to give up school because she was the girl; and most of all, that she had felt coerced by Jack into taking Don into her home in Minneapolis, which had resulted in such hardship for her. She had always had the knack of making the best of every situation in life; now she felt she could not make the effort and survive.

Jack did not make things easy either. At first the staff would put the siblings together for meals and for visits. Jack dominated, and Mabel could see herself losing her friends because he was rude to them. Then Mabel had to watch as the once-proud and fastidious Jack could not feed himself or eat without dribbling things all over. She was extremely distressed by this, so much that it was the last straw. As soon as the breakdown happened, Jack was moved to another wing of the building and the order was given to staff that his demands to have his sister come to him were to be ignored. Jack really was in poor shape and did not live very much longer.

When Jack had first arrived there, I was introduced to him for the first time. It did not go well. Jack did not even look at me but turned his wheelchair around so that his back was to us, and that was that. Apparently Jack did not think me worth acknowledging. Keith told me that this was not something surprising to him, and that I must not mind it. I thought to myself, “Here’s a pompous old ass,” and let it go.

A couple months later Keith and I took Mabel for a drive through the mountains to Heber City so that she could see the fall colors and all the old places she had known. She really enjoyed the trip but also felt a little guilty that Jack wasn’t along. We didn’t tell her why we had excluded him. We just said we wanted her company alone. We had just been learning from Elsie how badly things were going for Mabel because of Jack.

Mabel had gone into a sharp decline after Jack came there, and she did not recover even after she was no longer seeing him. He died that November. She lived only three months longer.

Just before she died, Mabel said, “My brother is coming for me.” The cousins always argued which brother she meant: Keith, Fred, or Roy. There are good arguments for each of them being the one, and of course we all think we know.

Mabel’s funeral was well attended. The missionaries who had served in Minneapolis who had stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, Norm Birch and a Mr. Siddoway came. Dawn Johnson, who served in Fort William with her, came. Doug Dew, who had been trained by Mabel at The Bon, was there. The janitor at The Bon came. Max’s ex-wife came. Keith’s ex-wife came. Mabel’s club came. Many of the 18 nephews came; of the two nieces, only Elizabeth could come as Ann lived too far away. Lots of grand-nieces and grand-nephews and their families came. We all agreed on one thing: Mabel was probably the best person any one of us had ever known.

Heinz spoke and enumerated all that she had done for him, “all of those blessings which came from Mabel’s open arms and her willingness to take in a stranger,” he said. Frank spoke and told about how Mabel comforted him after his mother died: he said she taught him how the Indians would eat ants. Keith spoke about how she was more than his aunt; she was his dear friend. He quoted a talk she had given in church once, regarding her testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

In this very materialistic world we live in, people are prone to seek their security in positions. Having the most, the biggest is likely to be their measurement of success. To some, it is having the best house on the block; to others, having the nicest car, having the fur coat, or some other luxury. But somehow I never feel that these people are richer than I am. True, my house isn’t as fancy as it could be. I don’t own a fur coat, and I feel lucky to get one pair of shoes at a time. But though no one can see it, or weigh it, or measure it, or put it in the bank, I have the greatest possession in all the world. It gives me the most security, the most happiness of anything that I could possibly have. This priceless possession I have is a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I know a lady who has a lovely diamond necklace, and it’s very beautiful and quite valuable, I’m told. Of course, she doesn’t use it every day, but only on special occasions. When she takes it out of the box and lights touch it, it sparkles and becomes very lovely indeed. But my priceless possession, my testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, isn’t like that. I find that when I put it away in a dark corner in my heart and keep it there, that when I take it out, that it has grown dim and doesn’t cast a light and glow as it should. And I am told that if I were to keep it hidden away in the dark too long without use, that it would completely disappear. In fact, the directions that come with this priceless possession of mine say, “For best results, use constantly.”

Mabel had always hoped that she wouldn’t die in the winter because she worried about everybody getting over the mountains to Heber City. That day the snow was plentiful but not actually falling, so we had no trouble. Her grave in Heber City, next to her parents, her baby sister, and her grandmother Wahlquist, and not far away from her Campbell grandparents, is very lovely in the snow. It is especially lovely in the spring around Memorial Day when the cemetery is filled with flowers.

Heber City Cemetery, with the Wahlquist family stone at center
Anna Walqvist’s and baby Ruth Wahlquist’s stone stand beyond it at right
Mabel’s grave is just to the right of the Wahlquist stone