Mabel’s Memories, part 12

This is part 12 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 11, Mabel and her mother had moved to Ogden in 1928 and begun living with and helping Mabel’s brother Keith with his family. This part concerns from about 1930 to 1933. Meanwhile, Mabel’s career continued its upward trajectory.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden

About a year and a half after Eva died, Keith started seeing Ruth. I shouldn’t say started seeing her, because he’d been seeing her every day: she taught English there at Weber High School where he was principal. But it was at about that time that he began taking her out and began thinking in terms of remarrying. In July, a little over two years after Eva’s death, Keith and Ruth were married in the Logan Temple, and they left almost immediately afterwards for Laramie, Wyoming, where he attended the second session of summer school that year.

Ruth’s mother had fought the idea of the marriage tooth and toenail. She was a very determined person and didn’t give in very easily. I think she had hopes of something better for her only child than to marry a widower eleven years her senior and the father of three children. As I recall, it wasn’t until the very last minute that she finally even consented to go with them to the temple to see them married. After it was all over, I think she took it with good grace. She liked Keith and she was quite proud of the fact that he was a high school principal and even more proud when he became superintendent of the Weber County Schools. She did not seem to resent the children, too much. She didn’t let them call her Grandma; they called her Aunt Em. She used to visit quite frequently and very often had the family out there for dinner.

Ruth’s father was quite a different person. He was a very gentle, kindly person, and he liked Keith very much, and he was always very good to the children. They all remember Uncle Joe with great fondness. He didn’t live too many years after Keith and Ruth were married. I don’t know just how long, but long enough for the children to become well acquainted with him and to learn to love him.[1]

Mother and I stayed with the children the summer that Keith and Ruth were married while they were away at school, and it was a very uneasy summer for the children. I don’t know why people are as cruel as they are, but it was not unusual for the children to come home very worried and sometimes in tears to tell us what someone had said to them about what would happen to them now that they had a stepmother—how mean she would be to them and all of the bad things that were going to happen. They began to dread very much the thought of Keith and Ruth returning. As children will, they said (particularly Max) “Well if she’s not nice to us, we’ll just tell Grandma.” Mother realized that if Ruth was to have any chance at all with the children, we must not be there, because they would naturally turn to Mother in case of any problems in discipline. We immediately began looking for an apartment and thinking in terms of being ready to leave as soon as they returned. I don’t really remember very much about their coming back and our leaving. I do remember looking for the apartment and finding it, and I know that we did leave almost as soon as they returned.

Keith and Ruth were very good to us after we moved, and we spent lots of Sundays with them and kept in quite close touch with the children. In fact, Max used to come to visit us quite often if he’d had any little disagreement with anyone and pour out his troubles to Mother. She always very wisely helped him get over them and sent him back home feeling better. Keith and Ruth had moved from where we were living up onto 20th Street, and it was quite a hike for Max to come clear down to where we were.

We had found an apartment on the corner of 26th and Adams. The place is still there and is still an apartment house. It made a very convenient place for us. It was just three and a half blocks from Wright’s, and when you get to 26th, the hill is not very steep, so Mother was able to walk downtown to a show and things of that sort. We were in the Second Ward—I don’t really know why, because I have told you that Washington Boulevard was the dividing line of the stakes, and I thought it was, and the Second Ward of course was on Grant Avenue, below Washington. But that was the ward that we were in. Judge Cowley’s family was also in that ward. Judge Cowley’s wife was a very good friend of Ruth’s, and we had known her quite well. We attended church very regularly, and I taught the adult Sunday School class that winter that we were in that ward. We enjoyed it, that particular area, very much.

I might tell you something about the apartment. I don’t remember how much we paid for it; I think it was only about $15, but it could have been more. It was one large room. I think it had been intended for two rooms but the colonnades had been taken out from the side so that it was just a long, narrow room. The front part of it of course was the living room, and the back part was the bedroom. It had a bed that came down out of the wall. It could be put up in the day out of the way, but I don’t think we ever put it up, because Mother had to lie down a good part of the day and that was about the only place, it was the only place where she could lie down. There was a tiny little kitchen that I’m sure wasn’t more than a clothes closet. In it was just a hot plate and a little sink. It was heated with a coal stove in the living room, a coal heater, and that was very handy for us, because Mother was awake a lot at night and up at night, and we could always stir up the fire and get it warm for her so that she could sit by the fire when she had to be up. There was no bathroom inside the apartment, but there was one across a hall; there was a long hall that went down the side past both rooms, and at the end of this hall was the toilet that we used. I guess we were the only people that did use it since there was no other apartment on that side. The front door coming into that hall from a big, long porch that ran across the front was always left unlocked; I don’t know why. We had a key to both of our doors, and we locked them very carefully every night.

We sort of liked the place; it wasn’t anything great, but it was fairly comfortable. We did have a few rather interesting experiences there, one in particular that we’ve laughed about many times. Mother got acquainted with the people who lived in the apartment in back of us. They didn’t come in the same way as we did; they came in from the side door, so we had no reason to see them a great deal. They were a couple, oh, I would guess that they might have been in their early forties or late thirties at that time. Mother and the lady got to be quite friendly. Since the man worked nights, he was home a good deal, and Mother got acquainted with him and liked him very much. Then much to her horror, she finally discovered that he was a professional card player, and that he was hired by one of the houses down 25th Street to play cards.[2] Of course it was intended that he would always win, and if he didn’t, I suppose he wouldn’t have kept his job very long. That was Mother’s first experience with crime close up, and it was very hard for her to like the criminal, yet she couldn’t help but like the man because he was a very pleasant person and very, very nice to her. I think she really thought that if we needed them, that we could go to these people at any time. I used to kid her quite a bit about her criminal friends.

One time while we were living there, suddenly we heard a hammering on our door. I went to the door, and a voice which sounded disguised—it sounded like a girl and yet it could have been a man—asked to be let in. Mother said, “Oh no, no, no, don’t you let them in,” and so I questioned the person and was told that it was a girl and that someone was after her and that she had to get in away from him. Mother would not let me let them in, and I didn’t. All night we could hear this person in the hall, and the next morning there were dozens of cigarette stubs in this toilet that we used. Whether or not it had really been some poor little girl that needed to come in, or whether it was someone trying to get in to harm us, I think was something that Mother had on her conscience for a long time, because had it been someone who needed to come in, she would certainly have wanted to have let them come in. We asked the lady who owned the apartment the next day what she knew about it, and she had not heard any of the noise at all. We had no telephone, so there had been nothing we could do but simply wait for daylight. We didn’t see the person leave, so we never did find out who it was.

I used to go home each day for lunch while we lived there, and I guess we would have been there for a considerably longer time, except that Martha Campbell had come to Wright’s to work. Martha Campbell was Uncle Bill Campbell’s daughter, and you remember me telling you that that’s where we always stayed any time we were in Salt Lake, and that’s where Keith had stayed when he was getting over his bout with spinal meningitis after he left Fort Douglas. Martha was a few years younger than Keith. She had had pneumonia when she was a child, and rheumatic fever, and it had left her with a bad heart, and she had not gone to school very much. When she was about fourteen, someone who wanted to help her out, because she was very restless at home, suggested that she get a job in Auerbach’s millinery workroom. She was a very artistic girl and did lots of creative things with her hands. She did so well there that they (Consolidated Millinery Company, who owned the department at Auerbach’s) had hired her and had taken her to San Francisco and had trained her there and then later sent her out to manage several stores. She had now ended up as manager of the millinery department at Wright’s, which was also owned by Consolidated.

Buying a hat in those days was quite an experience that you gals nowadays might enjoy hearing about. No self-respecting woman would have been seen on the street in those days without a hat. If she was coming downtown shopping, or going to the neighbor’s, or to church, or to a show, or anywhere, she would have worn a hat. She would have had as many hats as she could possibly afford to match her various dresses. The millinery business was big business in those days. When you went in the store to buy a hat, you were seated at a table with a mirror in front of you, and the clerk proceeded to try on hats for you. She kept on trying on hats until you found one that she and you agreed suited your face and complimented your hairstyle and so on. After this was done, then someone was called from the millinery workroom to come out. They began putting a rose here or a flower or bows or veiling here and there in various positions on the hat, deciding what, again, most complimented your face, what might make you look taller or shorter as you chose to be, or make your face look wider or narrower, as you chose it to be. It was really quite an art. When you and they were satisfied that it was right, then she went back to the workroom with whatever things you had agreed to put on the hat, and the hat was completed. This, of course, was what Martha had learned to do, and along with it, she had also learned the business end of managing a millinery department: what hats to order, and how many, and what materials to buy to trim the hats, and how to manage the work in the workroom.

I had not known Martha, but of course Keith did, and Mother, and we soon became very close friends. She was a beautiful girl and just as sweet as she was beautiful. She was living at the hotel at the time, and she expressed a wish that she might live with us if we had had room for her. That idea took seed very quickly, and so among us, we decided to find a place where we could all live together.

Arthur Wright, who was one of the brothers who owned Wright’s and Sons, had a house up on 24th Street, just next door to Mr. Ferris, and in the back of his house, he had a small apartment that he rented. Fortunately, this apartment became available, and we quickly snapped it up. Our front yard was Ferris’s back yard, and they had a beautiful back lawn. It was a very attractive little apartment, the nicest we had ever had. We could afford to pay a little bit more for it with Martha sharing the expense. It had a nice living room, and a bedroom which actually was a closed-in porch. It had a nice little kitchen, and a bathroom. It was quite nicely furnished. So we moved in there. It was just a block and a half up from the store, up 24th Street, and it looked like it was going to be just ideal. We were all real excited about it. The only thing we found out, and that very soon, was that Martha had trouble climbing that 24th Street hill. It bothered her heart. At first she had come home for lunch with me, but soon she started having her lunch at the store, and it wasn’t too many months until she began taking a taxi home because she couldn’t take the hill. This worried my mother a great deal, and I’m sure it worried Martha’s mother a great deal, but she still didn’t want to move; she wanted to be with us.

Martha had become a Christian Scientist. Her family was not affiliated with the LDS Church in any way. At that time they were holding Christian Science meetings in the old Legion Hall, which was about halfway up 24th Street, between Washington and Adams. I attended a few meetings with her there, and I never could quite see what was going on, but it did give her a great deal of comfort, and that was what was important.

She lived with us all of that winter. We moved there, I think, in the spring, and she was there all that summer, but I guess not all of the winter. Then she had to move back to the hotel because her heart got bad, and the doctors felt that she couldn’t stand the hill.[3]

That was a very pleasant winter for all of us for many reasons. Mother enjoyed Martha a great deal, and so did I. I particularly enjoyed being right next door to the Ferrises, and Mother did too. Mother and Mrs. Ferris became very good friends and visited a great deal during the day and enjoyed each other very much. I spent many evenings over there when Mr. Ferris would be telling me about his trips to St. Louis, which was where he usually went at that time to do his buying, and about his various experiences in the retail business. I learned an awfully lot, and I gained such a deep desire to be a buyer and to have these marvelous experiences that he had had. He used to talk to me about them for hours at a time. At that time he was gradually beginning to let me help him select the merchandise at the store. He was getting older and he wasn’t quite as well, and I used to go to the hotel with him to look at lines of merchandise there, and also to work with salesmen in the store selecting merchandise. This all thrilled me a great deal, and I really and truly loved it. I think that time that we lived there by Mr. Ferris was one of the happiest times that I could remember.

Of course, after Martha left us, Mother and I could not afford to stay on in this apartment, so we moved directly across the street into a little apartment in the back of Aaron Tracy’s home. Aaron Tracy taught at Weber College. We lived there for not too long; it was not a very pleasant apartment. It did have a living room and a very small bedroom and a porch, but it was colder than sin in that place. It had radiators, and I can remember that about the only way we ever would get any heat in there would be if we would pound on those radiators, and then Mrs. Tracy would hear us and turn up the heat.

Mother liked Mrs. Tracy very much and felt very sorry for her. I don’t know how many children they had, but they were numerous, and it seemed that she was always having another. She was having one during the time we stayed there, and Mother was always very out of patience with Aaron Tracy. I suppose he was just being a very good church member and was very busy with all of the things he was doing, but it seemed like he was never home. Poor Mrs. Tracy dragged herself around trying to take care of the house and her family, and Mother was utterly sorry for her all of the time.

Mother was not a bit well during the time that we lived there. I remember us having to have the doctor a time or two while she was there. One thing that I do remember that happened while we were there was one of the big events in Mother’s life—that was where we got our first radio. It came Christmas time and Mother had been so alone, and her eyes were beginning to get so she didn’t read as much as she had done before, and I got this brainstorm to buy her a radio. It cost $19, I remember, and I was going to pay a dollar a month for it.

On Christmas Eve, I had arranged for the driver to deliver it at the house. I didn’t know any way I could avoid her not knowing about it on Christmas Eve. When he went to deliver it, Mother got very upset, because she “knew” that it was not for us, because she knew that we couldn’t possibly afford to have a radio. I had told him to expect that and to refuse to take it, to tell her that he would have to leave it. The minute I got home that night, she started to worry because there was somebody who was not going to have their Christmas present Christmas morning, and here we had this radio that belonged to somebody and someone would be so disappointed. I finally had to tell her that night that it was for her. I don’t know of anything in the world that my mother enjoyed as much as she did that little $19 radio. It’s still down in our basement here. She used to sit by the hour and knew every single program, Amos and Andy, and Harriet and whatever-his-name-was, and oh, I can’t remember all of the programs, Helen Trent, well, all of them. She listened to that by the hour every day. Every night when I got home, she had to recount to me the stories of all of these various shows that she had listened to during the day. I don’t know of anything that ever paid off as well as that little radio.

I don’t know whether it was because of Mother’s health or Ruth’s, I can’t remember, but at about that time, they were moving into a place on 12th Street, on Washington and 12th, and Keith asked us to move with them, which we did, and left the Tracy place and went out to live with them on Washington and 12th [about 1932]. Joe was the baby at that time, and so there were the three big boys and him. It wasn’t a very large place, and we were rather crowded there, so we soon moved up on 23rd Street, up almost to the Thirteenth Ward. Mother and I lived with Keith and Ruth and the family most of the time from then on, except a couple of short periods when I felt that she was getting too nervous and too tired with the noise of the children and the work she insisted on doing, and we moved out into an apartment. Each time we were only in the apartment for a very short time when Keith would get so worried about us that he would come and insist that we move back in with them, which I was usually happy to do.

I’m sure I’ve told you a thousand times about how nervous Mother was. Everything bothered her, not for herself—she was always worrying about somebody else, and someone else’s problems and the things that might happen to them. Her stomach was very bad, which I suppose was partly due to her nerves. She had a dreadful time eating and ate very little, she was losing weight rapidly, and her health was really generally not good. Dr. Strandquist had given me a tonic for her to take. I knew that the tonic (because he told me) was wine, and she was to take a jigger of this wine each night before she went to bed. I knew Mother wouldn’t do it if she knew what it was, and so he put a prescription label on the bottle, and Mother took her tonic. I think this was one thing that got us back to Keith’s in a hurry. Keith came to see Mother one afternoon, and he was awfully tired and had a headache—he was given to having migraine headaches—so Mother insisted that he must take some of her tonic, which he did. Afterwards he said to me, “Don’t you know that Mother’s drinking wine? That that’s wine that you’re giving her at night?” He was very upset with me. I said, “Yes, I know it, but it helps her to get to sleep, and it gives her rest, and Dr. Strandquist says that’s what she needs, and so she has it.” I can’t remember the outcome of that, whether Mother still continued to have her tonic or not.[4]

One other thing that I guess poor Mother worried a lot about: she drank tea. She had tried many, many years not to drink tea. She would drink Postum and she drank cocoa and she drank different things, but they upset her stomach. Finally again, Dr. Strandquist said, “Well now, I can give your mother something for her stomach and her nerves, or she can have her cup of tea. As far as I’m concerned, I think the cup of tea would do more for her and maybe with it she might eat a little toast and jelly or something that would give her a little strength, instead of just giving her a pill.” I encouraged Mother again to drink her tea. She liked green tea.

This created a problem one time, Jack. (I guess I did a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about.) Jack wanted Mother to come down and stay with them for a while. It was when we were living in one of the apartments at some time, I don’t remember which one. He came and got her and she went. In about two days, who should come back but Jack, bringing Mother. He was very upset about it, and he said, “Mother just didn’t want to stay, she wanted to come home.” He said, “I don’t know why she didn’t want to stay with us.” He was very hurt about it, I could tell that.

After he was gone I asked her, “Mother, why didn’t you stay? Weren’t they nice to you, or what happened that you wanted to come home?”

She said, “Well, no, they were very nice, but,” she said, “I didn’t have my tea.”

I said, “Well, Mother, why didn’t you just tell them that you had to have tea, and I’m sure they would have gotten a package of tea and let you have your tea.”

Oh no, she said, she couldn’t do that. I said, “Well you had money with you,” because I always saw that she did. “You could have gone down to the little store just a block from where Jack and Grace live and bought you some tea yourself, and then made you a cup of tea.”

She said, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that, because maybe they wouldn’t want me to make it in their house in front of their boys.”

I said, “Oh Mother, that’s silly. You could have done that. Or if you didn’t want to do that, you could have ordered a cup of tea down at the little corner drugstore that was just a little ways away, and had your tea down there.” Well, she didn’t always want to walk down there when she happened to need the tea, so anyway she had come home.

I don’t think anything was ever said about that until just after Grace had her stroke. I was in Paradise [California] with them, and she and I were talking about it. I told her about this incident, and she said, “Well I don’t know that I would have let her make her tea, because we just didn’t make tea or coffee or have anything like that in our home.” They never had tea or coffee in their home; she wouldn’t have liked to have seen it served! Maybe Mother was better informed than I thought she was. Anyway, she didn’t stay because of her tea.

I do remember too, when she was sick that she would never ask Ruth to make her a cup of tea. When I came home at noon or at night, she would say to me, “Won’t you please make me a cup of tea? I haven’t had any all day.” I would go downstairs to make some tea for her, and Ruth would say, “Your mother just hasn’t had a thing to eat all day and I’ve offered to fix something for her, but she’s told me that she didn’t want anything.” Here again, Mother thought it was so sinful or something, that she drank this tea, that she wouldn’t ask anyone else to make it for her, even though she knew that they knew she drank it. I couldn’t quite see the logic of it all, but I’m sure Mother did some way.

Ruth and Mother always got along very well. I think sometimes it took a bit of doing on both of their parts. Ruth was always very kind to Mother and very good to her, and I’m sure did everything that she thought Mother would want her to do. She has told me many times that she could talk with Mother much easier than she could talk with her own mother about many things. They were able to discuss many of her personal problems better than she could discuss them with her own mother, which I suppose is natural.

There were times I’m sure when it was very hard for Mother not to interfere when she felt that one of the older boys was being chastised unduly or something of that sort. Naturally her sympathies were always with the children, but sometimes she wouldn’t know what the problem was. I think sometimes that it would have been all right for her to have said something, but Mother was always very careful not to interfere with anything that she didn’t think it was her place to. I’m sure there were times when she had to perhaps bite her tongue and leave the room rather than say something that she thought might create problems. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what the same thing was true with Ruth, that she had to keep still sometimes at something that Mother or I did. I learned a long time ago that, and Mother used to say, that no house was big enough for two women, and when you’ve got three women, I’m sure it needed to be even bigger. I think we all had to learn that in order to live together in any sort of harmony, that it was necessary at times for us to do a lot of give and take. I’m sure that was true with Ruth as much as with us. I’ve always thought a great deal of Ruth because of the courtesy and the kindness and understanding that she showed my mother, because I’m sure there were many times when it was hard for her to be as kind and as understanding as she was.

I think one reason Mother and Ruth were always able to get along together was that they were both so fun-loving. With all her nervousness and worry and everything that Mother had, she had a marvelous sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous, and so did Ruth. They could always see the funny side of any situation. I think that really saved the day many times when, if they had, either of them, been different, they might have had problems.

I remember when Joe was a little fellow, how much fun Mother used to have with him. She was just as crazy about Ruth’s children as they came along as she had been with the older children. Joe was such a cute little fellow. When he learned to walk, the bigger boys were playing basketball by then, and football, and so on. I can remember how she used to laugh at Joe when he would run and play and pretend that he was playing football and would tackle anybody and everybody that came within reach. He was such a cute little happy-go-lucky fellow anyway, and she had a great deal of fun with him.

We were living up on 23rd Street when Elizabeth was born. I remember that very well. I remember that Mother got a big charge out of Ruth. Ruth had a very long labor. She got sick quite early in the morning, but she didn’t go to the hospital until well in the afternoon. I’m sure that her kids all remember that Ruth did like to eat, and one of the things that she especially loved was apples. She had been in quite a bit of pain all day, and she was making a little fuss about her pain, and Mother was feeling very sorry for her and worrying about her. After she left to go to the hospital and Mother was cleaning up the room, why, here were just scores of apple cores back of the bed. Mother wondered where in the world they came from, and she asked the kids about it. I can’t remember whether it would have been Frank or Grant, probably, because he was the one that always Ruth called on for things—but whoever it was had been carrying her apples all day. Between her pains, she had been eating apples all day. I remember Mother wondering what all those apples were going to do while she was in the hospital!

Ruth Wahlquist with Joe and Elizabeth

By this time Mother had reached a point where she wasn’t able to do a lot of housework, but she was an awfully good babysitter. I’ve often heard her tell and have watched her when she used to play with the children. Joe had a marvelous imagination when he was a little boy. He used to play by the hour with his little truck and a little telephone. He would race around with the truck and he would have a wreck. Then he would call on his telephone for the wrecker to come. He would wait and wait and Mother would sympathize with him and they’d talk about it, the truck not coming—the wrecker not coming. Then he would call for it again and the wrecker still wouldn’t come. They would just go on forever, but finally the wrecker would come and they would get the truck out of the way. They could play this way for the longest time, and Mother would go right along with the story. They could spend hours without her ever having to get up or pick him up or anything of that sort that would be heavy for her.

The same was true with Elizabeth. She would play with Elizabeth by the hour, and Elizabeth seemed to know that Mother couldn’t pick her up, so she would sit on the couch beside her. Mother had a box of buttons, and she’d count out the buttons and then she’d count them back into the box. Mother would slip one under a pillow or somewhere and Elizabeth would always know that it was gone, and she would hunt and hunt for the button. I suppose that Mother was just about the best thing in babysitters that Ruth ever had.

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Notes:

1. Joseph M. Folkman, Ruth’s father, died in April 1939.
2. Houses of prostitution in Ogden were on the west part of 25th Street between Washington Blvd. and the railroad yards.
3. Martha Violet Campbell was born in April 1897 and died near the beginning of March 1934. Her death certificate says that she last worked in her occupation as a milliner in October 1931, which is probably when she had to leave the apartment with her cousin Mabel and aunt Elizabeth. At that time Martha moved home to her parents’ place in Salt Lake City, where she died two and a half years later.
4. Ruth told her children this story about the tonic, remembering that her husband had thought it very funny; but it also had made him realize how unwell his mother really was. The LDS health code, the Word of Wisdom, prohibited alcoholic drinks and “hot drinks,” which were understood to be tea and coffee, and of course Mrs. Elizabeth Wahlquist would have been very concerned about adhering to it.

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Go to Part 13 here.