Mabel’s Memories, part 13

This is part 13 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 12, Mabel and her mother had moved to Ogden and were living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family off and on while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. This part concerns 1933 and other years; she worked at Wright’s for nine years.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

I suppose it would be sometime around 1933 that we moved from 23rd Street into the house on 25th. It was the first house that Keith and Ruth bought. Up until that time the houses we had lived in had been rented. They were both in love with the house; we all were. It was a lovely big house with ample room and some to spare. The Depression was in full swing at that time, and it wasn’t too long after we moved there that Roy and his family came to live with us for awhile. I think they were there all of one summer, perhaps a little longer. Roy and Maude had been farming her father’s farm in Roosevelt. Roy had never been awfully well from the time he came home from his mission. He had had malaria twice while he was in the South, and each summer it would come back. He would get a fever and be very tired and listless and it was not pleasant, farming. He had continued to do this until one summer he developed tularemia, or what might be more commonly called rabbit fever, and he was very ill. I remember that Mother and Keith and his family and I went out to see him at the time, and he really was in very bad shape. That again made it so that farming was going to be very hard for him. I guess the thing that finally settled them to leave the farm was the Depression. The Great Depression was in full swing and farm prices had hit rock bottom. That particular spring they were faced with what the Basin may be faced with again this summer, drought, and they had no feed for their animals. At that time the government bought up a lot of horses and cows and things at $5 a head, and a lot of farmers were forced to accept these prices or else just go out and shoot their animals. With all of it combined, and with some convincing from Keith and Jack, Roy was finally convinced to come into Ogden and go to Weber College and prepare to teach school. Since we had moved into this big home that would be large enough, Keith had invited them to come and live with us until they were able to do something on their own. Maude had the three boys then (Reed was a baby), and she helped Ruth with the housework while Roy went to school.

I think it was rather a hard experience for Maude, she being the type of person that she is. She was unable to accept it as brotherly love; she felt that it was charity, and she felt that she had to do her part. Reed was a very small baby at the time, and she was still nursing him. I know that every time she had to go upstairs and nurse him and give him some attention, which he did require, she felt guilty. She felt that she should be always working and doing. There always was work to do, and she seemed to feel that a great deal of it rested on her. I think that it was extremely difficult for her. She and Ruth were not very well acquainted, and of course Mother was not at all well by this time.

After a few months they found a little place out in North Ogden. It was Ruth’s Uncle Tom’s place, her Uncle Tom Berrett. It was just a tiny little house, and they moved out there. From then on Roy would walk down to Washington Blvd. and catch the street car there into town, unless he happened to get a ride. Weber College then was on the corner of 25th and Jefferson, and he would often walk up there. He got a job working nights in the gymnasium as sort of the watchman or janitor, and he had to work until about eleven or twelve at night. Very often it would be after the street car had left, or at least it would be if there had been a ball game. Then sometimes he would walk all of the way to North Ogden. Otherwise, he would ride again out to Five Points [North Ogden] and then walk from there.[1] He was in school all day, so I’m sure that it was very hard on him, and that he really earned his education the hard way.

Fortunately, people in those days were much nicer about picking up people to give them rides than it’s possible for them to be today. I’m sure that many people got to know Roy and would pick him up along the way when they saw him walking. There were times, I’m sure, when he did walk the full distance. I don’t know just how long they did this, at what point they moved back into town. I should ask Maude that so that I have it somewhere near right. They did later on move into the little house on 24th Street right through the lot from us on 25th, and they lived there until they bought their home on Kershaw, which Maude still owns today.

Once Roy got his certificate to teach, he got a job at Madison School, and then he was on his way. He taught there and later became principal at Madison, and I think from there went to Ogden High School to teach and later to become principal. From there he went to be assistant superintendent of Ogden City Schools and was there until the time of his retirement. We all know that along the way Roy had several bad heart attacks and was ill much of the time. One would hardly have known it because of his attitude toward his illness. He didn’t let it hold him down or keep him back any more than was absolutely necessary.

During the first years, of course, when he was going to school and first started teaching, Maude had worked at Wright’s, and she worked at The Bon, and also at Penney’s, clerking, and was a great help financially to the family. Maude also worked for the government at the Ogden Supply Depot, had rather a good job when she quit, but I really don’t know what she did because that was during the time when I was away from Ogden, and I’m not familiar with what her work was.[2]

Roy was bishop of the Highland Ward for many years and was always very active in his church work, as was Maude, and as were all of the family. All of the three boys filled missions, and Mark and Reed were in the service. Maude and Roy have written their own histories, so anything more that I could tell you about them would probably be a repetition of what they have already written. I remember the many wonderful times I’ve had with them. I always enjoyed going to visit with them. I remember back to the first time I went to visit them after I came back from New York, my first trip that I ever made to New York when I was working in Boise. I’ve told this story many times. Reed was just a little fellow then, probably six years old or so, and we were visiting in the living room. It was when they still lived on 24th Street. Pretty soon in comes Reed with about six little boys following behind him, and they stood in a semi-circle around me and Reed said, “This is my Aunt Mabel from New York.”

I used to go there quite frequently on Thanksgiving or on Sundays for dinner and visit with the family, and I always enjoyed it so very much. I’ve always felt so close to Roy’s and Maude’s children. Nowadays Austin and his little family come out and spend an evening with me quite frequently and I always enjoy having them. I’ve really been very proud of what Roy’s been able to do, what he and Maude have been able to do, in spite of all of his many illnesses, and of the wonderful family that they have raised.

I was in California (I had been staying at Jack’s) when Roy died [May 1973]. The day that he died, I guess I had gone over to Joe’s, and when the phone call came to Jack’s, he called Joe’s to tell me that Roy had died. I was so sorry that I was not here at the time, and yet when I left to go to California, I stopped and visited with Roy a few minutes, and I realized that it wasn’t going to be too long until he would leave us. I was not sure that I would get home before the time came. I guess he’ll always be very special to me because in our growing up years we were so close together, so near the same age, and we usually got into the same troubles as little kids. He usually managed to break my dolls, and I usually managed to create problems for him. We went away to school together, and it seemed like our lives were always closely linked.

I worked at Wright’s for about nine years, and except for those few weeks in the cosmetics and drug department, they were spent in Mr. Ferris’s department. I not only learned a lot about buying from Mr. Ferris, I also learned a lot about the art of salesmanship. He had piece goods, as I mentioned before, but he also had the linens and domestics. There was no place that I loved quite as much as the linen counter. Linens in those days didn’t consist of pretty printed luncheon cloths and fancy doilies and things of that sort as they do now. Everything was white, except we always had a bolt of red and white and a bolt of blue and white check, large check, of cotton, coarse fabric that was used for tablecloths.

People lived quite differently in those days than they do now. The family, I think, was a much closer unit. People spent much more of their time together. They had their meals together and did their entertaining at home and things were, as I say, very different from many families today.

Down in one end of the store, we had a big rack with many rolls of oilcloth on it, and we sold a lot of this. It was measured off by the yard and sold for kitchen tables and counter tops and anyplace else that you wanted to be protected. There wasn’t such a thing as formica then, everything was wood and it could easily be stained by a wet glass or a hot dish, and so areas that you wanted protected were covered by oilcloth. During the week the family pretty much ate in the kitchen at the kitchen table, off the oilcloth tablecloth. On Sunday, every family who could possibly afford it at all ate in the dining room with a white tablecloth. Sometimes this tablecloth would be cotton, and with more affluent families it would be linen. There were apparently a good many affluent people in Ogden at that time, because we did have a lovely assortment of linens. In fact, I think that women vied to have the nicest linen and it rather told your status in the community, the type of table that you could set in the way of linens and lovely china and silver and things of that sort. We did have some beautiful linens from Ireland and Denmark and all over Europe. They were beautiful satin embossed linens, woven in lovely designs of roses and chrysanthemums and lily of the valley, and various other patterns that were particularly popular at that time.

Mr. Ferris was extremely fussy about that counter, and I think that’s one reason a lot of the girls didn’t like to sell there, because if you unfolded a lovely linen tablecloth to show a customer, it must be folded back again in exactly the same folds that it was in before so that it fitted again perfectly in the box that it came in, and the lid was put back on it. The lids must be kept carefully so that the edges weren’t scratched or broken, and so everything always looked brand-new and beautiful in that department. We had this long counter where we showed the linens, and stools in front where the ladies sat while they looked. The more the woman had to spend, the nicer the linens that you were able to show. I dearly loved to show those linens. I loved to unfold so gently and carefully those beautiful linens, because I liked to look at them myself and drool over them.

Any of you people who want to be salesmen, though, must learn that the first lesson in selling is that it’s your job, and necessary, that you must make the customer, the person to whom you are selling, want what you are selling more than he wants the money in his pocket. Now if you’re selling necessities like bread and milk and butter, that’s not hard to do. When you’re selling luxury merchandise like fine linens, it becomes an art. Under Mr. Ferris’s tutelage, I learned to spread out these linens with such care and such love that the customer caught that from me and handled them with the same gentleness and care that I did. Otherwise she would probably have grabbed hold of them with her gloved hand and scrunched up the corners and Mr. Ferris would have quietly died right there. You learn when you handle lovely merchandise that if you handle it gently and with care and reverence, that the person who’s looking at it handles it in exactly the same way. That’s what Mr. Ferris taught me to do. It also makes the person who is buying realize the preciousness and the loveliness of what she is looking at.

It would be my job to get these boxes of linens out, the different patterns, put them carefully out, and watch the customer very carefully to see where her interest lay and usually about the price that she began to be interested in, and then I would learn the pattern in that price range that she showed the most preference for and quietly and gently put aside the other cloths so they wouldn’t get wrinkled or messed up. You opened up the napkin so she could see how beautifully the pattern was arranged on the napkin, and she would know that it would be arranged the same way on the cloth. It was really an art and it was fascinating, and I loved the challenge of selling that type of merchandise.

You didn’t always make the sale the first time. In fact, you rarely ever did. Usually a woman came back two or three times to look at a cloth before she finally made up her mind. When she finally did decide on the one that she thought was the very nicest that she could afford and the prettiest of them all, and decided that it was worth more to her than the money in her purse—she finally parted with the money and you wrapped up the cloth and gave her her package, still making her feel that she had the loveliest thing in the world. You could see her go out of the store proudly clutching her package, and you knew that she was mentally deciding right then and there who she was going to invite to dinner next Sunday so she could show it off!

I did have one amusing experience. We had a lady, and I’m sure many of you would know her if I mentioned her name, so I shan’t, and she was a very difficult shopper in any department. She came into the linen department and looked at a cloth, and after several times looking, she decided on the one she wanted. Then she said, “Now put it away, and I’ll come back in a day or two and get it.” So I did this. In a few days she came back and looked at it again: “Now put it away, and I’ll be back in a few days and get it.” This went on for a couple of weeks as I showed her this cloth a dozen times or more, but each time it was, “Well, put it away and I’ll come back and get it.”

Mr. Ferris’ desk was right by the counter where we showed the linens. That had been hard right at first because it was rather embarrassing until I became more self-confident to show these beautiful linens and to try to sell them, knowing that he was listening. Very often after the customer left, he would tell me things that I might have said and where I made my mistakes and so on, but after awhile, I got so I felt fairly comfortable even with him there. After this particular lady came back for the umpteenth time and went out, I had the cloth all folded carefully back into the box and was going to put it back into the drawer where I had been saving it for her, when he said, “Give me that.” He took it and opened the bottom drawer of his own desk, which was empty, and put the box in there. He said, “Now the next time she comes in to look at that cloth, it’s sold.” I said, “Oh, Mr. Ferris, I can’t do that! I’ve promised her I’d save it for her.” He said, “It’s sold, and that’s all you need to tell her.”

The next time she came in to see the cloth, I said, “Well, I’m sorry Mrs. So-and-So, but it’s sold.” Oh, she threw a real tantrum: what kind of a person was I, here I had promised to keep it for her and it was the only one she had seen that she had liked and she must have that cloth. As Mr. Ferris had told me to, I said, “Well, I guess you’ll have to see Mr. Ferris, the manager.”

You bet she would see Mr. Ferris, and she would tell him what type of a clerk I was.

So she went to Mr. Ferris. He was a very quiet man, very gentle, and he always knew how to handle the women. I’m sure he had already made up his mind exactly what he was going to do. He said, “Well you know these things do happen; the other girls sometimes get into the drawer and sell things that are being held for another clerk.” He said, “Let’s look through my catalogs and maybe I’ll be able to reorder this for you, get another one for you. It will be special and there won’t be any more like it.” They looked through the catalog and it was there, as Mr. Ferris knew that it would be. He said, “Yes, I can get it for you, and this catalog will be out of date next month, so if you want it, you’d better order it right now.” Well, how long would it take? It would take about three weeks. She decided that’s what she would like, yes, and she was even more proud now because she was going to have the last one. He had told her that’s the only one he had ever had like it. She said to do that, and so he wrote the order out very carefully while she was there, and she was to come back in three weeks and get the cloth. Oh, and he also told her that Mr. Wright insisted on a special order that it be paid for in advance. So she had parted with her money, and the cloth was all paid for. As soon as she left, giving me a very triumphant look, he tore the sheet out of his order book and tore it up, and he said, “Now when she comes back in three weeks, you can give her the cloth.”

She came in two or three times during the three weeks, but she didn’t come to me, she went to Mr. Ferris each time, and he told her that no, it hadn’t come yet, for which I was glad, because I didn’t want to lie to her. Finally one morning he took the cloth out of his drawer, the bottom drawer of his desk, and gave it to me. He said, “Now when she comes in the next time, you tell her the cloth is here.” I saw her coming, and I said, “Oh, Mrs. So-and-So, your cloth is here.” I got it out of the drawer and I said he had put it there for her, and I wrapped it very carefully, and away she went with her cloth, as happy as you please.

I had one frightening experience at that linen counter too. I was showing a lady linens and I had them all spread out. I usually watched the customer’s face quite carefully to see what impression she was getting on various patterns and prices and so on. I had looked down for some reason for a minute, and when I looked up, she was starting to fall off of the stool that she was sitting on, and I didn’t know what to do! Her face was so distorted. I reached forward and grabbed her by the arms to hold her on the stool and called for somebody to help me. One of the girls came from behind and held her until I could get around the counter, and between us, we eased her down onto the floor. She was having an epileptic seizure. It was the first one I had seen—I did see one later in another store—we got a pencil between her teeth so that she couldn’t bite her tongue and I think Mr. Ferris came along about that time and told us to just let her lie there. He knew her, so he phoned her husband and by the time she was coming out of the seizure, he was there ready to take her home. That was one of the most frightening things that I can ever remember having happened to me.

Another fun thing that we used to do at Wright’s was our summer blanket layaway sale. Mr. Ferris used to order one of each color of 25% wool double blankets, which of course you never see any more. That used to amount to about 12 or 16 blankets, enough to make a nice display on one table. Then he would order one of each of North Star Woolen blankets, just one color, and then a color card to go with them, and that would be enough for another table. Then he would put up a big sign: “Lay away your blankets now and pay as you go and have them paid for by winter.” We were all given a little sales pitch to this effect. Along with this there was a contest, and we would receive 25¢ for a wool blanket up to a certain price, and 50¢ for each blanket we sold of the higher-priced woolen blankets.

Those were Depression days, and we were all of us making only about $50 a month, so we were quite eager to earn this extra money. It was really a race to the customers, they got beautiful service through that period. I remember Loretta Medcraft and I used to usually win, one or the other of us, this contest. Leyonna Van Kampen usually came in second. She probably would have been first, except she was in the silk department at that time, and she had to run all the way around the counter to get out to the tables, and so Loretta or I could usually beat her to the customer. Many times I would make several dollars a week for the month that we would have this sale, and I always counted on that a great deal.

The salesman for North Star finally got in on the act and he thought it was such a clever thing that he decided that he would give the girl who sold the most of his blankets a blanket free. He did that a year or two, and I know I won one of those. I saw that blanket just the other day down at Keith’s on a shelf in one of their closets, and it still looked like it’s in pretty good shape. It would have to be nearly fifty years old by now, which is quite a recommendation for North Star blankets. The North Star salesman was a very nice young chap, and Loretta was just sure he would be just right for me since he was a bachelor. He would have been just right for her, she thought, except that she was already married. He and I did become very good friends and I knew him for many years. In fact, I think we corresponded off and on until the time of his death when he was about 61. I’ll probably tell you more about him when I get to Minneapolis.[3]

The interesting part about that sale was that, so far as the customer knew, her blankets were being laid away that minute for her to have next winter when she got them paid for, but of course they had never yet been ordered. Mr. Ferris would just buy the samples and then when we had sold several, he would write an order, about once a week, for the ones that were sold, for the blankets to come in. It worked very well, and it was very seldom that a person ever came for the blankets before they had arrived. I used that technique several times after I became a buyer for C.C. Anderson Company, and it worked well as long as the sales people didn’t get too affluent, but after awhile that 25¢ didn’t mean enough to them to make them work hard for the sale. When the sale began falling rather flat, I finally gave it up.

I want to tell you just one more thing and then I think I’ll leave Wright’s for awhile. I mentioned that it was Depression time and it reminded me of how different people were then than they are now. It wasn’t necessary for them to have as many of us clerking as they had, and so it was very obvious to all of us that somebody was going to be laid off. There were six of us in the department, and we got together and decided that if it would be all right with management, each one of us would take a day off and lose that day’s pay and that would be the equivalent of them laying off a person. We approached management with this idea, and they accepted it. There was quite awhile that each of us took our day off without pay in order to save one of us, and no one knew which one would have been laid off. I sometimes wonder if people nowadays, would be as generous with one another as they were then.

Before I leave Wright’s I’ll tell you one more little story because I might forget it later on. It was when I worked in the woolens and lining area, which was right next to the silk department (I later did get the silk department), Leyonna Van Kampen had by this time married a brother to President Wolthuis[4] and she was pregnant and was worrying about what in the world she was going to do if management found out that she was pregnant, because then she would have to be laid off, and she couldn’t afford to be laid off. The Wolthuis family had, not too long before that [1928], arrived from Europe and her husband didn’t speak English well, and so he had not been able to get a very good paying job. I think he had a milk route at that time. Leyonna was always wondering what in the world she was going to do, and she was having a lot of trouble with morning sickness. The only thing that seemed to help the morning sickness was oranges. We didn’t leave the department for long periods as salespeople do today. I don’t recall that we had any breaks other than just our lunch hour break. The law now requires that a girl must have a morning and an afternoon break, but that had not come into effect. The only way that Leyonna could eat her oranges was to duck behind the counter and eat them. Everyone was going to notice what she was doing—the other girls—and she didn’t want them to know because someone was sure to tell and management would find out. She got the idea that I must get a liking for oranges too, and I agreed. For several weeks she and I took turns ducking behind the counter to eat a few sections of an orange. I don’t think I ever ate quite so many oranges. I loved them and was really quite sorry when Leyonna got over her morning sickness.

The 25th Street house in Ogden

The 25th Street house was quite the nicest house we had ever lived in, or I guess had really ever expected to live in. It was a beautiful old home and still is, on 25th Street between Madison and Monroe. I don’t know who built the home or who had owned it, but I’m sure when it had been built, it had been intended to be a showplace. As the society people moved farther east, up the hill, whoever had owned it had decided to move with them and it was for sale. Keith was able to buy it at rather a good price. Since it was the charm of an older home that we liked, of course we were delighted with it.

As you entered, you went into a large entrance hall, and going up the right side of this entrance hall was a beautiful spiral staircase with a lovely polished banister. On the other side there was a sliding door opening into a lovely, large living room with a big sectional window to the front. Off from the living room was what I suppose in that day had been a sitting room or parlor, another large room. At the end of the entrance hall through another sliding door you went into a nice big dining room. Now these three rooms formed a sort of an L and they were all quite large and had very high ceilings. There was a large window in the end of the dining room and also in the sitting room, which made for a rather large open area. They were all open with just the colonnade, which was a popular way of designing architecture at that time. I imagine in entertaining, whoever owned it had been able to entertain quite a large crowd rather elaborately by opening these three big rooms to each other. Back of the dining room was a big kitchen, large enough that we ate in it most of the time. There were nice front and back porches. Going up the spiral staircase, at the top of it, you came to another long hall, and from it on either side were three good big bedrooms and a large bathroom. At the end of the hall was a huge bedroom, and down the right side of that room there was another staircase leading back down into the kitchen.

The spiral stair

It was really quite an elaborate home, though as I say, it was old and it was somewhat run down and needed quite a bit of repair, which Keith knew that he could attend to himself, because he was pretty good at painting and papering and all that sort of thing. You can tell from this description that we had ample room for Roy’s family. All of the boys slept in this big bedroom at the back, including Mark and Austin while Roy was there, and there was a room for Roy and Maude, and one for Keith and Ruth, and one for Mother and I, and we had ample room for us all. In fact, after Roy and his family moved out, we realized it was, we had just a little bit more room than we needed, and for part of the time, I know we rented one of the bedrooms. I don’t know whether it was because there was a shortage of rooms in Ogden, or whether there was a shortage of money in Keith’s pocket. I would be rather inclined to think it was the latter.

As I said, Keith decided that it needed quite a bit of repair, so he started doing some painting, and since the ceilings were so high, he had some sawhorses and a large heavy, thick plank across the sawhorses to stand on, and he proceeded to do the painting. He had to have that in order to reach the ceilings, which were high, even though he was rather tall. This worked very well, and he did a lovely job on the downstairs and in the entrance hall, but suddenly we became faced with how in the world he was going to do the walls along this spiral staircase. There wasn’t exactly anywhere to put a sawhorse over a staircase, and the wall was two stories high, not just the one. This gave him a little problem, but he thought it through, and he came up with the startling suggestion that he would put the plank out over the banister and Ruth and I would sit on one end of the plank while he walked out on the other end to do his painting. We rebelled, but as usual, Keith prevailed, and that’s exactly what we did. Ruth and I sat on one end of the plank, or on one side of the plank, while he worked from the other side. We had to very gently wriggle back and forth as he was working so that the plank would be evenly balanced with him on the one side. It was a terrifying experience, and I’m sure that both Ruth and I were a nervous wreck before the day was over. Meanwhile, Keith did a beautiful job and he was very proud of it.

First landing of the spiral stair

I’ve often wondered where Mother went during that time. I’m sure she never could have watched anything so precarious. She must have hid out in the basement all day.

We did a lot of living in that old house, some of it happy and some not so happy. Ruth had a miscarriage while we were living there, and she also had pneumonia very badly during the time we were there. Mother’s last illness and her death also occurred while we were there. We were in the Fifth Ward. Bishop Shaw was the bishop at that time, and we were all active in the ward except of course Mother, who was not well enough to be doing any church work by this time. The boys were in Sunday School and Mutual and growing up. I worked in Mutual, I remember, and did some of my home dramatics while we were living in the Fifth Ward. We enjoyed the Fifth Ward very much. I would say on the whole, we did have a very lovely time during the years we lived there, in spite of the usual problems that affect most families.

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Notes:

1. It was three miles from Uncle Tom Berrett’s house in North Ogden to Five Points (about 1st Street in Ogden) and then another three miles to Weber College. Maude Wahlquist said that the street car ran all the way into North Ogden until a certain time of night, after which it stopped at Five Points. Roy often had to walk from Five Points the rest of the way home.
2. Maude stopped working upon the birth of their daughter during the War.
3. The North Star blanket salesman was Jim McEleney. By the time Mabel moved to Minneapolis, where Jim lived, marriage was no longer an issue, as Ruth Wahlquist later told her children, because of their family obligations and religious differences. They remained close friends until Jim’s death.
4. Bart Wolthius was their LDS stake president in the 1970s. He was also their dentist up to 1990. Leyonna had married his older brother Frank in 1930. They had four children and divorced.

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Go to Part 14 here.