Mabel’s Memories, part 14

This is part 14 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 13, Mabel and her mother were living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family in Ogden off and on while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. This part concerns 1935 to 1938, including her mother’s death and the different places she worked between her long job at Wright’s and going to work for C.C. Anderson.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

I would guess that my mother’s death was the hardest thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know just how long she had been having a series of small strokes. They were always accompanied by an upset stomach, and I’m sure it was quite some time before we recognized that it was anything else. They finally became severe enough that she would have a temporary loss of the use of one of her limbs and a few days of confusion in her mind. We did call Dr. Strandquist in, and he told us that she was having some slight strokes. It seemed that it was the breaking of a blood vessel in the brain—a slight breaking—so that just a few drops of blood would go onto the brain, and whatever part of the body that portion of the brain controlled, that was where she felt the results. I don’t know whether he was trying to make us feel better about it, but he told us that that was the problem that President Wilson had had during the years of his illness. These illnesses became a little bit more frequent, and they lasted for some time before she finally had a bad stroke.

Mabel’s favorite picture of her mother,
Elizabeth Campbell Wahlquist

Her first severe stroke came while she and I were alone. Keith and Ruth and the family had gone on a trip to California. They went directly to San Francisco, and when they got there, they decided that as long as they were there, they might just as well go down the 101 Highway to Los Angeles and let the children see the ocean, that they might not have another opportunity very soon. This took a few days longer, and in addition to that, they had a little bad luck. They had stopped the car by an electric train track, and as one of the boys got out of the car, he had left the car door open, and while they were looking at whatever they had stopped for, a train came roaring by and took the car door off. They had had to stop for repairs and that had delayed them a day or two. That meant they were gone longer than they had planned to be.

Mother had her stroke in the night and it was more severe than she had ever had before, and she was extremely confused. She got it into her mind that someone was in the room that we had previously rented. It was not rented at that time. She talked with a number of people that weren’t there, and things were just very distorted. It was a very eerie feeling for me and I was extremely frightened. The next morning she was somewhat better, but the paralysis had affected her one leg and her arm and it was difficult for her. She could walk with help, but it was difficult. I had to stay home from work with her for several days. The confusion in her mind remained for several days, but not as bad as it had been. I’m sure Roy and Maude must have been out at Roosevelt at the time. They didn’t have a telephone, but Roy always stopped in every few days, and he did come in before Keith and Ruth got back. I’m sure that Maude was not in Ogden, or I know that she would have come and stayed with me, and I wouldn’t have been alone. I was alone with her for several days. Sometime during that time I do remember that Fred came and stayed a day or two, but Mother seemed quite a lot better, and so he, being in a hurry, had gone.

When I thought Mother was well enough that I could go back to work if I had someone to be with her, I got my first blow when I called the Relief Society president and asked her. I told her my problem and asked for help. Mother was not a member of Relief Society in the Fifth Ward; she had not been able to go. Ruth didn’t go to Relief Society either; she worked in the Primary, and I’m sure she would have gone to Relief Society and taken Mother if Mother had been able to go. Whether that had anything to do with it or not I don’t know, but when I asked the president for help, she said she was sorry, but they just didn’t go out and do that anymore.

I was furious. I remembered all of those miles that my little mother had covered in her years as the Relief Society president and I felt that she had earned the right to be taken care of. I didn’t say anything of this to her, nor did I call the bishop, but I did ask her if she didn’t know of someone who would come and help; I would be glad to pay them. She said if she heard of anyone, she would let me know. I didn’t hear any more from her and she never did come to the home to see how my mother was, and I was deeply hurt. I didn’t tell my mother anything about it; I’m sure that she didn’t know that this happened.

Keith and Ruth got home, and of course they were terribly sorry that this had happened while they were away and so very sorry that they had been as long as they were getting back. No one could blame them because they had no way of knowing that such a thing was going to happen. By the time they got back, Mother was much improved, but she never did get very well after that. Ruth would watch out for her during the day while I was gone, and I would be with her at night. She was very restless at night and I got very little sleep, and I got rather run down during that summer.

It was in August that I wakened and went to work leaving her asleep, which was not unusual to do, because she would be awake nearly all night and by morning she would be exhausted and would fall into a sleep. She had done that this night, so when I went to work she was still sleeping. About 11 o’clock Ruth called me and said that they had not been able to waken her. She was in a coma for thirty-six hours and then she passed away without waking.[1] I remember running down stairs—those back stairs—when the undertaker came to take her body away and finding poor Max huddled on the bed on the back porch crying. I sat down by him and we sat with our arms around one another while my mother’s body was being taken away.

Fred and Roy arrived rather soon after Mother’s death, but we were in a dilemma about what to do about Jack. He had been teaching in Washington D.C. that summer and had his family with him. They had decided that they would come home by way of Canada and make a rather extended trip out of it, and we were not expecting them home for about two or three weeks. We didn’t feel that we should wait that long before Mother should be buried. Dr. Strandquist made the decision for us. He seemed to feel that I couldn’t take quite that long a time. I had gotten quite tired and worn down and for some reason or other I was unable to cry. He felt this was the result of nerves.

We went ahead with the preparation for Mother’s funeral, and her body was brought back to the house, as was common in those days, for a day or two so that friends and neighbors could come in and see her and visit with us. This of course, was in lieu of what we now do when we have a viewing. I remember during that time standing in the living room looking at Mother there in the casket. She looked so very beautiful, so rested and peaceful, and my eyes went instinctively to her hands. Mother had beautiful hands. With all of the work that she had done and with all of the arthritis and problems that she had had, it had not affected her hands. Her joints were not swollen, her fingers were long and tapered and very pretty. She had lovely hands.

As I stood and looked at her, I realized that she didn’t have her wedding ring on, and I suddenly remembered the many times she had said to me, “I mustn’t be buried without my wedding ring.” Her hands would sometimes swell, and she would have to take the ring off, and of course in the forty-some-odd years she had worn it, it had become rather worn and thin (it was just a plain gold band), and she had gently put it away. Now I thought, well Mother must not be buried without this wedding ring. I remembered her saying that Charlie might not know her if she got up there without her wedding ring. I dashed upstairs and started tearing the room apart trying to find the ring. I finally did find it, carefully wrapped in a handkerchief in the bottom of one of the dresser drawers. I took it down and put it on her hand. As I stood there looking at her, things seemed to fall in place and everything seemed to be all right. I remembered that she had told me the day before she went into her coma that my father had been there with her, and I remembered the dream that she had had, and I thought that after these twelve years of waiting, that the time had finally come when he had come for her and they could talk again. And then I cried.

Mother’s funeral was held in the Fifth Ward. I don’t remember who the speakers were, other than Harold Eldredge. Harold had visited us while Mother was ill, and I remember him saying at the funeral that both he and Mother had realized that they were saying goodbye to each other when he left. Ruth’s uncle Nephi J. Brown sang Mother’s favorite song, “The Holy City.” After the services she was taken to Heber City for burial, and there were a number of old friends there when we arrived. She was buried next to her baby, Ruth. It was not very long after that that my brothers brought my father’s remains from Myton and buried him there beside Mother.[2]

Jack was heartbroken when he got home and found that Mother had died and been buried without him. We had felt awfully bad about it. They got into Salt Lake late in the evening and telephoned us as soon as they arrived and came directly up when we had told them what had happened. I’m not sure that Jack ever did quite forgive us. He said that he never quite could realize that his mother had gone, the fact that he had not been there at the time of her funeral, which also reminded me of how Roy felt when Father died when he was in the mission field. I remembered so clearly when he came home that all of us had made the adjustment to Father’s death, but he had not, and it seemed that when we would be talking he would sort of be expecting Father. I suppose that’s the way Jack felt, and I’ve always been sorry about it. It did teach us, as a family, a lesson though. That is, we have made very sure since then that everyone knew where everyone else was, so that if any emergency did arise, we were able to get in touch with all of the members of the family and that no one would be put in this position again.

I missed Mother terribly, but I stayed on with Keith and Ruth and their family. It was now 1935, and except for the few times that Mother and I had had an apartment, she and I had lived with them. We had a very close relationship with them. I had always been very close to the big boys, and of course I loved each of Ruth’s children as they came along, and it was very fortunate for me that I had them to be with, or I’m sure I would have been much more lonely.

Ruth and I had rather a unique relationship. We had neither of us ever had a sister, and so we had sort of adopted each other and we had always had a very close relationship. I had appreciated so much her kindness to Mother during her illness. We always had a lot of fun together. I remember one time we went to a show before one of the children was born, I don’t remember which one. We went to the—I can’t remember what the name of the show house was—just above Washington Boulevard on 25th Street—and as we came out, it had been snowing and it was very slick. Ruth was quite pregnant at the time, and as we started down the hill, both her feet went out from under her and she started to fall. I knew that would be bad, so I grabbed her under the arms, and—we’ve laughed about it so many times—we, both of us, slid down the hill, me with my hands under her arms as if she were a wheelbarrow, until we reached Washington Boulevard, where she was able to stand up.

I don’t remember too much what happened that next winter at the store, probably some of the things that I’ve already told you, because as you know, I’ve just been telling you things as I happened to think of them. I’m quite sure that was the year, however, that Mr. Ferris became very ill and had surgery and was away from the store for several months. Gus Wright put me in charge. I did all of the buying and supervised the department and the girls, and it was really quite a wonderful experience for me. I used to go up—after Mr. Ferris got out of the hospital of course—to his place at night and talk everything over with him, and he would tell me what he thought I should do.

That spring Keith had arranged through a friend of his for me to work at Zion Canyon in the Curio Store. I wasn’t at all sure that I should do this, but when I talked to Mr. Ferris and Gus Wright, they both agreed that they thought it would be a good idea and not to worry about it, because my job would be there when I came back. I’m sure Keith did this thinking that I needed this change. I went, and it was really a wonderful experience for me.

It was the first time I had ever been away from home of course, away from some of the family, and I did miss them. It was also the first time that I had ever had any experience with this type of merchandise or with this type of living. We lived in cabins by the lodge, and we ate our meals in the lodge in the guest dining room. This wasn’t true of everybody who worked there. The waitresses and the maids and the bellhops all ate out in the kitchen. We who worked in the Curio Store were considered rather a different group, and we had many privileges that were not allowed the others. In fact, the maids were expected to make up our cabins. That, too, was a new experience for me.

We had a lot of beautiful Indian merchandise, lots of beautiful jewelry, some of it marked “Made in Jersey,” but maybe they had Indians in Jersey too; I don’t know. We had the jackets and the rugs, Navajo rugs, and the serapes. We had a lot of pottery and just a wealth of Indian merchandise. That was the only thing we did carry, was Indian merchandise, except of course for candy bars and cigarettes and things of that type. At one end of the Curio Store also, there was a soda fountain and there was a young fellow hired there to be the soda jerk. When he was out to lunch, we took turns taking care of it. At any time we were allowed to go back to the counter and get ourselves a soda or a sundae or whatever, the result of which I gained ten pounds, which I needed then.

Staff at Zion Canyon Park, Mabel the tallest in the center.

We did carry a great many postcards. It was quite a thing to see those big buses of tourists come rolling up to the lodge and the tourists come swarming out of them and into the store. Their first question was always, “How soon will we see a Mormon?” My answer was always, “Just look right straight ahead.” I was quite a disappointment to them. I didn’t look at all like a Mormon was supposed to look: no horns. One thing that always surprised me about tourists was that they all gathered around the postcards rack and bought any amount of postcards, stood in the curio store and wrote the postcards to Aunt Susie and everybody that they knew, got their stamps, went and mailed them, climbed back on the bus, and away they went. That was as much as many of them saw of the park, but they could go home and tell their friends that they had been to Zion National Park. There were others, busloads, who came and stayed overnight or even a few days, and they did see the Park. And so did we.

Our hours were arranged in such a way that we could see the Park. In the store, we went to work, for example, at 2 o’clock on Monday and worked until 10 at night when the store was closed, with time off for our dinner. The next morning we went to work when the store opened, at 6 or at 7, and worked that day until 2, when the other girls came on. In this way, you see, we had a full evening and a full morning together to see the Park, and then we were on duty again from 2 the one day until 2 the next day. I really saw Zion Park, all the way from miles up the Narrows to the top of Angel’s Landing. That was a really beautiful sight from Angel’s Landing, directly across from the Great White Throne. You could see it so much better from there than you could from down in the bottom of the canyon. That was quite an eventful day. That was one place we had to go with a group of tourists and with a guide.

We went up the trail on mules, and when we reached the top, we were way above the timber line and had a beautiful view of the canyon. The only problem was that the guide had forgotten to bring his water bags. It was hot as could be up there, and dry, and we were equally dry. I never was so thirsty in all my life. A group of young fellows had some cans of beer, which they opened and very accommodatingly passed around. I will admit I was so thirsty I took a sip of that warm beer. It was horrible. I suppose it was a good experience for me because I certainly lost my desire to ever drink beer. Despite our discomfort, it was still a wonderful day. There were so many beautiful places to see in Zion Canyon. To me it’s the prettiest of all of the canyons, probably because it’s more accessible. You can climb around and see so many sights.

I made some very good friends while I was there. The majority of the younger people there were LDS, but not all of the officials. The best friend I made during that time was Faye Williams from Morgan. She doesn’t happen to be LDS but had been raised among Mormons. They have the Williams Department Store, I think still, in Morgan. Faye was a lovely girl, was loads of fun. She and I were friends for many, many years; in fact, I suppose we still are friends, but we don’t see each other a great deal since I’ve been retired. It used to be that when she would be in Ogden, she would occasionally come in, and we would have lunch together.

It was Faye who arranged for Frank, when he was running for his first time to be District Judge, to speak on the same program at Morgan with Doug Stringfellow. He might consider that a rather dubious honor now, but at that time he was rather pleased about it because Doug Stringfellow was the real thing in those days. It was before his downfall.[3]

Mabel at Zion Canyon

Faye and I didn’t room together. I roomed with the girl who was the nurse. We were good friends too, but not nearly so close as Faye and I. I did have the experience of tagging around for awhile with the fellow who was there to take the photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, that owned the Parks at that time, and from which they made the postcards. After the first few times, this was a little tiresome, because he was an expert in his work and sometimes we would have to sit and wait for hours for the sun to get just right, or for that cloud to move to exactly the right spot, or for something to happen that would make his picture especially good. It was an interesting experience and I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed selling the merchandise too. It was really interesting to look at and to learn more about. There were some perfectly beautiful things. We had a little Navajo jeweler there who made up rings and things for people, and it was very interesting to watch his work with the turquoise, setting it into rings for people. I’m trying to think of his name. I think it must be rather a common name that was adopted by many of the Indians, because any time that I was ever back at the Park, there was always a jeweler there and he always had the same name.

We weren’t paid very much. We got just $30 a month, but this included our room and board. It was very nice board, and there really was no place to spend any money, except an occasional bar of candy, unless you wanted to buy a lot of the merchandise that was in the store. I loved it and would have liked to have bought much of it, but I had learned before then that I couldn’t buy everything that I wanted to buy, and so I came home with most of the money that I had earned in my pocket.

I hadn’t been back at Wright’s very long that fall until I realized that something was wrong. When I would go to Mr. Ferris and suggest that we should buy something, he would put me off with, “Well, let’s wait a little while.” Our stocks began running down and we were out of so many things that people came to buy. Finally, I guess Mr. Ferris could see that I was getting impatient because we weren’t replacing our stocks, and finally he told me that the store was going to go out of business. During the Depression, Wright’s had extended a great deal of credit to their customers and had in turn bought on credit, and things were beginning to catch up with them. The wholesale houses that they had bought from had no doubt bought on credit and were being squeezed by the manufacturers, and they in turn were squeezing the store. Wright’s made an effort to collect from their customers, but their customers didn’t seem to be very much concerned. As a result, it was just becoming apparent that they would not be able to go on any great length of time this way.

People are very funny, I think. During that time, Penney’s were in business down where The Bon is now, in the old building, and they were doing business on cash. How they got the reputation, I don’t know, because it actually was not true, but people seemed to feel that they sold a little bit cheaper than Wright’s did. If someone had cash, they always went to Penney’s to buy, but if they wanted to charge, if they didn’t have cash, then they came to Wright’s and charged it.

I’m sure Wright’s could have worked their way out of their problem and gone on with their business, but none of the sons had chosen to be interested in retailing, and there were none of them that ever worked in the store, to my knowledge. I think that Arthur and Gus and their sister decided that it was a good time to close the store and to go on to other endeavors. Almost as soon as it was being rumored that they were going to close, Penney’s were immediately anxious to get a lease on their building. If I have my figures correct, they do have, from the time Wright’s closed, a 40-year lease on that building, at $30,000 a year, which was an immense figure at that time. It probably doesn’t sound so big now, but it meant $10,000 a year for each of the three members of the family, which in those days was not a bad living.

I really don’t know exactly when it was announced that they would close, and when we started our close-out sale. Seeing the demise of an old institution like that, that had served the community so many years is really sad to watch. We started marking down merchandise and selling and not replacing it. By the time that I left the store, which was probably about a week before they closed, we were down to almost bare tables, and they were then beginning to sell the tables and the other store fixtures.

I had had an opportunity that year to manage the curio store at Zion Canyon. Miss Foley, who had been the manager, and that I worked under, was going on to Grand Canyon as a manager there. I considered taking the job, but it would have meant that I would have had to go down to Cedar City in April in order to get the merchandise marked and selected, and then get on down to the Canyon to get it in place and be ready to open on Decoration Day, which is when they always opened the store. Many people said, “Well, dummy, why don’t you do that? After all, you’re going to be out of a job here right away.” Somehow I felt the responsibility of staying on and helping with the sale. I felt that I owed Wright’s a debt, and I felt that I owed a great deal to Mr. Ferris. It was going to be the end of work so far as Mr. Ferris was concerned, because he was near retirement, but he probably could have gone on for a few more years had the store continued.

We began our sale along about April, and I left near the end of June. They had offered me a place to come to at the Grand Canyon for the balance of the summer. Miss Foley had written and had said that she could use me. Here again, some people thought I was rather stupid that I went down there for two months, knowing that when I got through that I would be out of a job and would be having to look for a job. I had written a letter to Auerbach’s and had received an answer that they would interview me, and also from Montgomery Ward. A number of the salesmen that I had worked with had told me that they would help me to find something in the area. Many people suggested that I apply at Penney’s.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to apply at Penney’s. I think part of it was that there had been a certain amount of rivalry between the two stores for a long time, and part of it was that I didn’t feel that, and it was true at that time, they didn’t carry the quality of merchandise that we did at Wright’s and that I had become accustomed to sell. Penney’s have traded up considerably in the past few years, but even now I think that I would not be especially happy working at Penney’s.

I took the job at Grand Canyon and spent two months down there, all of July and August. I think I was there into September. I did enjoy it tremendously. At Grand Canyon I was on the north rim. They always say that the north rim is the most beautiful, but you have to be on the south rim to see it. It is beautiful even if you’re on the north rim. The lodge has burned down since, the lodge that was there when I was there, and it was a beautiful old place. It was all entirely different from Zion, where you were in the bottom of the canyon looking up. At Grand Canyon, you were at the rim of the canyon looking down. It was entirely a reverse situation. It’s considerably higher than Zion, than the bottom, naturally, of Zion Canyon, so we had some things that were different in our activities. We stayed in cabins as we had done at Zion and ate in the dining room and had all the privileges that we had had at Zion. There were so many deer there, that was one thing that was interesting. They were protected, and as you went along the paths in the forest—the Kaibab Forest covers that area and you were in more of a forest—and you would see a lot of deer.

I think one of the funniest things that happened to me there was when I left to go down there, several people came down to the bus to see me off, and they gave me a big box of nuts, salted nuts. I had them with me, and I didn’t have a roommate, I was in a cabin by myself. I had this box of salted nuts open on the bed that I was not sleeping in, and when I came in from work at night, I would take a handful of these salted nuts. I noticed that the nuts were going down pretty fast, and I thought, well, the maids were enjoying them, and I knew that I didn’t need all of those nuts, so I just left them out for the maids to enjoy. One day when I came in, to my surprise, it was not the maids, but a bunch of squirrels that were on the bed eating my nuts! As I disturbed them, they scurried through the window and out. I didn’t eat any more of the nuts, but later when I went to take down my sweater or a jacket (I don’t remember which) as the mornings got cooler, and tipped it upside down, nuts went rolling all over the floor. They had been hiding them—the squirrels had been hiding them in the pockets.

Squirrels are most interesting and can be quite damaging in a place such as this. We had the same experience at the store. We had peanuts and various kinds of nuts in little cellophane bags as we see them all the time. We had them on a rack where they hung. In the mornings when we’d come to work, we would discover that the bags would be empty. You wouldn’t really know that they had ever been touched, except that just right across the very bottom of the bag it would be slit. I don’t know how they did it; you’d have thought they must have had a knife or scissors or something to slit the bottom of the bag and let the nuts fall out. I remember one day I was waiting on a tourist and was showing the serape jackets that were hanging along the side of the wall, and as I got them down, why, here came the nuts rolling out of the jacket onto the floor. Here again, the pack rats and the squirrels had been busily getting their winter store in, not realizing that those jackets were going to be packed up and sent into Cedar City for the winter and they would be not of any use to them when winter came.

Our merchandise was about the same as we had had at Zion Canyon, and the selling was about the same, and the tourists were about the same. One of the interesting things that I did was to take a mule trip down into the canyon, down to the bottom of the canyon. This was quite an experience and something that I enjoyed doing.

I did like the work very much, and here again, I had an opportunity to work the southern parts in the summer, and then that year Sun Valley was going to be opened, and then I could go to Sun Valley and work the winter months in Sun Valley, making it a year-round job. I gave this some consideration because I thought it would be a great deal of fun, but I finally came to the conclusion that it would be fun for a few years, but that it held very little future for me, and no doubt it wouldn’t be too long a time until I would not enjoy living that type of life, living always in a hotel or a cabin and eating in a hotel and not having a permanent home situation. I turned that down.

When I came home, I went into Auerbach’s and had an interview there and was given a job in their piece goods and domestic departments. I was to go to work the following week. As I was in Salt Lake, I thought I would walk up to ZCMI and see what they might have to offer. As you know, I had worked at ZCMI a short time from the time we came from Myton until Eva died. I went into ZCMI and up to the personnel department this time and was interviewed by Mr. Adams. They offered me a job in their hosiery department. I had never worked in hosiery, other than at Waugh’s we had hose, but I thought somehow I would rather work at ZCMI. The salary was going to be the same, and my friend Ruth was still there, and there were several reasons that I thought I might prefer to work at ZCMI.

I still was going to live in Ogden and commute back and forth, which I did that winter. It got a little tiresome. I would leave home at 6:30 in the morning in order to get my ride, which left from 24th Street, and then we’d get in to Salt Lake about 8:30. I rode with a fellow named George Nashville. He was working for a jewelry company in Salt Lake, and he had to be to work at that time. We couldn’t get into ZCMI until 9, and so we had a half-hour wait there. We used to go into ZCMI or Deseret Book Store, which was right next door and did open early, and read the gift card verses until we could get into the store.

Bea Gale was also working at ZCMI in the drapery department and also rode with George Nashville, and so did Fern Henchcliff. The three of us had worked at Wright’s together. We had quite a lot of fun in our rides back and forth. In the winter we used to spend some time in the ladies’ restroom in the basement of the Hotel Utah. We used to take our crocheting and sit down there and crochet for half an hour until we could get into the store. At night we had the same problem that we did in the morning. We got off work about half an hour earlier than George did, and so we would have to kill time until we could get our ride back. We used to get back into Ogden around 7:00, and by the time I caught my bus and got back home, it would be in the neighborhood of 7:30, so it made a rather long day and left very little time for anything else except the job.

I rather soon found out that I didn’t care too much for selling hosiery. I had worked always where I had had a lot of various things to sell, and I got so weary of people coming in to say, “I’d like to buy a pair of hose.” I decided it just wasn’t for me, and the long day and the long ride also got very tiresome, and it made me unhappy at ZCMI, because I’d worked on jobs where I worked many hours longer than that, and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. I think that it was rather that I was just plain bored with the job because it had so little challenge. There really wasn’t much you could do in a hosiery department besides sell a pair of hose. We had silk hose in two or three weights, and we had rayon hose by this time; we still didn’t have nylon. We had the rayons in one or two different weights, and of course we had the cotton lisles for the older ladies, and we had anklets and knee length socks for the girls, and that was just about it. Oh, that same year Belle-Sharmear came out with proportioned lengths, and that did complicate things just a little.

When a lady walked up to you and said, “I want a pair of hose,” the first thing you had to find out was what size she wanted to buy; otherwise, you would start to clutter the counter with everything. If she wanted anything, no matter how large she was, if she wanted anything larger than a size 9½ , she always wanted it for a friend. I’ve never been able to figure that out, why people were so embarrassed to say that they wore a 10½ like I do. Well, the friend introduced a third party into the sale and so from then on you had to always talk to the customer in terms of her friend. Would her friend like a lightweight silk hose for a dress? Or would she like a heavier hose for everyday? Or would she like rayons? And so on, until you finally established what the friend would like, and then you could begin showing merchandise. After she had made her selection on the type of merchandise, then you went into colors and she had a choice of a very limited number of colors in those days. Each thing required going into the matter of what her friend would like. We had to discuss what her friend’s dresses were so she would know what colors to wear with them, and so on, and it was a very long, belabored ordeal. If it hadn’t been quite so boring it would have been rather amusing. The only thing that you could do to improve your sale was to get her to buy a box of three pair instead of just one pair. Very often she wanted only one pair, but she always wanted the box so she could wrap them for a gift for her friend, and so you could get her to buy three.

Now if I had been selling a lovely linen tablecloth and the lady had taken all of this time to decide just what she wanted in a beautiful cloth that she was going to use all of her life and hand down to her children to be used through their lives and probably down to another generation, it would have seemed worthwhile, and I would thoroughly have enjoyed it. But to me a pair of hose was just something you bought one week and the next week they had a run in them, and I couldn’t see taking all of that time in making the selection.

They claim there’s something to do with boredom and your physical health; I don’t know, but I really didn’t know why it should make your feet hurt so bad. I never in my whole life, in all the years that I’ve worked, my somewhat 45 years, even tramping the streets of New York on a hot summer day, I don’t think my feet ever got so sore and so tired as they did that winter at ZCMI. At night I spent most of the time after I did get home with my feet in a pan full of water, trying to get them in shape for the next day. I’ve worked on cement floors and on cement pavements and anywhere you could mention, but I never have had that much trouble with my feet before. Could boredom do that? I wonder.

There was another thing I didn’t like about ZCMI at that time. All of the General Authorities[4] got discounts—their wives got discounts. I knew most of the General Authorities and I liked them and respected them very much, but I didn’t know their wives. Some of them, I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but some of them were just a plain pain in the neck. They were so very uppity and were really not at all courteous or polite to a salesperson. This wasn’t true of all of them; some of them were very sweet. When it came time to make out the sales check and you didn’t give them their discount, some of them would become very disagreeable. I didn’t know who they were by sight, and I would have to go to the buyer and have her okay it, and by the time we got the whole thing all straightened out, I would be made to feel like a little worm crawling along the floor somewhere. The third time I worked at ZCMI they had corrected that, and all of the discounts were given in the office, and the list was kept up there, and you didn’t put the discount on the sales slip in the department. That’s the way it should have been all the time, but I guess it takes a little while to work all of these things out. I really became very unimpressed with some of our General Authorities’ wives.

Christmas time came, and we were extremely busy. I’ll never forget those days, and I thought Christmas Eve when we walked out of the store if I never saw another pair of hose, I would be just as happy. I got up on Christmas morning and started opening my packages, and would you believe it? I got 21 pair of hose for Christmas that year! Many of them had come from salesmen, and some of them had come from girls that worked in the department and so on, but that was my Christmas, those 21 pair of hose. The day after Christmas, we had to go back for the big hosiery sale.

This went on until along about April [1938], I guess it was. I had hesitated on anything I wanted to come back to Ogden for. As I have told you before, I had this feeling that I didn’t want to work at Penney’s. There wasn’t any place else to work in Ogden, except the Emporium. The Emporium was a nice little store, a small store, almost as small as a specialty shop. However, they did have fabrics and domestics in a small way. Finally, I decided that I would go in and ask them for a job. They were owned by Thorstesons, or at least they were the big owners at that time, and it was being pretty much run by a young George Thorsteson, who was very recently out of college and had majored in business somewhere in an eastern school and really knew his stuff when it came to how an inventory in a store should look on a piece of paper.

They hired me, and they gave me a buyer’s job to buy the domestics and piece goods. I know the handbags were part of my department, and the jewelry, and the hosiery, I’m afraid. I can’t remember what else. Again it was a disaster so far as I was concerned. I liked the Thorstesons; I liked George very much—he was a very fine young fellow—and I liked the girls I worked with, and we had a nice clientele. The only trouble was we didn’t have any merchandise. We had merchandise on paper in George’s inventory upstairs, but it was springtime and people were ready to buy white bags and white gloves and summer jewelry and things of that sort, and we still had a nice supply of black bags and brown bags and dark gloves, and nothing that looked like spring. George had been taught that you did not over-buy. I’d been taught that too, but how were you going to sell this winter merchandise and not have any summer merchandise in your department? My period at the Emporium was spent most of the time in George’s office arguing about the fact that we had to get rid of the old merchandise at any price, even if we did lose money, so that we could buy the new merchandise. Sometimes I won, and sometimes I didn’t. I wasn’t at the Emporium very long.

About that time, C.C. Anderson opened and everybody was scrambling to get a job with them (they opened in the old Penney’s building). C.C. Anderson was a chain from Idaho that had been taken over during the Depression years by a New York company called Allied Purchasing Corporation. I went down and applied for a job with them and got one. I should say that one thing that made me come to the Emporium was that they paid me $80 a month, which sounded really big after $50, which was the most I had ever earned up until that time. That was what they offered me at C.C. Anderson, $80. They had not opened yet; they were still in the process of getting the building ready.

While they’re getting the building ready, I’ll go back and tell you a little bit about what the family had been doing during that time.

I really don’t know the reason why Keith sold the 25th Street house. I don’t know whether he discovered that it was more than he could handle financially, or whether they just decided that it was too big, and more room than we needed. I know that Ruth had to have help quite a bit of the time while we were there, because she wasn’t too well, and the stairs were always quite hard for her. The bathroom was upstairs, and that and other things about the house, even though it was such a lovely home, were not too convenient, and that may have had something to do with their deciding to move. I am more inclined to think that it probably was that with his desire to go on to summer school and to get more education, Keith just couldn’t quite handle that and the house too. At any rate, he sold it and we moved out to Washington Blvd. again.

I don’t know just how long we lived in the house on 25th Street; probably four or five years at the most. Mother died while we lived there, and I know that we were living there the winter after I worked at Zion Canyon. I know that we were living out on Washington in the Bingham house the winter after I worked at Grand Canyon, so it was some time during that time that we moved. I don’t remember a thing about the move, whether they moved while I was down at Grand Canyon, or whether my memory is just not with it about the move, but I know we did leave there and rented a house on Washington, in the 700 block on Washington. It was rather a nice home.

One of the things that I remember about the Bingham house was the day that Keith [Ruth and Keith’s son] was born. He was born on the 24th of July and was a pretty good-sized kid before he realized that that wasn’t what they had the parade for on the 24th of July.[5] It was always “his” parade. That particular day, I remember Mrs. Folkman came in, Ruth’s mother, and took Joe and Elizabeth to the parade. Keith was at the hospital with Ruth, and I remember I was doing the washing on the back porch.

I don’t know exactly when Keith started working on his book about Reed Smoot, but I do know that winter, and I guess most of the time we were in the Bingham house he was working on it. I remember my bedroom was just off the dining room, and I know he used to work far into the night writing, and I know he worked harder than he should, with his daytime work, trying to get this book finished.[6]

I know that one of the years that we were in the Bingham house, that Max and I were there alone during the summer while Keith and Ruth and the smaller children, Ruth’s children, went over to Greeley for summer school, for Keith to attend summer school. Grant and Frank went out to stay at my brother Fred’s on their farm down in the Roy Valley.

This house, of course, put us back into the Eighth Ward, and I was able to renew all my acquaintances in the Eighth Ward again. I hadn’t really lost the ones that I had been close to: this little club that I told you about had been going on all of the time, and I had been a member and had met with the girls every other week throughout all of these years in between.

I’m not just sure how long we were there at the Bingham place. I know that little Keith was a very small boy when we bought the Barker home that the family owns now, and where I live. I remember very well when we moved that it was in the wintertime, and we couldn’t get little Keith to take his coat off. He went around all day with his coat on and cried to go home, and he didn’t want to stay in this strange house. We had quite a time getting him to go to bed at night.

I’m beginning to find out that this is just like eating bread and jam: I just simply can’t come out even. I’m either way ahead on what the family’s doing, or ahead on what I’m doing with my work. At this point now, I’m far ahead of myself and I’m going to have to go clear back to when I went to C.C. Anderson to work. I’m sure that that would be a year or so further back. I would guess that from now on, I’m just not going to be able to keep the two stories straight, and I just hope that I don’t get them so mixed up that you won’t be able to understand them.

I hope that I have made you realize that several years have gone by now and the big boys are getting to be pretty good-sized fellows; Ruth and Keith have been married a number of years by now. I had been with them all of this time and they have been just a very important part of my life.

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Notes:

1. Elizabeth Campbell Wahlquist died 17 August 1935.
2. Mabel and Ruth discussed many times the story Keith told that when he and his brothers dug up their father’s casket in Myton, they decided to open it because Roy had not been there at his death and wanted to see him once more. For a brief moment, their father was perfectly preserved, looking as if he were asleep. Suddenly his body disintegrated into dust. As the brothers rode with the casket from Myton to Heber on a wagon, Keith recited all of Hamlet’s speech beginning, “Poor Yorick. . .”.
3. Doug Stringfellow was an ex-congressman from Utah who made up stories about his World War II experiences. He used to speak often to various groups about these experiences, and he even appeared on This Is Your Life before he was exposed as a fraud.
4. The General Authorities refers to the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There might have been around two dozen that got discounts in those days.
5. In Utah, the 24th of July is celebrated as Pioneer Day, the day in 1847 when Brigham Young and his first colonizing wagon train entered the Salt Lake Valley.
6. Although Keith finished the book on Reed Smoot, he died before he could try to have it published.

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Go to Part 15 here.
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