Mabel’s Memories, part 16

This is part 16 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 15, Mabel went to work for C.C. Anderson and Co., and her brother Keith died. In this part, Mabel begins working as a buyer for Allied Corporation and goes to New York.


Chapter 8
Buyer from Boise in New York

The office was set up, I’m quite sure, in 1943. About two days before Christmas of ‘42, I got a phone call from Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the C.C. Anderson stores, telling me that I was to be one of this group who were to set up this new office in Boise. He didn’t say, “Would you like to be?”; he simply said, “You are to be.” I was to be in Pocatello on the 27th of December to meet the other buyers who would be coming down from Boise on the Portland Rose railroad, and I would meet them there and go with them into New York to meet with the Allied people and with the supervisors who were already in New York and to set up an organization to look for merchandise for the stores. You can imagine my surprise! I never dreamed—well, I did dream, always, and had done clear back from the years that I worked with Mr. Ferris—of doing something of this sort, but I actually never expected the dream to come true. It really was a dream when he called me that morning.

I was so excited I didn’t know what to do, but there in the back of my mind was how was I going to leave Ruth and the children and my promise to Keith that I would help to take care of them. I was really torn with what I should do. I really had not too much of a choice on what I was to do: as I say, he didn’t ask me would I like to, he simply told me that I had been chosen to do it, and where I was to be and when. I talked it over with Ruth, and she felt that I should do it, and I talked it over with Roy and he felt that I should go. One of the great advantages of it was that I was going to make $200 a month, and that against the $80 that I was making was not to be discounted. We felt that I could be financially perhaps more beneficial and make more of a contribution to the family than I could by staying in Ogden, even if I were to go somewhere else and get a job.

I don’t know how I got through those two days before Christmas at the store. Christmas was on a Saturday that year, so I had Saturday and Sunday at home, and then on Monday afternoon I took the train to Pocatello. The store had made the arrangements for me to—for the train and also for me to stay overnight at the Hotel Bannuck, in Pocatello, and then meet the train the next day. I frantically bought a few things to wear, because I really had a very meager wardrobe, but I couldn’t buy too much. I took the train; I think it left here about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and arrived in Pocatello around 9 o’clock that night.

It was the first time I had ridden on a train of this kind. I had ridden a couple of times on the Heber Creeper when we moved to Provo and back, and I had ridden the old Bamberger electric train quite a lot of times back and forth between Salt Lake and Ogden when I was working down there. This was my first experience on a real train. I had a chair seat going up, and I really felt important, I guess you might say, to be going on this job. I was so frightened, I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do. I felt very unqualified to take the job. I assumed that I would be buying piece goods and domestics and the same things that I had been buying, and I would know something of what I was doing.

I got into Pocatello, as I said, around nine, and took a cab, probably the first one I had ever taken, to the hotel, and spent my very first night alone in a hotel. As I said, I had stayed in a hotel one night in Los Angeles with these other ladies. But oh, that seemed like such a lonesome place to be there, and I was feeling so badly about the job requiring me to leave home, even if Boise wasn’t very far away, and I knew that I would be able to get home quite often.

Anyway, the next day I wandered around town and it seemed like the longest day in the world. By 4 o’clock I had my things down at the depot waiting for the train to come in to meet these other people. They had told me that Kathryn Karren and Evelyn Muller, who bought for the Boise store, and Mable Nye, who was also new in the office, would be coming in on that train and that they would get off and pick me up. The train made a stop in Pocatello for water and was usually there for 15 or 20 minutes. I was waiting for them when they came in. I had seen Kathryn; she had been down when the store opened, and I think Evelyn Muller was too, but I wasn’t sure that I would know either one of them, and I didn’t have any idea that they would know me. But the minute I saw those three gals get off the train, I knew who they were: three beautifully dressed, smart-looking young women, who looked like they might just have stepped out of Vogue Magazine. I stood there, looking like I had just come out of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. If I could have, I would have gone right through the floor. They didn’t have any trouble picking me out, either. But they were very sweet, and they bought some candy and various things there in the station, and we all got on the train together.

When we got on the train, I found that the four of us were to share a double bedroom. I don’t know about other people, but to me one of the saddest things I know of is the demise of those beautiful old trains like the Portland Rose and the Chief and the Super Chief that we used to travel in so much. I’m sure that many of you younger people have never even seen that type of train, and so I’m going to take just a minute to explain what a double bedroom is.

It’s simply two single bedrooms. A bedroom has an upper and lower berth, but during the day the upper berth is pushed completely out of sight. The lower berth sort of doubles up and makes a lovely velvet-covered seat. It’s very comfortable. Also in this little bedroom is a wash basin that pulls out from the wall and folds back completely out of sight, and what looks to you like a nice chair or seat, but the lid comes up and you have a toilet. A double bedroom is just two of these bedrooms with a collapsible door pulled back so that it makes one room. In each room too is a little closet in the wall where you can hang your coats and at the bottom a place for you to put your shoes. From the outside, from the corridor, the porter at night will pick up your shoes and polish them and put them back all nice and shiny for you for the next morning.

Those old trains had every luxury that there could possibly be on a train, and to travel across the country leisurely on one of those lovely velvet seats, looking out the window and watching the countryside go by is just my idea of the way to travel. At night, when you’re ready to go to bed, you call the porter and he lets down the upper berth and unfolds the lower berth, and you’re ready to get undressed and washed and climb into bed. I had the upper berth and Mable Nye had the lower berth of our bedroom.

We had been on the train a little while just talking about things before I realized that I was not going to be buying domestics and piece goods and the things that I was familiar with. I was going to be buying children’s wear and house dresses and foundation garments, none of which I knew anything about. I was just absolutely stunned when I heard this. I know now, or did know soon afterwards why this happened to be. I had been planned to buy the domestics and piece goods, but one of the people from the New York office, a young Irish fellow, had wanted this job, and the company felt that it would be good for him to have this experience, and so they had suggested him for the job. He was buying domestics and piece goods for the New York office and doing a very good job. That is, he wasn’t the head buyer, but he was in the department. He also had a lot of connections and they thought that he could handle it best. So I was given these other departments, which up until this time had been part of Kathryn Karren’s job. I think she resented just a little bit me getting them, though she realized that she had not been able to justify keeping them. Mable Nye was to buy the accessories and handbags and things of that nature. She had had no experience at all in buying anything. She had been Mr. Hinshaw’s secretary and had always wanted to go into merchandising, and I think had taken some classes in it in college, but had had no practical experience.

It was rather amusing. She had a briefcase just packed full of catalogs and bulletins and everything necessary to learn something about her job. Here I was: I didn’t even have a pencil, let alone a piece of paper. I had come totally unprepared to do any work on the train. I afterwards learned that that’s where you did a lot of your work, but I hadn’t known what to expect of the job as we went. I’m sure I wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway, partly from excitement and partly because I really didn’t know a great deal about what I was going to do until I got to New York.

One of the other fun things on a train is going into the dining room for your meals. Now you don’t go into a diner like we think of them today. You went into a beautiful dining room. Every table had a lovely white tablecloth and beautiful shiny silver, and the dishes that you were served in were, all the serving dishes were silver, and lovely glass goblets to drink from. Everything was just as you would have found it in the finest restaurant in the world, and a nice long menu to choose from and perfectly luscious food to eat. It was just a wonderful experience to me to eat in the dining cars. Then they had the lounge car, which you could go to if you chose, one little car of restful chairs and couches and benches. If you wanted to, you could have tables brought so you could play cards or do anything that you chose. All of this was really luxury; the draperies and everything were beautiful. Those were really wonderful days.

During the war, a lot of the trains got beat up a great deal when they were forced to carry a lot of the military, and things were not as comfortable as they were in peace time. The trains were full of military. Going back and forth across the country, I sometimes wondered why, if you went east, they were all traveling east, and if you went west, they were all traveling west. I often wondered why they had to shuttle them back and forth across the country so much as they seemed to do.

We had a nice trip across the country. Every place that they had to take on water, they had regular stops. We always stopped at Green River or at Cheyenne, and Omaha in Nebraska, and into Chicago. In Chicago we always had several hours to wait, and we’d leave the train and go uptown and window shop or even go to a show sometimes between trains, and then get back on the train and go on into New York. As I said, train travel was delightful, and that was one of the things that I enjoyed very much about the years that I spent in Boise. I guess that I ought to get back to telling you something about the job, because after all that’s what we were there for. I won’t either for a minute, because I’m going to tell you a few other things.

We got into New York on New Year’s Eve, and we were staying at the Lincoln Hotel, which is now called the Manhattan Hotel. It was rather an old hotel, but up until then had been rather a fine hotel. It was taken over by the military just afterwards. At the time, we stayed there a time or two, and then we started staying at the Astor, which was right next to it on Broadway. The Astor at that time was one of the fine old hotels in New York. It has since been torn down, but it was a lovely place to stay. Anyway, this night we were at the Lincoln.

New Year’s Eve is something that everyone ought to experience once in New York City on Broadway. At the time we got there, my first trip there, New York was still having the blackouts, and there were no lights except little shaded lights. On each block there would be a light that would have a shade over it. All of the big signs that many of you who’ve been to New York are familiar with were all turned off; there were none of those. The streets were really very dark. We went up to Broadway, and I think they said that night there were, I don’t know how many millions of people, on Broadway in about a two-block area from the Times building up to the Duffy Monument. We tried to stay sort of on the outside of the crowd. Kathryn Karren was with us, and she had lived in New York for quite a long time and was sort of herding us around. Mable Nye was having her first trip to New York too, so she and I were both very much excited about everything. They had said that they would turn the lights on for just a moment at 12 o’clock, but about the time that it was 12 o’clock we could hear planes overhead, and so the lights were never turned on and it remained dark.

We went back to the hotel, and Kathryn (she had just been out to Boise for this meeting arranging for the new office), she and Harvey lived in Queens. She suggested that we all go over there for a little while for New Year’s Eve, but Ev Muller didn’t want to go. She was tired, and felt that she would rather just go to bed. Mable and I were out for anything that was going on, so we went with Kathryn over to Queens. We went over on the subway, which was my first time on the subway. From the old Lincoln Hotel you used to go down right into the 42nd Street subway, and so we thought that would be very easy, and when we came back we could get off the train there and go right up into the hotel.

After we had spent the evening, well, I should say early morning I guess, out there, Harvey put us back on the train and we came back into town, and we got off the subway when they announced the 42nd Street subway, not realizing that the 42nd Street subway station is about two blocks long. We started trying to find the right stairway to come up out of to get into the Lincoln Hotel. I guess we came up about six or eight different stairways. We found ourselves on Broadway, and we found ourselves on Eighth Avenue, and several different places. By this time it would have been about 3 o’clock in the morning and there was no one much down there but us and a bunch of drunks. A policeman finally took pity on us and approached us and asked us where we wanted to go, and we told him, and he took us to the right subway entrance and we got up into the hotel. From there it was no problem to find our room. By the time we got back, Evelyn was beginning to get quite worried about us and wondered if she had lost us on our very first night in New York.

I mentioned that many of the hotels in New York were taken over by soldiers, and this did happen to the Lincoln Hotel. They had a group of soldiers stay there who were coming back from Europe, and on one occasion when we stayed there, in the middle of the night I sort of felt itchy, and I got up and turned on the lights and found out that I had a bed full of bedbugs that apparently had come along with some soldier who had had the room before me. Because of this, we quit staying at the Lincoln Hotel.

In fact, the hotel was closed down after the war. It was kept for soldiers as long as the war lasted, and then it was closed down and was remodeled, as I’ve said before, and is now called the Manhattan. It’s a beautiful-looking hotel, both inside and out. I’ve never stayed there, but I’ve been there with people for luncheons and meetings that manufacturers have had there. They have a nice room there for meetings and I’ve been there a number of times. I never go in there but what I remember the occasion when we stayed there when I first went to New York.

I think one of the things that impressed me that night on Broadway on that New Year’s Eve was the policemen. They said there were 9,000 policemen in that two-block area that night. They stood in the middle of the street with their arms locked together so that they couldn’t be separated, so that the crowd had to move in the same direction all the way around them, because if people had gotten going crosswise or trying to get mixed in among them, people would have been crushed. On the outside there were hundreds more of the policemen on horseback circling the crowd and keeping everybody moving in the same direction so that people wouldn’t get crushed. I always loved to see those policemen on horseback, and the horses that they rode were beautiful. We used to always take a few lumps of sugar from the sugar bowl when we ate our meals and as we would go along and see a policeman on horseback, we would give the horse a lump of sugar. They were used to that; lots of people did it, lots of tourists did it, and they just loved to stop and nibble at sugar out of your hand.

I might say that the first time that I ever went back to New York after the lights were turned on, after the war, and saw all of those great signs lit that you see on television sometimes when they’re showing the New Year’s programs and all, and I saw all of those lights and Broadway just as light as day (The Great White Way as it’s always called), it was almost like going to New York for the first time. I was really excited to see it. It wasn’t until then that I realized how dark it had been the first time that I went, on several times afterward that I went. As I go along, I’ll tell you about a few of the blackouts that I was caught in during that time, during the war, because I had some rather frightening experiences with blackouts during the war.

It was rather a short night, that night that I’ve told you about. The next morning we all got up and got ready and went over to the Allied office, to the C.C. Anderson office that was there, to learn something about our new jobs. We used to walk from the Lincoln or the Astor Hotel over to our office, which at that time was on Broadway. When I was in New York a couple of years ago, I felt so badly to find so many of the old places gone that I knew. We always ate at Schraff’s or at Fontenetti’s, which were our two favorite restaurants, moderate-priced restaurants, really very nice. They were both gone, along with so many of the places that I knew. I almost felt like a stranger in New York. I thought I was going to all these various places I had known, but a great many of them for some reason had vanished. I couldn’t help but notice how different New York was in that particular area. Down in the area where I worked it was always dirty and messy, but up on Fifth Avenue and in the nicer parts of New York it was so clean and shiny and pretty when I first started going, and now even those have gone downhill a great deal, and it’s apparent to see that New York has changed a very great deal in the last few years.

I know I’m not going to be able to keep anything in any kind of chronological order through the time that I was working in Boise, so I guess I’ll just try to tell you some of the highlights and some of the things that I did and not try to put any continuity or any dates to them. It was a fascinating time in my life. I loved New York; I loved those great, tall buildings, and I loved the many sights that you could see. You could see anything in New York that you could ever see anywhere. We did a lot of sightseeing the first few trips that I made, and each time someone else new came, we did it all over again to show them. I think it’s almost more fun showing somebody else than doing it yourself the first time. It was a long time before I even knew where I was going. As long as I could see the Astor Hotel and the Empire State Building, I knew something about where I was.

I’ll try to be just a little more brief about things from here on. Probably no one would be interested in my description of the trains; the younger people probably could care less and the older ones already know. To me, it is such a shame to see those trains gone that I couldn’t resist making another trip on them myself in my mind. If you didn’t enjoy it, at least I did.

As I started to say, we went over to the office the morning after our big night at Karrens’. We were introduced to various people in the office. I was introduced to the lady who bought the infants’ wear for Allied. Her name was Gladys Munz. She was a lovely person, and I also met several of the other buyers: the one who bought foundation garments and house dresses and lingerie. I didn’t mention before that I was also to buy lingerie. For the life of me, I can’t remember her name right now, but I’m sure it will come to me. We were very good friends. After I’d met everybody, the three supervisors from the C.C. Anderson stores and I went into one of the conference rooms to plan our strategy for the day. As you know, I didn’t know a thing about what I was doing. The stores were divided into three groups: the small and the medium and the large size stores, and there was a supervisor for each one. I sat down with these three men. They had all previously made the trip—which from then on I would make—to all of the stores before they came in, and they had with them inventories of what the stores had and what they needed and the quantities they needed and that I must buy. They had consolidated them all into one grand total and I was just to look for 500 dozen shirts and 600 dozen of something else and so on, to buy for the various stores.

I suppose it was rather funny if I hadn’t been so scared. Here these men sat with their list of layette items, which was where we were going to start, because that seemed to be where we were shortest of merchandise in the stores. They had on it the shirts in so many sizes and rubber pants, and stockings, and receiving blankets and other blankets, and so on, everything that you would need to dress a baby, and the quantities that I would have to buy in each of these. They had put down the manufacturer’s names and addresses that they preferred that I work with, but I should get merchandise wherever I could find it in those days, because as I have told you before, the merchandise was already on quota, and our stores being very small, we didn’t have very big quotas. After we had gone over all of the items and they had given me my instructions, they said, “Okay, well, we’ll see you tonight.” I had been looking frantically around for Miss Munz or somebody to come who was going to work with me that day. I had no idea that they would send poor little old green me out into New York to look for merchandise on my very first day.

I guess Mr. Burke saw my dismay, and he did go down the elevator with me and out to the front door of the building where we had our offices and explained to me that there were only three directions in New York. You didn’t talk about east and west and north and south, you went uptown or downtown or crosstown. Fortunately, all of the manufacturers that I was to visit that day were on Broadway and they were all, as he pointed the direction to me (which to me was south), were downtown. You might be interested in knowing, too, in New York the buildings are numbered, but the number of the building has absolutely nothing to do with the street on which it is; that is, as we have here 24th, 25th, 26th Street, and so on, with all the numbers between them on the cross streets going from 2400 to 2500 or 2500 to 2600; there 1224 Broadway, which was one building that I was to visit, happened to be on 34th Street, and another building numbered 1200-something would maybe be on 36th Street. There was no continuity to the numbering of the buildings like at home, and if you were to walk one block crosstown, up to Fifth Avenue, which to me was like going east a block, you would find that the same number—a building on the same corner that was 1224 on Broadway was 105 on Fifth Avenue. It was a little bit confusing to me. There were maps one could get, but Mr. Burke explained to me that the maps were even more confusing than him telling me. He told me just to walk down the street until I came to a building that had the number that was on my piece of paper and go in and look at the register in the hall, as we have them here, and then go on up in the elevator to the floor and find the manufacturer. With that he left me, and I went off downtown with my list of what I was to find clutched tightly in my arms, and my heart in my mouth, until I came to the first address. I went in and went upstairs and started.

It was a very complicated thing in those days to get merchandise. You went into a showroom, and the showrooms were several little showrooms partitioned off in the room, with a table in each and a couple of chairs behind them. You would go in and sit down at one of these tables and the salesman would come to you, eventually, and say, “Where are you from?” You would tell him, and then he would go and get his list and see how many dozen of whatever you wanted that your store had allotted to them out of the merchandise they had. They had already been required to give so much of their merchandise, or sell it (I shouldn’t say give because they got very good prices for it) to the government for the government’s supplies for overseas and for the camps here and so on.

I would say I was from C.C. Anderson and Company, and they would go and get their list and come back. Very often the first comment was “You’re too little, you just won’t have anything coming.” I soon learned to say, “Will you please check and see?”

They would come out in a very superior tone, some of them, and say, “You have ten dozen infant shirts, or ten dozen hose, or something,” and I would say, “I’ll take them.”

“Well, that’s not going to do you any good.”

I’d say, “If you didn’t have any in your store, it would do you some good.”

I made a lot of friends that first trip. I had worked with salesmen quite a lot and so I wasn’t quite so frightened talking to the salesmen themselves. They were always interested in the west, and they had heard about Hill Field, and many of them had sons or brothers at Hill Field or at some of the western encampments in various places, and they would be interested in them. I learned to sort of get that into the conversation rather quickly, and pretty soon I would make friends, not always, but I would make friends with most of the salesmen. I have seen salesmen on many occasions sit with their lists, and after I had talked to them for some time, reminded them that we had so many of their eastern people now on the west coast that were in need of merchandise, I would see them erase a number by the side of a large store, say, for instance, Jordan Marsh, and say, “He’ll never miss that; I’ll give you fifteen dozen.” He’d go down the list a ways to some other store: “They’ll never miss that, I’ll give you ten dozen there,” and so on, until maybe by the time I got through I would have picked up 25, 50 dozen of two or three different items that I needed. That was the way I bought merchandise during that time, because as little as we were, we actually did not have any merchandise given to us.

I learned a few other techniques too. I remember one day I was tired and hot and disgusted, and I had barely opened the door and started to walk in to a showroom, and there were four fellows seated around one of the tables playing cards. They just looked up at me and one of them said, “Oh, come back after the war.”

I said, “Well I’m sorry, but there will be lots of places that I can go after the war, and I probably won’t be back here.” That startled them enough that they invited me to come in and found out where I was from, and I got a few dozen things there. Another thing I often said when they’d say, “You don’t have any allotment; come back after the war and maybe we can work out something,” I’d say, “If I don’t get something today, I may not have a job after the war, so you probably won’t see me again.” They’d take pity on me for that.

All in all, I soon learned that I was buying more merchandise than the supervisors had anticipated that I would, and I realized that they were very pleased with the amount of merchandise that I was getting. Part of the trouble before was that Kathryn and Harvey just didn’t have time to make all these calls that I was making. I remember one particular day that I made 42 calls and didn’t buy one single piece of merchandise, and if you don’t think that is discouraging, you ought to try it sometime. Each morning I would meet with the supervisors; we’d sit down together and I would turn in my orders of the things that I had bought the day before. They would add all of those up and tally them against what they needed and let me know how much more we needed of that particular item, and each day they would add a few more items to my list.

This went on day after day and week after week, until I had been in New York for some six or seven weeks before I covered all of the resources for all of the various types of merchandise that I had to buy. Some areas were much more difficult than others, and at that particular time of course the infants’ department was one of the worst, because of the big baby boom that the war had brought on.

It was very interesting work, and I enjoyed it. I gradually learned to get around a little bit better. I have a very poor sense of direction, as you all know, and I hadn’t the slightest idea of which direction I should walk when I would come out of a building, until I would look up and see the Astor Hotel. If it was time to go home, I would know to walk in that direction, because the office was in that direction. If it wasn’t time to go home, then I would walk in the opposite direction until I’d come to my next address. That was the way I spent my first six or seven weeks in New York. Gradually I didn’t find all my resources on Broadway, and I had to learn to go crosstown, not uptown, because none of my market was uptown at that time. Some of it was up on Fifth, much of it was down on Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and I had to learn how to walk down there and which streets my resources were on.

I really had had a good education in New York and also in merchandising before I got through with that first trip, so I don’t think I’ll try to repeat another trip to you. I’ll just tell you some of the more interesting or funny things that happened in various trips and not try even to keep them consecutive. Before I start that though, maybe I’d better get myself back in Boise and tell you a little of the arrangements there and what we had to do from there.


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Go to Part 17 here.
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