Mabel’s Memories, part 17

This is part 17 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 16, Mabel was working for C.C. Anderson and Co., which had joined Allied Corporation for its purchasing power in the main markets, and Mabel was sent to New York to learn to be a buyer. This part continues her adventures in merchandising beginning with her initial return from New York to establish her new home base in Boise, Idaho.


Chapter 9
Adventures in Merchandising

When I got back to Boise, the first thing I had to do was find me an apartment. The first month I lived with Ann Atkinson. Ann was my Uncle Joe Campbell’s daughter, and she was married and living in Boise, and she was very kind and let me stay with her while I looked for an apartment. I think I was there a good part of a month.

In Boise they had set up a special office on the third floor for this new group who were to work during the war. We each had our own little private cubbyhole, and we shared secretaries with the main office. Later we moved to the third floor of another office building there in Boise, and we each had our own office room and our own secretary. That came a year or so later. We got home and settled in our offices, and we had a big warehouse in Boise where this merchandise that we had bought in New York started to arrive. The first thing we had to do was to get it sorted out and shipped out to the stores. I spent many, many hours in the warehouse sorting out so many house dresses to go to Cascade, Idaho; or McCall, Idaho; or Weiser, Oregon; or Pendleton, Oregon; or Ontario, Oregon; or Pueblo, Colorado; or Grand Junction, Colorado; Ogden, Logan, Idaho Falls, Gooding, Twin Falls; Buell; Nampa, Idaho, to all of the various stores.

CC Anderson store in Nampa, Idaho
(photo: https://nampapolice.org/DocumentCenter/View/
8671/Historic-Walking-Tour-FOR-DISTRIBUTION)

There again, I was green, because I didn’t know the size of any of these stores. I had not visited them, and so I had to go by what these three supervisors told me. We had a long order form which had the names of each store, beginning with the largest store and ending up with the smallest, which was Cascade, Idaho—or maybe it was McCall. Anyway, we would sit down with these forms and, at least for the first few times, for example, when a group of house dresses came in, we would line them all up on a rack and sort out so many to go to each one of these stores, judging by the size. The little stores might only get six or eight house dresses of each style, and the bigger stores would get two or three dozen perhaps. The same with all of the infants’ wear. They did seem very pleased with what they got.

We had a manager’s meeting right after we came home, and I’ll never forget how wonderful those managers were to me and how they complimented me and congratulated me that I had been able to get this merchandise for them that they needed so desperately. I’m sure this was true for the other buyers too, but I was more aware of my own circumstances.

After we got the merchandise pretty well sorted out, we started out to visit the stores. We could pretty well visit the stores at that time by car, and about six of us would travel together in a car and make the rounds of the stores. We had a pretty good route worked out. We would start out and go to Ontario and Weiser, Oregon, and Payette, Idaho, and Pendleton, Oregon, and all the stores in that group. Then we would go down to southern Idaho and do that group. We’d go into the stores and look at their stocks and take their inventories and prepare our lists of what we needed to get for them, and then we would return to Boise and get it all consolidated, and then we would head back to the market. This went on all through the war and for a year or two afterwards.

While merchandise was scarce, it was rather interesting going into the stores. Those darn managers and the girls in the departments would hide the merchandise you had sent them and would look you straight in the eye and tell you it was all sold, sometimes when you knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. We had to learn to be regular detectives and look under the counters and in the drawers and hunt for the merchandise to be sure that they were not hoarding it. We weren’t as smart as they were—they did hoard lots of merchandise, much to our dismay.

As the war came to an end and merchandise became more available, it was almost as hard to get those managers to realize that we could get plenty of merchandise. They kept asking for more and more, until they had their stores loaded, and at the end of the war we took a lot of mark-downs and lost money, because when we could get more than they wanted, then they started digging things out from their corners and wanted to return merchandise to the warehouses. We had to take it back (because they couldn’t sell it) and try as we had done during the war—during that time it was very easy to shift it from one store to another, but after the war we found that they all had good stocks of merchandise. It created some very serious problems at the end of the war, which I may go into later, I don’t know.

After we had been out to the stores, we would head back to the markets. We would go to New York, and go into Chicago, and for lingerie I used to stop at St. Louis, and I went up to Minneapolis several times where I bought merchandise from Munsingwear. We learned if we could get right to the manufacturer, very often we could get merchandise, even when we couldn’t get it in the showrooms in New York. I remember one trip going to Dallas, Texas, and for children’s wear we went to Los Angeles. I did cover the United States pretty well at various times through the war looking for merchandise.

There were some wonderful people out in the stores. The managers were always very nice to us, and the girls in the departments were too. We often worked in a store—we worked hard. We worked long hours. We would go into a store; there wasn’t a lot you could do during the day while customers were in the store, so we would travel during the day from one store to another. The small stores we could work in, but a lot of times we would—the minute the store closed—we would go in and work until 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning sometimes, doing their inventories, and hunting out this merchandise that they had hidden under the counters, and arranging it on top of the counters so that it could be sold.

I remember one funny incident about us getting into Gooding, Idaho. One thing I would like to say, that in all of my experience I have never worked with a nicer group than the group of girls and fellows in Boise, Idaho. We worked very closely as a group. We traveled together all the time by car. All of the fellows were married, and Mable Nye and I were the two single girls in the group, and Kathryn was the one married woman. When we were in New York—I’ve never been in New York during that time when I had to eat my dinner at night alone. When you were in New York, the only girl in New York would always get a call from one of the fellows to have dinner with them. When we were out in the stores, we all had dinner together, and we had our breakfast together. We were almost like a family, and we were very close to each other. They were kind of a drinking bunch; they all had to have their cocktail before dinner, and I’ve seen them get drunk in New York sometimes, but I’ve never seen the time when they weren’t just as gentlemanly and courteous, and see that Mabel got back to the hotel okay. They were always very nice to me, and I have always respected them and thought a great deal of them. This hasn’t been true when I’ve worked in individual stores. The buyers were not nearly so close and there always was a lot of jealousy among them. But our particular group during the war, we were all working for a cause, and we were a very closely-knit group.

That brings me back again to this little story that I was going to tell you. We were in Gooding, Idaho; we got in during the afternoon and went over to the store and worked awhile. We had left our suitcases in the car, and later we went to the little hotel—there was only one little hotel there in Gooding—and they assigned us our rooms. I went up to my room (it was on the second floor; there were only two floors in the building) and there was no lock on the door. I had asked her, when I got my suitcase, for the key and she had said, “Oh there isn’t any key.”

I said, “I’d kind of like to have a key.”

She said, “Well, there isn’t one here.”

So I thought, Maybe it’s in the lock. When I got up to the room, there was no key, and I couldn’t lock my door. I was a little bit concerned about it, so I went back downstairs, and I said, “I wonder if we couldn’t find a key for that door.”

She just handed me a double handful of loose keys and said, “Well, take these and try them and maybe you’ll find one that fits.” Here I was, going back upstairs with both my hands full of keys, and I met Harvey Karren coming down, and he said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m going to try to find a key for my room.”

He laughed and he said, “My room’s got a key. You give me those keys and come along and bring your suitcase and I’ll trade rooms with you.” He said, “If I don’t have a key, if I can’t find a key, I probably can deal with anybody that might happen to come in.”

We knew that no one was going to rob us or anything like that, but you never did know but what somebody might mistakenly be a little bit under the influence and forget which room he had. That was the thing that always concerned me, and of course that didn’t bother the fellows so much. We did have a lot of funny little experiences like that in some of those little towns.

I remember one night we got into McCall, Idaho—or Cascade?—I always get those two mixed up. We stopped to have dinner, and we went into this little restaurant, the only one in town. We were all sitting around the table. We had just ordered some hamburgers, as I recall. There was a cat that was winding around between our legs under the table, going around and around, and just as the waitress yelled out, “Six hamburgers!”—the cook in his apron came tearing out into the dining room and picked up this cat and carried it back out into the kitchen. One of the fellows said, “Well, there’s our hamburgers.” Mable Nye and I were together that trip with them, and that took care of us. We couldn’t stand to eat the hamburgers, so we all got up and left and went over to a grocery store and bought some crackers and cookies and cheese and a little of this and that and went up to one of the rooms and ate this meal. We had a lot of fun little experiences like that in those little towns.

We did have an interesting experience in Cascade. It was a time when they had found some new star that the scientists were going to check on, and so they all gathered in Cascade because it was very high. It was in all the papers and the magazines, and back east they were talking about these scientists in Cascade, Idaho. We had a dress manufacturer who was going to ship some dresses to each one of the stores, and he had his list of how many to ship, and Cascade usually only got three. But we had a national ad in the paper, in a girls’ magazine, and they got orders for 50 dresses, which was more than they had sold in a year before, because everybody was hearing about Cascade, Idaho. It was just a little bit of a place with two or three hundred people, and we just had a small store there; half of it was groceries, and half of it was dry goods. It was similar to Waugh’s, where I started out, and I always felt very much at home in Cascade.

I’ve always thought that that’s the reason I got along so well during that period—because I could relate to those stores. I had worked in stores as small as the smallest one, and the largest store we had was the store in Ogden, where I had worked for many years. I was a little bit more able to judge what they would need than anyone. Once I had seen all the stores, I was pretty well able to judge what their sales might be and the figures made more sense to me than they had when we were in New York that first trip.

During this time, whenever we made a trip to Ogden I was able to visit with the family, and all of my vacation and my holidays were spent in Ogden. I came down as much as possible and visited with the family, so I did see them quite often, but I did miss them a great deal too.

I remember one time being in the store in Ogden—I guess I’d been away two or three years, and it just goes to show how funny people can be—it was in the summertime, and I didn’t have a hat on, and a lady came rushing up to me and said, “It’s about time I found you in. Every time I come into this store you’re out to lunch.” We often laughed about that.

It was always fun to come home and visit. Ruth made a visit up to Boise and visited with me. She came up once with Faye Williams to a Republican rally, and I was able to visit with her then. Elizabeth came up with me once, and we had quite a time. I had been down here on a trip and she was going to go back with me on the train, and we got a roomette. A roomette bed is just a single bed, and that was what we shared back to Boise that night. We left in the evening and got there in the morning, and she spent a week with me. I couldn’t spend a lot of time entertaining her. There wasn’t a great deal for her to do, but she spent a lot of time in my office at a little table drawing pictures and I don’t know what all she did. Ann Atkinson had her over to her place for an afternoon or two. I don’t know if she remembers that trip with very much pleasantness or not, but I certainly enjoyed having her.

When Grant got married, Ruth and Keith and Andrew went up with Ruth for the wedding. I had intended to go, but something came up at the office, and I was not able to go. The three of them went up, and on their way back, they stopped and spent a few days in Boise with me. I remember when Ruth came back, her telling about at Grant’s wedding, Andrew had had to go to the bathroom. Andrew and Keith were still little fellows then, and they had little sailor suits. Grant and Bobbie were in the line, in the reception line with Bobbie’s parents and Ruth and others. Andrew came back from the bathroom with Keith right behind him very much upset, because Andrew “had” to have Grant do up his pants. Keith could have done it, but Andrew was there to see Grant and so Grant was to do this. Everybody got such a kick out of it and Ruth thought it was so funny.[1]

Grant, Mabel, Max

I also had an opportunity once to visit Max, when he was in the hospital in Spokane. We were up that way visiting stores, and I took an extra day and went over to Spokane and visited with him.[2] So I did try to keep in touch with the family, and of course we always had a wonderful time at holidays when I would come home, and I always did come home as long as I was in Boise. I wasn’t always able to after I went to Minneapolis.

This might be as good a time as any to say that I was in New York when Grant came home from Germany from the service. At that time Frank was stationed just out of New York. He came in to New York and together we went down to the dock and saw Grant’s boat come in. We thought at the time that we would be able to see him, but as we stood on the side of the fence where we were told to stand, we saw the soldiers whisked away to the delousing area, and from there they were sent directly home, so we never did get to see Grant. Frank was particularly put out about it because he was not sure just where he was headed for right then, but he knew it wasn’t home, and so he knew it would be some time before he would have another opportunity to see Grant.

The year after the war ended, the first summer, Grant and Bobbie lived with me in Boise. I was away a good part of the time, but they lived there in my apartment. Bobbie was pregnant at the time with Jeff and was very miserable. It was the early part of her pregnancy. Ruth came up then and stayed for a few days with us and we had an awfully nice time. Later, I visited with Grant in Moscow, Idaho. He and Bobbie went up to Moscow to school that next winter. That summer Grant took a course in barbering in Boise, and that was the way he earned part of his money for his schooling, was barbering the students up at Moscow.

I was in New York once when Austin [Roy’s son] came into New York and spent a weekend with me. I was also there when, I think it was Bryan, one of Fred’s boys, went on his mission, and I had an opportunity to spend some time with him.

Frank came down to New York several times while he was stationed there. I remember we saw the Macy’s Thanksgiving-Christmas Parade together one time from our office window, and it was rather an unforgettable thing to see. Carl visited me, too, once while I was in New York, and of course I spent several times visiting with Don when I was in Minneapolis and he was living in New York before he came up to live with me.[3] I went to Washington D.C. one time and visited with Frank while he was stationed there. All in all, I did get to see various members of the family quite frequently during those first years.

In later years Elizabeth visited with me in New York. The first year that she went up to Bread Loaf summer school, she stopped on her way home from Bread Loaf and visited with me in New York. I was also in New York when Keith and Heinz came, when Keith came home from his mission and brought Heinz home with him. I did go down to the boat and was able to meet them at the boat, and we took a cab back to my hotel and I had arranged a hotel room for them. I visited with them in New York for a couple of days, and then I came home. I flew home and they came by train, so I got home in time to go down to the train and meet them when they came home.[4] The same was true with Elizabeth. I put her on the bus to come home, and then I flew home and got home in time to go to the bus to meet her.

Which goes to show that flying does have some compensations. I didn’t mind flying; in fact, I rather enjoyed flying, except for the fact that I loved the leisurely way of traveling on the train, and it was about the only time that we did have leisure, because the minute we got into New York we had to get registered and get ourselves cleaned up and get right to work.

It was always fun to have the kids come, because they hadn’t any of them seen a lot of New York, and it was fun to take them out to see the Statue of Liberty, and up to St. Patrick’s Church, and to Radio City, and the various interesting spots in New York.

I must not forget the times that I visited with Andrew in New York—that was much later, after I came back to Ogden to work. I visited with Andrew when he was in New York one year studying acting. He came to the hotel several times and we had dinner together and saw a few shows together. I went down to see his apartment, which gave me chills, because it was night and the minute we turned the lights on, the cockroaches went in all directions. He lived down in Greenwich Village, and it was supposed to be an average New York Greenwich Village apartment, but it looked rather barren to me. I think the lady must have stored all her furniture and not told the kids, because I’m quite sure that she didn’t live like that. She was a friend of a friend of Ruth’s who also lived in New York, and who Elizabeth always stayed with when she was in New York, and Ruth stayed with several times in New York.[5]

I want to tell you more of the things that happened to me during the time that I was traveling for C.C. Anderson during those war years. I’m going to tell you a few highlights and hope that you won’t get too bored with them. They make awfully nice memories for me now that I’m not working. I’m never short of something to think about.

I told you that I’d tell you something about the blackouts. My first experience with blackouts was at the office. Evelyn Muller and I had gone back to work late at the office. We were getting out some orders, and we found that we were the only ones there, the only people there in the Allied office, except the night janitor who was a black man who had been drinking quite heavily. His breath smelled to high heaven, and he was being just a little bit fresh. We had let him know that we were not interested in joking with him and that we were very busy, and he had gone about his business. While we were sitting there concentrating on our work, suddenly everything went black. I don’t believe that it would be possible to even describe to you how black black really is in New York when every single light goes out. Standing where we were, I don’t remember which floor, but quite high up, and looking down, even the cabs and cars had to turn their lights off when a blackout came, so there wasn’t a solitary bit of light. With all of those high buildings, the streets looked like canyons anyway, and in the dark you could see absolutely nothing. You couldn’t look up and see anything because of the high buildings above you. It was an awful feeling.

We started to make our way to the elevator, foolishly thinking that we could go down. We didn’t want to get caught up there with that drunk Negro. When we did get to the elevator, we realized that the elevators were not working either, because of the blackout. All of the power had gone off all over the city. One thing we did, trying to keep our courage up, we laughed and said to each other, “Well, at least we’ll know if he’s coming, because we can smell him before he gets here.” We were there by the elevator for several minutes before finally the lights came on and we were able to get on the elevator and go down and get back to our hotel.

In the hotels, on the back of the door to your room, there was a chart that showed the area you were to go to in case of a blackout. Each floor had an area where people were supposed to go. I assume that in the event of an emergency they wanted everybody in one spot so they could try to get them out as quickly as they could. When I first went to New York, the first few times, whenever there would be a blackout—you’d be working in your room writing orders and all the lights would go out—we would feel our way along the hall to this area where everyone was to go. But long before the blackouts were over, we had decided that we were about as safe in our rooms as we were out in the halls with some of the people that we ran into, so we would just stay in our room until the blackout was over. One thing I always hoped was that I would never be caught on a subway in a blackout, and fortunately, I never was.

Everybody in New York is in a hurry. There’s no one that ever seems to have any leisure time. You go out on the street and everyone is rushing in both directions, especially at evening time when it’s time for them to go home. On one occasion, well, on any occasion that you were waiting for an elevator, if you happened to be about the third floor of a high building, by the time the elevators would get down to that floor, they would all be filled. There would be banks of elevators, maybe twenty elevators, but they would all be filled; an elevator would go past and leave you on the floor waiting for the next one to come, and it would be full and it would go past. That would go on for ever so long before you would finally get an elevator.

One day Evelyn Muller and I decided that we wouldn’t wait any longer. We had waited for quite awhile, and then we decided that we would walk down. We went to the stairs and started to walk down. There was a heavy door that we had to open to go down the stairs, and then at the bottom another heavy door to open. We were about halfway down when the blackout came, and there we were in the stairway. This was on a Friday night at about 5:30 or so, so we crept on down to the bottom of the stairs, and we couldn’t open the door; it was locked. We groped our way back up to the next floor, thinking that we could get out there, but that door was locked also. I don’t know whether they automatically locked when the lights went out or what happened, but anyway, here we were caught between floors and were unable to get either out or upstairs or down at the foot, at the bottom floor, and on Friday night, and we wondered if we would still be there on Monday morning. We banged and banged and banged on the door. Finally a janitor heard us and came and unlocked the door, and we were able to get out.

The blackouts came very often. Sometimes you might be in a restaurant in the middle of a meal and suddenly all of the lights would go out, or you could be in a cab and he would get to the side of the road as quickly as he could, and his lights would be out. It was a wonder there weren’t more pileups in the heavy traffic than there were.

Speaking of elevators, I might tell you a little experience Mable Nye and I had on an elevator. The elevators would get extremely crowded. People would jam in until you would just be crowded so closely, and if you were in the back of the elevator and you’d been high up, sometimes the air would just about be gone by the time you would get down. It was uncommon, but it did happen occasionally that someone would pass out in an elevator. Usually it would be from panic or fear of some sort. I remember one day we were in an elevator and it was extremely crowded. The men who smoked would get onto the elevator with their cigarettes and hold them down to their side because they were not supposed to smoke in the elevator. Mable was wearing a coat with a deep wool pile, and when we got outside into the air, all of a sudden she screamed, “I’m on fire!” and sure enough, a cigarette had embedded itself into her coat, and the air made it burst into flame, and it burned a big hole in her coat.

I usually went to the Manhattan Branch of the LDS Church on Sundays. They had quite a large group there. They met in what had been a lodge hall of some sort, rather a nice building, but in a bad location. It was up on 81st Street between Broadway and—I really don’t know just what that would be there—Broadway, as you know, runs catty-corner through the city. I used to take the subway up to 79th and then walk along Broadway for two blocks and then walk about two blocks crosstown to get to the building, and it was right through what was then the Puerto Rican area and Negro area. It was a very bad area for a white woman to walk through.

I must tell you about one other time when I went to a different church. It was, I think, one of the very first Sundays that I was in New York. I’m sure all of you have heard about the Little Church Around the Corner in New York. It’s shown in a lot of films and a lot of movie people are married there. It’s a small church; it’s right downtown, right in the heart of the business section, and you go around the corner from one of the big office buildings to this little, quiet church. It sits back a ways and there’s a lawn around it and quite a few pieces of sculpture, and it’s rather a pretty little setting. I think it’s Episcopalian, I’m not quite sure. One Sunday morning, Mr. Hinshaw and Mr. Barker and Mable Nye and I decided that we would go to church there. Mr. Barker was Episcopalian, Mr. Hinshaw was a Quaker, and I don’t think Mable Nye was anything. Anyway, we went down to the Little Church Around the Corner. We were late, and as we went in, we were a little bit embarrassed, because there were no seats in the back and we had to walk quite a way down toward the front. As we got to our seats, Mr. Barker was leading the way, because after all, he was the Episcopalian in the crowd, and we were looking at all of the beautiful sights. The windows are simply beautiful there; they have all been donated by members of the congregation at various times and are just beautiful windows. As we got to our seats, Mr. Barker suddenly knelt before going into the pews, which is a proper thing for an Episcopalian to do; Mr. Hinshaw was right behind him and we two girls were a little further back. When he knelt, Mr. Hinshaw happened to be looking off in some direction and wasn’t aware of it, and so he went right over the top of him and landed flat on his back in the main aisle! The priest—I don’t know whether he was giving a prayer or a sermon, it was in Latin and we didn’t understand it—but we couldn’t help but laugh. Everyone I guess was very shocked, and we were very embarrassed, and poor Mr. Barker was completely humiliated. Mr. Hinshaw always loved to tell how no one had ever seen the Little Church Around the Corner from the same angle that he had seen it, flat on his back looking up.

We did visit other churches on occasion too. We visited St. Patrick’s; in fact, we visited St. Pat’s many times. We were there once at Easter time, and we didn’t go into the church that day, but we stood across the street and saw the Easter parade of the people going into St. Pat’s in their beautiful gowns and hats and the men dressed in their formal morning dress. It was a beautiful sight to see. We often went into St. Patrick’s. Whenever we took anyone new to New York, one of the places you always took them was to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is very famous. We also went up Riverside Drive to St. John’s, the beautiful church up there, which has, to my knowledge, never been completed. It’s a fabulous church, simply immense. Right in our market area, of course, was the church where Norman Vincent Peale preached [Marble Collegiate Church]. It is a church where President Roosevelt worshipped and where several of the presidents have worshipped. It’s not a very ornate-looking church from the outside, much less so than many of the other churches throughout the city. When we went down to Wall Street, we did see that beautiful old church down there that sits right at the end of Wall Street, but the name of it escapes me—oh! Trinity Church.

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Notes:

1. Grant married Bobbie Roberts in 1943 in Washington State. Grant was called back into the Army for the Korean War and ended up being the most decorated soldier from the state of Washington.
2. This was when Max had been sent home from the Philippines to recover from jungle fever.
3. Carl and Don were Jack’s sons.
4. This was in 1960. Keith met Heinz Christiansen in Flensburg, West Germany. Mabel decided to sponsor his emigration to the U.S., paying for his passage and subsequent schooling and LDS missionary service.
5. The friend of Ruth who sublet her Greenwich Village apartment to Andrew was Mrs. Elma Taylor Wadsworth.

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Go to Part 18 here.
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