Mabel’s Memories, part 18

This is part 18 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 17, Mabel was working for C.C. Anderson and Co., and had come home from her first trip to New York as a buyer during the War and described how they distributed all the merchandise. She mentioned seeing various nephews and her niece in New York City, and she began to tell travel experiences with various churches. This part continues her adventures while traveling, beginning with a church-related experience.


Chapter 9
Adventures in Merchandising (continued)

One of the very most pleasant things I did in New York with our own church [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] happened because I was at church one Sunday when they announced that a group was going up to Palmyra to see the pageant the following Saturday.[1] They were taking a bus, and anybody who wanted to go could, and so I signed up to go. We left New York very early in the morning on Saturday and drove to Palmyra. It was a beautiful drive; we went through Syracuse and many areas that I had not seen before.

Mabel in Sharon, Vermont, on that trip.

We got into Manchester/Palmyra early enough so that we did go out to the Sacred Grove that evening, and we also went through the Joseph Smith home that day. We stayed all night, and then the next morning we went back out to the Sacred Grove for a testimony meeting that all of the missionaries, all of the people who had been working on the pageant, were holding. It was, I think, one of the most sacred meetings that I have ever attended in my life. I never have been so completely overwhelmed as I was that day. We enjoyed the pageant tremendously too. It rained that afternoon, and everyone was afraid that it was going to rain that night, but it didn’t. It stopped raining just before the pageant started, and it did rain again afterwards.

I must tell you a funny thing that happened on that trip. I didn’t know any of the people, and we were assigned out into different homes. The other churches were really making a haul off of the pageant; they do every year. They arrange for people to sleep and to eat in their homes, because of course, there aren’t any other accommodations there. They are both very small towns; Manchester and Palmyra. Our group had been assigned to one of the churches; I can’t remember which one; all I remember about it was that it had a woman minister. We ate all of our meals there in their gymnasium, and then at night they set up cots in there for the men to sleep, and the women were assigned out to various people’s homes. Another lady and myself were assigned to a family, and we went there. I was to sleep on a couch in the living room, and she had a cot in the dining room. After the pageant, we were taken back to this place , and they seemed to be very nice people. There was a lady and her daughter there when we went, and they also had a room upstairs that they had rented to tourists who were there to see the pageant. Anyway, we went to bed.

I don’t know how long we had been to bed when we heard this man come in, and I could tell that he was drunk. I awakened and heard him coming in, and he was mumbling away and grumbling away, and he went into the dining room where this other lady was sleeping. I thought, Oh my heavens, I hope he doesn’t come in here! I could tell that he had sat down on the bed where she was sleeping. I heard one shoe drop, and he was mumbling away and talking, and I wondered what in the world had happened to her, maybe she wasn’t there, or what, and I was just stunned. Apparently she finally woke up because suddenly she let out a scream, and the poor man, it scared him to death. He didn’t know his wife had made these arrangements, and he didn’t know anyone was there. About the time that the lady screamed, the wife came tearing down the stairs and got him and took him off upstairs, and we could hear him mumbling away, “I didn’t know there was anyone there, I didn’t know there was anyone there.” The next morning we got up and left, and we didn’t see a soul. Fortunately, we had paid our money the night before, so there was no reason why we needed to see anyone, but we never did see those people to thank them for their hospitality. We were quite amused and laughed about it.

That’s the only time that I ever saw the pageant, and it was really an exciting experience. I was happy that I had been at church and had known about it so that I could go. I always enjoyed going out to church because I always saw someone from Salt Lake, very often some of the people from ZCMI, buyers that I got acquainted with, and Mr. Bennett was very often there, Mr. Nelson, and others whom I knew from ZCMI.

I know I’m rambling, but I’m just sort of telling you things as I happen to think of them.

I just thought of another of my early experiences in New York. It was the first time that I ever went in alone, and I got off the train at Grand Central Station. I had had a roomette on the very last car of the train. It seemed like the car out of Boise always landed on the last end of the train by the time we got to New York. I had walked all the way up to the station and had collected my luggage and gotten a cab and was halfway to the Astor Hotel, and I started to get the money out of my purse to pay the cab driver and realized that I didn’t have my purse. If you can imagine that panicky feeling, to know that all of your money and all of your identification and your train ticket and, well, everything was in that purse. I was frightened absolutely to death. I told the cab driver what had happened, and he turned his cab around and we headed back to Grand Central Station as fast as we could go. He said “Shall I go down with you?” and I said, “No, I’ll go down.”

I ran as fast as I could down to where the trains were, hoping that the train had not yet been broken up. As I got down there, I could see that it was still intact, and I started running down to that last car. I just didn’t see how my purse could possibly still be there, but I got to the car and went in, and into the roomette where I had been, and sure enough, no purse. I came out just crushed and started back up the ramp to the depot, and all of a sudden I thought, There’s that cab with my suitcases and all my clothes, and everything I own—maybe he will be gone too! Maybe I won’t even have that. As I started to run back up, I heard someone calling, and I turned and looked back, and clear down at the end of the train was the conductor, or the porter or someone, I can’t remember who, waving my purse above his head back and forth. I ran back and got my purse, ran back up to the cab, and by this time I was completely out of breath. Sure enough, the cab was still there, and the driver was waiting, and we went to the hotel. I got myself in and signed in and up to my room and collapsed. I never have been so completely and utterly frightened in my life as I was that day.

I just heard something on the radio about a strike, and it occurs to me that I have been in New York during a subway strike, a bus strike, truck strikes, and even a milk strike, and it gives you some idea of what can happen quickly in a big city. I remember during the milk strike that I couldn’t even get a glass of milk for my breakfast because all the milk was being kept for children. There was a little store right near the hotel that we were staying in at that time, and we went to work in the morning, and when we came back at night we thought we’d stop and get some crackers or cookies that we usually kept in our room, and walked into that little store, and the shelves were bare because, knowing that there was a truck strike going on, people had just cleaned that little place out in a day.

To try to get from our office down to the hotel during a taxi strike or a subway strike was just almost impossible. I never will forget trying to make that walk from our office down to the Statler Hotel. It was just one sea of people. It wouldn’t have done you any good if you could have gotten a cab: people didn’t pay one bit of attention. They just filled the streets and it was one solid mass of people from one side of the street to the other, rushing to try to get down to the Pennsylvania Train Station to get their commuter trains home. Each time as you would come to a subway opening, out would come hundreds more to join the mob, trying to make their way down to the trains. I’ve never seen so many people. You were shoved and pushed and jostled until you wondered if you would even make it to your train or to your hotel. Living in a big city is not my idea of a comfortable, safe life. I think I would much rather take my chances in a much smaller place.

I also remember being on the Chief coming up from Los Angeles to Chicago once when a train strike began. We were out on the desert and we sat there for several hours until some of the officials from the train came chugging out on one of those little push-pull things to bring the train into Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we stayed there until, fortunately, the strike was over in a matter of a few hours. I think we slept there on the train that night, and by morning they had the thing settled and we went on into Chicago.

I happened to be in Chicago the day that the war ended, VE-Day, and it was an interesting thing to see too. We got into our hotel all right, but to find a place to eat was absolutely impossible. The streets were just absolutely jammed with people, and the waiters and waitresses, everybody, were in the streets. No one was tending to business, that’s for sure.

I have already mentioned how many soldiers we used to see shuttling back and forth from east to west coast. I used to feel awfully sorry for these kids. They used to be crowded into chair cars just as tight as sardines in a can. Their officers didn’t travel that way; they usually traveled Pullman, but I think before the war was over every rickety old chair car in the railroad had been pressed into service. I’ve traveled in some of those too, along with the soldiers. I’ve made trips between Tacoma and Seattle, or Seattle to Spokane, or Seattle to Yakima, sitting on my suitcase in lieu of a chair, so I did know how uncomfortable they were. I think that I really found out how miserable a trip could be one time between Minneapolis and Omaha.

I was coming home from New York by way of Minneapolis. I had a reservation out of Omaha for a roomette, but I hadn’t been able to get anything from Minneapolis to Omaha except a chair. It was just a day’s journey, and I thought that would be fairly pleasant. We got on the train early in the morning and arrived in Omaha in the evening. It was a real hot summer day, and there was no air conditioning in the train, so every single window had been pushed up as high as it would go, and the wind was whistling through the train, blowing our hair in every direction, and it was a hot prairie wind that just scorched your skin.

There wasn’t any diner on the train. We had nothing to drink, nothing to eat. The soldiers, most of them, must have made some preparation before they left, realizing that there wasn’t a diner. You rarely saw the soldiers in the diners, because I guess they couldn’t afford the prices, so whenever the train would stop, they would just swarm off the cars and into the depots to surround the coke machines and anywhere that they could get something to eat. Many of the stations had canteens set up for them. One station that was particularly good about that was North Platte, but we didn’t go through North Platte that day. I think we did make a stop at Sioux City, Iowa, and many of the soldiers probably got off that day.

In the car that I was in, there were all soldiers except myself and one other lady. She was just a young girl with two small children and was on her way to the west coast to meet her husband. We were terribly uncomfortable, and the babies were uncomfortable and cried a good part of the time. Before the day was over, you wouldn’t have dared to have moved out of your seat for fear you would slip on a banana peel, or an orange peel, or a gum wrapper, or a candy wrapper, or something of that sort. Those kids had been eating stuff like that all day in lieu of food or drink. I had had neither, and I was really miserable, and I really thought Sherman had described war correctly.[2]

We finally got into Omaha just as it was getting dusk, and as we pulled into the station, I saw the Portland Rose in on the track right next to us. I knew that I wouldn’t have time to go into the station, so I just jumped off the car and ran across the platform and got to the door of one of the cars of the Portland Rose as they were pulling up the steps. The porter let me on, and I showed him my ticket and he let me on, and I walked through the train until I came to my car and got into my roomette and took a look at myself in the mirror. My hair was absolutely straight and blown ‘til you would have thought that I had, well I had just been sitting in the wind the whole day long. My face was as red as a beet—it was sunburned and burned by the wind, and speckled so with cinders from the train that I looked like I might have the measles. My hair was full of cinders and my clothing was covered with cinders, and I was just so glad that there wasn’t going to be anyone on that train who even knew who I was.

I was so hungry that I just didn’t know what I was going to do if I didn’t get to the diner and get something to eat. I was just famished. So I washed up the best I could and changed my clothes and changed purses, grabbed a purse that would match what I had changed into, got my hair into as good as shape as I could and got my face at least clean, and ran for the diner as quickly as I could, and went into the diner and ordered my dinner.

After I had eaten my dinner, I sat there feeling much better until I opened my purse to pay for my dinner and realized that I hadn’t taken my wallet from my one purse that I had been carrying to put in this purse. There I sat, without a penny to my name and my dinner all nicely eaten and looking very blankly at the check that was sitting in front of me. I really didn’t know what I was going to do, I was so embarrassed. I didn’t like to make a scene by saying, “Well, I’ll have to go back to my car to get the money.” I was several cars back, actually. I just sat there feeling smaller and smaller by the second.

Suddenly, as I looked around, clear down in the other end of the diner sat Mr. Burke and the manager from the Idaho Falls store, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Hill. They were both great kidders, and I wouldn’t for the world have let them see me looking like I looked, so I simply said to the porter, I gave him the check and said, “That gentleman,” pointed Mr. Burke out at the end of the car, “will pay for my meal.” And I got up and ran. They didn’t see me and I guess they wondered whose meal they were paying for, but they did pay it and I didn’t see them until the next morning at breakfast. In the meantime, I had gotten my hair washed and gotten to where I looked a little bit respectable, and I told them. They never did let me live that down, and it was always brought up that they wondered who paid for my meals normally, when I was crossing the country by myself.

An officer could always say he was on emergency travel and could bump anybody out of their reservation when they got on a train. I remember one night I got on the train here in Ogden to go to Boise. The porter carried my bag into the roomette, and here sat another bag in there. We could see it was a military bag, but there was no one there. I realized that I was being bumped out of my reservation. It was night and I didn’t want to sit up all night if I didn’t have to. We knew the porters pretty well; we traveled the trains so much that we got to know most of them, and they were really an awfully nice bunch of fellows. I remember this fellow looked at me and said, “Now, I’ll take his bag, and you just shut your door and go to bed. And,” he said, “maybe I’ll have to ring the bell to try to wake you up to let him have your room, but,” he said, “don’t you hear it. You just keep still.”

That’s exactly what I did. I locked the door and got undressed and went to bed, and the doorbell did ring, but I didn’t answer it. I don’t know where the officer slept that night. However, I did know that they always had one extra roomette on a train, a berth or something, where the porter could sleep if he wanted to, or if he didn’t want to, he could sell it to someone and he could stretch out in the lounge car after everybody else had gone to bed. I would guess that’s what happened that night. I never did know—there were many officers at breakfast next morning, and I don’t know which one it was that I had gypped out of his bed, and I never did find out. One other time when officers caused me problems was in New York, but I think I’ll tell that at another time. I shouldn’t say they caused me problems, because I won on that one too, but it’s a different story, because I would like to say more about these soldiers at this particular time.

The same thing was true when we traveled on planes. Near the end of the war we were traveling on planes more than we were on trains, and so were the soldiers. I remember in Denver one night, I was going to stop off in Ogden I think, or I might have been going right straight through to Boise. Anyway, this poor young fellow was so upset because he was coming home on leave and he had a date that night in Salt Lake, and he didn’t have a seat on the plane. He had been there for several hours waiting. There were always people waiting, hoping that someone wouldn’t show up and that they would be able to get onto a plane. A plane wasn’t like a train; they couldn’t just crowd them on quite like they did on the trains. I had a seat, and we were all waiting out at the gate when the plane taxied up. This boy was just so nervous, and if he didn’t make that plane, he was not going to be able to get home in time for his date with his girlfriend, and as it so happened, there was no seat. I told the official that I would wait, and to let him have my seat, which he did, and the boy was so grateful. I’ll never forget how happy he was and how grateful he was. The fellow at the gate said, “Now you just go back in the airport,” and he said, “I’ll watch and I’ll see that you get on the next plane if I possibly can.” I don’t know just how long I sat there, but it was quite a long time when he came and told me he had a seat for me on the plane that was going to land in Salt Lake. By the time I arrived, I’m sure it would have been much too late for him to have his date.

We got so used to these boys and just became so fond of them, you just felt like you almost knew them. I remember coming up from Dallas one time—we had visited the Allied store there, which is Joske’s in Dallas, and they had, with their usual Southern hospitality, just loaded us down with food, with fried chicken and pies and cakes and all sorts of goodies from their lunchroom there in the store. I remember that we just gave them to the soldiers on one of the chair cars on our way into the dining room, because we knew that they would enjoy the food so much.

I think one of the funniest things I ever saw happen, perhaps I shouldn’t tell it, but I’m going to. There was an officer who was bringing a prisoner back—I don’t know what the fellow had done, he’d been AWOL or something—anyway, he was bringing him to San Francisco. They were sharing the same roomette, and he would lock the prisoner in the roomette while he went to the club car. He was quite a gay fellow and having a very good time, and he got rather interested in a girl who was on the train. They played cards a lot and drank quite a lot in the club car and had a very good time. The train always broke up at Green River, and the part of the train that was called the Portland Rose went on up to Boise and on to Seattle. The other part of the train went on to San Francisco, and that was where this fellow was going with his prisoner. Well, we had been in the club car quite late that night. We didn’t very often go to the club car much, but for some reason we had that night, and this fellow had been playing around with this girl. When we left, and we were getting rather close to Green River, and that was one of the reasons that we left and went back to our room, so that we would be on the Portland Rose. The next morning, everybody in the diner was chuckling because this fellow had not gotten back to his room, and the train was broken up at Green River, and he had been so busy with this young lady, in her roomette by that time, that in the morning he found that he was on his way to Seattle and his prisoner was on his way to San Francisco. He had to wire somebody at San Francisco to pick up his prisoner for him, and he was really in a state, he was so worried about what was going to happen to him; what punishment he would receive for leaving his prisoner in this fashion.

There were so many people coming and going and traveling here and there during the war that when you got a hotel room, it was only guaranteed to you for a week, and at the end of that time, they could ask you to move. We were usually in New York anywhere from five to seven weeks when we went in, and the people in the hotels where we stayed got to know us quite well, and so we were rarely ever asked to move. I remember one cold, sleety night that I came back to the hotel; I had a cold in my head and I had had a wretched day, and I just could hardly wait to get to my room and get to bed. When I stopped to pick up my mail, there was a note in my box that said that I would have to vacate my room that night. I asked the fellow at the desk what the problem was, and he said that there was a big football game between West Point and somebody else, and that there were some officers down from West Point and that they had to provide rooms for them, and so they would have to have my room. This rather upset me, because a war is one thing, but a football game is something else, and I wasn’t very happy about it. I had had the room for three or four weeks, so I went out and got a cab and went down to the Governor Clinton Hotel where I had stayed a number of times. I went in I guess looking completely rejected and bewildered, with my hair straggly from the storm, and tired, and wet, and asked the fellow at the desk there, whom I knew quite well, if he had a room.

He didn’t have anything, but he said, “How come? Aren’t you in a room somewhere?” I explained the situation, that I was up at the Astor, but they had to have my room for some officers to see a football game. He laughed and said, “I’ll tell you what you do.” He said, “You go back to your room, and just go by the desk—Have you got your key?” I said yes, because I never did bother to turn my key in. He said, “You just go back to your room and lock your door, and go to bed.” And he said, “They can’t throw you out of your room on that short of notice. They’ve got to give you a little time.” Then he said, “You come down tomorrow and I’ll have a room for you.”

I did just that. I went back to the hotel and went up to my room and locked the door and went to bed. If anyone knocked on my door, I didn’t hear them. I took a couple of aspirin and went to bed, and I must have gone right to sleep. I don’t know where those officers slept that night, but they didn’t sleep in my bed. The next day I checked out of the Astor and went down to the Governor Clinton.

When I talked to the fellow at the Governor Clinton and he had told me that he had nothing for me, and I had turned away and started back up to the door when he called me back, and I suppose he wasn’t really ethically supposed to tell me that I could not be thrown out of my room, I don’t know. When I went back down, I asked him about it. I said, “How come you were no nice to me about—” and he asked me how I made out; if I’d slept in my room, and I said I did, and I said, “How come you told me that I could do that?” He kind of laughed and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, when you came in here you looked so bedraggled, and I just can’t stand to see a woman cry.”

I think that’s the last time I ever stayed at the Astor Hotel. From then on, for a long time, I stayed at the Governor Clinton as long as that particular fellow was assistant manager. Later he became the manager of the same chain of hotels in Florida, and I didn’t know the new fellow who took his place. About that time most of us moved up to the McAllister Hotel, which was a block closer to our office. It was also an old hotel, but it was a nice hotel and we enjoyed staying there. We particularly liked the dining room there when we didn’t want to go out anywhere else to eat.

We also stayed at the Statler Hotel a lot. It’s the Statler Hilton now, and it’s directly across the street from the Pennsylvania Station. It was very convenient for us. We stayed there for several years, off and on. After I was in Minneapolis, we stayed at the Commodore quite a bit. It’s up right off of Grand Central Station, but I never did care for it up there so much. It was further away from the office. It was out of the business district, and they liked it better because it got them away from business a little bit more. I thought it was a little bit too far away from everything and I preferred the other part of town myself.

One time Evelyn Muller and I stayed at the Barbizon, which is directly across the street from the Waldorf-Astoria. It was in the summertime. You have no idea how narrow the streets are in New York—they are just almost like alleys, some of them, especially the side streets. I’ll swear that you could almost reach out from our room and touch hands with anyone sleeping in a room in the Waldorf-Astoria opposite. This was a real hot night, and we couldn’t stand to have our window closed, or our window shade down. The Barbizon was not air conditioned. There was always a convention of some sort at the Waldorf, and I don’t know who was there, but it was a crowd of men, and they insisted on standing at their window drinking and looking into our room directly across. We couldn’t go to bed because we couldn’t get undressed unless we put the window shade down and the window down. This went on until long into the night before we could get to bed. We finally just had to put the window down and pull the shade and roast. That was my one and only experience at the Barbizon, and the only time I was that close to the Waldorf, except for conventions and things of that sort. I will tell you about some of the times that I spent there for conventions.

I think that may be one of the things I didn’t like about the Commodore Hotel, either. It was directly next to an office building, a big office building. I remember one night coming home, and I was awfully tired, and I just thought I was too tired to bother about dinner. I had bought some candy on the way home. I went into my room, and without even taking my coat off, just threw myself down on the bed and was lying on the bed eating this candy. I hadn’t even thought about my window; I thought it was just a wall next to me. All of a sudden my phone rang. I answered the phone, and a man’s voice said, “That surely looks like good candy.” It startled me so, and then I realized where he was and I dashed over and pulled down my shade. In a few minutes, my phone rang again, and it was the same voice wanting to know if I would like to come downstairs to have a drink.

When I was telling someone about it the next day, they said that the fellows in this office building knew the hotel. They had—there was a chart on your hotel door showing the whole floor so that you knew how to get around, where the exits were and everything, and he said that these fellows in this office building knew the hotel as well as they knew their office, so they could tell exactly what room we were in. This fellow I guess had been working late and had seen me, but by the time I got over to the window to pull my shade down, he had turned the office light out, so it still looked just like a blank wall to me, and I never did know why I hadn’t noticed it before. From then on, I never cared to stay in that hotel.

I’ve mentioned Evelyn Muller a lot. She bought the same items for the Boise store that I bought for all of the stores, and we used to work together a great deal. She had had a lot more experience in ready-to-wear than I had, and she was a very great help to me and a very good friend to me. I’ve always thought a great deal of Evelyn.

One trip that we were in New York, she had a heart attack. We were staying at the Astor Hotel, and we had been out together and had come home. I had just barely gotten in bed when my phone rang and it was the operator. She said, “I think your friend was trying to get you, but she has dropped her receiver or something, and she may be ill.” She was on the floor below me, and I dashed down as fast as I could. When I got down there, I discovered I had my robe and my shoes both in my hands, and I hadn’t put either one of them on. I went down on the stairs, fortunately, so no one saw me on the elevator. I think I had just gotten to the door of her room and realized that I might not be able to get in, but fortunately she had turned the lock on her door before she had gone unconscious, and so I was able to get into the room. I called the desk and they called the house doctor, and he was there very quickly and gave her a hypo.

The type of heart trouble that Evelyn had was a fibrillating heart, and she would get it occasionally when she was very tired. We were near the end of our trip and were pretty well finished up with our work, so the next morning when I called Boise to tell them about it, they told me to stay with her a few days until the doctor said she might travel, and then for me to bring her home. I did this. We were traveling by train that trip, and she’s always accused me of trying to run her under the train in Chicago when I was trying to get her wheelchair pushed from the depot down to our car. It was so busy in those days, it was awfully hard to get bellhops, and so I had attempted to push the wheelchair. It was my first experience at pushing a wheelchair, and I didn’t know that they could be such tricky things, and I did just about put her under the train at one spot. I’ll admit that having this happen in New York and being there with Evelyn for those four days and making the trip home with her, not knowing just exactly how well she was going to be, was a bit scary, and I was quite glad to arrive back in Boise with her.


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1. “America’s Witness for Christ,” popularly called the Hill Cumorah Pageant, was started in 1947 by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the upper New York area around Palmyra and Manchester. The pageant depicted scenes from the Book of Mormon, including Christ’s visit to the American continent.
2. General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War of 1861–1865 famously said that “War is hell.”

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Go to Part 19 here.
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