Mabel’s Memories, part 20

This is part 20 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 19, Mabel told how she was part of a team that opened new stores for C.C. Anderson and Co. This part tells how she became an executive for Allied Stores at the L.M. Donaldson Store in Minneapolis. This is the last of Mabel’s tapes that we could find.


Chapter 20
An Executive in Minneapolis

As the war began to wind down, the government cancelled their big contracts with the manufacturers for various types of merchandise, and it wasn’t long until merchandise became very readily available. Salesmen started traveling again, and the stores were able to buy the things that they needed. As this happened, it became less necessary for Allied to have the office in Boise. They still maintained a skeleton office, but they cut out some of the people.

As this became evident, I realized that I would be one of the people who would be cut, because most of the people there were Boise people, and as you remember, I went up there from Ogden. I began wondering just what I would do. I looked forward to the thoughts of coming back home, but I didn’t look forward to the $80-a-month job that I would have at the store here, which would be all that would be available in the C.C. Anderson store. I was in New York on one trip when I was called into the personnel office there and they discussed with me the fact that the office was going to be cut back in Boise, and would I like to remain with the company? I felt that I had done a fairly good job in Boise. I know I made mistakes, all of us did, but the last year that the war was in progress, the departments that I bought for sold over $3 million worth of merchandise, the largest amount of any one of the buyers in the office. I realized that I had done as well as the others, and so I was not surprised when they did offer me a place somewhere else in the company.

I really didn’t want to work anywhere in the east or in the south. The only places where they had stores that I felt that I would care to work were in Minneapolis and St. Paul, or in Seattle, and I told them this. I was later interviewed by the manager from Seattle and also by Mr. Bulette, who was the supervisor for Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as several other stores, and he offered me a job in one of his stores. I went up to have an interview with the managers of each of these two stores. I thought that I was going to take a job in St. Paul, but at the last minute Mr. Bulette asked me to go to Minneapolis. Minneapolis and St. Paul, of course, are twin cities. It didn’t really matter to me which one I worked in. The people in Minneapolis are very much like western people. In fact, they consider themselves “west”; they don’t think of themselves as easterners. They are mostly Scandinavian and Irish, and they are people who came there under, not the same circumstances as the Utah people, but certainly as the western people. Many of them went up there during the Irish potato famine that we have heard so much about, and it was colonized by farming people. Many of the Scandinavians went there because it was so much like their own homeland. They were a very wholesome, happy, nice people, and I enjoyed the people in Minneapolis very much.

The job that they offered me up there was to be what they called a “division manager” for the infants’ and children’s (girls’ and boys’ wear), children’s shoes, and house dresses. I was to have a buyer under me for each of these departments except the girls’ wear, and I would buy the girls’ wear. It was the Donaldson Company that had been bought up by Allied after the First World War, as I told you many other stores were. They did about $30 million in total volume, so you can see that they were rather a large store. They had a thousand employees, and I later discovered that I was the only Mormon in the group. The greater part of the people working there were Catholic. The managing director was Catholic, and Mr. Bulette who hired me was Catholic, and it was natural that they had, over the years, hired many Catholic people.

Donaldson’s in Minneapolis

I went to Minneapolis in August 1947. It was rather funny—someone had told me that Minneapolis had winter weather by the time you got into August. We were buying ready-to-wear, and ready-to-wear was all fall clothes by that time. All the windows were full of fall merchandise, so all I took with me was my fall wardrobe and winter clothing. The others I had packed and stored, along with my piano and other things that I planned to take with me, and they were shipped to Minneapolis and put in storage there. When I got to Minneapolis, it was so warm, it was the hottest September that they had had in history, and everyone else was still wearing their summer clothes. Here was I all bundled up and just simply roasting. The first few weeks I lived in a little hotel, not too far from the store, that was not air conditioned, and I just about sweltered.

The duplex Mabel bought in Minneapolis

After I’d been there a short time, I moved into a resident-type hotel, the Oak Grove, and lived there for about a year. After that I bought a small duplex and lived in half of it and rented the other half. The rent from the half I rented paid my payment, and so I felt that I lived rent-free while I was there. Besides, anything that I did for the rental side, I could write off on my income tax. I rented the one half to a single lady.

At the store, I found that I enjoyed the women that I worked over very much. They were all very nice women. I enjoyed the store and the work, but I found it very, very hard. You’ll have to remember that the biggest store I had ever worked in as a buyer was C.C. Anderson in Ogden that did about $1 million, and that against $30 million was quite different. True, I had been buying in large quantities for quite some time for these other stores, but learning to relate the actual running of an operation of that size as against what I had been familiar with was very new to me. The advertising was something that I was not too familiar with, and supervising these other buyers was something that I was not familiar with. There were many things that I had to learn. They also had a big mail-order business. There’s only one paper in Minneapolis and it circulated out through Montana and the Dakotas and all of that area, and so they had always had a mail order coupon in their paper. One floor of the building (there were seven floors in the building) was devoted mainly to mail order. They mailed all types of merchandise out into these western states, and we always had to have a supply on hand of whatever we had in the ads. This was also something I had to learn to do. For instance, you would have a house dress in the ad, and you would fill orders for two weeks and then the rest of the house dresses would come down and be sold on the floor. This was true of various items. That was all brand new for me to handle.

I hadn’t been there very long until they also added the budget dresses to my group. The reason they did this was that the woman who had those was a Jewish woman, a brilliant woman and a marvelous merchant, but she couldn’t get along with anybody. Mr. Kempf, who was our supervisor, decided that he thought that I could get along with her. I did; we got along very well and were marvelous friends for years. I didn’t ever attempt to tell Bess how to do anything. I knew she knew more about it than I did, so I just let her do it. Other supervisors had tried to direct her, but no one could direct Bess. Bess did things exactly as she pleased, and I quickly found this out, and since I knew that she knew a lot more about it than I did, I just encouraged her and let her have her head. However, she did like me very much, and we did talk things over a great deal and became very good friends. I will tell you about some of the times we spent together at a later time.

I continued to make a lot of trips to New York because I went with the various buyers, as well as going down to buy for the girls’ wear, which, as I told you, I was in charge of. In that store, they believed in having every divisional buy for one department. They felt that that made you more alert and kept you more aware of the market. I also had the junior dresses added to my department, and eventually I had the better dresses added to my department. I bought for them one season, and that was an experience I’ll probably tell you something about, too. Before I left there, I had the foundation garments added to my department, and the lingerie. I had all of that floor, the third floor, except coats and suits. That’s the only thing that I didn’t supervise.

I never did get my directions straight in Minneapolis. Every morning I went in the east door and every night I went out the south door, and it was the very same door. The house I bought faced the east and I lived on the north side, but to me, it faced the south, and I lived on the east side. I was always quite glad of that, because it would have seemed much colder had I lived on the north side. It was cold enough as it was, goodness knows.

The winters in Minneapolis were very cold, and it wasn’t unusual for the store to be closed early if a snowstorm came along. Occasionally people didn’t get home if there was a storm. The store would have put you up at a hotel or somewhere for the night and sometimes, many of the people stayed right in the store and slept on the beds in the bedding department. We really had winters there; I’ll tell you something about those as I go along too.

I’m not right sure how long I was there. I guess it would be four years, but it was a very pleasant time. One thing that made it particularly pleasant was my activities in the Church, and this I’ll probably spend quite a bit of time on.

While we’re talking about the weather, I might say that the summers were just as hot as the winters were cold, and very humid. There are, I don’t know how many lakes, but a great many lakes within the city limits, and oh, I don’t know how many thousand they brag about being in the state. The lakes and the humidity and the heat all made it very beautiful. There were lots of trees and foliage, and one of our favorite evening entertainments was to ride out and then walk around the lakes or sit by the lakes. There was always a breeze blowing off the lake and that was about the only way you could get cooled off. In the wintertime our chief sport was the Northern Lights, to get in the car and drive out into the country away from the lights of the city so that you could actually see the Northern Lights, and they were very pretty. . . . [tape ends]

[Mabel said that the missing tape should appear here, telling more about her work in the store, about visits from family members, and then about how much she enjoyed her church work, including providing frequent meals for the young missionaries serving in that area. Her home became a sort of gathering place for the missionaries, and she always had a dinner for them at holidays. If she ever revealed any more of her friendship with Jim McEleney, it would have been on this missing tape. She did tell family members about some of their activities, canoeing, seeing the Northern Lights, a river cruise with him and his mother, and so on. From here on, the last tape was never transcribed during Mabel’s lifetime. She told Elizabeth it would be a mistake to have it done. You will understand why as you read it.]

Christmas 1949 - Mabel and the missionaries

Christmas 1949, Mabel in her home

[Tape begins]. . . One of Billy Graham’s revival meetings, but I never did. At one time, some of the missionaries were going to go with me, and about that time President Hawkes recommended that none of the members attend and absolutely forbade any of the missionaries to attend, so I just never did hear him speak. I don’t know whether he thought that we might, in the enthusiasm, get converted or what, but he was very strong in his view that we not go to hear Billy Graham. I have heard him on radio and on television, as I’m sure most of you have.

When we used to travel down to New York, I very frequently went with a couple of these Catholic girls, and it was too early when we left Minneapolis in the morning for them to have attended Mass, and so we always had to go by way of Chicago, and there was a little chapel not far from Midway airport, which is what we used then, and I used to wait in the waiting room there while they went to Mass and then came back, and then we took the next plane into New York. They were very devout about their Mass; yet I didn’t ever feel that their religion got in the way of their doing pretty much what they wanted to do, other than that they were very good about attending Mass. I don’t mean by this that they weren’t lovely girls; they were, but they felt free to smoke or to drink or to do many things that of course I could not join them in.

Until I went to Minneapolis, I had always made the trip to Ogden for Christmas. I could leave Boise on Christmas Eve and spend the holiday with the family in Ogden. After I went to Minneapolis, that became much more difficult to do. I wasn’t working in a store in Boise; I had only the office to be concerned about. In Minneapolis in a department store, the day after Christmas is one of the biggest days of the year, with the after-Christmas clearances, and the exchanges, and so on. It became very difficult for me to get home. I think I told you that I usually had missionaries with me at this time.

One year we had rather an interesting experience: Bess Marschel couldn’t get home either, and there was a girl working in the Forest Service who was a friend of mine from Boise, and she was not able to get home, and so we decided to spend our Christmas together. We thought that we would like to have some children, and so we had inquired around where we might be able to get some orphan children or who would need a place for Christmas. Some of these Catholic girlfriends, or buyers of mine suggested that we call one of the Catholic orphanages, and I talked to the managing director, who was very active in the Catholic church there, who he would recommend that we call. He gave me the name of an orphanage, and I called them. We were going to have Christmas at my home, and we had a Christmas tree, and we really had things, we thought, quite nice. When I called, I asked if they had any children who didn’t have any place to go on Christmas, and they said, oh yes, we have several who have not been placed for Christmas. She said, “How many could you take?”

I said, “We could easily accommodate six or eight children.”

We had the thing all arranged, where we would pick them up and everything, but just as we went to end our conversation, she said, “Of course, you’re Catholic.”

I said, “No, I’m not Catholic, but we’re Christian.”

She said, “Oh, well, we could not allow our children to go anywhere except into a Catholic home.”

This surprised me, and it made me just a little bit provoked. I did manage to get it told to the managing director how we had been refused to give these little children a happy Christmas, because we weren’t Catholic.

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I was just listening to people tell embarrassing moments in their lives (on radio), and it reminded me of something that happened to me which I think I’ll insert here, though it doesn’t belong. If I don’t do it now, I’ll forget it later.

This happened while I was still in Boise, during the war years. In fact, it was one of the early trips that I made to New York. I was traveling with another lady buyer; she was a very sharp-speaking, very aggressive young lady, very nice, and a very good friend of mine. We got into Chicago and took a cab to the Palmer House Hotel where we were to stay for a day or two. When our cab pulled up in front of the hotel, we saw the red carpet stretched all the way out to the sidewalk, and there were a lot of people gathered around, and so we knew that they were expecting some dignitaries to arrive. We were a little bit embarrassed as we crawled out of our cab and looked around for our luggage. The cabdriver was getting the luggage out, but no bellhop had showed up. There was a man in uniform with braid and so on, whom my friend assumed was a doorman, so she said very sharply to him, “Help us get this luggage out of the way so we can get inside before whoever is coming gets here!” He didn’t move, but just then a bellboy came dashing up with a big grin on his face and gathered up our luggage, and we paraded along the red carpet past a grinning bunch of bellhops, and we even heard some snickers in the crowd of people that were standing around. When we got in and got registered and finally got into the elevator, she said to the bellboy, “Who was that man that I spoke to outside?” He couldn’t hold it any longer, he just burst out laughing and he said, “Madam, that was Admiral Halsey, waiting for his limousine!”

I could tell you so many experiences that we had with servicemen; in fact, as I think about it, I think perhaps I already have told you some, so maybe I better not say anything more, because I may just be repeating myself. I used to feel so sorry for those boys as they traveled. They looked so tired, so discouraged, so frightened, and so young, and really, your heart just went out to them. I used to get a little bit out of patience sometimes with some of the officers, because they expected such preferential treatment, but not the boys. They really had a rough time as they traveled across the country from one end of the world to the other.

I don’t remember just when it was that my nephew Don came to live with me. After the war he had come home to California to his folks for a short time and then had gone to New York and was there supposedly working on his book. He didn’t have a job, and Jack was very worried about him and asked me if I would please try and see him each time that I went into New York. Don and I had dinner together several times and saw a few shows together. He was always very pleasant and enjoyable company. He’d always been reading a new book and he wanted to tell me about it, and I did make an effort to spend some time with him on each trip. Finally, Jack came up to visit me one trip after he had been in New York himself and had visited with Don, and asked me, if Don would go to school in Minneapolis, if I would let him come and live with me that winter. He had refused to go to school in California apparently, and Jack didn’t want him in New York; he wanted to get him out of New York, for which I certainly couldn’t blame him, because he was not living in a particularly good area, and not having a job, he was not as busy as he needed to be.

I didn’t know exactly what to say, but of course I said the only thing I felt I could say, and that was that I would let him come. Apparently Jack and Don had already talked about it, so it wasn’t long until I discovered that Don was arriving. In the meantime, I had given quite a bit of thought to it and realized that my house was not arranged so that I could have someone else living there. I had changed my mind. I only had the one bedroom, and it meant that someone would have that bedroom, and the other person would have to sleep on my davenport in the living room, which opened up into a bed. I did have rather a large clothes closet in the living room where clothes could be kept, and I had a small chest of drawers in there also.

Well, Don came [in time for the fall term 1950], and of course it ended up that Don had the bedroom, and I was in the living room. Don was very pleasant always, but he smoked a great deal, and I hadn’t made any decisions before he came about smoking. I know that in California he was not allowed to smoke in the house, but in Minneapolis with temperatures well below zero much of the winter and with him being almost a chain smoker, he really couldn’t spend the time outside smoking as much as he smoked or he’d have frozen to death. So he smoked in the house. He also drank coffee, so it wasn’t long until my house had the aroma of coffee and tobacco quite strongly. I began to notice that my missionary boys were not coming as frequently as they had. Don loved to bait the boys; he was much better read and much better informed on many subjects than they were, and instead of them being able to talk with him, he insisted on arguing with them. I think they felt that it was not doing them any good, or him any good for them to be there, and so they’d rather stop coming. I felt badly about that.

I guess it was about the same time that the work at the store began being rather hard for me. I was given a number of new departments to supervise; they made some new alterations in the store, and that meant that they brought the lingerie and the purse department up onto my floor, and they were given to me to supervise along with my other departments. Soon after that the better dress buyer left the store, and so, since I already supervised the budget dresses and the junior dresses and the house dresses, it was assumed that I could take the better dresses. I had bought foundation garments and lingerie before, and so this was not entirely new to me, but the better dresses were. In fact, I had never bought dresses at all.

The part that was the worst about it was that they didn’t hire a new buyer for that department; I was to buy the better dresses. I didn’t like buying dresses, and the better dress market is a very difficult market to work in. It’s a very snobbish market, where you had to make appointments for viewing the lines and you were constantly being bombarded with cocktails and, well, many things that I just didn’t like. It was very different, not businesslike, like the other markets, where you went in and looked at your lines and left. In the better dress market, they arrange for a viewing and a number of buyers are there and it’s more of a party with cocktails and all. I just didn’t like it at all. I didn’t know a great deal about better ready-to-wear; in fact, I had never been interested in that area. Evelyn Muller always managed to get me dressed in something respectable, and that was about all I worried about so far as clothes were concerned; they never played a very big part in my life, I’m afraid. There were too many things that I thought were more interesting. With all my previous responsibilities and the new ones added, this really made an awfully big job for a little country gal who had never been in a store bigger than C.C. Anderson’s in Ogden, until I went to Minneapolis. True, I had had a lot of experience in buying for the other stores during the war, but I had not actually worked in a store of the size of Donaldson’s. I worked very hard and tried very hard, but I had always been able to take my work home and have the quiet of home, and with Don now in the house, home was not quite the refuge that it had been, either. It seemed to me that problems piled up quite fast that winter.

I realized on one trip to New York [summer 1951] that I was not able to concentrate, not able to give my attention to the work as was required. I knew that I had not been doing so for some time, but I had not faced it until that trip to New York when I found that I could not go out and meet people and concentrate: my mind simply seemed to be a blank. When I went back home to Minneapolis, I went to my doctor, and he told me that I was both mentally and physically exhausted, and that I would have to have a rest. I went back to the store and told the manager. The doctor had given me a letter to take to management, and they offered to send me down to Palm Springs for a two weeks’ rest at the store’s expense. I called the doctor and told him this, and he said, “That won’t do.” He said, “You’ve got to have at least six months of rest.”

It is an impossibility for a division manager to take six months off the job. It isn’t like any other type of work. You’ve got to be right there through your seasons, because during that six months you would be buying for the future season, so it would be almost like a year away from your work. But the doctor was very determined about it and said that I must do it, and he, as I say, wrote to the store and told them that that would be necessary. The store did grant me six months’ leave of absence, and I was to be back in six months, and if I could not have my same job back, they would find another one for me within all the Allied stores. With that I left.

I stayed home almost a month, I guess, and tried to make up my mind whether to come west or whether, well, what to do. I just didn’t seem to be able to organize my thoughts on the subject at all. One day I got a telephone call from President Hawkes. I have guessed that the missionaries had probably told him my problem. I went in to see him as he had asked me to do, and he asked me if I would like to serve a short-term mission. That just seemed to me to be like a ray of sunshine; it seemed to me to be the most wonderful thing that could have happened. I had always wanted to go on a mission, and I had never been or felt that I was financially in a position so that I could. I told him yes, I would be very happy to do that. He said he needed someone in Canada to work at Fort William, which is just at the top of the Great Lakes in Canada, as you know. I said that I would be glad to go and this was arranged.

One bright morning at the end of September, I left for Fort William with another lady missionary, a woman about 65 years old who had just retired from Salt Lake Hardware, and, feeling very lost and all, had been called on a mission too. We started out together, and we had some amusing experiences even on the way before we arrived, where I was to work with Dawn Johnson from Midway and she was to work with the other lady missionary who was there. [Tape ends]

Mabel never taped any more of her memories after this.

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Go to the Epilogue here.
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