Mabel’s Memories, part 9

This is part 9 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 through 8. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there about twelve years.


Chapter 4
Beginnings of a Career (continued)

Without living through it, I think people could have very little idea of the hardships of those early settlers out in Uintah Basin. I got one of my best and most lasting lessons on the Word of Wisdom[1] from a little lady one day in Waugh’s Store. There was very little water out there. There hadn’t been too many canals dug yet, and the little orchards or fruit trees here and there, and the berry bushes and gardens were almost all literally watered by hand. People carried water from the ditches to water their trees and their bushes, and there was practically no fruit to be had, because it was too far for it to be hauled out there. It would spoil before it could ever arrive, and it would be too expensive for people to buy even if it were brought out.

This one day a little lady came in, in her buggy with her eggs to trade for groceries, and while she was buying things, she was telling me that she had raised some raspberries. Her raspberries were finally bearing that year, and she was going to have a few to bottle. She was so pleased and so proud, she was just bubbling, she was so excited about it. Among the other things that she bought was 50¢ worth of sugar to put up these raspberries. She lived out on North Myton Bench, and it must have taken her two or three hours to make the drive in, in the buggy. It was a hot day.

After she had left, she had been gone at least an hour, maybe more, when she—I saw her come back in, and she had this package of sugar with her, and there were tears in her eyes. She said, “You know, could you take this sugar back and let me have some tobacco?” She said, “I forgot to get my husband’s tobacco.” She said, “All of the other things I just have to have, but I can do without the sugar and not put up the fruit. We can eat the berries.” And she said at the end, “My husband will be so cross if I go home without his tobacco.”

I put the sugar back and she took her husband’s tobacco. Then and there I realized what the habit of tobacco could do to a family. Here was his wife and these children, deprived of such a wonderful luxury as these bottled raspberries were going to be, all so he could have his tobacco. I wished that she would have taken the sugar home and asked him to bring it back for the tobacco. I’ve often wondered if he would have had what it takes to do it.

There may still be room here to tell you a more amusing incident about tobacco. There were a lot of construction crews digging ditches and making roads and so on, and a lot of our business came from these crews. They would bring their order in when they came in. The whole bunch would come in on Saturday afternoon and leave their grocery order in the store and then go across to the pool hall and play pool and gamble all afternoon, because it would be their payday. Harold and I would put up their order of groceries, and then before they left at night, they would pick it up. Sometimes we’d have to wait until 9 or 10 o’clock for them to get through and come and get their order.

This one day I was putting up their order, and on it, it said—I don’t remember how many, but several—cartons of “Beechnut.” I knew about Beechnut chewing gum, and it never occurred to me to even think about Beechnut chewing or smoking tobacco. So what they got was however many cartons they wanted of Beechnut chewing gum. It was my turn to open the store on Monday morning, and on Monday morning when I got back to the store, here was the whole crew on the front steps waiting to get in. They had been the whole weekend without any tobacco. They’d had chewing gum, but they had had no tobacco, and they could scarcely wait for me to get the door open and let them get inside to get their tobacco. They either lit up if they smoked it, or stuffed it in their mouths if they chewed it, before they could even start back to work. They never did quit teasing me about that. I’m sure at the time that it happened, they could have done a lot worse than tease. I bet I got a lot of things said about me over that weekend, but finally when they all got cheered up with their cigarettes or plug in their mouth, they could laugh. And from then on, whenever they came, it would always be underscored: “Chewing tobacco, Beechnut tobacco,” not chewing gum.

Harold and I used to have some great times in the store. I wish that we could talk more about them. He’s so very hard of hearing now that it’s rather hard to talk to him. At Roy’s funeral he was there, and he and I got in a corner and got to talking about things that happened at the store, and of course I had to talk loudly to him, and some of the things struck us funny and we laughed. I’m sure that people thought that we were being very irreverent to laugh as we did.

One time I remember, well, lots of afternoons it used to get pretty slow in the store and there would be an hour or so that would be rather quiet. Sometimes Harold would go down in the basement and work during that time and clean up down there, and I would work upstairs. One afternoon I had been to a dance the night before, and I was just so sleepy I didn’t know what to do. We kept our overalls under the counter toward the back of the store, and I crawled in on top of the overalls and went sound asleep. I don’t know how long I may have slept, but I could hear people walking back and forth in the store, and I could hear Harold just bustling about and taking care of customers, and I thought, “Oh my word. I’ve got to get out of here some way.” I crawled out very quietly from underneath the counter, and as I raised my head up above the counter, here stood a great big Indian, one that I didn’t know or hadn’t ever seen before, and I think he thought I was a ghost or something—it scared him almost more than it scared me! Anyway, I managed to crawl out and wait on the customers, and we laughed and laughed about that afterwards.

Another funny thing that happened, Harold—oh, I won’t tell you that right yet. Harold got married along a couple or so years after I was in the store. He too went outside; however, he only went to Kamas [a Utah town about 100 miles away] and married a childhood sweetheart, a girl he had known when they went to school. They weren’t old enough to be married at the time he moved out to the Basin, but she had never married, and of course he hadn’t, and so they started corresponding, and he went back for a visit, and they got married. Erma was a very fastidious, particular girl. She liked things just so. One day we got a bunch of hats in, and Harold loved to try on these women’s hats; he always had. This day he tried on all the hats, and one he thought was particularly funny-looking on him. He thought it just really did something for him, and we laughed and laughed over this hat. Then he went downstairs in the basement to work, and Erma came in. She started trying on the hats, and lo and behold, she fell in love with this hat that Harold had made so much fun of, and she bought it.

I didn’t say a word to Harold about it (this was on a Saturday, too). On Sunday morning, I played the piano at church as usual, and Harold was the superintendent of the Sunday School. Erma was usually late for church—I don’t know why, but she was one of these people who are always late. They only lived across the street, maybe that’s why. Anyway, Erma came in late. We were singing the first song when she came in, and I was playing the piano, and all of a sudden I heard a gasp from up in front, and without even looking, I knew what had happened. Erma had arrived in her new hat. I got the giggles, and Harold got the giggles up in front ‘til he couldn’t sing or lead the singing—which he did even though he was superintendent—and neither one of us dared to tell Erma why we were so amused. It was really just hilarious, and she wore that hat all summer. I don’t think she ever did know about how much fun we had made of the hat before she bought it. It was real fun for me to tease Harold about that hat afterwards.

Inventory at the store was done almost as carelessly as the bookkeeping for Mr. Waugh was done, and every year we were going to do it better next year. We had this one drawer in which we kept laces and trimmings and a little bit of ribbon and things of that sort for the ladies who did their sewing at home. Each year Mr. Waugh would look in that drawer about three or four times during the year and say, “Now, when inventory comes again, we’re going to measure this. This has got to be measured so we know what we’ve got here.”Each year I’d get it out and I’d start to measure the lace and so on, and he’d come along and he’d look at—he’d open that drawer and look in it for a minute, and then he’d say, “Oh hell,” and he’d shut the drawer and that was the end of measuring the ribbon. In all the time I worked there, the laces and the ribbons never ever got more than one or two pieces measured at inventory time. I don’t know if the rest of the inventory was taken quite that carelessly or not; I think we did do better on other things, but when it came to that drawer, he just couldn’t be bothered.

Many people owed a great deal to Mr. Waugh. Many of the farmers and the homesteaders could never have made it without Mr. Waugh. He used to carry them all summer until their crop came in, in the fall. If it came in, why, then they would pay him. But if the storms came and the frosts, or if there was no rain and the crops burned up and they didn’t have any crop, why of course he didn’t get paid. I’m sure he lost thousands of dollars trying to carry farmers, and then I have already told you about the money he used to hand out to the Indians. He was a wonderful man. As he grew older of course, and as the Depression started to come on, the ‘29 Depression, he began to lose money rapidly, and it looked very much like he was going to lose the store.[2] Finally it reached a point where he simply had to say no to these people that he had been carrying for so many years, because he just couldn’t do it. So they lit on the plan that he would not come in the store. He would stay out on his ranch, or on his farm out on South Myton Bench, and Harold and I ran the store, because we could say, “Well, Mr. Waugh isn’t here, and we have no authority to let you have any credit.” This is what we did for the last year that I was in the store [1927].

When the hard time came, it got to a point where we only had on the shelves what we could actually use that week, and as the salesmen came through, we would give the orders for just the things that we were just absolutely out of. At one point—our creditors were mostly ZCMI Wholesale and Patrick Dry Goods—and at one time they came out with their trucks and took back cartons and cartons and cartons of merchandise to try to make up some of the debt that Mr. Waugh owed that he was unable to pay them, because the ranchers had not paid him. We’d live from hand to mouth. Harold and I didn’t draw any salary at all; we took just as little as we possibly could from the store and just barely what was needed to live on. I’m sure that Harold sacrificed even more than I did during that time, because it was all of his living, and of course we did have Fred’s salary and cows.

We would do almost anything to have saved the store for Mr. Waugh and through doing that way, through living from week to week on what we could sell, we were able to save the store. It was just heartbreaking to see how angry these people could be, how harsh they could be, because they could not get credit, and how hard it was for them to understand that the reason for his nearly losing his whole livelihood and his whole lifelong labor was because of the kindness and the goodness that he had shown to them while he was able to do it.

Remember, Mother and I were alone for about four years in Myton after Roy and Fred were married.[3]

You might be interested in who our neighbors were. On the west of us we had that old, empty hotel building that I’ve talked so much about. On the east we had McKuen, the Indian medicine man, and on the north were our corrals, and then right next to our corrals was a very small house where a Mexican family lived. There was a wife and a number of children and a husband who was home occasionally. On the south of us there was a family (I can’t remember their name), and they were not the most desirable neighbors in the world. Now I’m sure they were reasonably respectable, but some people would have thought that was rather a dreary spot to be in, but I don’t recall us worrying a great deal about it.

We did have one rather interesting thing happen with the neighbors. It was on a Sunday morning that we were just getting ready to go to Sunday School, when suddenly I heard somebody running across the porch and a voice crying, “I keel him! I keel him!”

I ran to the door and looked out, and here came this little Mexican lady, and she had a gun and she was pointing it directly at me, and her hand was shaking so badly that I was afraid it might go off accidentally. I don’t know how I got the courage, but I suppose you do things without really thinking; I walked toward her and was able to take the gun out of her hand. I asked her what the problem was, and she said that her husband had come home—no, her husband was away, and a friend of his had come who had been at the house before with her. Some time in the past he had made some advances and had frightened her, and so she had told her husband about him. Her husband had got her a gun and had told her that if he came again that she was to scare him away with this gun.

This day he came, and she got the gun and told him to leave, but he wouldn’t, so she started to threaten him with the gun, and she had chased him around the house three or four times, but she said that the trigger on the gun was so stiff that she couldn’t pull it. Anyway, she had succeeded in frightening him enough that he had left. Apparently he had been very drunk. Then she had run over to us and left her children asleep in the house, and she was very frightened.

Once I got the gun in my hands I was very frightened too. Up until then I hadn’t thought much, but then I realized what could have happened. I went out the back way, and there was a gate at the back of our yard, and I went through there and up to the sheriff’s place. He lived probably three blocks from us. He came down and talked to the lady and they went up to the pool hall, and sure enough, they found the man there and arrested him and took him over to the jail.

Before I went to the sheriff, I had gone with her back over to her house to see if her children were all right, because she was very worried about them and to make sure that he wasn’t still there lurking somewhere around the house. Then I came back and went for the sheriff. I was really rather frightened by this time, because I didn’t know what he might do.

I myself wasn’t very good with guns. I had shot a gun a few times; in fact, I almost killed a fellow one time when we were out hiking and one of the fellows had a gun with him and they were shooting tin cans off the post, as kids will do. When it came my turn to shoot, just as I went to shoot the gun, this fellow spoke to me, and I turned, pointing the gun with me as I turned, and shot. It just whizzed by his head. After that, I had not had anything to do with guns.

I don’t know at just what point the boys decided to remodel our house a bit. I might say that our house was in a sort of an L shape. There was the living room and then my parents’ bedroom, and then the room that I’ve talked about so often that we used as sort of a bedroom or a dining room, whichever it was needed for. After my father’s death it also had his old roll-top desk in there. The room that formed the L was the kitchen. From the kitchen to the front of the house past my parents’ bedroom and the living room was a wide porch. I’m sure it was wide enough that it could have been partitioned off and made into a couple of small bedrooms, but we never did do that. We had, along the way, boarded it up partway and screened the rest. That was where we took care of our milk and had our separator during the during the years that we sold milk. At one time along the way, we had boarded in one end of it so that we could have a bed out there in the summertime. It wasn’t finished well enough to be warm enough for the winter. This arrangement had its advantages and its disadvantages. In the wintertime, by keeping the door between the living room and the front bedroom open, you could get quite a lot of heat into the bedroom from the stove in the living room and you could also get quite a lot of heat from the kitchen stove into the other room and all of the house could be a little bit warm. The disadvantage of course was that if you wanted to go from the living room to the kitchen, you had to walk through both bedrooms. That wasn’t always pleasant. I’m sure it was after Father died, the boys decided that it would be a good idea to cut a door from the front bedroom onto the porch and make that room our kitchen, and the two back rooms into bedrooms. This worked very well, except the fact that those two back bedrooms were pretty cold in the wintertime.

While Mother and I were alone, at least two years, we kept boarders. We had two lady schoolteachers, and they slept in the bedroom that had been our kitchen, and Mother and I in the other room. Then we had the front room and the kitchen next to each other. That made a very nice arrangement, except I remember the girls used to always get undressed by the fire in either the front room or the kitchen, and make one wild dash for their cold bed, each with a hot water bottle. As Mother got so that she was not so well, we finally put the couch, which I told you I slept on in the front room for so many years, into the kitchen. The last year, we didn’t have boarders, and she didn’t make an effort to keep a fire in the front room all the time. She spent much of her time just in the kitchen on this couch.

I can well remember when I was working at Waugh’s, at night when I would be going home, there was a certain spot at which I could see the window of the room that was now the kitchen. If the light was on, I would know that she was up fixing my dinner, and that she was all right. But sometimes she would have gone to sleep and wouldn’t have gotten up and turned the light on, and I wouldn’t be able to see the light, and I know that when I couldn’t see the light at that particular spot between the houses, then I started to run, and I ran until I was home because I was so afraid that she had gotten sick or that she had fallen, or that something had happened to her. That always was a terrifying experience.

With all our worries and problems, we had a lot of fun in that little house in those last years that Mother and I lived there. It was sort of a center of activity. As I’ve told you before, there were very few young people there, and especially in the winter when the girls were with us, the men teachers used to come down and we’d spend lots of evenings playing Flinch and Rook and making fudge and just generally making our own good times. We all sort of went together in a bunch to dances, both in our own branch and to neighboring towns. I wasn’t always able to go, because if Mother was not well, I didn’t leave her. But we did have a lot of fun. We had a lot going on in our own branch. I was very big in dramatics—I loved that—and we had lots of plays, and I guess I was a ham just like my dad. I did enjoy that very much.

Roy and Maude, Fred and Loreen, Harold and Erma were all very good about coming to visit with us and we had a lot of fun with them. We especially enjoyed the twins when they came along.[4] Mother and I used to tend them while Fred and Loreen went to Roosevelt for leadership meetings or if they had some other function that they wanted to go to. They were cute little mutts. The only trouble with them was that if one woke up and cried, they both woke up and cried. You’d just barely get one asleep and the other one would wake up. But they were good babies and we loved to have them. Austin was born before we left Myton, and we used to enjoy having him too, and tending him while Maude and Roy did other things.[5]

Fred with his twin boys

Mabel and Roy, before 1925
(because Mabel had not yet cut her hair)

It was during this time that I managed to have measles and chicken pox and mumps, one at a time, of course. I guess being the youngest of the family, I hadn’t had them when I was a child, and since I always had to play with everybody’s baby that came to the store, I suppose it was inevitable that I would get them. Since all the rest of our bunch had had them, they had a famous time coming to watch me suffer. I remember that they all thought I was particularly amusing when I had the mumps.

Speaking of dramatics made me think of Archie Palmer again. I hadn’t thought of him for years, and I have no idea whatever became of him. He was older than the rest of us; in fact, I think he had even gotten in on a few months of the very end of World War I. During that time he had learned some bad habits, one of which was drinking, and the other one was forging his father’s name on checks, which didn’t please his father very much. After a few times, his father decided that it might be well for him to spend a few months in jail, which Archie did. His mother was a lovely person. She was my mother’s counselor in the Relief Society presidency. When Archie came home from the pen, we all decided that we would get Archie and reform him. We got him going to Mutual and we found out that he dearly loved dramatics. He was very good at them too. The only problem that we had with Arch was that even though it was Prohibition, as soon as we got into a strange town, some way he had an uncanny knack of getting hold of a bottle. We solved it by giving him a part that had a drunk in it, and this worked very well. Arch would always be pretty good in the first act, and very good in the second act, and absolutely stupendous in the third act. He always stole the show.

We all liked Arch, and Arch liked me for some reason, except when he was drunk. His mother used to say to my mother, “Now don’t you worry about Mabel, because Archie will take care of her,” and Archie did, except as I say when he got drunk. Then he would have nothing to do with me whatsoever. One night this almost became a disaster. It looked like one of us was going to have to walk home from Roosevelt [ten miles]. The other car had gone, and Arch refused to get into the car that I was riding in. We finally resolved it by just waiting until Arch went to sleep, and then the fellows hoisted him into the back seat and I got into the front seat. All the way home, Arch was mumbling, “I’m not gonna ride with her.”

For some reason or other we never really had much luck in reforming Arch, and as I say, I don’t know whatever became of him. I haven’t heard of him, or for that matter, thought of him for years until we were talking about dramatics for these tapes.


***************************
Notes:

1. Latter-day Saints have a rather strict health code called “The Word of Wisdom” which includes not smoking or chewing tobacco.
2. Before the stock market crash in October 1929 that started the Great Depression, Utah farms were losing money rapidly. The same extreme, prolonged drought that caused the Great Plains to become the Great Dust Bowl had also affected the Uintah Basin, and starting around 1925, farms and ranches all around Myton failed by the dozens and then by the hundreds as the years passed.
3. Actually, it was four years after her father died that Mabel and her mother moved to Salt Lake City, and either Fred or Roy had been living with them, with the exception of the six months that Roy was gone on his second mission, and the six or eight months after Roy's marriage.
4. Fred and Loreen’s twins were born at the end of the summer of 1926.
5. Roy and Maude’s first boy was born in the summer of 1927.

****************************
Go to Part 10 here.
****************************