Mabel’s Memories, part 19

This is part 19 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 18, Mabel was traveling for C.C. Anderson and Co. as a merchandise buyer, and was having all sorts of adventures. In this part, Mabel tells of how she was part of the team that opened new stores for the company, beginning during the War and continuing through 1946.


Chapter 10
Opening New Stores

I don’t remember exactly at what point we started to open new stores, but during the time that I was in the Boise office we did open seven new stores. Six of them were in the state of Washington. We opened one at Spokane, Tacoma, Everett, Yakima, Walla Walla, and Bellingham. All of these stores are now branches of The Bon Marche in Seattle. I’ve often wondered why The Bon didn’t do it in the first place, but for some reason, at that particular time they had our office buy and open these stores. We also bought and reopened the Paris at Great Falls, Montana. As you can imagine, doing these new stores made our work much heavier, but it was a great deal of fun.

It was a very exciting experience to be part of opening a new store. Before we did anything, all of the public relations work had been done by management. They had been in the town and surveyed the stores and made all of the contacts with the Chamber of Commerce and so on, and made their decision as to whether or not they wanted the store. Once all of the details had been taken care of and they had arranged for the store, then it was our job it go in and decide what merchandise should be bought and in what quantities. It would mean that we would go into a town and go into the store and get acquainted with the people in the departments and see what stock they carried, and what they had so far as quantities were concerned in relation to their sales, to see what brands of merchandise they carried, whether or not they were the same brands that we carried, or whether or not we would have to make new contacts in the market for them. It was also our job to go out and survey the other stores in the town and see what they did in relation to the store that we were buying and to see what lines of merchandise they were carrying also, so that we would know what our competition would be and whether we would be duplicating the things that they had, to compare their prices and to observe what type of customers they had in their stores, and also in the store that we were going to buy. We spent many hours in the library in the town looking over the advertising for both the store that we were opening and also for the other stores in the town, to see what had been advertised and what appeared to be the general method of operating these various stores in the city as nearly as we could. All of this was necessary for us to know what type of a store we wanted ours to be, and what place in the community we could best fill in order to be the most profitable to us and to make the best contribution in the community in which we were going. I won’t attempt to tell you what we did in each one of these stores. I think if I just tell you about one or two of them it will be representative of all of them, because we had very much the same experiences in all of them except for a few peculiar things that we ran into.

One of the most interesting of all of the stores we opened was at Richland, Washington. This was a new store that we built and opened completely from scratch, and it was opened for the benefit of the people who worked at the nuclear plant at Hanford, Washington, up where part of the work on the atomic bomb was done, and where a lot of the work on plastic was done. This store was peculiar in every sense of the word. It had complete government priorities. For the Richland store we could buy anything that we wanted to, in any quantities that we wanted to. If we went into a manufacturer to buy anything for that store, it had a government priority and we would get it. It was a nice little store. It wasn’t large, but it was a nice building. We had such fun with a store where everything was brand new. You didn’t have any old things that were left over from the old store that you bought, or that you had to get rid of some way; just everything was brand, spanking new.

There was also a very peculiar sensation in the town. It was a very heavily guarded town. Not that you would observe it or know, and that was part of the thing about it that made it just a little bit spooky. You didn’t know who the guy next to you was. The girls who worked in the store told us that very often when they would go back to their rooms at night, they would be able to tell that the drawers in their dressers and their rooms had been completely searched throughout the day. It was a very guarded place. At that particular time, no one knew what was being built or made over at the Hanford Plant. I heard a senator in Minnesota give a talk and tell what was going on there as if he knew, and I think he thought he did know, and I thought I was very well informed and later discovered that he had it all wrong, and nothing that he said was correct about what was being built. I guess that was one of the best-guarded secrets of the war. I don’t even know if it could be guarded that well now, the way the press gets hold of everything so quickly. It just simply was not known, really, nothing very definite about the atomic bomb until it landed on Hiroshima.

It was fascinating though, and we knew that something very hush-hush was going on in that particular little town. It wasn’t very far from Yakima. The people who worked in the store and lived anywhere except right in Richland had to have clearance to come into Richland every day and to leave, and when we made visits to the store, we had to have clearance to come into that little town and out again.

I guess we had more trouble with the Spokane store than any other store that we opened. It wasn’t the first store; I think we opened both Tacoma and Everett before we did Spokane. We built a new building at Spokane. It was an old store that we bought, but we didn’t open on that site at all; we built new. We did have some merchandise that we had to take from the old store. The problems we had were mainly with the unions. Spokane was an extremely unionized town. We had trouble with the electric union, and we had trouble with the bricklayers union, and just about the time we would think we were almost ready to open, somebody would go on strike and delay us for several weeks. We actually bought the inventory for that store completely at least twice, and some fashion items, dresses and things that had to be in and out of stock in a hurry, were bought at least three times. We would get stock in there and then there would be a delay, and so we would ship it out into the other stores as they needed it, and we would buy again for Spokane.

This saved the day for us in the Walla Walla store. I think it was one of the funniest stores we opened of all. It was an old, old store. I don’t know who the owner had been. As I remember, he was an elderly man, and he had the funniest idea of running a store. None of his merchandise was “departmentized” by age or anything but classification. All the sweaters were together, from the tiniest infant sweater to the adult sweaters. All the stockings, from the tiniest infant stocking to the ladies’ stockings, all of the underwear from the infants’ underwear to the women’s underwear, everything was stocked together in that manner. They didn’t have a children’s department at all. The children’s dresses were in with the women’s dresses. It was rather disturbing to me when I went in and found out I didn’t have any department, because all of the merchandise was mixed in with the other merchandise of its class.

About the first thing I did was start my department. There was a balcony that had had the beauty parlor on it, and I remember Ed Karren and I worked all one night there. We cleaned out that balcony, we even mopped it ourselves, scrubbed it on our knees and cleaned it up, and we got tables from everywhere we could find them all through the store, and then we went all through the stock and pulled out all of the infants’ wear that we could find, the sweaters and shirts and everything of the infants’ wear, and arranged them on these tables. Very early in the evening we could tell that we weren’t going to have nearly enough merchandise to make a respectable looking infants’ wear department at all, and that most of what we did have was quite old.

We hurried and dispatched a truck to Spokane to load up infants’ and children’s outings, little boys’ overalls and shirts, girls’ dresses, and so on, to bring back to Walla Walla. They got into Walla Walla probably, oh, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. We had pretty well pulled out everything that was in the store for our new department and got it arranged there on the balcony when the truck arrived, and it was unloaded, and we proceeded to get all this new merchandise out and build an infants’ wear department. We got through barely in time to go back to the hotel and get a bath and get cleaned up and eat our breakfast and get back to the store when the store opened, but it opened with an infants’ and children’s department.

It was just fantastic that day, the amount of business that we did up on that balcony. To start with, we didn’t even have a cash register, but we found a cash register and a table to put it on. They didn’t have any clerk, because they had had no department, so I was the clerk and Ed Karren worked right along with me, and I think we did borrow a girl from some other department. We sold several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise that day in our brand new infants’ and children’s department.

That’s the sort of thing that we did in some of these new stores that we opened. In the Walla Walla store, in the shoe department, we found old-fashioned, high-heeled, high-top, lace shoes, women’s shoes, and much of the oldest old-fashioned merchandise that you can imagine. We brought a lot of it back to Boise and made a little antique gallery out of it. It wasn’t merchandise that we could possibly ever have sold. I don’t know why he had never gotten rid of it, unless it was for sentimental reasons.

You can imagine that I was pretty tired at 6 o’clock on that opening day at Walla Walla, and I had been watching the clock pretty well for the last couple of hours. But I wasn’t through by any means. The department was a shambles; all the merchandise was unfolded and just in a heap. We quickly got a bite to eat, and then we started getting it back into order for the following morning. Some of the merchandise had to be filled in, and all of the counters had to be straightened, and everything had to be so that we could work the next morning. It must have been close to midnight when Mable Nye and I went back to the hotel. She had had the same type of problem in her hosiery department. I guess all of us had had trouble, but I think she and I were about the last two that finished up, or maybe we were the first, but for some reason we went back to the hotel alone.

Who should we meet in the lobby but Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the company, and a man from New York that they had sent out for the opening of the store. They immediately grabbed us and we were to go up to their room for a drink. It’s a little bit hard to be rude to the president of the company and to visitors from New York, and I could see that Mable wanted to go, so I said, “Well, just for a few minutes.” I was awfully tired.

We went up to the room, and after they had had a couple of drinks and I had had all the ginger ale I could hold, I said, “I think I’m going to go to bed.” I could tell immediately that Mr. Hinshaw was not going to be pleased. He was set for a long evening. Well, he hadn’t worked all day like the rest of us had, with no sleep the night before. He had observed what was going on and gloated over our success, but he hadn’t done very much work. Of course if I left, that meant Mable had to leave; she couldn’t very well be left with these two men. I suppose that I should have stayed, but I felt like it was going to be rather something I didn’t care to be a part of, and anyway, I was just too darn tired.

I started to leave, and Mr. Hinshaw, I remember, eased over by me and said, “You leave and I’ll fire you in the morning.” I was so mad at that, because I felt he should have realized how hard we had worked those days, all night long, because they had all talked about it—what a job we had had to get that children’s department ready.

I was just mad enough that I said, “Okay! I’ll see you at breakfast,” and I went to my room, and instead of worrying about it, I went sound asleep immediately. The next morning I went down to breakfast. Mr. Hinshaw wasn’t there, but he arrived before I finished breakfast and left to go over to the store. He didn’t say anything about the previous night and I didn’t either, and it was never mentioned again. We had a very successful day the next day and a very successful opening at Walla Walla, and I lived to open a few more stores.

Nylon hose were just becoming popular during the time that I was in the Boise office, and I remember that when we would go out to a store, we would often take, oh, three or four dozen pairs of nylon hose. They were very scarce, and women would just be begging for nylon hose. We would have a hard time getting them, but we’d get a bunch in to the warehouse and we’d parcel them out to the stores a few dozen at a time. It was a funny thing how people could possibly know, but I’ll swear that we couldn’t hit the parking lot of a store and get inside, but what that store would immediately fill up with women coming, hoping that we had brought nylon hose. I remember that happening once in Idaho Falls, and we hadn’t even gotten into the store when the front doors opened and women just flocked in. We had brought a few dozen hose and they were gone before you could hardly bat an eye.

I bought foundation garments about that time and I’ve often thought it took me quite a while to figure out what my mistake was. The lady in Idaho Falls was always writing me, very upset because I was buying her too many heavy garments. She always had too many heavy foundation garments on hand, and would I please not buy them? About fifteen miles away in Blackfoot, Idaho, where we also had a store, the lady was always writing to me: would I please send more heavy foundation garments, why did I send her all these little light things that nobody wanted? I hadn’t been down to those two stores for quite a while, as we had been so busy up in Washington opening our new stores, so I really couldn’t understand the situation. Why in that fifteen mile radius should there be such a difference in the kind of foundation garments that they would need? Finally I got a chance to go down and visit those two stores, and then I saw the reason. The lady in Idaho Falls was a cute, little, trim woman about as big as a minute, who wore a very light foundation garment and who attracted to her that type of customer, apparently, who wore the same type of things that she did. The lady over at Blackfoot was a large, quite buxom woman who wore heavy foundation garments and seemed to attract that type of customer to her. That was a great lesson to me, that we do have a tendency to sell the type of merchandise that we like. I always used that as an illustration in trying to teach girls in selling after that to not think of themselves or what they liked, but to remember that it was the customer they were waiting on that should be pleased. Both of those women could have brought trade into their stores that they missed because they thought too much about their own preference and not enough about the customers.

That reminds me of when we opened a store in Ogden, and little Elva Stokes came tearing back to my office and said, “I’ve got a lady on the phone who wants two cheap, white wool blankets, and the cheapest ones we’ve got in stock are $25.”

I said, “How do you know that to her $25 isn’t cheap? Perhaps she’s a doctor’s wife or someone who has plenty of money and $25 doesn’t sound expensive to her. It does to you and it does to me; it sounds like quite a bit of money, but to her maybe that is a cheap blanket. Why don’t you just go back and tell her that we have two nice ones and that they are $25 each?”

She did, and the lady said, “That’s fine, that’s just about the price I’d like to pay,” and she took them both. After that I had no trouble with Elva Stokes. She became one of the best sales people I have ever known. She could line up every doctor’s wife, or every well-to-do woman in town would wait for her to buy from, because she always showed them the type of merchandise that they appreciated and that they liked. It would just absolutely flabbergast her, the things that they would buy, but she would always come back and say, “I just figured maybe they would think it was cheap, like you told me about those white blankets.” She never forgot that story.

Perhaps I’ve told you enough to let you know something about how busy we were during those War years. I remember one time keeping track—I kept an apartment in Boise in order to have a place to keep the wardrobe I wasn’t carrying with me, and I figured out that I spent two and a half months of the year in my apartment. It did get used some by my relatives. I remember once when I was in New York, being awakened about 3 o’clock in the morning by a telephone call from Frank, announcing that he was going to be married, and that since he and Marge were, perhaps not broke, but not feeling very affluent, they wondered if they might just go up and use my apartment for a week for their honeymoon. I told them where to get the key and they used my apartment.

Opening the Paris store in Great Falls, Montana gave me the reason for my first airplane ride. A lot of the girls had traveled on planes before that time, before the Second World War. It seemed that they had rather luxurious planes. They were rather slow, slow enough that they had sleeping compartments on them, because it took them that long to get to New York. I never did see any of those. I went up to Great Falls in the train, and getting to Great Falls on the train was really quite hard. You had to come down from Boise to Pocatello, and then you waited for the Union Pacific to come up from Salt Lake to Pocatello, and then it went on to Idaho Falls and up through St. Anthony and on up into Montana. I had left Boise early in the morning, and I got into Great Falls between 3 and 4 o’clock the following morning. It was a rule that no matter when you got into a town, you always got to a store when it opened. I had rather a short night.

When I got to the store, I found that Ed Karren and one of the fellows who bought hard lines had arrived there from Chicago. We worked the store that day, and Ed was going to stay for a few days, but the other fellow was flying back to Boise, and he insisted that I should fly back with him: why take the train? It would be so much simpler to fly; they had flown in from Chicago, and he had thoroughly enjoyed the flight, and it was just great. They had come in on a regular sized plane, and I think it had been his first ride. When we got out to the airport (I decided finally, after some persuasion, that I would go with him), we discovered that we were going to fly to Pocatello in a little one-engine, two-passenger plane. That didn’t make any difference to me, and apparently at the time it didn’t make any difference to him, so we started for Pocatello.

It was a beautiful ride. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. We flew like a bird, and I really mean like a bird. We dipped down into the canyons and up onto the tops of the mountains, and barely skimmed the trees oftentimes as we went sailing over the forests. It was just beautiful country. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was so pretty. The mountains were very heavily wooded, and being such a small plane, it was flying very low. It was just what I had imagined flying would be, ever since I saw my first airplane back in Myton when I was a young girl, just floating along with all the ups and downs that a bird would have while flying.

I noticed that this fellow was getting a little bit pale, but I thought, well, he was tired. We really had had a long day the day before. All of a sudden, I noticed that there was a fair-sized round cardboard carton, about a pint size, fastened to the seat in front of us, which was the pilot’s seat, and I said, “Oh, they’ve even brought us our lunch.”

The pilot laughed and said, “No, that’s where you put your lunch when you can’t hold it down any longer.”

That was all it took for that poor guy. He was so sick, and he just was so miserable all of the rest of the way home.

But I had a glorious time and thought it was a very delightful experience. Then when I did fly in a large plane, it seemed rather dull, because as all of you who are used to flying know, you just sit there and don’t feel like you’re going anywhere. You have no sense of movement unless you happen to be in turbulence of some sort, and the only way you can tell you’re moving is to sit by a window and look down and see the things on the ground moving along. I’ll never forget that first experience.

I never experienced airsickness, so I have no idea how miserable people are who have it, but they certainly look like they’re going through a lot. I wasn’t afraid of flying and I enjoyed it, though not as much as the leisurely train trips that we had had earlier.

I did have a couple of times that I could have been glad to be safely on the ground. One of them was coming down from Minneapolis one time. We had just left Minneapolis, and we landed in Milwaukee and then we were going to land again in Buffalo, New York, across the lake [Lake Michigan]. I don’t know how far out onto the lake we had gotten (it was a two-engine plane and I was sitting in a window seat), and I looked out, I had been reading and as I looked out, to my astonishment, the propeller wasn’t going around. I thought, Well, that’s sort of funny. I really didn’t get too alarmed until in a few minutes the hostess came bringing us our coats and told us all to put our coats on. Then I knew that we were having trouble and I wondered about that cold water down below. It wasn’t long until we landed, and it wasn’t until I got into the airport that I discovered that we had landed in Chicago. I suppose it had been closer than to go back to Milwaukee, and so the pilot had headed straight for Chicago. They put us on another plane and we proceeded to New York.

Another time, coming home from New York, I had an experience that I have never forgotten, and that I’ve really learned a good lesson from. I was sitting next to a fellow who was just coming from Iceland or Greenland, rather a rough fellow, but very nice, a gentlemanly fellow. We had visited quite a bit during the flight. It had started to storm just after we left New York, and it seemed like the storm got worse and worse. There was a great deal of turbulence and they weren’t able to serve us our meal and it was just generally quite a wild flight.

When we got into Chicago, the pilot announced to us that we were not going to be able to land immediately, because they had such a pileup of planes waiting to land in Chicago. At that time, O’Hare had not yet been built and all of the planes had to land at Midway, which is a smaller airport. Chicago was always a main place for planes to land going in all directions, east and west or north and south, and it can get pretty hairy at times. We were flying round and round and round and round in a circle in this storm, really a terrible storm. The lightning was flashing and I just felt sure it hit the wings several times.

I guess I began showing my nervousness, and this fellow whom I had been talking with spoke to me very calmly and said, “You know, you have to remember something.” He said, “When you got on this plane, you made the commitment that you were going to get on it and you knew what the chances were, and so you have to live with that commitment.” He continued talking to me and said, “I learned that a long time ago through various things that have happened to me, that whenever I start to do something, once I’ve made the commitment, I know I must live with it.” He talked that way to me very calmly and he helped me a great deal.

Eventually we were able to land, but not until after the pilot had announced that we were almost out of gas and that they had to let us come down because we didn’t have enough gas to get us anywhere else, to any other landing field. But that idea the man told me has stayed with me and has helped me many times, and I’m sure it saved me from making some mistakes in my life when I had thought that once I do this, I have made the commitment and I must live with it, so I’d better think it through and know that’s what I want to live with before I go ahead and do it.

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Go to Part 20 here.
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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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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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