Mabel’s Memories: Epilogue

This sketch of the rest of the life of Mabel Wahlquist ends the story begun with my transcription and editing of her memories that she tape-recorded in the 1970s. Part 1 can be accessed here. Her tape-recorded story ends rather abruptly just as she left Minneapolis and her executive position at the L.M. Donaldson Department Store in order to serve a short-term mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have gathered this information from interviews with her niece Elizabeth and nephew Keith, from my own memories, and from diaries, photographs, and Mabel’s own papers.


Mabel’s mission was five months long, from the first of October 1951 through the 4th of March 1952. She worked mostly in Fort William and partly in Port Arthur, two close towns in Ontario on the shore of Lake Superior that years later in 1970 joined together to form the city of Thunder Bay. She was given high praise for her work by the mission president, and she investigated staying on for another six months but decided it would be better if she went back to Minneapolis and settled her affairs. Her mission had restored much of her strength of mind and self confidence. To solve the problem of Don having taken over her home, she had decided to sell the house and come home to Ogden. She couldn’t get a job in Ogden right away, so she went back to work at ZCMI Department Store in Salt Lake City. She lived in three different places in Salt Lake: the Belvedere Hotel was the nicest but really too expensive; the little place in the Avenues was too small; the Oxford Hotel turned out to be the most convenient and affordable. She would go to the bus station every Saturday night after work and go to Ogden to stay with Ruth and her family on Sunday and then take the bus back on Sunday night. She often took Ruth’s children to a movie on Saturday night, and Ruth would usually come too. Mabel was a department manager at ZCMI, doing drapery and yardage, which was new to her but which she liked and excelled at, as she had with everything she tried.

Ruth Wahlquist had to have some serious surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Mabel gave her the money to pay for it out of her savings from selling her house in Minneapolis. Mabel was still living in Salt Lake City then; it was 1952–53. Ruth’s son Joe was in the Air Force and got a hardship transfer to Hill Field because his siblings were alone.

One of the times that Ruth had to be at the Mayo Clinic was after Mabel had come back to Ogden. Mabel and the three younger children drove there because they had gotten word that Ruth was not doing well. They got lost in looking for a place to stay in the city the night they arrived, and Mabel got out at one corner and asked for directions, but there was no answer. When she got back in the car, all the children were giggling, because, they told her, she had been talking to a fence post!

Ruth and Mabel

In 1954 a job opened up at C.C. Anderson’s in Ogden, and Mabel took it immediately and moved home to Ogden, living with Ruth and the family in the Wahlquist home on Washington Blvd. She got Keith, who was in high school, a job delivering furniture. They had him drive the truck sometimes, but he wasn’t 18 yet and the police warned the company that they weren’t to have him drive that truck anymore.

Mabel was a department manager and was the buyer for several of her lines. At various times she had yardage (including draperies), china, gifts, linens, pillows, and things of that sort. Mrs. Islaub, the wife of the man who did the Wahlquists’ taxes, had the dresses; she would save out dresses for herself and mark them down at the end of the month and then buy them. Mabel didn’t approve of that. Mrs. Islaub got fired eventually. The head of the store was Norman Anda, a man Mabel liked and respected.

The store moved out of the old building and into a corner store at Washington Blvd. and 23rd. It was a smaller area and they were very cramped. The reason they moved into this small store was so that the company could tear down the old store and build a new one. When the new one opened, it was The Bon Marche. This was the mid-1950s.

Whenever there was a shortage of sales near the end of any month, the management would go to Mabel and tell her, “Why don’t you run one of your drapery orders through, and we can make up our numbers?” Mabel always had a lot of sales lined up.

One of the heritages the Wahlquist family has because of Mabel’s employment is fine linens. Mabel couldn’t stand to see some of the beautiful linens not sell. A few of them, after they had had to be marked down, Mabel bought when they had aged to the point that they were going to be bottom price. When she had draperies, she ordered new draperies for home. Up to then, the draperies hanging in the dining room were original to the building of the house in 1903.

Mabel finally learned to drive in the 1950s, but she was never a good driver. She especially hated making left turns against traffic and would drive out of her way to make all right turns in order to get where she wanted to go.

In church work Mabel went back to teaching a Sunday School class for the girls in the reform school.

Keith went on a mission to Germany in 1957 and met Heinz Christiansen in the town of Flensberg. Heinz had long wanted to come to America, and he asked Keith if there were any chance that his family would sponsor him. Mabel wrote back to Keith that she would be glad to do so. After Keith’s mission was over in the early spring of 1960, Mabel sent him some extra money so that he could travel for six weeks until Heinz would be finished with his apprenticeship in June and be free to go. The two young men traveled by ship and Mabel met them in New York. She took them to a show and got them on their train to Utah, and she flew home at the end of her buying trip, beating them home. She met them at the train and took them home.

Ruth signed Heinz up for classes at Weber College right away, and he had two months of summer to learn English. He did so by watching television, lots of television. Mabel got him a part-time job at the Bon. She sold her car to him for $1 and supported him when he was called to serve a church mission in Austria. Heinz was very bright and soon had a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s degree, then a doctoral degree. He had married Kathleen Heiner from Ogden, and they had four bright children. Heinz became a professor at the University of Chicago and then started a private business. He always credited Mabel for being his second mother.

Doug Dew trained under Mabel at The Bon and became good friends, staying in touch the rest of her life. In fact, Mabel trained a lot of executives. A Mr. Southwick was one that she trained. They were turning left into the driveway bringing her home one night when they were hit from behind and their car flipped over. Joe saw it and came running into the house yelling, “Call for an ambulance! That’s Mabel in that car upside down!” She went to the hospital and stayed a few days. Fortunately, there were no lasting injuries.

Mabel was always getting people jobs. She got Heinz another job at The Bon during his college years in Ogden, painting signs, helping with the advertising, and anything they could find for him to do. Later she got several grand-nieces jobs at The Bon.

Jim McEleney

She continued to correspond with Jim McEleney of Minneapolis, the man she had met in the 1930s when he was the North Star Blanket salesman who had come to Wright Brothers Department Store in Ogden. She was terribly grieved when she received the letter telling of his death in the mid-1960s.

Mabel continued her buying trips around the country until near the end of her employment. The stores then quit doing things the way they had always done, and the central company simply sent merchandise to stores without a buyer picking it out. Mabel didn’t like the way things were going; the merchandise she received wasn’t always what her customers wanted, and she had to get it sold somehow anyway. The quality of the merchandise was no longer what she had been used to; the layout was not as nice as it had been; the custom of making a nice package of the customer’s purchase was no longer done in favor of shoving things into a paper bag. The store managers no longer had much say about their departments; they had to do things the way the centralized management told them, whether it worked for their particular store or not. The last two years she worked, Mabel no longer enjoyed her work and retired as soon as she turned 65 in January 1969.

Mabel and Ruth always planned that they would retire together. Ruth, who was three years younger than Mabel, would be able to retire from teaching the same year at age 62 because she was a widow and the rules then were that widows could collect full Social Security and pension at 62. But when Ruth was a month from turning 60, she suddenly died from complications due to her longtime health problems. She had been teaching junior high school English and French, and the school year was very nearly over. Good friends of Ruth took over her classes those last few weeks. Mabel was very much grieved to lose her sister-in-law, who had been as close as any sister.

Ruth, Mabel holding Andy’s daughter, Myrna (Andy’s wife), Elizabeth
Taken in May 1967 two weeks before Ruth passed away

In retirement, Mabel did not get credit for the ten years before her mission that she worked for Allied. When she was hired again at C.C. Anderson’s after three or four years away from the Allied Company, the agreement was that management would go back and join those years to her later years in reckoning her pension and retirement. But when she retired, she discovered that this had never been done, and the management that had promised had died, and so she did not fight for it. She realized it would be a “He said, She said” type of argument, and she felt that she would not win, especially with the current management being so unsympathetic to her in general.

In retirement she continued to live at home on Washington Blvd. in Ogden, and she continued to help her brothers’ families, to meet with her club members every month, and to engage in such church work as she could. She was secretary of the Relief Society, something that gratified her since for so many years she had not been able to attend its midday meetings during the week. She also taught a young adult Sunday School class that Elizabeth was in.

She suffered with her leg pain. Her knees were bad, always swollen. She had probably spent too many years on her feet in heels. She had restless legs, which she called the “Wahlquist figits.” A lot of people in the family had the same thing.

The children of Roy and of Fred always said that they didn’t know who Santa Claus was; they had Aunt Mabel instead. Her brother Jack continued to call upon Mabel to come and help him through every crisis with Grace’s health until Elizabeth put a stop to it, being worried about the strain on Mabel of traveling to California, let alone of taking care of Grace and Jack. The last time Jack visited Mabel in Ogden, she got mad at him for saying he had supported her and their mother. She was never “not nice” to anyone and disliked arguing with anyone, but this time she let Jack know just what she thought. She told him he had never given them any money, and when he argued that he had loaned them a certain amount, she got her purse and wrote him a check and thrust it at him, saying, “Here. I’m paying back your loan.” Jack left very early the next morning, leaving the check and a note that said he knew where he wasn’t wanted.

Jack’s son Don continued to have problems until he was permanently committed to the psychiatric unit of the Veteran’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. Mabel’s nephew Max was committed to the same hospital, but he and Don didn’t visit together. Whenever Mabel or Ruth or Ruth’s children tried to take Don for an outing, they soon found that inevitably they lost him and would have to get the police to find him again. They stopped trying to take Don out after a time and eventually stopped visiting when Don became very abusive. Jack periodically went to Utah to visit Don; Grace never did. Don’s brother, Carl, did not visit. Jack did not give up visiting, but one of the nurses there was Elizabeth’s roommate, and she reported to Elizabeth one time that Don had attacked his father and scratched his face all up.

Max had had a nervous breakdown in the 1950s stemming from his medical problems that he had picked up during the War. He was never free of jungle rot, and he had a bad heart. His nervous condition led his wife to divorce him. As she put it to her in-laws, she could take care of Max or she could take care of the five children, but she couldn’t do both. She remained attached to Max the rest of his life. They often went to dinner together, or they’d meet to go shopping. While Max was still able to earn money, he paid many of the bills for his family. Max was a brilliant civil engineer and draftsman; he designed the enlargement of the railroad yards in Ogden. When he was committed to the hospital, Mabel and Ruth often had him out to spend the weekend with them. Each time Max would become stable and be able to get out of the hospital, the military at Hill Field was always eager to rehire him as his work was always excellent. Mabel was always fond of Max and tried to do all she could for him, but beyond moral support, there was not much she could do. Max died in 1975, during the time Mabel was taping her memories.

In the early 1980s a woman came to America who was the daughter of Don and a woman he had met during World War II in France. Don’s daughter’s name was Danielle, and she was the spitting image of Don. She visited with her grandparents in California, but Jack and Grace did not want to accept her. We are not sure of the reception she got from them, although we found out that they were the ones who had written to her mother to find out about her. She traveled back to Utah and spent some time with various members of the Wahlquist family, staying at the house with Mabel and Keith (who was living at home after a divorce). Danielle visited her father in the hospital, but the report is that he told her it was too late for any relationship between them. Don’s and Jack’s and Grace’s treatment of Danielle upset Mabel, but she was unable to do very much more than try to be as kind as she could to her.

Mabel’s brother Fred died in late 1984. She always said that Fred was the most righteous person she had ever known, and she missed him greatly. Roy had died back in 1971.

Mabel and her nephew Keith lived together in the Wahlquist house through the 1980s. Keith’s daughter was frequently there, and Mabel devoted herself to entertaining the little girl. They played together for hours and hours at a time. Mabel found purpose in cooking meals for Keith, doing his washing and ironing, and generally keeping house for him. In return, after work almost every evening from the spring through the fall, Keith worked in the yard (the yard work had not been done for years before Keith had come home). He also redid the shingles on the roof and made needed repairs that had been waiting for attention for quite some time. Elizabeth came home most weekends and did the weekly shopping for her brother and aunt. Mabel had sold her car some years previously; she did not like to drive and had had one too many close calls.

Elizabeth made dresses for Mabel after her retirement; Mabel stopped wearing dresses for everyday, so these were Sunday dresses, and there were just three of them. Elizabeth bought slacks for Mabel to wear every day, and Mabel was very happy to exchange dresses for slacks. She had worn slacks or trousers of some kind as early as it was starting to be acceptable for women to wear slacks, in the 1920s. But during most of her years of employment, of course she had to wear dresses to work, and she came home usually so late at night that she didn’t change before bedtime. She had not had a pair of slacks for many years and was happy to have them.

She loved to read and read lots in the extensive book collection in the Wahlquist home. During the time she was suffering from cataracts, though, she slowly stopped reading and began to watch tv more. She liked the Lloyd C. Douglas books and read them all. She read a lot of self-improvement books. She read a lot of material for her Sunday School class. She constantly read and studied the scriptures. She liked magazines, and Elizabeth subscibed to a lot of them. She did some handwork, crocheting blankets for each of Ruth’s children and more. She also made a quilt out of some of her old drapery material samples, which came in large squares.

In the fall of 1988 Keith moved into an apartment in the city where his daughter had been going to school in order not to make her change schools when she came to live with him. Mabel began to decline. She didn’t make herself meals; it seemed too much trouble just for one person. Her nephew Wayne’s wife, Elsie, who had been a nurse, kept a close watch on Mabel and decided she should have Meals on Wheels deliver a meal each day. But then Elsie would go over to the house and discover three meals piled up by the door; Mabel had not taken them in for three days. Elsie called the Meals on Wheels company and gave them a piece of her mind about the irresponsibility of drivers who see a meal from a day ago, let alone two, and who don’t notify anybody.

I met Mabel that Thanksgiving. I took to her, and she to me, right away. She loved my little green and yellow bird, Bucky, and told me stories of her Dickie birds that all seemed to have been eaten by cats. She played with Bucky, and she cornered Keith after the Thanksgiving meal to tell him that he was to marry me. (I heard about that conversation only months and months later; it helped that I had liked Keith right away too.) Mabel showed me a red leather autograph book that she was reading. It contained messages from all her friends in Minneapolis upon the occasion when she left for her mission to Fort William. She also told me the story about her first airplane ride, the one over Idaho in that tiny plane.

Right after Thanksgiving that year, Mabel had a fall in her room that broke her wrist and her hip. She lay on the floor for hours until Elsie came over to find out why she could not get through on the telephone. Mabel was taken to the hospital and then to a nursing home. She was never able to get well enough to live at home again, though often Elizabeth, or Wayne and Elsie, or Keith and I took her out. Elizabeth almost always brought her home for the weekend.

At Manor Care Mabel was extremely popular with both staff and residents. Two years in a row she was voted the Queen of the Senior Prom, an event held in conjunction with one of the local high schools, when the high school seniors and the Manor Care senior citizens would get dressed up in their finest and have a joint dance and celebration. The first year, Mabel found out that another lady had dearly wanted to be the Queen, and she made the staff give this other lady the honor. The staff decided that she was not going to be done out of her rightful honor the next year, so when she won again, they announced that the winner would be known only on the night of the ball. Then they phoned her family, and we all dressed up and went to the ball too. Mabel was crowned and was happy to serve as the Queen.

Right after that something very regrettable happened. Jack was found not to be able to live on his own anymore (Grace had died a few years earlier), and he was brought to Utah from California and put in Manor Care “to be with Mabel.” Mabel suffered a breakdown almost immediately. A lot of painful things came out: her grief at her father once boasting that his profession was “raising boys” without any mention of Mabel or ever an acknowledgement that he might be proud of her too; that Jack had always been their mother’s favorite and that everybody had had to accommodate him; that she had been forced to give up school because she was the girl; and most of all, that she had felt coerced by Jack into taking Don into her home in Minneapolis, which had resulted in such hardship for her. She had always had the knack of making the best of every situation in life; now she felt she could not make the effort and survive.

Jack did not make things easy either. At first the staff would put the siblings together for meals and for visits. Jack dominated, and Mabel could see herself losing her friends because he was rude to them. Then Mabel had to watch as the once-proud and fastidious Jack could not feed himself or eat without dribbling things all over. She was extremely distressed by this, so much that it was the last straw. As soon as the breakdown happened, Jack was moved to another wing of the building and the order was given to staff that his demands to have his sister come to him were to be ignored. Jack really was in poor shape and did not live very much longer.

When Jack had first arrived there, I was introduced to him for the first time. It did not go well. Jack did not even look at me but turned his wheelchair around so that his back was to us, and that was that. Apparently Jack did not think me worth acknowledging. Keith told me that this was not something surprising to him, and that I must not mind it. I thought to myself, “Here’s a pompous old ass,” and let it go.

A couple months later Keith and I took Mabel for a drive through the mountains to Heber City so that she could see the fall colors and all the old places she had known. She really enjoyed the trip but also felt a little guilty that Jack wasn’t along. We didn’t tell her why we had excluded him. We just said we wanted her company alone. We had just been learning from Elsie how badly things were going for Mabel because of Jack.

Mabel had gone into a sharp decline after Jack came there, and she did not recover even after she was no longer seeing him. He died that November. She lived only three months longer.

Just before she died, Mabel said, “My brother is coming for me.” The cousins always argued which brother she meant: Keith, Fred, or Roy. There are good arguments for each of them being the one, and of course we all think we know.

Mabel’s funeral was well attended. The missionaries who had served in Minneapolis who had stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, Norm Birch and a Mr. Siddoway came. Dawn Johnson, who served in Fort William with her, came. Doug Dew, who had been trained by Mabel at The Bon, was there. The janitor at The Bon came. Max’s ex-wife came. Keith’s ex-wife came. Mabel’s club came. Many of the 18 nephews came; of the two nieces, only Elizabeth could come as Ann lived too far away. Lots of grand-nieces and grand-nephews and their families came. We all agreed on one thing: Mabel was probably the best person any one of us had ever known.

Heinz spoke and enumerated all that she had done for him, “all of those blessings which came from Mabel’s open arms and her willingness to take in a stranger,” he said. Frank spoke and told about how Mabel comforted him after his mother died: he said she taught him how the Indians would eat ants. Keith spoke about how she was more than his aunt; she was his dear friend. He quoted a talk she had given in church once, regarding her testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

In this very materialistic world we live in, people are prone to seek their security in positions. Having the most, the biggest is likely to be their measurement of success. To some, it is having the best house on the block; to others, having the nicest car, having the fur coat, or some other luxury. But somehow I never feel that these people are richer than I am. True, my house isn’t as fancy as it could be. I don’t own a fur coat, and I feel lucky to get one pair of shoes at a time. But though no one can see it, or weigh it, or measure it, or put it in the bank, I have the greatest possession in all the world. It gives me the most security, the most happiness of anything that I could possibly have. This priceless possession I have is a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I know a lady who has a lovely diamond necklace, and it’s very beautiful and quite valuable, I’m told. Of course, she doesn’t use it every day, but only on special occasions. When she takes it out of the box and lights touch it, it sparkles and becomes very lovely indeed. But my priceless possession, my testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, isn’t like that. I find that when I put it away in a dark corner in my heart and keep it there, that when I take it out, that it has grown dim and doesn’t cast a light and glow as it should. And I am told that if I were to keep it hidden away in the dark too long without use, that it would completely disappear. In fact, the directions that come with this priceless possession of mine say, “For best results, use constantly.”

Mabel had always hoped that she wouldn’t die in the winter because she worried about everybody getting over the mountains to Heber City. That day the snow was plentiful but not actually falling, so we had no trouble. Her grave in Heber City, next to her parents, her baby sister, and her grandmother Wahlquist, and not far away from her Campbell grandparents, is very lovely in the snow. It is especially lovely in the spring around Memorial Day when the cemetery is filled with flowers.

Heber City Cemetery, with the Wahlquist family stone at center
Anna Walqvist’s and baby Ruth Wahlquist’s stone stand beyond it at right
Mabel’s grave is just to the right of the Wahlquist stone

Mabel’s Memories, part 20

This is part 20 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 19, Mabel told how she was part of a team that opened new stores for C.C. Anderson and Co. This part tells how she became an executive for Allied Stores at the L.M. Donaldson Store in Minneapolis. This is the last of Mabel’s tapes that we could find.


Chapter 20
An Executive in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

Donaldson’s in Minneapolis

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

The duplex Mabel bought in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas 1949 - Mabel and the missionaries

Christmas 1949, Mabel in her home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- * - * - * -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel never taped any more of her memories after this.

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Go to the Epilogue here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 10

This is part 10 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton, Utah, in about 1915, when Mabel was nearly 12 years old. This part tells the story of how Mabel and her mother moved to Salt Lake City in 1927.


Chapter 5
From Uintah Basin to Wasatch Front

During these years, Mother’s hernia had gradually been getting worse, and she was having much more distress and difficulty, and her stomach was bad. Everything she ate disagreed with her, and that upset the hernia worse. Things began to look quite serious for her. I think it was June 1927, probably, that Jack and Grace came out on a vacation when school let out. Jack was very much upset about Mother and her condition. He was determined that she was going to go into Salt Lake and have surgery done. He had had some surgery with a Dr. Hatch (I assume it was the same Hatches that were in Heber City). He had liked him very much, and he had talked to him about Mother, and he had assured him that her condition could be easily taken care of. He finally persuaded Mother that she should go back with them and have this surgery done, and so she did.

I couldn’t get away right then from the store, but she went out with them and had the surgery. When Dr. Hatch opened her up, he discovered that the tissue was just completely gone around the incision where the smallpox had eaten away the tissue. The surgery was much more difficult than he had anticipated that it would be. She came through it all right, and when it was time for my vacation, I came out to get her.

I came out fully expecting to bring her home. It was getting along towards the end of the summer by this time. But when I arrived and talked with the doctor, he told me that I would not be able to take her home that summer; she would need to be—well, in the first place she couldn’t stand that rough a trip or that long a trip, and in the second place he wanted her to be closer, where he could keep in touch with her better and see how she was getting along. When she came out of the hospital, we both went to stay with Jack and Grace, for about a month.

When I had learned that she couldn’t go home, she was very anxious that I not go home and leave her there, so I began to give some thought to getting a job in Salt Lake with the idea of just staying there that winter, and then we would go home in the spring. Soon I went down to ZCMI to look for a job.

I really didn’t know anything about hunting a job; I’d never hunted one in my life before, so I didn’t know about personnel offices and things like that. I asked to see the manager, who was Mr. Bennett—Harold Bennett’s father was the manager at that time—and somebody told me where his office was, and I went directly up there and asked him for a job. I’m sure he was very surprised and nonplussed at someone coming into his office, especially a little country girl like me, to ask for a job, but he talked to me for quite a long time and then sent me down to the personnel office. I’m sure that they were expecting me—I’m sure he had called them—and they gave me a job. They asked me where I would like to work, and I remember I said that, well, I told them the experience that I had had and I said that it didn’t matter, I could work in the notions or piece goods or so on. They explained to me that I would make more money working in the piece goods than in the notions, and I said, well, I’d work in the piece goods. They put me on and I went to work at ZCMI the next week.

I’ve always remembered what a kindly man Mr. Bennett was. In all of the years—well, I shouldn’t say that; I was only there a year—any time that he came down on the floor and saw me, he always stopped and talked to me and remembered me. I just thought he was a wonderful person. At that time, Harold Bennett, who later of course became president of ZCMI, was still in college and used to work at the store in the afternoons, in the marking and stock area. He used to come down pushing trucks in the afternoon after school with piece goods and other merchandise to go in the store and unload it in the departments. I’ve always thought what a wise father his father was in teaching him how to work. I think that probably had a great deal to do with making him the successful person that he was as a manager, because he understood all of the areas of the store and the workings of the store. Later, as I got acquainted with him at other times when I worked at the store that I’ll tell you about later, I’ve always thought a great deal of Harold Bennett.

You can imagine what a change it was for me to go to work at ZCMI after Waugh’s Store. It took me about a week to learn how to even get in and out of the place. I didn’t know anything about ringing a time card when I came in; I didn’t know anything about leaving my purse and my packages there at the desk before I went up. I had never ridden on an elevator before, and I—well, everything was just so strange and so new that it was just like coming into another world. Out in Waugh’s Store where I’d worked everywhere from the plug tobacco to the overalls, it was rather a change when I went to ZCMI.

I was put in what I’m sure was the lowest classification of the piece goods department, which was outing flannels, calico and ginghams. That’s all that I sold, but even that was a great, long counter, and I thought that was quite a bit. Later, before I left the store, I had worked my way up so that I was in the white goods counter. In those days, that was the way they did. You started down in the ginghams, and then you went from there to linings, and then you went into white goods, and then you went into silks, and so on. Even when I came up to work in Wright’s [in Ogden], I went through all of those different areas. It was good training.

I got acquainted with a very lovely girl there, who was my friend for many years and who was very, very good to me. Her name was Ruth Gershner. I haven’t seen her for a long time; I don’t think she ever worked anywhere but ZCMI. She would be at the cashier’s desk at that time. We didn’t ring up our own sales; we took the sales slip and the money to the cashier, and she rang it up. Or rather, what she did was send it up in those little cups that I’m sure none of you remember, but it went on a wire, electrically, up to the main cashier’s office. There the money was taken out and the change was sent back. That was Ruth’s job. She did that for many years, and then the last that I saw her and talked with her, the last time I worked at ZCMI, she was working in the stock room, marking merchandise. I think her whole life was spent, from the time she started working until she retired, in ZCMI, which is quite different from the experience that I had.

Not just ZCMI, but coming to Salt Lake was a tremendous experience for me. I had been in Salt Lake once before as a young girl. Now to be in this huge city, walking on paved streets instead of up dirt roads, seeing all of the people, automobiles and the street cars, and learning which street car to take to get up to Jack and Grace’s at night after work was rather a terrifying experience. I was never quite sure whether I was going to arrive there, or where I would end up. Trying to find such simple things as the employees’ lunchroom and learning to be casual about using a telephone—oh, I just can’t tell you how many things were different. It was just like coming into a new world. Being able to walk across the street over to the temple grounds and walk around and to look up at the temple and to see the beautiful flower gardens was a thrill for me. I also remember one night coming downtown with Jack and Grace in their car and listening over the radio downtown to Jack Dempsey fights, being broadcast out on the streets.

When Mother was strong enough, Jack helped me find us a little apartment where Mother and I could be by ourselves. We thought it would be better for us to be alone; the children made Mother rather nervous, and she needed to be quiet where she could lie down a great deal of the day.[1] We had to find a place that was near enough to the store so that I could go home at lunch each day to see how she was, and it couldn’t be very expensive, because I was only making $50 a month. We found it—a place about three or four houses east of the McCune School of Music.

The house on 200 North where Mabel and her mother lived in 1927-1928

We lived in two different apartments, I think both in that same house.[2] I can’t remember the order in which we lived in them, so I’ll have to describe them both to you. When I think about it now, that seems like quite a little hike up there and back at noon, up that hill, but I guess I was younger then than I am now, because I don’t remember it as being too difficult to do. I think that the first place we lived, the first apartment was really just a closed-in porch at the front of the house. It was rather a pleasant room, because there were a lot of windows, and Mother could see out and see people and cars going by. There was just one room. There was a bed in one end of the room, and there was a rocking chair, and I suppose a kitchen table. I don’t remember furniture details.[3] There was a hot plate and a few dishes. The bathroom was down the hall, and we shared it with the other people on that floor, and there were several, so I had to learn to dodge in and out very quickly in the process of getting ready for work in the mornings. I think that Mother probably enjoyed that place as much as any until it came cold weather, and then it really just was not warm enough. There was a radiator in it, but it wasn’t enough with the cold winds, and so we moved into another apartment.

I’m quite sure it was in the same house. Both apartments were on the second floor. The second one was two rooms, a bedroom and a small kitchen at the back. Well, in fact, the whole apartment was at the back of the house. It was a very dark room; there was just a window that looked at the wall of the house next door. In order to have light enough to see, Mother had to have the lights on all day, so it was not nearly as pleasant a room for her, but it was warmer. We used the same bath, which was a door closer than the other one had been, so I didn’t have to run quite so hard to outrun the other tenants to get to it.

I suppose that we would have stayed there longer, except for the fact that it was upstairs, and the hill was really too much for Mother to get out and get any exercise or to get to church. I remember us going downtown a time or two and going over to the Capitol Hill Ward to church a few times and getting out a bit, but it was always so hard for her, and she would be so exhausted when we would come home, that it was hardly worth the effort to go downtown to a show. The shows were very inexpensive, I think 25¢ or something like that. We did see one or two plays at—I don’t remember the name now—it’s now a movie house, but it was a theater then, right on State Street just east of ZCMI.[4]  She loved doing that. But she simply couldn’t take the hill and didn’t get out a great deal that winter; in fact, it must have been rather a lonesome winter for her.

I think the only thing that saved the day for Mother was that she loved to read. Magazines were very inexpensive in those days, and I used to bring her home lots of magazines. The library was close by, and I got her lots of library books. Fortunately, her eyes would permit her to spend many, many hours reading. I’m sure she missed her friends in Myton, and things were not as happy for her as I would have liked them to have been, but Mother was always an awfully good sport, and even if she couldn’t go, she insisted that I go. She always put up a good front. I went to Mutual in the Capitol Hill Ward and to all of the Mutual functions, and to all of the store parties and many places with Ruth Gershner, the friend that I mentioned, and had rather a pleasant winter.

As it came near spring, we decided that we should get off the hill; we should move where she could get around more, and so I started looking for places. I finally found a little apartment up Canyon Road. It was a basement apartment; that was the only thing that we didn’t like. In fact, I think Mother thought we had really sort of got in the cellar when we moved into that apartment. But it was very pretty; Canyon Road was very much like a park in those days. There were trees and grass and she could walk much better along the even ground, and we could walk downtown along the sidewalks and get to a show and do more things. I’m sure that she enjoyed it there, but we had hardly gotten settled there—I don’t remember how long, but I don’t think even a month—when we got word from Keith that Eva was very ill and they wanted Mother to come. It was only a few days after Mother came to Ogden to be with the children that Eva died, and so we really didn’t live in that place on Canyon Road very long.

Before we go to Ogden, I’d like to talk a little bit more about ZCMI. It was like a fairyland to me, particularly the piece goods department where I worked. I very soon found out that I would have been completely lost anywhere but in the ginghams and calicos and outing flannels and fabrics where I was placed. At that time there were really only four basic fabrics: things had to be made from cotton, or linen, or wool, or silk. I’m sure ZCMI had an unusually good piece goods department. It was simply beyond my wildest dreams to see the crepes and satins and brocades and georgettes and beautiful fabrics that were in the silk department, and the wool department with its serge and herringbones and plaids were just something that I had really never dreamed about. I would imagine that the white goods department at ZCMI at that time was one of the finest in the west.

It was a long way from the old days when the pioneers had done most of the weaving in their own homes and when they finally got the unbleached muslin, which in those days was called “factory cloth” because it was woven in the factory rather than at home. Out at Myton we were still calling it “factory cloth” and then after they’d learned to bleach it, a customer would ask you for “factory” or “bleach.” Outside of the ginghams and calicos and a few voiles, that was about all we had in the store at Myton. So ZCMI was a marvelous place to me.

Everyone was nice to me. ZCMI had been sort of a home for so many converts who came from foreign lands and who were given jobs there because of it being the Church store.[5]  You heard a great many different accents as you went through the store. I suppose because of this, they were very closely knit and everyone was very friendly with one another.

One of the people that I remember most and who probably helped me most of anyone was a little Englishman. He was quite an elderly man. (Of course I can’t remember his name; you’ve learned by now I’m sure that I’m not very good at names.) He had charge of the white goods section. Apparently he had worked with cottons and white goods all of his life. He had been apprenticed in a cloth factory in England as a young boy and had worked there until the time that he joined the Church and came to Utah, and then he worked there at ZCMI. He knew more about white goods than any person that I have ever known in my life, about the weaves and the qualities of the merchandise. He carried his little magnifying glass as many people did in those days, well, and much later, so that he could count the number of threads to the inch, and he could recognize—his fingers were so sensitive—he could recognize whether or not there was filling in the fabric, or whether it was all that it was supposed to be. For some reason, he liked me, and he took an interest in me, perhaps because I was so interested in fabrics, and he taught me a great deal about white goods and about how to recognize the quality of fabric. Years later, when I became a buyer, a lot of the information he gave me stood me in good stead. He was getting to be quite an elderly man when I knew him, and in fact, that winter he was getting rather senile. His wife died and he completely broke under the strain, and he was finally taken down to Provo, to the mental hospital there. That’s another story that I might tell you before I leave Salt Lake.

Many of the people from the store had gone down to visit with him, because everyone did love this old gentleman. One day the manager of our department—his name was Mr. Hagen, that’s one that I can remember—took Ruth and me down to visit him. We were taken into a waiting room, and Ruth and I were left there while Mr. Hagen went to talk with his doctor. While we were there, another lady came in, and they soon brought her husband, who was a patient, in to visit with her. He was not at all interested in her; he was interested in us, and he sat and grinned at us, and giggled and grinned and giggled, and we got more frightened by the moment. Finally, she got up and left, and then we were terrified. She had gone—we didn’t realize it—but she had gone in search of an attendant. After she had left, then he began coming toward us a little way and then he would laugh and back away, and then he’d come toward us and back away. We were just about ready to—well, he was between us and the door so we couldn’t leave. Presently an attendant did come and took him away when the wife came back. She apologized profusely and was very much embarrassed, and left. Not too long after that, Mr. Hagen came with our friend’s doctor and said that we were to have a tour of the hospital.

We thought that would be very interesting, but I dreamed about it for months afterward. I’m sure that the hospital at Provo is one of the most up-to-date now; it has a very good reputation, and it probably was as good as any at that time. But it was a horrible experience to go through it. We went through wards where there were women sitting on bare floors on little mats; some of them had a little blanket or a little mat or something that perhaps their family had given them, on these bare floors. There was no furniture in the rooms; I guess that was so they couldn’t knock each other out with them, I don’t know. It was the same in the men’s wards.

Then a rather amusing thing happened. We were going along a long corridor from one ward to another, and the doctor was ahead, and then Mr. Hagen, then Ruth, and then I was last. I looked around and there was the oddest little man coming along right behind me, and he smiled at me. We had just been in the men’s ward, and so I thought that he had probably slipped out of the ward and was following us. I crowded up closer to Ruth, and I tried to get someone’s attention so that I could tell them, let them know that he was there. I kept looking back at him, and he kept smiling at me, and he followed us all the rest of the tour. When we went back to the office he was still following us, and he walked around to the front of the group and to the desk and sat down. Then he was introduced to us as the superintendent of the hospital. He had realized how frightened I had been and had suspected what I had thought. He was an odd-looking little fellow; I can’t say anything else about him. He laughed and laughed, and of course he told everybody else about it, and they all laughed. I always used to blush very badly, and I was terribly embarrassed, and it created a lot of fun for everybody.

This dear little man from ZCMI was there for, I guess, several years, and as far as I know died there.

I want to tell you something of Eva’s family before we go to Ogden. Eva was the oldest of the family and her folks had gone out to Altonah very early, after the opening for settlement of the Uintah Basin. They went to a little town called Altonah, where her father opened a general merchandise store. The store became very successful I understand; I never did see it, but it was in operation for quite some time after Mr. Maxwell’s death. The Maxwell family were rather a large family. There were at least eight children whose names I can think of but won’t give here. They ranged in ages from Eva, who was a year younger than Keith, down to Grace, who was a little bit older than Max. There might have been some miscarriages in there somewhere, but I don’t know anything of that. Mr. Maxwell was a big, strong, outgoing person. He really had rather a temper, which got the best of him at times, and he was very plain spoken, but very fond of his family and a good father. He died I think before Eva did. He was killed by a horse kicking him in the head. Mrs. Maxwell was a smaller woman; I imagine she was about the size of my mother. She was a very quiet, retiring, little woman, and she was quite religious. She had sort of kept the children religious. She lived many years after her husband died, and died in Salt Lake City in their home, which they bought after Mr. Maxwell died.[6]

Eva and Cylesta were the two oldest in the family[7]  and when it came time for them to go to high school, of course there was no high school in Altonah, and it would be necessary for them to go away from home. Mr. Maxwell thought that they might just as well go out to Salt Lake and get a good education as long as he could afford it (which he well could) so they came out to Salt Lake and went to St. Mary’s of the Wasatch. He felt that they should be in a boarding school where they would be well looked after, which I guess they were. They loved it there; they loved the school, and they loved the Sisters and enjoyed it very much, even though they felt that it was rather strict. On a few occasions when Harold went out, he used to laugh at the problem he had getting in to see them, because of course he was only a few years older than Eva, and she had a hard time convincing them that he was her uncle and not her boyfriend! They did enjoy it there, as I said. Eva evidently had taken some classes in nursing while she was there and also some classes in sewing and some business courses. When it came time for them to graduate—at that time they all were dressed in white and wore their veils, and as they walked across the platform they were to kneel and kiss the priest’s ring. Cylesta was rather a large girl and not as graceful as some, and Eva of course was rather small. As Cylesta went to walk across the stage and she knelt to kiss the ring, her veil fell off, much to the amusement of the audience and to the consternation of the bishop and Cylesta. She and Eva used to laugh about that a great deal.

When they finished school, Eva went back to Altonah to help her father in the store. In fact, I think she pretty well managed the store, at least the business end of it. She did all of the bookkeeping and a great deal of the buying and was a very good help to him. He also had some land out on South Myton Bench which by this time he was trying to do a little with. Up until that time I think it had just lain idle. Eva continued to work there in the store until the year of the flu epidemic of 1918, when, as I’ve told you before, she came down to stay with her grandfather and Harold after her grandmother died of the flu, and it was at that time that she met Keith.

Cylesta, I guess, went right from school to teaching, and I know she taught for several years in Weber County. And from there on I don’t know just where she taught.

Eva was very close to her family and loved them very much. Even after her death, Keith remained very close to them, and I can remember many times going to visit Grandma Maxwell with Keith and the children. Even after Keith married Ruth, I remember us going to visit Grandma Maxwell. Ruth and Cylesta were always very close friends. After Mrs. Maxwell’s death even, we still continued to visit at the Maxwell home. I think Elizabeth and Joe spent a few weeks visiting there one summer. We always loved Cylesta; she was very, very close to all of us. I don’t remember too much about the boys and the younger girls, so I won’t attempt to tell you any details of their life. Cylesta died just last year[8], and it was the end of a very lovely friendship which we had all enjoyed for many, many years.

Frank has always stayed very close to the Maxwell family and has had a nice friendship with several of the Maxwell boys, and of course always loved his Aunt Cylesta very dearly. Max, during his long illness, which I’ll tell you more about later, always found a welcome at the Maxwell home. Cylesta was always very good to him, as were the other members of the family, and they were good to visit him in the hospital and to make him feel welcome when he was well enough to come to their homes. They were always very good to his family and tried to do what they could to make things more pleasant for them. As a family, I think that all of the younger members of the family, who probably hardly knew Eva because she was so much older, they certainly have rallied round and been good to Eva’s family. I probably should mention too that Ruth and Cylesta made a trip up to see Grant after he had his first heart attack and were very concerned for him. I’m sure that he also was remembered through his illnesses by the Maxwell family.

Since I’m sure there’s very little room left on this cassette, I think I’ll wait and go on to the next cassette to start in again at the point where Keith sent word to Mother for her to come because of Eva’s illness to take care of the family. I’m sure Jack took her up to Ogden at that time.

Eva and Keith Wahlquist and sons:
Frank (back), Grant and Max

* - * - * - * - *

As I’ve told you before, I’m not trying to make this a personal history; I’m really trying to sort of tell the family story, and perhaps answer some of the questions that are often asked of me by various members of the family. It’s really only for that purpose that I’m doing this.

* - * - * - * - *

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Notes:

1. Don was 2 years old, and Carl was less than a year when their Grandma Wahlquist stayed with them after her surgery.
2. The McCune School of Music was located in the McCune Mansion on the corner of Main St. and 200 North St. in Salt Lake City.
3. Mabel never said what happened to all their belongings still out in Myton. Her brother Fred sent some things to them, and the house and land were still in Mrs. Elizabeth Wahlquist’s name up to her death in 1935.
4. The Orpheum Theatre opened in 1905, and during the year Mabel and her mother lived nearby, it could have been known as Loew’s Casino Theater, Wilkes, Roxey, or Salt Lake Theater. It went by more names after that, finally becoming Promised Valley Playhouse in 1972. It was demolished in 2003.
5. Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) was founded in 1868 by Brigham Young, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and was the first department store in the United States.
6. Evalett Eldredge Maxwell died in 1948; her husband A.F. Maxwell died in 1924.
7. Eva was born in 1897; Cylesta (pronounced “Clysta”) was born in 1899.
8. Cylesta Maxwell died September 14, 1976. Mabel had been working on this book for 3 years at this point.

Go to Part 11 here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 6

This is part 6 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 Part 5. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there over ten years.


Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)

I just came in from hanging a batch of clothes in my usual haphazard way, which I tell Elizabeth is a rebellion of the many, many years that I had to do it the “right” way. So maybe I might take the time to tell you about a typical wash day in Myton.

Our old washer had broken down before we left Heber, and so by the time we got out to Myton, we had to do our washing on the board. As I’ve said before, Mother was not in good health. She had sciatic rheumatism, which made it impossible for her to wash on the board, so doing the washing fell mostly on me. It was not the easiest job in the world, with all of the heavy clothes that we had in those days. I don’t mean to imply that Mother didn’t work hard, because she did. The washing on the board just happened to be one of the things she couldn’t do, but she did many other things on wash day. She always sorted all of the clothes and got them ready to wash. You must remember that in those days we didn’t have permanent press and drip-dry and all of the things that we have today.

We had mostly white clothes. Our sheets were all white, no pretty stripes or flowers; our towels were all white, and our underclothing was white. The men’s dress shirts were all white, no pretty colors like we have now. So most of the washing consisted of white things. Then there were the boys’ work shirts and their overalls and their socks, which were black, and of course Mother’s and my stockings were black too, black lisle, and that—and our handkerchiefs of course were white—and that was mostly what our washing consisted of.

Mother always sorted the clothes for me and got them ready to wash. The sheets and the pillow cases all went in a pile, and then the underwear in a pile, and each thing in its own little pile in the order that I was to wash them. I’ve often thought that Noah could have used Mother very nicely when he was putting the animals into the Ark, because she certainly had an orderly mind, and I’m certain that she wouldn’t have gotten any of the animals mixed up. There seemed to be a law in those days exactly how a washing should be arranged. I don’t know whether it was handed down from mother to child or not, but if it were, I’m afraid Mother failed to get it handed down to me. Why it should make such a big difference whether a handkerchief should get mixed up with a shirt is something I’ll never understand, I’m afraid. I’ll have to hand it to Mother, she certainly tried, and even though I don’t do it to this day, I have a real sense of guilt if I don’t get that washing out the way that Mother taught me that it should be done. I’ll have to admit that Mother had a real knack that all things must go like things together, and if a white nightgown happened to get mixed up with the sheets or vice versa, it would have been a most terrible thing to her.

While she was sorting the clothes, I was busy getting the water. First I would have to stoke up the stove. If it were 100º F. in the shade, which it sometimes was in the summertime, the old stove had to be stoked up as hot as we could get it. The only way you could keep all those white things clean was to boil them. We would put the boiler on—I’m sure most of the older ones of you have seen a boiler, the others, I can’t really describe it to you—it was a large tub-like, oblong-shaped thing that covered the two front burners of the stove. We also had a water heater on the side of our stove, and then of course we put on as many pans and buckets and whatnot, on top of the stove as we could, of water. You mustn’t forget that this water I carried from the hydrant that I told you about, which was on the far end of the block where we lived, a bucket in each hand. Many trips were required to get the water to do a week’s wash.

The boiler would be filled with water and when the other water was warm, a tub would be filled with water and I would start to scrub, beginning with the sheets and going in Mother’s proper order down through the various types of clothing. I would scrub them on the board and then they would be wrung out by hand and put into the boiler. We couldn’t put too much in the boiler at a time, because it had to be loose enough in there so that it could be stirred around with a stick and all of it be properly boiled. After it had boiled a few minutes, it would be taken out with the stick into a pan and from there transferred to the tub of water again, and there it would be rinsed thoroughly to get all of the lye soap out of it and to be checked to make sure there weren’t any spots left that had been missed. Then it would be put from that tub into another tub of clear water with some bluing in it. The only bleach that we had at that time was this bluing. When that was done, then it would be ready to hang. It would take several boilers full to get all of the white clothes done. After the white clothes were done, then you started scrubbing the colored clothes on the board. They didn’t go in the boiler; they were simply washed in the hot water with the lye soap and scrubbed on the board. Then they were wrung out by hand and put into the clear bluing water and wrung out by hand again. Then they were ready to go on the line.

Hanging the clothes on the line was something that I just simply never did quite learn to accept. I think a woman’s character was judged by how she got her washing on the line. The sheets must hang absolutely evenly, the corners must be pulled straight and square. Everything had to go in its order: the shirts must all be together, all the white shirts together and all of the tails had to hang exactly to the same length, no deviation whatsoever. The towels had to hang exactly the same length; they all had to be together. For a towel to show up between two shirts would have been as bad as an elephant and a cow getting into the Ark together. Even after you got the white clothes all out in their exact order and all hanging evenly at the bottom, then you started on the colored ones the same way. All of the blue shirts must be together, all of the aprons together, not an apron between two house dresses; that would never do. Finally, down to the very end would come the black socks. Every sock must be exactly even at the bottom. When it was all done, it was really a work of art, and it would take me all day, let me tell you that.

When you got through with the washing, you had all the nice, soapy lye suds left, and that made a marvelous opportunity to scrub the kitchen and the room next to the kitchen. That room we used—we had a bed in it, but we also had our dining table in it and we ate in there on Sunday and at times when there were too many of us at home to eat at the kitchen table. Those two floors were bare wood and they had to be scrubbed on your knees with this lye soap. It made the bare wood floors a beautiful, clean white, just as white as your hand. Well no, not as white as your hand, because your hands were red by that time. When you got that done, of course the porch had to be mopped because that was where we did all of our taking care of the milk, and that’s where the separator was, so that had to be scrubbed and kept nice and clean too. This was really quite a day, wash day.

The only other difficulty about wash day was those darned cows. We always took our cows down east of McKuen’s place, about a quarter of a mile, in the summertime, to graze. It was open land down there; there were no farms. Since McKuen didn’t raise any crops on his land, there was no obstruction and we could see from our back door where the cows were. If they would stay where they belonged, why it was fine, but every once in a while they would start to roam in various directions. If they went in one direction, they could get into the cemetery, and if they went in the other direction, north, they could get across the river. If they did that, and I didn’t have a horse at home, I was in trouble. So we’d have to keep watching the cows, and if they started wandering too far in one direction or the other, I would have to take my dog, Tip, and we would run through McKuen’s field, about a quarter of a mile down to round up the cows and get them back together again, and then come the distance back home to continue with our work.

We watched and rounded up cows all summer. I don’t know, it might have been more than a quarter of a mile, it could have been a half a mile. It certainly sometimes seemed ten miles to me. Sometimes on a real hot day, I used to get so tired that I would have to lie down and rest coming back. Later we discovered that by that time I had already gotten my low thyroid, which left me with very little energy.[1]

The day after wash day was always ironing day, and it was almost as interesting as wash day. We didn’t have an electric iron. We did have electricity by that time, but we used the old flatirons that maybe you have seen in museums, or maybe some of you have them for relics. The kind that we had were the old black flatirons, not the kind that had the handle you could take off or on. We set up the ironing board and proceeded the next day to iron all of these things we had washed the day before.

We had no no-iron or permanent press things, as I said before, so everything had to be ironed. I shouldn’t say everything. We didn’t iron our sheets, but of course we had to iron the pillow cases. We had to iron all of these white shirts that my father wore to the office and the white shirts that the boys wore on Sundays, because they were just cotton shirts. The aprons and the house dresses had to be ironed. We had quite a few aprons and quite a few house dresses, because my mother, in all of the years that I can remember, when we got all of our work done for the day, before night came and my father came home from the office and the boys home from their work, my mother always had on a clean apron, and if needed, a clean house dress. When she sat down to do her mending after we finished the ironing, it would be in a clean apron. That usually took a good day, to get our ironing and mending done. This took care of two good days of our week.

One thing I think I’ll always remember about home, though, was our evenings. Sometimes they began a little bit late, because we had the cows to milk and the chores to do and dinner to get over with and the dishes to wash and all of that sort of thing, but we always managed somehow to have some evening. There was never any work done in the evening. I’ve noticed—and I’m sure it’s because so many women work nowadays—that the evening is spent in doing the things that we would get done in the daytime. All of the housework that we were going to do, all of the fruit we were going to put up, anything that we were going to do was done during the day. When evening came, we sat down as a family and enjoyed our evening in reading, or visiting, or playing Flinch or Rook together, or just plain talking, or singing around the piano while I played the piano. We always spent our evening as a family. I think it will be always one of my very best memories of my growing up years.

Talking about scrubbing those floors till they became white with the lye soap reminded me of the summer that Max was born.[2] Keith and Eva were going to come out and stay with us that summer as soon as school let out, and Mrs. Maxwell was going to come down and be with Eva when the baby was born. He was to be the very first grandchild on both sides of the family, so it was quite an event. Mrs. Maxwell would have to bring her baby with her; she had a baby girl and a little boy named Carl, a little over two years old.[3]

We had a bit of a dilemma of what we were going to do with all of these people in our little four-room house. We always pitched a tent outside in the summer, where Fred and Roy liked to sleep, and so that would relieve the sofa bed inside, so that would make one more bed available inside. After thinking about it a good deal, my father hit on the idea of renting this old hotel-house next door to us that we had lived in when we first went to Myton, and fixing up a main floor bedroom for Keith and Eva. So that’s what he did. I imagine he was able to get it pretty cheap—it hadn’t been lived in since we had moved out of it. Guess who got to clean it up? I was sixteen that summer, and so with my scrub brushes and buckets and rags and what not, I spent the better part of a week over there cleaning out this room, with Mother making occasional inspections to make sure that I was doing it properly. We had an extra bed that we put up over there, and from somewhere Mother got some scrim. The nearest thing I can describe scrim as, is a pretty good grade of starched cheesecloth, white. It was used quite a bit in those days for an inexpensive curtain. She made curtains for the windows with this white scrim, and with one of her nice quilts on the bed, and when I finally got that floor to a good, clean white to suit her, and the windows washed, and the woodwork washed, and I’m not sure, but it seems to me that we calcimined (put white calcimine on) the walls, anyway it was rather a pleasant room with some of Mother’s braided rag rugs on the floor.

We decided that Keith and Eva could sleep over there, and Mrs. Maxwell and her baby could have the bed at our house, and Roy and Fred could sleep out in the tent, and everybody could take their meals at our house. When Eva had the baby, her meals could be taken over to her on a tray. That way everything was arranged very nicely. We even had a crib for the new baby.

This crib had given me a lot of trouble and I was glad when it finally was able to be used. My father had had a client who had come in one day and said that he was unable to pay his bill, but that he did have a small bed—if Father would like it, he could have it. I’ve already told you that I slept on a cot in the front room. Father, when the man said “a small bed,” he immediately envisioned a single bed that Mabel could have, and he said that would be just fine. When the bed arrived, however, instead of being a single bed, it was a very nice crib. I had been kidded about that crib a great deal. Father insisted it would come in handy some time, and it had been put away carefully. It must have been in pretty good condition, because I think it saw Max and Grant and Frank all through their babyhood. So, that in the room too made things quite complete.

Keith and Eva arrived, and they were very happy with the arrangements, and in due time Mrs. Maxwell and baby Grace and little Carl arrived, and they were very happy with their arrangements. Eventually, Max arrived, and I’m quite sure he was happy with his arrangements, too. The only person who wasn’t really happy that summer was Mabel. I was very happy about baby Max. He was a cute baby, very dark and big black eyes, and a real sweet little baby. Even though I did tend him a great deal, I didn’t mind that at all. The only thing that I was unhappy about was Carl.

He was two years old and he was really a little terror. He became my sole responsibility while his mother was taking care of Eva. He did get me into quite a bit of trouble, the least of which was getting into my mother’s very best tub and stomping up and down until he managed to get a hole in it. He was always getting away from me, and I was having to run after him before he fell in the canal or got into the corrals or climbed into the pigpen or got into the bullpen or anyplace else a little two-year-old boy could think of to get. I spent, it seemed to me, my whole summer chasing that kid.

All in all, it was a happy time. It was one time when we were all home again, except Jack, and we all enjoyed one another and we were all so thrilled with this little grandson, the first in both sides of the family.

Charles Wahlquist and his eldest grandson

Mabel and little Max

Maybe there might be time left on this cassette to tell you about two of my favorite horses. They were Buttermilk and Topsy. Buttermilk was Topsy’s mother. I don’t know just why we called her Buttermilk, whether it was because she was as slow as buttermilk, or whether it was her looks. She was almost the color of buttermilk, white with yellow spots that looked like chunks of butter on her. We used Buttermilk in our single buggy most of the time, and she was a most exasperating little animal, but we did love her. You’d give her a flick of the whip and she’d start out at a real good pace, but she would just keep gradually slowing down and slowing down, until if you’d let her, she would be stopped dead still in the road, sound asleep. She would have been a very safe horse for my mother to use, but Mother never did drive her. I don’t know that she would have been so good for Mother, because she’d never use the whip, and I guess she’d have spent most of her time sleeping by the roadside unless Mother got impatient and got out and walked. We had Buttermilk a long time.

She had, oh, probably many colts, but the two that I remember, we called Bill and Topsy. Bill was sort of an ordinary horse. He was a trotter and he was also a good workhorse, and as he grew up, he made part of one of the teams. But Topsy was something else again. She was a little pacer, a beautiful little bay animal. I don’t know who her father was, but he must have been something special. The boys were all just crazy about Topsy. Before Keith went on his mission, the craze came in for horse racing, and I don’t know what you call those little tiny carts that they rode on and the horse pulled in the races, but anyway, Keith and Fred made themselves one.[4] They used to love to get Topsy pulling this and go around the big square that I suppose had been the original 160-acre homestead, which by this time had been broken up into many parts.

Mother would just be frightened to death when they would do this, and she and I used to go upstairs and she went from one window to the other upstairs and watched their progress. We could see their cart with Topsy pulling it flash by between the trees here and there along the way, and she would heave a big sigh of relief when they finally got back. I don’t know if Keith ran Topsy in any races or not, but he certainly did use her a lot that way.

One time when we were upstairs watching, Mother cut her hand very badly on a broken window. We always had at least one broken window—with four boys and their friends and baseballs, I suppose that was inevitable. Mother’s hand was badly cut and it bled profusely, and she always had the scar from that cut.

Speaking of broken windows, I remember we had an earthquake before Keith went on his mission, and it cracked a place right on the front of our house. Keith had to have a picture of that. It wasn’t until the picture was developed that anybody noticed the rag that someone had stuffed in the broken window until it could be fixed, in the window right above the crack. If we’d taken the rag out, we could have blamed it on the earthquake. As it was, it was inevitable that it was a baseball. Mother was always so embarrassed about that rag in that window.

Back to Topsy. One spring Topsy was stolen. We knew that she had been stolen because we knew that she wouldn’t have left on her own. It was a very sad summer without her. Then toward fall, one morning when the boys went out to do the chores, there stood Topsy with her head over the corral gate, with a rope hanging from her neck that she had apparently broken in order to get loose. She had been treated very badly while she was away and was very thin. Apparently whoever had had her had beat her a great deal about the head. She was never quite the same horse after that. When you pulled on the reins quickly, she would stop immediately, or if you would by accident touch her around the head, she would stop dead, trembling. She had learned to be afraid.

I haven’t mentioned yet that I used to love to ride Topsy, but I didn’t very often get a chance—my mother was very frightened and very nervous for me to ride Topsy. But occasionally I did. While she loved to have the boys ride her, and she would run, just gallop, and jump ditches, and anything that she could, and just have a glorious time, when I got on her she was very sedate. I would have to kick and tug and pull and work very hard to get her up to a canter at all, and she would jump only very small ditches with me and never a fence. When I would come back with her and my dad would take me off, he always patted Topsy and said, “Well, you knew you had precious cargo that time, didn’t you girl?”

After Topsy had come back and we had gone to Myton, I used to ride her sometimes when I would be going after the cows. I remember one time when I was riding her, and I think I said that someone had treated her very roughly. I remember one time I learned about this, to my sorrow. I was chasing the cows and I did have her going a fairly good speed. I was riding her bareback and I sort of started to lose my balance, and I reached forward to put my arms around her neck, and as I did that, she stopped short, and I went over her head and landed in a bunch of cactus. I’m sure Topsy was very sorry about it. She stood right still and waited for me to get myself picked up and brushed off the best I could and to climb back on her and go on our way.

It was always Topsy that Fred rode when we lived in Myton and he was making his long rides, morning and night, to the schools where he taught. She was a very sure-footed little animal and certainly a trustworthy, wonderful little friend to all of us. As far as I can remember, she was still alive and Fred was still using her for a riding horse when Mother and I left Myton.[5]

I’ve mentioned the Church a time or two on some of the other recordings. I thought maybe I might tell you just a little bit more about it now. I think I’ve told you that my father was the branch president and Mother was the president of the Relief Society most of the time that we were there. All of the family were very active in the Church. Certainly a great many of my memories of Myton revolve around our activities in the Church.

I think I told you that Myton was the non-Mormon town in the Uintah Basin. There could’ve been several reasons for that. The first was the fact that it was headquarters for the government Indian Agent. He lived there and the people who worked with him, and the people who were there to serve those people, the stores and the post office, the barbershop and laundry, and most of the business people were non-Mormon people. Also, the land around Myton was not the best land for farming, and there weren’t too many farms around. Most of the farming people were the LDS people who came out from Salt Lake and vicinity and took up or homesteaded land there and farmed. Most of them were near to Duchesne or Roosevelt, and that’s where they went for church. Practically all of our congregation was from the farming areas outside of Myton. I don’t recall any families, really, from town, except us and Harold Eldredge, who were LDS.

I think I’ve said that we met in what had been the Old Town Hall down in what was called Old Town. It was a very small building. I remember it as being adobe, but I could be wrong; it might have been frame. It certainly had never been painted. It had inside, along one end of it, a raised platform about a foot high, I guess, from the main part of the floor, and there was a wire across that from one wall to the other and a curtain could be drawn across. We used it as a stage, as I suppose that’s what was intended at the time it was built. We also curtained it off to use for a classroom for Sunday School. Down the center of the hall on either side there were about, oh, maybe six or eight handmade benches down the aisle. The floor was bare, and it had the usual pot-bellied stove in one corner that gave off a lot of heat to the people who were in the first two or three rows next to it and didn’t do very much for those of us who might be at the other end of the room. I don’t recall that there were any windows in the building. There was just an ordinary-sized door at back and at the front. It was not built on a foundation, it just sort of squatted there in the dirt. There was no lawn around it and there were no trees. There was no sidewalk in front of it; it just was there along that windswept lot, and there was a muddy old road that went along in front of it. It held marvelous memories for us. We did have some wonderful times there.

We had Sunday School at 10 o’clock and Sacrament Meeting at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. That gave the farmers time to get home to do their chores at night. In the wintertime we held Mutual and in the summertime we held Primary, if we could get enough children there. Primary in the wintertime was impossible because the children came from so many different directions and could not get there in time after school to get their parents to get them back home before dark. They were so far away that their parents would have had to bring them. In the summertime we did attempt to have Primary, and a parent would gather up a number of children and bring them in. It was a very small group. I’m sure we would have considered it very unusual had we had more than fifty people in attendance at a meeting; that would include all of the children. Usually we just had two classes: the little children up on the stage and the rest of us in one class down in the main part of the hall.

Eva and her boys

I remember once after Max and Grant and Frank were all born, Eva was staying with us one summer and she had little pongee suits for the children.[6] I don’t know if all of you know what pongee was, or is (I suppose it still is used some), but it’s the raw silk from China that hasn’t been converted into anything else, just a very lightweight tan material. She had made little suits for the boys; they were sort of the middy type, middy top and little short pants. When she got them ready that morning I thought that she was asking for trouble, because all of the children that came to Sunday School just came in their overalls and their heavy work shoes. That was probably all of the clothes that they had, their little dark blue work-shirts, or little homemade shirts from gingham or calico. Anyway, certainly that morning the teacher had taken the children outside. As I said, there was no lawn or trees or anything, so they were just out there in the dirt. They were playing out there during the class period, and all of a sudden I heard a great howling and bustle go on, and I knew what had happened, so I went out. All of the farm kids in the class had ganged up on these three little guys dressed up in their city clothes. But Max and Grant and Frank had held their own. Mother and Eva for some reason had not come that morning, and when I went home with them, they were so bedraggled looking, their clothes were torn and their faces were dirty and one of them had a black eye, and they really did not look like they were returning from Sunday School.

One thing about Mutual was that we always waited to have our opening social until after school started. It was always a watermelon bust down at Brother Musser’s. We depended heavily on the school teachers for Mutual. There would be three, or when Fred was not teaching in Myton, there were four who would come besides Fred, and usually there would be young people from out Salt Lake way who were coming out there to get their first years of experience. We rarely got the same ones back the next year; they would move on to something just a little better. We’d wait anxiously for the news to come as to who was to be our teachers. We were always delighted if they were young LDS people, because they were a great deal of help to us in our Mutual.

In Mutual we pretty much had one class, though we did make an attempt one year to have a Beehive class [the class for 12- and 13-year-old girls], which I taught. I was president of the Mutual Young Ladies for quite awhile, and Fred, as I told you before, was president of the Young Men’s. Most of our Mutual was activities. We did have a lot of dances and parties in that little building. We had all of the old-fashioned things that you won’t remember. We did a lot of square dancing and Virginia Reels, and we had a fellow who could play the fiddle, and some waltzing, and that was the type of dancing that we did, mostly. Oh, and I used to just love when I could schottische with my dad. He was a marvelous dancer and when he came down the hall in a schottische, the floor really jumped.

Another thing we’d have was home dramatics. We nearly always put on one or two plays during the year. I loved that very much. My father was a real ham, and I guess I must have taken after him. Father was never in any of our home dramatics in Myton, he was always much too busy, but I do remember that in Heber he was very active in home dramatics and usually took a character part in almost everything that was done in Heber, sometimes much to my mother’s embarrassment. One night I remember, though, in Heber, she was too frightened to be embarrassed. In the part that he was taking, he was to be killed in the second act, and when the guy shot the gun that was to kill him and the smoke went flying in all directions, and Father hit the floor the way you’d expect Father to hit the floor, just as hard as he could. When they carried him off, there was real blood dripping all down the side of his head and Mother was really frightened. She thought that they had forgotten to take the bullet out of the gun. But it just so happened that Father went down with such a bang, and he hit his head on a nail that was sticking up out of the board, that was what caused all of the blood.

I was much like Father in that I liked character parts too, and I did take part in a number of our plays. A lot of our evenings I’m sure were spent rehearsing, rather than in any other Mutual activities, I suppose. We used to take our plays around. We used to take them up to Ioka, where Loreen’s family lived, and we used to go up to Roosevelt and various places with them, and it was a lot of fun.

Mother had a counselor in the Relief Society whose name was Sister Palmer. She was a dear little soul. I shouldn’t say she was a dear little soul—she was a dear big soul; she was a very large woman. She had a son named Arch and she really doted on Archie. Archie wasn’t fond of religion, but he was fond of dramatics. Another thing he was a little too fond of was the bottle. Every winter we always got Archie to come to Mutual by having him in one of our plays. I don’t know when we went out of town to take our plays just how Arch always knew where to find a bottle, but he always seemed to find one. That was the only problem with him, was trying to keep him sober throughout the play. One year we gave him a part of a fellow who was supposed to be a drunk in the second and third acts. I’m telling you that Arch gave a marvelous performance that year. By the second act he was always in real good form. The amazing part about it was he could always remember his lines. Well, not really remember his lines as such, but he could always remember the content. He could go along beautifully with the play, and it was just a little bit hard for the person who was playing opposite him to know exactly what their cue was. I’ve often wondered what became of Arch. He was an awfully nice guy and we all liked him very much and would have liked to have seen him be more active with us in other things than just in dramatics.

Another thing we did in the way of activities was dances. We had various types of box lunches that were popular to do in that day. The girls prepared a box lunch and you were supposed to disguise your box as much as you could so that no one would know whose box it was. We devised various ways of raffling off these boxes. Sometimes they were simply raffled off, and other times they were done by weight of the girl. The fellow had to guess the weight of the girl, and the one who came the closest to her weight got her and her box. We did all sorts of things of that nature to make our dances interesting, and we really had just an awfully lot of fun.

Half of the fun of that type of a dance was the funny combinations that you came up with for your lunch. Very often the fellows would get a glimpse of their girl’s basket or box, and so they would know what they were bidding on. Sometimes they wouldn’t, and you would see some real young boy eating with an elderly lady, or a young girl with some elderly man or such. That was one of the wonderful things about a little branch like that. I don’t know of any place you could live where you really are closer than in a small branch of our Church. No matter how it turned out, everybody was just there in a little group, almost like a family, and everyone could laugh together and enjoy the joke on one another or on themselves and have a glorious time together.

You would think that our Sacrament meetings might be rather dull with so few people to choose from for speakers. Maybe it was because they got so much practice, but really, we had some very good speakers. You could always count on a good talk from Brother Musser or from Harold or Fred or Roy, and of course my father was a very fine speaker. At least I thought so. He did his speaking with the same zest that he did everything else, and sometimes he would get very emotional and have to get out his handkerchief and blow his nose and wipe his eyes and harumph a few times ‘til he got his voice cleared and could go on, much to the embarrassment of my mother and Roy. I loved his spirited talks, and he did understand the gospel and could explain it most beautifully.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Brother and Sister Musser to you, so I think I’ll tell you just a little bit about them. They were really wonderful people. He was a well-educated man, and so was his wife. I think they had both taught school before they were married. I don’t know, but my impression is that they might have married a little older than usual when they were married. Maybe it’s just because people aged faster than usual out in that dry, hot country that I think that, but they always seemed a little old to me for as young of children as their family were. They had only two children that I remember, a girl named Mattie who was much, much younger than I, and I can’t remember the boy’s name. I don’t know when they went out to the Basin, but it was much sooner than we did, but in all of the time that I knew them, they lived in two tent-houses. They had built floors in the tents and built them partway up the walls, probably three or four feet, and then the tents over the top. They had one for their living area and one for their sleeping quarters. Sister Musser was a fabulous, fabulous housekeeper. I don’t think the finest of mansions could ever have looked any cleaner or prettier or more homelike than she had made those two tent-houses look. She was a wonderful cook too. I remember when she used to come to church—they either came in their buggy or very often they walked; they lived about a mile down from the edge of town where we lived—but she always came in a dark skirt and a white blouse. Those blouses were the whitest white I’ve ever seen, and they had tucked fronts and ruffled lace fronts. I don’t know how many of them she had, but they were all made the same way. I’ve heard my mother so many times marvel at how beautifully she had ironed those blouses, the tucks and the ruffles were just so perfect. She always looked just like she had stepped out of a bandbox. You couldn’t believe that she had come from that long, dreary, hot, dusty trip from their place up to church. She was a very good speaker too, as was he. She was, I’m not positive about this, one of Mother’s counselors [in the Relief Society presidency]. I know that she was one of the people we depended on a great deal in the branch, because as I say, she was well-educated and a very intelligent person and a very sweet person.

I remember one amusing thing about Mattie. They were at our place for dinner one time and Sister Musser kept saying to Mattie, “Now Mattie, don’t eat so much. You’re going to be sick. You’re going to have a stomach ache.” Mattie was not easily discouraged and she ate a hearty meal. A little later she was lying on the floor crying, and her mother said, “I told you, Mattie, that if you ate so much you would have a stomach ache.” She said, “Well, that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I’ve got the stomach ache so I might just as well have eaten all I wanted anyway.”

I just played this over and decided that maybe a few explanations might be in order so that you’ll understand it better. For example, you might wonder why Eva and the children were with us that summer and not Keith, but this was not too unusual. Keith got all of his college education during the summertime. He would teach in the winter and then go to summer school all summer. Eva usually spent at least part of her summer with us or with her parents up at Altonah. Some summers they rented a place in Salt Lake and stayed there, but more often he simply rented a room and the family came out to the Basin. Jack did this too. Both Jack and Keith spent most of their summers in school, and that also accounts for why I mentioned Fred and Roy in talking about our activities in the ward. It was always a great event when either Keith or Jack came out. We had them for speakers at our church meetings the same as it was an event when some of the stake presidency or some member of one of the stake boards should happen to visit us. They could always count on speaking.

I might say that you could get the impression that those boys being in silk suits meant that they were in something expensive, but pongee was about the cheapest thing that one could buy. At that time it would probably be about 25¢ a yard. Many years later when I was clerking in Ogden, it was 49¢ a yard. So they weren’t living beyond their means; it was just that Eva had dressed them as she would in Salt Lake City, and not as she perhaps should have dressed them in Myton. I did make the comment that there were no people in Myton who were members of the Church, to speak of, but there were just a few. One that I remember was Mrs. Holder, who always helped us with our dramatics. In the summertime a family named Stewart from Spanish Fork used to come out there. They had bees out in that country, and I couldn’t forget them, because Merle, their daughter, was just my age, and one of the very few people who were my age, one of the few girlfriends that I had in Myton.

It seemed that, like I suppose in most small places, we didn’t worry a great deal about age. Everybody was together. I don’t remember more than two or three people being my age. Les Maxwell’s wife Fern is about my age, and she lived in our ward for a few years. I guess my first friend in Myton was a girl named Susie Twitchell, who we thought was carried off by a traveling salesman, but many, many, many years later we discovered that she had gone with him quite willingly.[7] She never did let her family know where she was, and they grieved very much about her. Many years later when she wanted to go to Europe, she wrote them for her birth certificate, and that was the first that they had known that she was alive. It did do one good thing, I guess: it put a scare into all of the rest of us never to get into a car with a stranger, which is what the story had it for many years that Susie had done.

I remember one disastrous experience that Merle Stewart and I had together. It was a 24th of July celebration and we were in charge of the lemonade. Instead of making some sort of a base with the lemons and the sugar to start with, we filled up the milk cans that we were going to use for the lemonade with water and then started squeezing the lemons in one at a time. I don’t know, it seems to me an awfully lot of lemons went into each can before we could even tell that we had put a lemon in it.

Another thing that I remember, thinking of Jack and Keith being at home in the summertime, one time after church on a Sunday, the four boys went down to the river for a swim. There was supposedly a good swimming hole down there and the weather could get very hot, and our little church could get very hot. I think I’ve told you that there wasn’t a window in it, and when you came out if it, you felt like you had been in a steam bath sometimes. So they headed for the river, which wasn’t very far from church, and went in for a swim. The Duchesne River was rather a treacherous thing [before the dams were built]. There really wasn’t a lot of water in it at that time of year, I don’t believe, but there were a lot of eddies and whirlpools in it and undercurrents that one wasn’t aware of. Suddenly they discovered that Fred was in one of these and was not able to get himself out. And Fred was having a problem with his breathing—and as you know, his lungs were not very good to begin with—so Keith decided to get him out. He went for him first—he was the first one to notice it I guess—and he got into the same hole, and he got in trouble. Then it fell to Jack, who was by far the best swimmer of the bunch, to get them both out, which he was miraculously able to do. Fred was in pretty bad shape by the time they got him out, and it took quite a time for them to get the water out of him and get him conscious again. I’ll never forget when they brought him home, how frightened my mother was and how awful Fred looked.

I’ll also never forget my father’s reaction to criticism. My father was a very practical person, as I’ve said many times. He was very, very religious, but he was not fanatically so. When somebody criticized the boys for going swimming on Sunday, he said well, it was too bad, but the thing that was really too bad was that he’d had that meeting after church that he’d had to have with somebody, or else he’d have been with them and it wouldn’t have happened at all. I remember how shocked whoever it was that he said it to was. I do remember in all the years of our growing up that my father was like that. I remember he used to play ball with the boys between Sunday School and church. When it came time for church, why, he’d say, “Well, fellows, I’ve got to go to church. Is anybody going with me?” Can you imagine four boys staying behind when a father had played with them through the afternoon until church time came? I think he was a much smarter father than a lot of people realized.


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Notes:

1. Mabel had low thyroid and took medicine for it all her life.
2. June 19, 1920.
3. The baby girl was Grace, born the previous July.
4. This was in Heber City.
5. Topsy would have been at least 12 years old by then, probably more.
6. 1924 or 1925; Frank would have been the youngest at age 2 or 3.
7. Mabel herself found out Susie’s true fate when she discovered by accident that a nephew’s wife was related to Susie’s people and knew about it because when Susie won “Queen for a Day” in Hollywood and needed a passport to claim her prize, she had contacted the family after decades of silence. Susie’s parents had died before then, so they never did know what had become of her.

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Go to Part 7.
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