Mabel’s Memories, part 9

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


Chapter 4
Beginnings of a Career (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred with his twin boys

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

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

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

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

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


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Notes:

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

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Go to Part 10 here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 8

This is part 8 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 through 7. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there about twelve years.


Chapter 4
Beginnings of a Career

The summer a year after my father died was certainly the summer of decision and probably was the one that shaped what was to be my future so far as career was concerned.

After I had worked a few months in the Phillips’ store, I got an opportunity to work in Waugh’s Store. I would guess that this opportunity came largely through Harold Eldredge, who was the clerk at Waugh’s Store at that time, and of course as I told you before, was a very close friend of ours. My father and Mr. Waugh had been good friends too. They were together on the Town Council and they had a great deal of respect for one another, and he had gotten pretty well acquainted with me as I had gone in the store all those years with the butter and eggs. Anyway, this opportunity came to work in Waugh’s Store for $50 a month and I took it.

Before I start telling you some of my adventures in the store, I think I’ll tell you something about Mr. Waugh and about the store. Mr. Waugh had been out in Uintah Basin many, many years, long before it was settled by white people, or opened for settlement. He had worked in trading posts and had finally opened his own store there in Myton. As I’ve mentioned before, there was a trading post at Fort Duchesne and perhaps some others, but when he opened his store in Myton, the Indians followed him there. The Indians loved Mr. Waugh. Now, I did at one time know his first name, but I can’t think of it now, all I can think of is Ernest Waugh. He was single those many years that he had been out there. In fact, rumor had it that he had been a “squaw man”[what a man with an Indian wife used to be called] for many years. At one time, a very beautiful Indian woman was pointed out to me, by Harold I suppose, as the woman who had been his wife. She was a well-educated woman, I think of the Cherokee tribe. As white people had moved in and the country had become more civilized—that might have been the reason—but at the time that I knew him, he was a single man. He was a man about my father’s age, and at that time, he had a partner in the business, whose name was Mr. Ward. Now I used to know his name too, but I can’t remember it now. They were very close friends. I don’t know where Mr. Waugh came from, nor where Mr. Ward came from, except from the outside. But they were in the store as partners for a good many years. They each took what they wanted from the store; it was a very unbusinesslike arrangement. If they wanted something, they simply took it and neither one of them minded, and everything worked out just fine. I think they even “bached” together for many years.

But prior to the time that I had gone to the store, Mr. Waugh had gotten married. She was quite a few years younger than his age. She was rather a lovely little woman. She was very efficient (I think she had been a schoolteacher) and a very knowledgeable person, and she decided that she would help in the store. She and Mr. Ward took an immediate dislike to one another and it was the breaking up of the friendship of these two men. She felt that it was very unbusinesslike, the way they handled things, and she resented very much when Mr. Ward would take anything from the store, and she saw to it that Mr. Waugh took something of equal value each time that he did. It must have been rather an unpleasant situation for quite some time.

Then Mr. Ward went on a vacation outside, and when he came back, he brought a wife, and the two wives took an immediate dislike for each other. They really created havoc with the friendship of these two men. She too was rather an attractive woman, and I’m sure a very intelligent woman. She thought that if Mrs. Waugh worked in the store, she should work in the store too, and so they were both there at each other’s throats most of the time, according to Harold’s story. Well finally, I guess the two men realized that it was an impossible situation, and about that time an opportunity for postmaster came up, so Mr. Ward took the job of postmaster with his wife as his assistant and sold out his interest in the store to Mr. Waugh. I don’t know what interest he had; I’m sure it wasn’t as great as Mr. Waugh’s, though he had probably taken the same out of it that Mr. Waugh did.

When I went to work at the store, Mrs. Waugh was still coming in the store some, particularly at inventory time. She always came in and helped us take inventory, but she was not clerking at the store. That was probably what made the opportunity for me to come in: the Wards leaving and Mrs. Waugh spending less time. During this time they had built a rather lovely home out on South Myton Bench and she wanted a baby. They were able to adopt a little baby girl that looked exactly like Mr. Waugh, a beautiful child. I don’t know where they got her, but she was a delightful little girl, and then they later adopted another little girl.

Anyway, the opening was there, and I was offered the job at $50 a month, which was as much as I was going to get if I had taught school, and so I went to work in the store. It was really a tremendous experience and I’m sure I’ll spend quite a lot of time talking about it. Before I do, though, I think I’d like to describe the store to you a little bit. It was a typical trading post store. It was the largest store in Myton, and it was pretty much the center of activity. It and the pool hall across the street, I’m sure, were the most central places for killing time of anywhere in town. People went to the bank and they went occasionally to get their hair cut, and they went to the post office, but Waugh’s Store always had a lot of Indians in it, because they liked Mr. Waugh so much because he was so good to them.

Each Indian got an allotment at the beginning of the month from the government. Of course, at the beginning of the month they spent and spent; they went to the pool hall and played a lot of cards and gambled a lot, and they bought a few clothes and they loved to eat the sweets and the foods that they had not been accustomed to. They loved fruit; I’ll never forget when the cherry season came along, they used to love to buy cherries. The cherry would go in one side of the mouth and the stone would come out the other side. I never could figure out how they could do it, but they were almost as good as a machine, the way those cherry stones would come out, and they always went on the floor.

Near the end of the month they would begin to run out of money. Then you would see them going back to Mr. Waugh’s desk and pretty soon he would come up and cut them off a little piece of tobacco and get a few packages of cigarettes, and a little of this and that, and make it up into a little bundle, and away they would go. Of this I’m sure there was never any record kept, unless he did in his books back at his desk. I’m sure it was never paid back, and each month I know there were several hundreds of dollars went out of the store to these Indians.

Let me describe the store to you just a little bit before we go on. The one side of the store was dry goods, as we called it then. On this side we had what clothing we carried; we had loads of overalls, both bib and waistband overalls. The farmers liked the bib overalls, but the Indians preferred the waist overalls, which some wore low on their hips. I always thought it was so their big stomachs could come out over the top. We had shoes of many kinds, work shoes mostly, and cowboy boots. We had men’s hats, mostly cowboy-type hats, a few dress hats, and in the summer of course, loads of straw hats. We had lots of underwear, long-johns for winter, heavy underwear, and heavy socks for the men. In the women’s department we had black lisle stockings, and slips and a lot of dresses—that is, house-type dresses that the Indians bought—the farm women didn’t wear ready-made things. We had a lot of calico and gingham and dress materials that they would buy to sew their clothes. We always had a few little trimmings and bias tape and things that went along for their sewing.

We had a long ladder that I don’t see in stores any more, on a track from the ceiling and it went clear to the ceiling. We really had a big stock, particularly in the fall of the year, because in those days with the bad roads, most everything was hauled out on wagons, and it was hard to get merchandise out there, so a tremendous amount of stock was always bought for the winter.

On the other side of the store were the groceries. We had lots of canned goods, and the shelves in the fall would be four and five cans deep and a couple of cans high on each of the shelves along that side of the store. There was a long counter on each side for measuring merchandise, yard goods and so on. On the grocery side there was the cash register, and there was a showcase that had candies in it. It had horehound candy, old-fashioned white peppermints, taffy, and candies of that sort, a few bars, and an occasional box of candy which usually got given to either Harold or me before it got too old, because no one ever bought them. Under the counter were drawers that contained peanuts, both shelled peanuts and unshelled peanuts, and rice, and beans, and tapioca, and things of that sort, and there was the sugar bin.

On top of the counter, there was a big, square glass case, the cheese case. The lid came up, and there was always a great, big, round cheese on it. Nothing was ever packaged in those days as it is now. It had a big knife that, if a person wanted a pound or two pounds or whatever they wanted, you guessed as closely as you could how much to cut. We soon learned to be pretty good at it. Right by that was a scale that told you how much you had cut. If it wasn’t too far off, why, you just gave it to them for the pound, but if it was too much off, it also figured how much it would be.

One of the most important things on top of the counter was a case that contained a big plug, well, that isn’t what they called it; I can’t remember what we did call it, but a great big sheet of chewing tobacco. It was called plug tobacco. That also had a big knife with it, and you learned pretty well what to cut for a pound or whatever amount they wanted of chewing tobacco. That smelled good; I really liked the smell, and I was always tempted to try it, but I never did. And of course we had cigarettes of various brands.

Between the two counters there was room for one row of tables, and on these would be assorted items: blankets for the Indians—bright Indian blankets—and saddles for their horses, and bridles, and anything that you might think of would be there. We had two little show windows, one on either side of the front door. In those we would show our new items, such as our new house dresses when they came in, and the occasional shipment of hats for the ladies that came. On the other side we would have stacks of groceries of various types, and soap, or anything of that sort. I’m certain that they were not very decorative windows, but at least we always kept something in them, and once in a while we even washed them.

Towards the back of the store, at the very back of the store, was Mr. Waugh’s desk and a big safe. In all the years that I worked in the store, there was never any money kept in the safe. At some time or other it had been robbed, and there was a sign that hung on it, and this sign read, “Turn both handles to the left and pull hard. This safe is not locked.” This was put on because when they couldn’t open the safe, apparently the time they had tried to rob it, they had hit it so hard with hammers and things that they had dented the safe. Rather than have that happen again, Mr. Waugh had put this sign on it. The only things that were in the safe were Mr. Waugh’s ledgers, which I’m sure didn’t have much in them, and perhaps insurance papers and fire insurance and things that were flam— could be burned should the place catch on fire.

The money was kept in various places. At night when it would be time for us to close, it would be my job to stand by the light switch by the front door and Harold’s job to stash the money. Or mine, if I was there alone, which I sometimes was in the summertime; I was never left there alone in the wintertime when it would be dark at closing time, but in the summer I often closed up. Whoever closed up had to get there first in the morning, because they would be the only one who knew where the money was. One of the ways we entertained ourselves during the day was deciding where we would hide the money that night. It got hidden in various places; sometimes it would be in the bean barrel, or it could be in a shoebox way up high on a shelf, or it could be in the shirts. (Oh, I forgot to tell you we had loads and loads of bright colored shirts and also blue work shirts, and a very few white shirts, not many.) Or it could be hid under a loose board in the floor, or it might be, the money might be hidden most anywhere, but it was your job to remember where you had hid it the night before. It was never put in the safe.

Another thing that might be interesting about the money is that so few, or so many of the transactions that we had, we didn’t deal with money at all. They were eggs and butter and things of that sort. If you had eggs, you counted them out three in each hand, which was a half dozen, and if you had twenty double hands full, why then you had—you divided by two and that meant you had ten dozen eggs, and at 15¢ a dozen, that would be a dollar and a half that the lady would have to spend. Then you would figure out with her what she could buy, and she would buy up to her dollar and a half. Oh, occasionally she might have a little money extra and buy a little extra. That money of course would go into the till, but the amount that was dealt with in eggs, there was no record kept of any kind. You simply added up what she could spend until she had spent the amount of her eggs, and away she went. That was as much record as there was.

Harold and I, whenever we wanted anything, we simply took it and put an IOU in the cash register. At the end of the month, Mr. Waugh would add up the IOUs and whatever they came to, if they came to $40, why, he handed you a $10 bill, or whatever. Or if you had happened to have gone over the $50—of course we were supposed to keep track of it ourselves—but if we happened to go over, he just simply put an IOU in for the difference at the first of the month and started over. In the years that I worked there, three or four years that I worked there, I never did receive a paycheck. All I did was take the groceries or anything else that was needed and put in an IOU. I remember one time—I don’t suppose Mr. Waugh bothered to put in an IOU for what he took; that was just part of his merchandise—I remember one time a salesman, a cash register salesman coming through and wanting to sell Mr. Waugh a cash register. One of his arguments was that a dishonest salesperson could really rob him blind, which of course they could have done. Mr. Waugh became—well that’s the most angry I ever saw him become, and he informed the salesman that if anyone made any mistakes on that cash register, it was him and not one of his clerks, and he ushered the salesman out very quickly.

That was a strange old cash register. It didn’t add anything up for you. It had just one drawer, which we both used, and you had to figure up what the customer was buying on a piece of paper, and then you cranked the register with a hand crank to put the money in and take the change out. I’ve seen a lot of hard-looking cash registers, but I’ve never seen one quite as ancient as that one was. At the time, it was the only cash register I had ever seen, so I thought it was all right.

I’ve forgotten to tell you about the most important piece of furniture in the store. It sat about, oh, more than halfway back in the store and it was a great, big, potbellied stove. In the wintertime that thing would get red hot. There were several chairs arranged around it and there the Indians would sit and visit and talk, or road construction men, or whoever happened to be in the store would sit around and visit. On Saturday afternoons sometimes things would get quite rowdy and the stories would get rare, and on such occasions Mabel would get sent home by Mr. Waugh.

That old stove, by morning the ashes would be pretty well around on the floor, and as I mentioned before, the cherry pits would be pretty well scattered in that season of the year. The floors were bare and each morning it was our job to sweep out the store before we opened, so you’d always get there about half an hour earlier than opening to sweep out the store.

The basement of the store was about as big, and usually about as loaded with merchandise, as the main part of the store, particularly, again as I say, in the fall of the year. In the basement, which was loaded with merchandise, towards the back of the store, they kept the rope. We sold an awfully lot of rope for the farmers and to the Indians for their horses and so on. It came in several different sizes—thicknesses of rope. Rope came in great big rolls, huge things weighing a great deal. The men would tug and pull and get them into the basement. Then they bored a hole in the floor and would put an end of the rope up and through this hole, and tie a knot in it so it wouldn’t slide back down. Then when people wanted rope, they simply pulled along that piece and measured off what they wanted.

The first morning that it was my turn to sweep the floor, in order to do a nice, neat job, I untied all of the knots and let the rope slide down so that I could sweep. That created quite a turmoil when Harold got there and had to go down and push all the rope back up and we had to retie all of the knots. I learned that if you had a little dust behind the rope on the floor, you just didn’t worry about that.

As I mentioned before, it was quite the center of the town. People coming in to shop visited with each other, told what they had been doing, discussed their affairs and how their crops were going, who had visited whom, who had a new baby, who was sick, who had died, and so on. So the man who was the reporter for the little newspaper spent many hours in the store. I can see him yet, sitting on the counter by the peanut drawer, reaching behind him every few minutes to get a handful of peanuts and sitting and shelling them, letting the shells fall on the floor, and eating them and listening to the visiting that was going on. If he wasn’t there, we were instructed to remember what was said, and that was how the newspaper was printed. Next week you would read all of these little bits of gossip in the newspaper of what had gone on in and about the community.

I can’t remember his name; I wish I could. I really had a bit of a crush on him. He was a very nice-looking fellow, in his thirties, and Harold worried terribly about it, because he thought he had too much of a crush on me, being that he was a married man and had about four children. He had a funny little drab wife, poor little soul; they lived out on South Myton Bench too. I don’t know whether he went outside to get her, or whether he brought her with him when he came; I don’t know how long he had been there. He was a very bright fellow, a very interesting person to talk to, but he had very little to say about his own past, and I don’t know anything about him. As I say, I can’t even remember his name now. But that was the way he gathered his news. That, in addition to the United Press organization that Mr. Cook got, comprised the Myton Free Press. I suppose the reporter went across the street and gathered up a few notes from the pool hall too. They probably were even more exciting than the ones that he collected in the store.

I remember one time being terribly—well, it’s really the first time I really was aware of severe suffering. We were in the store and we heard someone screaming. You could hear them a long way off. As they came closer, we discovered that this man who was being brought into town had been burned severely. His house had caught on fire, and he had a desk right near a window in which he had his insurance papers and things that he thought he needed, and he had reached in through this window to get these papers out. I don’t know if he got them or not, but in the process he had burned both arms very badly, and he was in tremendous pain.

They brought him to Myton, and they had phoned from Myton to Roosevelt for a doctor to come, because there was no doctor in Myton. While we were waiting for the doctor to come, they brought him in the store part of the time and part of the time he just walked up and down the street on the outside and screamed and moaned with pain. That was one of the types of newspaper items that this man got, I’m sure. We really saw life in the raw there.

One of the funny things that happened when I was in the store alone—well, many things happened that were funny—perhaps I’ll tell you the very first day that I worked in the store.

Harold went home to lunch and Mr. Waugh had been out to his place on South Myton Bench, and I was left alone in the store. As I told you before, the Indians are really fun-loving people. They really worked me over that very first day. The bucks would come in and they said they wanted a bottle of lemon extract: “My squaw, she make lemon pie.” Well, I knew my mother didn’t make lemon pie with lemon extract, but so what if they did? That was all right with me, so I sold them the lemon extract. During the hour that Harold was gone to lunch I sold two full cases of lemon extract to the Indians. Before Harold got back, Mr. Waugh arrived in the store, and I was very proud of myself, and I told him just as soon as he got there what a success I’d had on this lemon extract. Mr. Waugh made one beeline out the back door in the direction of the Indian Agent to try to salvage the store, I suppose. I didn’t get into any trouble over it, but we surely had a bunch of drunk Indians that day, and I’m sure nobody made lemon pies.

Another amusing incident—well, the Indians had a lot of fun with me for quite awhile before they came to accept me, which they did. At first they all looked just alike to me, and one would step up to the counter and buy something, and I would get it ready and wrap it and go and give it back to them, and pretty soon another would step up and say, “Where’s my package?” I’d say, “Why, I gave it to you!” They would giggle and laugh and have a great time, and pretty soon a different one would pull it out from under his shirt. They just thought I was the funniest thing ever.

We all had Indian names. I learned to count (I couldn’t do it now), and I learned the names of most of the commodities that they bought. Mr. Waugh had had his name I guess many, many years. He was called Sutsegar. I don’t know whether the name was because when I knew him he had grey hair, which he combed straight back, but he could have gotten the name for that, because Sutsegar apparently meant White Duck. Whether it was because he was an early white man, or because of the grey hair and the way he combed it, I don’t know. Harold’s name was Ohwatnekubuts, and it meant Big Ears. Harold does have—anyone who knows him knows that he does have very large ears. My name, as they got better acquainted and named me, was Cheenuggets, and I couldn’t find out for the longest time what the name meant. I would ask them, and they would laugh, but they wouldn’t tell me until finally I managed to get one buck there alone and ask him what my name meant, and he told me. This was what he said: “Me see big pond of water. Pretty soon wind come.” Then with his hands he went like the wind making waves on the water. “Pretty soon sun come, shine on the water.” He pointed to my hair, and I did have blonde hair, and I combed it in sort of a marcel type style, which made it kind of wave like the wind would make waves on the water. So that was what my name meant.


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Go to Part 9.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 7

This is part 7 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 and 6. 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’ve mentioned these pot-bellied stoves a number of times. I think I’ll tell you an experience Fred had that at least I think was partly, at least, due to the pot-bellied stove. I guess this probably happened after Father died, because I know I had helped Fred milk the cows that morning, and I didn’t learn to milk the cows until after Father’s death when Fred was the only one at home. I had to milk cows that winter in order to help him get his chores done in time to get to school. It was on a Sunday, a fast Sunday, and he had been asked to go up to one of those little communities up that way, I think it was Neola, anyway it was to speak at a funeral. It was rather an upsetting thing for him, because the funeral was for a young man who had committed suicide, and I’m sure it was Fred’s first experience with something of that sort. I didn’t know the young man myself, and I really don’t know how Fred happened to know him, unless it was through his stake MIA [Mutual Improvement Association] work. I would imagine that he had gotten acquainted with him in some way through that. Anyway, he had been asked to speak at the funeral.

We had done the chores and gone to Sunday School and come home, and it being fast day, Mother had urged Fred to eat something, but he wouldn’t. She had quietly suggested to me that I might suggest to Fred that I would like to go with him. I did, and he consented, and so I went along. I’m sure he didn’t know that Mother had made such a suggestion. Mother and I got into cahoots on a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about. We left, and my impression is that we went in the buggy with old Buttermilk, but I can’t imagine why we would have done that, because I know we had my father’s famous car by that time, unless it was out of order. Anyway, it was an extremely cold day and we were just simply frozen before we got there. There was a bad wind blowing, and if you’ve ever been out on North Myton Bench in the middle of the winter in a wind storm, you know how very cold it can be. When we got there we were both just frozen.

We got there just about time for the funeral to begin. I was real happy that they had put Fred rather close to the pot-bellied stove, because we were both just frozen stiff, and I thought at least he would be a little bit thawed out before it was time for him to speak. I was at the back of the hall, and I couldn’t feel any heat at all and was still chilled through. When it came time for Fred to get up and speak, I guess he had gotten too warm beside this pot-bellied stove, or at least he had gotten warm too fast, and with a stomach which was too empty to churn, he was quite upset. He seemed very calm as he started to speak, but I noticed that he began to get whiter and whiter, and his voice began to get slower and slower, and I could tell that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts in order, and I realized that he was going to faint. No one seemed to be very concerned; the people behind him of course couldn’t see. As I saw him start to sway, I started running down the aisle, and just then someone back of him caught him before he fell. They asked for some water, and of course there wasn’t any there, and they sent someone after some to the closest neighbor, and he finally got back with some about thirty minutes after Fred had fainted. Fred was unconscious for quite awhile, and I was terrified.

After he came to, we were taken to the bishop’s home, and he rested there awhile, and I’m quite sure we were given something to eat there. They did finish the funeral, and we did go to the cemetery, and with it all, we were very late getting back. Mother was beside herself with worry by the time we arrived home, and Fred had me sworn to silence by that time that I was not to tell her what had happened and worry her further. I’ve always thought that it was that pot-bellied stove and getting so close to it after being so cold, and getting the heat from it so quickly that caused him to have that experience.

I’ve had one other experience with a person who committed suicide. In those days it was not customary to have the funeral for a person who had committed suicide held in a chapel, and on this occasion it was held in the family home. This man had been ill a long time and had become very despondent, and while his wife was away at work he had shot himself. As I’ve told you before, I usually played the piano for all of our church activities, and this was no exception. There was a piano in the home, and Father of course was conducting the funeral, and I went along to play the hymns. Most of the people from our branch were there in attendance. I have always thought my father was very wise that day in the choice of music. Apparently the wife had been so very disturbed that she had not been any help in making any of the arrangements, and Father had made the arrangements. The song that we sang was “Nay, Speak No Ill,” and we never sing that hymn in church but I don’t think of that particular incident. I remember how right I thought that song was for that occasion.

I hate to leave this on a dreary note, so maybe I can tell you about the time Harold Eldredge rode down the middle of Myton Main Street in the hearse. They had a little hearse at the hardware store. He got somebody to drive it and he stretched out in it, and they drove down Main Street. Just when they got in front of the saloon, Harold sat up. You should have seen those drunks scatter.

There was one time when the branch people didn’t go along with my father. I guess medicine or superstition or something has come a long way since that time. It was learned that there was an old man living out by himself who was very ill, and when my father went down to see him, it was discovered that he had syphilis. He was wearing LDS garments and he maintained to the end of his life, which was really only a few days after Father found him, that he was innocent.[1] When it came time to get him to prepare him for burial, no one would come near because of the danger of syphilis. It fell to my father to prepare him for burial. As I’ve told you before, we had no undertaker, and when someone passed away, it would usually fall to friends and neighbors and branch members to prepare the bodies for burial. When Father had dressed him, he put his garments on, because the man had been wearing them all of these years, and some people were very upset. Father said that was between the man and the Lord. If he had felt innocent enough to wear them all of those years, as far as he was concerned, the Lord could make the final judgment. But the people in the branch did refuse to have the service in our chapel. I remember it was on a Thanksgiving morning that Fred and Father hitched up the wagon and went and got the man’s body. They had a grave dug and they took it to the cemetery and buried the body and dedicated the grave. Since the men who had dug the grave weren’t sticking around for fear of what might happen to them, Father and Fred filled in the grave and then came home. Mother had a good supply of hot water for them to use and they washed and cleaned up and changed their clothing before our Thanksgiving dinner. I know that we today can’t realize the things that people believed and the lack of knowledge that people had at that time.

Charles John Wahlquist

It was in April 1923 that my father died. I was nineteen at the time. He died on a Sunday afternoon from a massive coronary thrombosis type of ailment.

He had been in Vernal for a few days on a case, and we learned later from Mrs. Richardson, where he always stayed, that he had not felt well on Saturday. He hadn’t finished up at court early enough on Saturday to drive home, and she said he had been ill again in the night, Saturday night. On Sunday morning she had tried to persuade him to stay over and not attempt the drive home, but he had smiled and said no, that if he was going to be sick, he wanted to get home so Mama could take care of him. He had had rather a bad trip home—it had taken him about five hours to make the trip. It had been raining, or snowing, sort of a slushy April storm, and the roads were quite slick. Some people who had passed him reported that he smiled and waved to them. One person said that when he passed him, he was stopped with his engine stalled and was trying to crank his car. Of course, stalling his engine was not an unusual thing for my father. We don’t know how ill he was or how much pain he may have suffered.

As I said, it was on Sunday, and when it came time for Sacrament meeting, Mother said for Fred and me to go to Sacrament meeting, and she would stay home to be there when he got home and get him something to eat. We could tell of course that she was getting worried about him by this time, and of course we were too.

I suppose in the years that Mother was sick so many, many times, so seriously ill, we had given some thought to her death and to what our reactions might be and what we would do. In fact, I know my father worried a great deal about her when he had to be away, because whenever he was leaving, when he was giving me my goodbye hug, his last words to me were always, “Take good care of Mama.” I don’t think any of us had ever thought in terms of Father’s death. He was only 57 and he was an unusually healthy person. I don’t ever remember him being sick enough to stay in bed all day. He could out-work almost anybody and was always very cheerful and very happy and very eager in everything that he did-he had a real zest for living. And I don’t think that the thought of his not being with us had ever occurred to any of us.

Fred and I had gone to church, and after the meeting we had a committee meeting to plan some program for Mutual that we were working on. We had looked out the back door of the chapel and could see our father’s car in front of the house, so we knew that he was at home. We hadn’t worried and had stayed as long as we needed to. But when we were coming home, we just came up over the brow of the bench from Old Town where our chapel was and saw Mother standing on the porch calling to us and waving her apron, and of course we knew that something was wrong, and we started to run.

Fred beat me home and we hurried into the house. Father was on the bed in the room right next to the kitchen, which I have described before, just lying on top of the bed. Mother told us afterwards that when he got home, she had told him she would fix him something to eat, and he had told her he felt rather tired and he thought he would lie down for a few minutes, and so he had gone in there. She had stepped out into the kitchen and was doing something when she heard a little sound and hurried back into the room, and he was unconscious. She couldn’t revive him, and she had run out onto the porch hoping she could see someone to help her and had seen us coming.

When we went into the room, his face was a deep purple, and I don’t know what anyone else did; I went directly through the door from that room into my parents’ bedroom and knelt down and started to pray. The only words that I seemed to be able to say were, “Please let my father live!” I said this over and over again, sometimes I guess pleading and sometimes I’m afraid almost demanding. I didn’t seem to be able to close my prayer—I wanted to and to get back into the room where he was—then suddenly it occurred to me that I must pray as my father had taught us to, and say, “Thy will be done.” With this realization I also realized that if I said those words my father would die, and so I was determined that I would not say that. I don’t know how long I was there—it could have been seconds or minutes—it seemed quite awhile to me. Finally I was able to say the words, “Thy will be done,” and I knew when I got up and went back into the other room that he would be gone. As I stepped into the door into the other room, Mother put her arm around me and said, “He’s going.” The purple had cleared out of his face and he looked very peaceful and natural.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about those next few days. I do know that Harold came; I don’t know who told him, perhaps somebody passing by the house; we didn’t have a telephone and neither did he, but I know Harold was there, and other members of the branch were there. They washed my father and prepared him for burial, and a casket was brought and he was placed in the front room. In those days the body was not taken to the mortuary as it is now, it was just prepared by family and friends, and the body remained in the home until time for the service. I know that people came; I couldn’t tell you who, except the story that I have already told you about Mr. Cook.

I don’t remember going to the funeral. I know that it was held in the opera house and that it was full. I don’t remember any flowers, but I know the articles telling about the funeral say that there were many beautiful floral offerings. I’ve saved all of the clippings about the funeral and I will attach them to this when it’s transcribed so that you may know what happened. I know that Congressman Don B. Colton, who was a close friend of my father’s, spoke, though I don’t remember him speaking. I don’t remember going to the cemetery, or leaving the cemetery, but I know that I did.

I don’t remember when Jack and Keith came, but I know that they did. I don’t remember when they left, but I know they and my brother Fred cleared out my father’s office. I suppose among them they determined that Roy was to remain on his mission—he had been gone just eight months when my father died—but they probably arranged among them how they would support him. I just don’t remember anything about any of it, except worrying about my mother for fear she would not be able to bear up under it. But she did, surprisingly well. I know that the boys came out by way of Price, because Daniels Canyon was closed with snow that late in April, and that was the reason that my father wasn’t brought to Heber for burial and was buried in Myton. It was about 15 years later, after my mother’s death, that the four boys went out together and brought his body back and buried it beside my mother.[2] As I say, I’ll have to let you depend on the newspaper articles for the details of my father’s funeral.

Because of the snow in Daniels Canyon and through Strawberry Valley, none of my mother’s family were able to come to Father’s funeral, which would have been a real comfort to her, I’m sure. The following summer the two sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Agnes, and her brother Jim, who were the only three living then, did each come and spend a few days with her. I’m sure she derived a great deal of comfort and pleasure in visiting with them.

The period after his death I suppose we got back to normal living, as people do at such times. I know that the following Sunday we were all in our places at church, me playing the piano and Fred up in front directing the Sunday School. I suppose we went ahead with our life pretty much as before, though it hardly seemed possible that such a thing could happen, that life could go on without my father there to direct us. Mother continued in her work as president of the Relief Society and Fred and I were extremely busy in our church work. I was president of the Mutual at that time and I think Fred was still president of the Young Men’s.

Roy was still on his mission, and Keith and Jack were both married and living on the outside.[3] They were both teaching school at that time. There were just Mother and Fred and I at home. Fred was to teach school in Myton that year. I think that was the first year that he taught in Myton, before that he had made these long horseback rides, as I’ve told you about before. I sort of wished that I could teach school, but there wasn’t any way that I could go away to school, because Mother was not well enough, though she was well enough so that I could leave her during the daytime. The School Board offered to let Fred and I teach together in a little school called Antelope, between Myton and Duchesne. It would be about ten miles from Myton and we would have had to ride that distance morning and night all through the winter, or else stay up there. We knew we couldn’t stay up there because we had to come home and milk cows and it would have been impossible to have left Mother home alone at nights, and we knew the worry that it would be to her to know that we were making that long trek morning and night, which under the conditions at that time would really have been quite a trip.

We were debating about this, but we decided I would have to stay home. The winter after Father died Mother’s health was not too good, and the decision was made that I would stay at home. That’s the year I learned how to milk cows. Up until that time, with four men, four boys in the family, Mother had never thought that I should learn to milk the cows. As I told you, I herded the cows, and I went and got them at night and brought them home, ready so they would be there to milk when the boys came home, but I had never milked them. My only experience of being around the cows when they were milked was as a little girl standing with my tin cup while Father squirted warm milk from the cow into my cup for me to drink.

I do remember one frantic experience when my mother, who didn’t know any more about the cows than I did at that time, had to stick a cow. I’m sure you don’t know, all of you, what I mean by that, but when the cows in the springtime would eat certain grass or alfalfa, they would bloat. There is a spot in a cow where if you insert a knife, the air and gas and whatnot from what the cow has eaten will come out. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for Father or the boys to have to stick a cow, but Mother had never done this. One afternoon we found that one of the cows was down and was bloated badly and would die if it were not helped. Mother very fearfully went out with the butcher knife and inserted it where she had been told it was supposed to be done, and I went along with her for moral support. Somehow or other we must have done it all right, because the cow got well.

Anyway, back to my milking. I did learn to milk the cows that winter, and I milked six cows in the morning and at night all of that winter, and Fred milked the other six. As I recall, we were milking twelve. I don’t know what we were doing about the milk then; my impression is that we were probably separating the milk and selling the cream, but I’m not sure. Anyway, helping in the house because Mother’s health was failing and she was particularly miserable that winter, and helping Fred with the chores was a good part of my day.

We did have a boarder that winter. That’s the first time we ever did anything like that. A young fellow named Ernest Bramwell, who had come out there to teach school for his first year’s teaching, lived with us. He slept with Fred and was with us the whole winter. He was a very nice young fellow and very pleasant to be around. He was very fond of my mother and she was fond of him, and in fact, we were all fond of him and enjoyed the experience of having him stay with us.

The first job that I had was in Phillips’ Store. It was a very small department store, about three doors down from Waugh’s. I don’t remember just how I got the job, whether I asked for it or whether they asked me. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips ran the store themselves without any help, but for some reason they decided to take in a clerk, so I was hired. I don’t recall just how long I stayed there and I don’t remember anything very exciting about it. They were lovely people and I enjoyed my experience there. After, oh, I think just a few months, I got a chance to go to Waugh’s Store and I decided that I would like to do that. The Phillipses asked me if I knew someone who would like the job, and so I suggested Loreen. She was delighted with the idea of coming; she was going to live at our house. They hired Loreen, and she went to be their clerk when I went to Waugh’s.

We had quite a laugh about this the other night; Fred and Loreen were here visiting and I asked Loreen how I got acquainted with her, because I really don’t know when I met Loreen. She didn’t know either. We decided that it must have been just through the fact that both of us worked in the Mutual. Loreen lived up at Ioka, a little community, well, I don’t know how far from Myton, but it could have been to the end of the world the way traveling conditions were at that time. Anyway, I had grown to like her, and we had become quite well acquainted at Mutual leadership meetings, and when we had taken plays up to Ioka to Mutual, and they had brought programs to our ward, and so on. There wasn’t anyone in our branch who was my age; I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I thought it would be so nice to have Loreen come down and we could be friends.

We laughed the other night; she accused me of playing Cupid, but that really wasn’t in my mind, and I was amused when she said that she had already decided that Fred was the boy that she was going to go after. It was a result of her having seen him play ball at Ioka, and she had been impressed by him. I’m sure she had also met him at leadership meetings in Roosevelt, too. I was sort of surprised when she said that, because I really don’t think I had thought in terms of Fred and Loreen at that time. I was delighted when they did fall in love and get married, but Loreen was such a vivacious, popular, pretty girl—she had her beautiful auburn-red hair and her big sparkly brown eyes, and she was very lively and not shy, but popular and a good dancer, and all the things that I wasn’t. I think it rather surprised me that she would think in terms of quiet Fred, who didn’t dance and who didn’t go to many of the parties or things of that sort and was not very much interested in girls. However, he admitted in this same conversation that he had had his eye on Loreen, having met her over at Roosevelt and having heard her speak, and so he was quite delighted when I had this brilliant idea of having Loreen come down to work at Phillips’. Which all goes to show that the wheels of the gods or whatever-it-is they say, grind slowly and things do work out for people.

When Loreen came to stay with us, she and I of course were very good friends, and it was a very happy time for me. We made dresses together and we could go to church together and do so many things together. I don’t know when she and Fred did their romancing; I wasn’t conscious of it. Maybe Mother was, though if she was, she didn’t tell me, and I’m quite sure she would have done.

I well remember the night that Loreen was going to go home for the weekend and how shocked Mother and I both were when Fred announced he was taking her home. They left, and the next morning about 5 o’clock, when Mother awakened thinking it was time for Fred to be up to milk the cows, she discovered that Fred had not arrived home. The only thing she could think of at all was an accident, and so in our usual manner we were out ready to start hiking for Ioka until we found him, when suddenly we saw him coming up through Old Town in the car, and he arrived home very sheepishly to tell us that he and Loreen were engaged to be married.

Fred and Loreen’s marriage changed our lives a great deal.[4] Fred had some land leased out south of Myton about a mile. lt was where we had kept the cows pastured that summer. There was a house on this land and he and Loreen were to live in it. They went into Salt Lake to be married and then had a honeymoon trip down to the canyons in Southern Utah. I remember my part of it all was to be very careful that no one should know when they returned home, because one thing Fred was not going to have was a shivaree. Perhaps you do or don’t know what a shivaree is, or was. Whenever a couple got married, all of the other young people in town would try to get them when they got home the first night and usually separate the girl and the fellow, sometimes taking the fellow away for the whole night, or the girl, and just generally making things very unpleasant. Fred was going to have none of that, so I kept it a very deep, dark secret when they were to be home. When they did get home, they stayed with us the first night. Anyway, they managed to get themselves settled before people knew that they were at home.

They took the cows out there, and this left Mother and I alone, which was a brand-new experience for us and a rather frightening experience for Mother, I’m sure. I know it was a frightening experience to me, because it gave me the full responsibility of Mother. Mother was always very nervous about us being there alone, but our good old dog, Tip, was a good watchdog and took very good care of us. You remember me saying about how much we came to appreciate our neighbor, McKuen, the medicine man. It wasn’t any time after Fred left until McKuen came by one day and said to Mother, “Me watch,” and he always did, bless his old heart. We always knew that in McKuen we had a good friend, and that if anything very seriously went wrong, we could go to him for help and he would be there.

I seem to have done things wrong. Sometimes I think I should never have started this, because whenever one of my brothers is here, they say I’ve got things wrong. Fred insists that Roy was at home when he got married and that Mother and I were not home alone, but the more we talked about it, he couldn’t figure out just how Roy could have been home.[5] Roy had, as I’ve said before, gone on his mission to the southern states, and he was there his full two years and an extra three months. He came home and after he had been home a short time there was a letter came, sent out to all wards and branches in the Church, asking for missionaries, asking each ward to furnish a missionary, preferably one with some experience, to go into the mission field for a special drive that they were doing. These were just to be six-month missions. We really had no one in our ward to send except Roy. He was about the only experienced, well he was the only returned missionary we had in the branch, and so he volunteered to go. The branch theoretically was supposed to support him, but my judgment is that Fred probably provided most of the money. In fact, Fred admitted that when he was here. I think that’s where he was when Fred got married, but Fred thinks he had returned, but we won’t argue about it, and I’m not going to do the record over.

Now, to tell something about Roy and his romances, I don’t know how I got acquainted with Maude either. I assume it was through Loreen.[6] I remember meeting her at Pack’s one time when I went up to visit with them for a few days. That was when I got my hair cut.

Mabel after her hair was bobbed

I think I was the last person in the world to get their hair cut, and I don’t know why, because I never liked my hair long. It was very heavy and it always gave me headaches, and I didn’t do it very attractively. They had already had theirs cut, and they talked me into letting them cut my hair. Very reluctantly, I did. They first cut off the big braid that I had hanging down the back, and then they proceeded to hack off the rest of it. They wouldn’t let me look to see what was going on, and they didn’t let me look into the mirror until after they had it all curled and ready for inspection. I was very pleased with it, and thought it looked very nice. When we went home that night to Myton, there was a dance or ward function of some sort, and I knew Mother would be there. We were so late getting down there that we didn’t have time to go home first, so the first that Mother saw me with my hair cut was on the dance floor, and she was very shocked. However, she liked my hair, and everything turned out very well on that score.

Another time I remember spending with Maude was when I had the first of my many benign tumors removed. I’d had this tumor in my leg for, oh, many years, since I was just a very young girl. We had never thought much about it; my father didn’t worry about it, but it suddenly started growing quite rapidly, and it got so it showed quite badly on my leg beneath my dresses, and also my leg had got so it ached quite badly. I went over to Roosevelt (I don’t know who with at that time), to Dr. Miles, who was a woman doctor, rather a good doctor, and also a surgeon. She said that it should be taken out because it might be attached to the bone in my leg and might cause serious trouble. So Maude invited me to stay with her at her place while I had it out.

I think she and Roy were probably going together by this time (he had returned home). I went and I had the surgery done that day, and that night I went to Maude’s. She was going to be extra nice to me, and they had a very wide windowsill in their living room. Now, I don’t know whether they didn’t have the extra bed—I’m sure they did—but I think she must have thought that would be a pleasant place for me to be, so I could sit up and look out this window. She put a feather tick on the seat of the window—it had no pad on it—and that was where I slept. It was real soft and comfortable and cozy when I first went to bed, but during the night my leg ached quite a bit, and of course the windowsill was a little short for me, being rather tall, and by morning the feathers had all gone to both sides and were all over me in all directions, and I was sleeping on just the fabric of the tick under me on this hard window seat. I didn’t say anything to Maude, because I knew that she was trying to be very kind.

We went to the doctor the next day—I’m sure we must have walked—and of course Dr. Miles’ office was on the second floor of the building, and we climbed the stairs, and with it all I had torn several of the stitches and the wound had begun to hemorrhage. I had quite a little trouble getting it to heal up, and I did stay there in Roosevelt for three or four days before I returned home. It healed fine eventually, and instead of having a lump show underneath my dress, I had a nice long scar for many years.

Another time I remember being with Maude before she and Roy were married, I went with her over to Fort Duchesne for the U.B.I.C. That’s the Uintah Basin Industrial Convention, which used to be held every year, and I think still is. Fort Duchesne was quite an interesting place. It was built very much on the same pattern as Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, and the officers’ homes were really very nice homes—nice two-story buildings, and they were in rather a sort of a semi-circle. There were the long barracks for the soldiers that stayed, though there were no soldiers there at that time, and some of the officers’ homes were occupied by families there at the fort. There was a store there and a few other government offices, and these government men lived in the homes that had been the officers’ homes. That was my first time, I think, of going to Fort Duchesne to stay.

U.B.I.C. in 1926 when Mabel and Maude attended.

I’d been through there once before, and it was my first experience of going over to what was called “The Strip.” I don’t know exactly how to explain that, but apparently there was a narrow piece of land that did not belong to the fort and did not belong to the Indian reservation and did not belong to Uintah County, so it was not really under any legal jurisdiction. During the time that the fort had been in operation, apparently it had been a very wild spot, with many saloons and gambling places. It had been the place for wild life for the soldiers and many others, but at that time there was very little there except the Chinaman’s Store. The Chinaman had an Indian trading post there and it was quite a large store, I guess about the biggest thing around. He had just everything in the way of clothing and groceries and what-have-you, and did a very lucrative business. He got business from everywhere; everyone went over to the Chinaman’s because he had the reputation that if he couldn’t get you to buy it any other way, he would make you a deal. As I say, that was another experience I had with Maude.

I liked Maude and I was happy when she and Roy were married.[7] At the time Roy and Maude were married, Fred and Roy divided up the cows and the horses and the farm implements and everything they had worked with in common. Roy had leased some land down on the river, just across the river, really. There was a house on the land, an old log house, that they lived in. It wasn’t too far from the grist mill, which was run by a man named Waterson or Waterman, who was their closest neighbor.

Roy and Maude didn’t quite escape the shivaree; they weren’t quite as lucky as Fred and Loreen. It was just a few of us who went out there the evening that they got home, I think the four schoolteachers and myself and few others, I don’t even recall who. They didn’t have anything to give us to eat—they hadn’t gotten groceries much into the house yet—so the fellows disappeared and in a little while they came back with a couple of chickens and a couple of nice, big watermelons. The chickens still had their feathers, but not their heads, so we had to pull the feathers off the chickens and clean them and cook them before we had our midnight supper. I’m sure neither Roy nor Maude was very happy about this, because it was quite obvious to all, though nothing was said, that they had not bought the chickens, nor had they bought the watermelons. I guess Roy thought that it was better than being taken off somewhere to walk home through the night in his bare feet, and Maude thought it was better than being left alone. Nothing was said and we cooked the chickens and we had a nice dinner in lieu of a shivaree.

The next day—I was working at Waugh’s by this time—and the next day, Mr. Waterson came in to the store and he was just as mad as a hatter about young people having gotten into his chickens and stolen two of the chickens and also taken some of his watermelons. I tried very hard to look as innocent as I could; I don’t know how well I succeeded. I finally managed to escape to the basement. I didn’t fool Harold; he immediately caught on and kidded me about it afterwards and kidded Roy about it afterwards. These teachers who had come from outside had had such a hilarious time and it had been such an experience for them that they could not feel sorry about it. We all just sort of said nothing and I’m sure Mr. Waterson knew who got his chickens and his watermelons, but though he said he was going to make a great fuss about it, he didn’t.

I guess I’d better tell you about the “outside” and the “inside.” When you lived in Uintah Basin at that time, if you were living in the Uintah Basin, you were living “inside,” and if you lived outside Uintah Basin, you lived “outside.” I don’t know how that came about, unless it was just that so many people in earlier days maybe didn’t either want to explain or couldn’t explain or didn’t want to say, “I came from New Jersey (or New Mexico, or wherever it might be)”; they just came from the outside. So that was the term that was always used. If you didn’t live in the Basin, you lived on the outside.

When I played this record for Maude the other day, she assured me that Roy had gone to Mr. Waterson and confessed all and had paid for the chickens and the watermelons.


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Notes:

1. For faithful Latter-day Saints, the garment they wear as underwear symbolizes their commitment to covenants with God. Once a church member is authorized to wear the garment, only a complete removal from church membership requires that the garment no longer be worn by that person. Charles Wahlquist was right to leave the choice to the man himself.
2. Mabel’s brothers went to Myton to get their father’s body between 1935 and 1938.
3. Jack had married Grace Dorius that summer, August 30, 1923.
4. Fred married Loreen Pack on August 26, 1925.
5. Roy was gone from October 1922–March 1925 and November 1925–March 1926; so he was home for Fred’s wedding.
6. Maude and Loreen were first cousins.
7. Roy and Maude were married on October 20, 1926.

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Go to Part 8.
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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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