Mabel’s Memories: Epilogue

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


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

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

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

Ruth and Mabel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim McEleney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel’s Memories, part 15

This is part 15 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 14, Mabel and her mother had been living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family in Ogden while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. Mabel’s mother died in 1935. This part concerns 1938 to 1940, beginning with when Mabel went to work for C.C. Anderson and Co., and ending with the death of her brother Keith.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

I left the Emporium on the last day of October and went to work at C.C. Anderson on the first day of November [1938]. We didn’t open the store until the day after Armistice Day. In those days Armistice Day was a holiday on which we honored the veterans of the First World War, and everything was closed. I did work that Armistice Day. We had been busy those two weeks getting the store ready to open, marking merchandise and unpacking it and arranging it on the shelves, and getting ready for that great day. No one can appreciate, unless they have worked in retailing and have helped to open a new store, what an exciting time it is. It is just something that builds up like the expectations of Christmas. It’s been my lot to help open a number of stores, and I’ve found that the thrill and the excitement of it never wear off. Looking over your merchandise and making it look as exciting as you can make it, and finding a nook and a corner for every single piece of merchandise to be put where it will attract the most attention and look the most inviting to the customer, well, all of it is just more fun than a picnic.

As exciting as my new job was my new boss. He was so much like Mr. Ferris in his ideas and approaches to merchandise that by the time I had worked with him a few hours, we both felt that we had worked together for years. I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Barker. It was also really exciting to meet all of the people who came down from the Boise office and also from New York for the opening of the store. This was my first contact with these very bright, fast-working people from New York and from New York-type markets and merchandising. It was a brand new experience, real fun, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t always agree with them. Neither did Mr. Barker. He had grown up as an old-time merchant, and sometimes he thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves. Sometimes when he could see that I wasn’t entirely agreeing with them, he would come around quietly and say, “Now, do it their way and they’ll be gone next week and we’ll do it our way.” That was sort of a joke between us.

The opening day was really something. People jammed the store such as I had never seen before. In fact, they were very much afraid that the floor was not going to hold up. I don’t remember how many people were supposed to be on the floor at one time, but we had twice that many most of the day. At least the floor managed to hold the crowd. It was a most thrilling day.

The people of Ogden had things to learn about this new type of merchandising. While they came and bought and bought and bought, they soon learned that they could not extend their credit over six months in a year as they had done at Wright’s. If their bills were not paid in 30 days, they received notice that they were to be paid or else their accounts would be closed. This angered many people and it hurt our business at the beginning of the opening of the store, and it affected business for a few years afterwards.

That first year at C.C. Anderson Company was a very happy one for me, even though I realized that we were not quite coming up to expectations. I think there were several reasons for this. One, of course, was their strict credit policy. Another was the fact that J.C. Penney had moved into Wright’s old building, and in doing so, they had seemed to gain quite a bit of respectability. I think perhaps had we gone into that building, things would have been much better. Also, I will have to say that Penney’s at this particular time had a very popular manager. He was well accepted in the community and belonged to the country club. He drew a lot of trade to J.C. Penney. J.C. Penney of course is a chain, and C.C. Anderson had been a chain, but in joining Allied Purchasing Corporation, they had ceased to be a chain. But somehow people in the community who were unhappy loved to call us “those New York Jews.”

I’m going to take just a moment even though it’s not part of my story to explain, if I can, the difference between a chain and a corporation. All stores of any size use the help of a buying office in New York or Chicago or California, usually all three. It saves them a great deal in not having to send their buyers into market nearly so much, and it keeps them more alert and aware of new things that are coming out. Toward the end of the Depression and afterwards, there were many stores that found themselves in exactly the same spot that Wright’s had been, big stores like the Bon Marche in Seattle, and Donaldson’s in Minneapolis, and Joske’s in San Antonio, Jordan Marsh in Boston, and even Stern’s in New York, and many others. A group of those stores, along with C. C. Anderson and Company, joined together as a corporation. Naturally, much of the money did come from New York. The New York office, the Allied buying office, which held a lot of the paper for their extending credit to them, agreed to trade their accounts for stock, so they did own a certain amount of stock in each of these stores that joined the corporation. I don’t know what the other stores did, but I know that Mr. Anderson sold 49% of his stock to Allied and kept 51%, or a controlling interest in his stores. For many years he was Chairman of the Board of Allied. All of these stores banding together were able to go into the market and buy in quantities comparable to what Penney’s, or Sears, or Montgomery Ward which was quite strong at that time, were able to buy. That was very necessary in order to offer the public the same kind of prices that the chains could offer. While the Allied stores were quite largely owned by their own communities, or people in their own communities, they were very often thought of by people who didn’t know what the deal was as chains, and they were thought of as being controlled by New York Jewish money. I don’t really know whether it matters whether money is Jewish or something else. I’ve worked with so many Jewish people that I have a very high respect for them and particularly for their financial ability.

Another thing that made that year a nice year for me was the fact that I was able to be at home more and join in the fun. I was able to be home in time for dinner, and that’s when we always had a lot of fun at our house, at the dinner table, just as we did at home when I was a child. Keith liked to carry on that same tradition, that dinner time was a family time. Ruth entered into that spirit a great deal. She was always a great hand who liked to do things nicely, and she taught the children how to behave at mealtime at the table. She always said that you couldn’t take kids out to eat unless they knew how to behave themselves and to handle themselves, and that it was important as the boys were growing up that as they went out to other people’s homes or took girls on dates or anything of that sort, that they should know the proper etiquette so as not to be embarrassed. I certainly agreed with her on that, because I remember as a young girl how much better I felt going out when I did know somewhat how to behave myself and the proper things to do. Anyway, we did have a lot of fun at the table.

One thing that I still have trouble with my friends about when they come to visit is the matter of napkins. Ruth hated paper napkins. We always had to have a tablecloth and cloth napkins on the table. She hated plastic tablecloths too, and we never ate off a plastic tablecloth. We always had some sort of a tablecloth on the table and we always had cloth napkins. To this day when I entertain and my friends say, “Oh, you shouldn’t give us these cloth napkins,” I say, “Well, if I didn’t, Ruth would probably just turn over in her grave if I were ever to use paper napkins at a dinner table in our house.”

Ruth and I did quite a lot of things together that year and other years; I don’t remember exactly which years we did what though, so I’ll just have to tell you little stories of things as I remember them, and they may not be in the right spots at all. I do remember one night us going to a show. We came home from the show and the lights were on and when we came in, we heard someone out in the kitchen. We went out in the kitchen and here was Keith, frying bacon and eggs, and a tramp was sitting holding the baby. Of course he had, by this time, washed and combed his hair and looked fairly respectable. Keith, here again, was like my father. He always insisted that tramps must be fed and must be treated as people. Ruth was quite taken aback and quite shocked when she came in and saw the tramp holding the baby. He had his meal and had intended to walk out to where the highway met the railroad tracks and then he was going to catch a freight train there. Keith then got out his car and told him he would give him a ride out to that point, which he did. When he came back, he told us that as the tramp got out of the car, he thanked him for the meal and for his courtesy, and he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t do this again.” He said, “When I came to your home, I had every intention of leaving with whatever money you had and with your car.” But he said, “You were so nice to me and as I held that little baby in my arms and all, and as the evening progressed and then you offered me this ride, I realized that I could not do that to you. But,” he said, “if I were you, I would not do what you have done for me again.” I don’t know whether Keith learned anything from that or not. I can’t ever remember the time when we were not good to tramps who came to our house.

Mr. C.C. Anderson was a scary little old man until you got to know him. I really didn’t get to know him until many years after the store had opened, but I do recall my first encounter with him. He was a small man, a little bit heavy-set. He had a thatch of gray hair and real bushy gray eyebrows and the most piercing eyes that you can ever imagine. He didn’t have very much to say, but when he talked, you listened. The first time I remember talking with him was shortly after the store opened, and I hadn’t really known who he was. I saw this little man standing by the counter as I was finishing up with a customer and was wrapping her package. I will admit that I did wrap a good package. That was one of the things that Mr. Ferris had always insisted on. We didn’t have bags like we have nowadays that the clerk can just stuff your items in and hand to you. Our packages had to be wrapped in paper and tied up with string. Mr. Ferris always insisted that the fabric, if it was fabric you were selling, must be folded in a way that would wrinkle it the very least in the wrapping of it, or whatever else you were selling—you must think how you were wrapping it and wrap it as carefully as you could so that it would look just as fresh as possible when the customer opened it. I guess I had just learned to do this automatically, and so I had wrapped this lady’s package and handed it to her.

Then I turned to this little man standing there to ask him what I could do for him, and he said, “Girl”—he always called me “Girl”; as long as I ever knew Mr. Anderson, I was always just “Girl” to him—but on this occasion he said, “Girl, I hope when that lady gets home and opens her package she will be as pleased with her purchase as she was when she left the store.” I thought at first he meant the wrapping of it, and he did compliment me on the wrapping, but he said, “I didn’t hear you make the sale, but,” he said, “I hope you told her what the merchandise would do, what it wouldn’t do, how to take care of it, and if it was something to be stored in the winter, how it should be stored, and all of the essential things that she must know about that merchandise.” I said yes, I thought I had, and he said, “Good,” and turned and walked away.

That impressed me very much, and I have told girls that have worked for me about that many times, that in making a sale, so often we’re more inclined just to work on selling the merchandise to the customer and not letting her know what her responsibility to that merchandise is as she cares for it after she gets it home. I’ve always remembered that about him. As I did know Mr. Anderson in later years, I found out that he was just a great big bluff. He scared you to death until you knew better. Then you realized that he was just having a right good time and was very much amused when he could put the fear of his condemnation on you. He really became one of my favorite people in the company.

Things went along beautifully for about a year at the store. I loved my work, and of course I loved the opportunity of being able to be at home more with the family. I thought I really had it made at last. But after about a year, suddenly, with no warning at all, Mr. Barker was transferred to Grand Junction, Colorado, and we received a brand new manager by the name of Mr. Jessey. I was heartbroken, but I made up my mind that the only honest thing that I could do would be to accept the new manager and give him all of the loyalty and all of the help that I could. I soon learned that he didn’t want any help from anybody. He was a very arrogant person and had an extremely bad temper, and it was just impossible for us to like him. He would gather us together in a meeting, and he would start out very nicely, telling us what he wanted us to do, and as the meeting progressed, he would get louder and more angry, and by the time the meeting was over he would just be giving us the worst lecture you could imagine. His language was terrible. If he became angry with a girl on the selling floor, he would swear at her and call her “stupid” and “dumb” and anything that he chose. He would do this in front of a customer, which was very embarrassing to the clerk and certainly shocking to the customer.

We all decided that we were sure that he must have had a mental breakdown or something, because his oldest daughter worked in the store (he gave her the job), and we soon noticed that whenever he got into one of these extremely bad moods, that it would only be a few minutes until his wife would come and get him and take him home. The girls who worked near his daughter said that she would go to the phone and call her mother.

He came from California and had worked in one of the better stores there (I really don’t know which one) and was supposed to be a marvelous manager and a really high-powered man in business. He certainly did not know how to handle people, and he was not liked by any of the people in the store, or at least not by very many, nor by the people in the community, because he could not hold his temper. That period after he came changed things completely, and we didn’t find the store nearly as happy as it had been.


Chapter 7
Changes: Keith’s Death and the War

Going back home, Andrew had come along by this time. He was a real cute, happy, healthy baby, and we enjoyed him very much. That spring Keith and Ruth decided to take the younger children and go back over to Greeley to summer school again.[1] Again, Frank and Grant went out to stay at Uncle Fred’s, and Max stayed at home with me. I don’t know how much help Frank and Grant were out at Fred’s. They were big enough boys to be quite a lot of help by this time. I think Frank was about 15 and that would make Grant nearly 17. Fred had a bunch of boys of his own, and I’ve often thought of my father’s saying that two boys were half as good as one boy, and three boys were just no good at all. I wondered sometimes how Fred got along with all of these boys.[2] Knowing Fred, I’m sure he managed.

I really get a lot of fun out of listening to Wayne and Frank, when they’re here at the house at the same time, discuss some of the things that happened out at the farm that summer. One of the things that Wayne particularly likes to rib Frank about is the time he ran the truck into the well. In fact, their stories are just a little bit different on how it happened, and I don’t know which one is correct. The thing that seems to have stayed with Frank more than anything else was how calmly Fred came out of the house and looked the situation over, and his only remark was, “Have you figured out how you’re going to get it out?” I don’t know just how they got it out, but apparently they did, and it all worked out well.

Fred was always like that: very quiet and very gentle. Yet, if he did get mad, he could be about as mad as anybody I’ve ever known. But he rarely ever got mad at people. He sometimes got mad at things, and he got mad at situations and things of that sort, but he was always pretty much able to control his temper where people were concerned. He always had a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of empathy, particularly with young people.

My relationship with Mr. Jessey deteriorated very rapidly that summer. I guess I can get mad too, and when he would get angry with my girls and would say disagreeable things to them and actually swear at them and demand apologies and what not, I just couldn’t take it. I would make all the effort that I could to defend them, and of course this displeased him very much. I think had it not been that I had gained a fairly good place in the company, as far as the people from the Boise office and the New York people were concerned, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have fired me on one or two occasions when I told him in rather clear terms how I felt about the way he was treating some of my girls. It was starting to be a really rather unhappy summer for me. I couldn’t come home and talk it over with Keith and Ruth because they were gone, and I don’t suppose that helped matters any either.

Keith C Wahlquist

It was along toward the end of June on a Sunday, we were just sitting down to the table for dinner, Max and I, and I’m not sure whether Roy and Maude were here for dinner. It seems to me there were more than Max and I here, but I’m not sure just who was here. It could have been Ruth’s mother here having dinner with us. I remember the telephone rang and it was Ruth to tell us that Keith was in the hospital and very desperately ill, and for us to bring the boys and come at once, else we might not be able to see him before he passed away, that the doctors were holding out practically no hope for recovery. During that winter and spring, Keith had had a number of boils on his neck, and as I’ve told you, he never did get over having a lot of infections and blood poisoning and so on from the time that he had had spinal meningitis in the army. It seemed that on Saturday morning he had shaved and had cut a pimple on his upper lip and by Saturday night he was in the hospital in very bad condition with blood poisoning. There was nothing to treat blood poisoning with except sulfa at that period, and so by noon the next day, on Sunday, the doctors had suggested to Ruth that perhaps she should call the other members of his family.

We were stunned, but we hurried and got ready to leave. I’m not sure whether Roy had a car then. I guess he did; if not, he arranged to get someone else’s car. Mrs. Folkman got a few things together and I did, and Max, and we started out. Roy drove; Maude did not go with us. We were to pick up Grant and Frank out at Fred’s and bring them with us. It was a very smooth trip over there. We certainly were blessed with no trouble with the car and in making excellent time. When we got to Fred’s—we had phoned ahead, and the boys were ready. We merely stopped a very few minutes, and Fred said that he would clean up what work he could and that he would follow us the next day. We drove all night, and the boys were terribly upset. I will never forget Grant saying on the way over that if Dad died, he would never pray again. He told me later that he never did pray again until he was in the foxholes in Germany.

We went by way of Denver[3] and got into Denver about daylight and drove right through the city and on to Greeley. I don’t know just what time we got into Greeley, but it was probably around noon. Keith’s room faced the street, so Ruth had been watching for us and when she saw the car drive up, she came down the steps to meet us. She had been with him all night, and she said that he was in very bad shape. Someone had taken care of the children for her so that she wouldn’t need to be away—so she could be with him, except that she had had to go home to nurse Andrew. T.O. Smith was over in Greeley that same summer. I’m not sure that Mrs. Smith was with him—I don’t believe she was—but he had been very good to Ruth, and he had taken her back and forth and had stayed with her through the night.[4]

We saw Keith, of course, and we realized that he was very ill, and we talked with the doctors. I don’t know just how long Roy stayed. Fred arrived the next day, and he and Roy stayed for a few days. They decided that it was going to be a long, drawn-out illness. Whether or not he would make it or not, they weren’t sure, but they decided that it would be some time. It would just be a matter of whether his body would be able to withstand the illness. Fred and Roy decided that they would have to get back to their work, and Ruth suggested that they take Grant and Frank back with them. I had made up my mind that I would stay.[5]

It was a terrible month. Keith lived until the 25th of July. Ruth had the car there and we stayed at the hospital all day. Mrs. Folkman took care of the children and Ruth would go home periodically when it was time to nurse Andrew for a little while and come back. Then at night I guess T.O.—I never can remember just how it happened—but I guess T.O. Smith would take her home and they would leave the car at the hospital and I would sleep in the back seat of the car at night, if you could call it sleep. I used to sit so that I could see when the light would come on in his room, and when it did, I would go up to see what was going on. The next morning Ruth would come back with T.O. and then take me home to the little apartment that they had, and I would have a shower and sleep perhaps for a few hours and then walk back to the hospital. I just didn’t seem to be able to stay away from the hospital. I couldn’t think of anybody or anything else.

I knew that Mrs. Folkman had her hands full with the children, although the missionaries by this time had come to our rescue too, and they would take the children to the park and spend a great deal of time with them.

Keith was in a great deal of pain and a tremendous amount of distress. He was delirious a good part of the time; his temperature was very high. They had him in an oxygen tent practically all of the time. The sulfa affected his kidneys and he was not able to tolerate it. For some time they used sulfathiazole, which was the first time I had ever heard of it (it was still in the experimental stage); it would be flown in from Chicago every day, and then each day they had to report back to Chicago what his reaction to it had been.

The nights were pretty awful sometimes. I would go up when I would see the light come on, and at first the nurses were not going to let me in, but soon I was spending a great deal of time in his room. In fact, they finally put a cot in his room and I could lie down in there sometimes. They would not touch him except with rubber gloves. I’m sure they were rubber and not plastic, though they could have been. I don’t think we had plastic then; I think they would have had to have been rubber. They would be cold and clammy, and as he was in this oxygen tent, he would have the feeling that he was down in a well, and he used to beg me to get him out of the well. He seemed to always know me. I don’t recall any time when he didn’t know who I was. They would tell me not to touch him, but I used to open the tent and put my hands in and take hold of his hands, because I knew how horrible it must be for him with these clammy rubber gloves and the clammy cold air from the oxygen tent. I could talk to him and usually quiet him so he would go back to sleep a bit. The nurses finally just gave in and put a bowl of disinfectant water by the side of the bed, and after I would touch him, I was supposed to wash my hands and dry them.

This went on night after night after night throughout that month, and I’m sure during the day of course Ruth would try to comfort him and talk to him. I tried to comfort her, and we comforted each other. One thing I must tell you, though. While he was still in the oxygen tent, I remember one night we had a terrific electric storm and the lights went off in the hospital, which shut off the oxygen tent. I’ll never forget that night. The power was off for perhaps an hour or so, and they had all of the windows open, and we stood over him with fans to fan the air to try to keep enough air for him, but before the lights went back on he was really gasping for air. Finally he seemed to be getting a little better. He became rational and things began looking a little better. He had got well enough that they had taken the oxygen tent off him and he was beginning to feel better. We were beginning to talk about when he came out of the hospital, that I would get a little apartment and stay in Denver for awhile with him until he was able to come home, and that Ruth and the children would come back.

You must realize that by this time we were getting pretty broke between us, and I decided that I would try and get a job. I went down to Penney’s and asked for a job. The Penney’s store in Greeley was rather a nice Penney’s store, and I think it was one of the better stores in town, though I really don’t remember much about Greeley. They gave me a job, and it was in the corset department, and that was one department that I had never ever had any experience in. I didn’t know the first thing about fitting a lady in a foundation garment, and I don’t know that I ever tried. I think they just put me at a counter where I was supposed to sell brassieres and things, and lightweight garments and things that women bought without trying on.

I was still sleeping all night in the car and then I would go down and get a shower and get cleaned up and go to the store. Actually, there were not enough beds in the apartment, so there would have been no place for me to have slept at night if I’d have wanted to. I would crawl into somebody’s bed and sleep a few hours before I could go to work. I was living on No-Doz. It’s my one and only experience with No-Doz and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. I was so tired—and so worried, of course—I really just didn’t know what I was doing. I must have been a terrible salesperson, and I’m sure they regretted ever having hired me. I was only there about a week, and I doubt very much that I would have been there another week, because the manager had already talked to me two or three times about my sales. It’s the first time in all of the history of my work up until that time that I felt that I was a failure so far as my work was concerned. I just simply could not concentrate on what I was doing. I was so near asleep, or else it was the No-Doz or something, but I was only about half-conscious.

After I had been there just a week, the missionaries suddenly came into the store and told me that I must come at once, that Keith had had a heart attack and was dying. I simply left my customer. I don’t know what ever happened to her. I never said anything to management; I just ran with them and we got in the car and rushed back to the hospital and found that Keith by this time had gone unconscious. I don’t know how much pain he had had, but by the time I got there, the pain was gone and he was unconscious and was barely breathing. I stood there with Ruth until he ceased to breathe.

I’ve always felt that Ruth held Keith probably longer than he would have lived otherwise. She simply could not understand that he was not going to get well, and I remember the very first words that she said as the doctor told us that he had gone: she said, “I didn’t believe that it would happen.”

I’ve often felt that Keith may have had a premonition that he was not going to get well. I’m sure he tried very hard to live and fought very hard (I don’t know if I have said or not, but he had both staphylococcus and streptococcus and it was an impossible combination), but I remember when he was beginning to get a little better and we were talking about me staying over there and getting a job and taking care of him until he was well enough to come home, he and I were alone at the time, and he said to me, “Mabel, don’t worry about getting a job. Just think about going home and helping Ruth with the children.” I wondered afterwards if he knew at that time that he was perhaps not going to make it.

An odd thing happened just as he died that Ruth and I have talked about many times. It was a perfectly clear day, but just as he died, there was one great big clap of thunder. Our family has a rather funny feeling about this. It seems like we have nearly always had some Thing that we’ve known—just before my father died, a similar thing happened—somehow we seem to have this feeling that we have known when some one of the family were going to leave us.

Everyone was kind to us. I’m sure the doctors and nurses who had worked so hard to save Keith felt very sorry when he died, and they were extremely kind to us. The missionaries received permission from the president of the mission to help us to get home, to drive Keith’s car home. T.O. Smith brought Ruth and some of the children. The missionaries drove Ruth’s car and I rode with them. I don’t remember how we were arranged in the cars, but we came home with the two cars. We had notified Fred, and he brought Grant and Frank, and they arrived here very shortly after we had arrived home. Keith’s body was brought by train. They were still having the bodies brought to the home rather than viewings at the mortuaries, and so his body was here in the front room for a few days, and friends called here to visit. Ruth and the little children—it was touching to see them go and look at their father there in the casket, Joe and Elizabeth and Keith.

Keith’s children after his death: Max, Grant, Frank;
Joe, Elizabeth, Keith, and Andrew

Keith’s funeral was held in the Ogden tabernacle. It was a very nice service; it was an awfully long service I know. In addition to the regular service there was an army tribute paid to him, and then he was buried in Salt Lake at Wasatch Lawn next to his first wife, Eva. It was an interesting thing that he was married just about the same length of time to Eva and to Ruth: just about ten years to each of them.

Ruth did a very good job of holding up. I really felt that she was a very courageous person. It was that same fall that she went back to teaching school. She got a job teaching out at Lincoln I think, teaching elementary school. Before school started, she had to have all of her teeth removed, and she started teaching school with a brand-new set of false teeth. She was still nursing Andrew, so she had to come home at recess to nurse him and rush back over to school for several months after school started. The worst problem that we had was getting help, getting someone to stay with the children so that she and I could both be gone. The people in the ward helped quite a bit in that respect. We did get a girl who stayed with us for some time, from North Ogden, and I’ll tell you a few more things about that as we go along.


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Notes:

1. Keith was going to finish his doctoral degree that summer. He was the Superintendent of Weber County Schools. The faculty at the college in Greeley actually had him teach the classes he needed to finish the degree as he had already mastered all of the material; they were paying him and would give him the credits he needed. He had finished his dissertation already as well.
2. Fred’s children at this time, besides the twins Charles and Fred, were Bryan, Wayne, Glen, and Earl. Brent, their last, was born after this time.
3. With no interstate freeways, they would have connected with Highway 40 near Vernal, Utah, and followed it over the Continental Divide at Berthoud Pass (elev. 11,307 ft) and down into Denver; then they would have taken Route 85 northeast to Greeley.
4. T.O. (Thomas Ole) Smith was one of Keith Wahlquist’s best friends. He was eight years younger than Keith and was principal of Lincoln Elementary School in Ogden (later he became principal of Washington Junior High, then Ogden High School, and finally superintendent of the Ogden City Schools). He and Keith had previously spent a summer school session living in a tent together in Logan and attending classes at the Agricultural College (now Utah State University). They had decided to spend that summer session in Greeley together. T.O. Smith never went back to Greeley after that summer; Ruth said that he could not stand to be there afterwards. Mrs. Smith was there in Greeley that summer, probably with all their children, including their daughter, Olene, who became Governor of Utah in 2003. Olene, age 9 at the time, played with the Wahlquist children. T.O. Smith gave Ruth Wahlquist the job teaching at Lincoln Elementary that fall.
5. Mabel did not say whether Max went back to Utah with his brothers or whether he stayed in Greeley that month. It seems most logical to think that Max went home with Roy to Ogden.

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Go to Part 16 here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 14

This is part 14 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 13, Mabel and her mother were living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family in Ogden off and on while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. This part concerns 1935 to 1938, including her mother’s death and the different places she worked between her long job at Wright’s and going to work for C.C. Anderson.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

I would guess that my mother’s death was the hardest thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know just how long she had been having a series of small strokes. They were always accompanied by an upset stomach, and I’m sure it was quite some time before we recognized that it was anything else. They finally became severe enough that she would have a temporary loss of the use of one of her limbs and a few days of confusion in her mind. We did call Dr. Strandquist in, and he told us that she was having some slight strokes. It seemed that it was the breaking of a blood vessel in the brain—a slight breaking—so that just a few drops of blood would go onto the brain, and whatever part of the body that portion of the brain controlled, that was where she felt the results. I don’t know whether he was trying to make us feel better about it, but he told us that that was the problem that President Wilson had had during the years of his illness. These illnesses became a little bit more frequent, and they lasted for some time before she finally had a bad stroke.

Mabel’s favorite picture of her mother,
Elizabeth Campbell Wahlquist

Her first severe stroke came while she and I were alone. Keith and Ruth and the family had gone on a trip to California. They went directly to San Francisco, and when they got there, they decided that as long as they were there, they might just as well go down the 101 Highway to Los Angeles and let the children see the ocean, that they might not have another opportunity very soon. This took a few days longer, and in addition to that, they had a little bad luck. They had stopped the car by an electric train track, and as one of the boys got out of the car, he had left the car door open, and while they were looking at whatever they had stopped for, a train came roaring by and took the car door off. They had had to stop for repairs and that had delayed them a day or two. That meant they were gone longer than they had planned to be.

Mother had her stroke in the night and it was more severe than she had ever had before, and she was extremely confused. She got it into her mind that someone was in the room that we had previously rented. It was not rented at that time. She talked with a number of people that weren’t there, and things were just very distorted. It was a very eerie feeling for me and I was extremely frightened. The next morning she was somewhat better, but the paralysis had affected her one leg and her arm and it was difficult for her. She could walk with help, but it was difficult. I had to stay home from work with her for several days. The confusion in her mind remained for several days, but not as bad as it had been. I’m sure Roy and Maude must have been out at Roosevelt at the time. They didn’t have a telephone, but Roy always stopped in every few days, and he did come in before Keith and Ruth got back. I’m sure that Maude was not in Ogden, or I know that she would have come and stayed with me, and I wouldn’t have been alone. I was alone with her for several days. Sometime during that time I do remember that Fred came and stayed a day or two, but Mother seemed quite a lot better, and so he, being in a hurry, had gone.

When I thought Mother was well enough that I could go back to work if I had someone to be with her, I got my first blow when I called the Relief Society president and asked her. I told her my problem and asked for help. Mother was not a member of Relief Society in the Fifth Ward; she had not been able to go. Ruth didn’t go to Relief Society either; she worked in the Primary, and I’m sure she would have gone to Relief Society and taken Mother if Mother had been able to go. Whether that had anything to do with it or not I don’t know, but when I asked the president for help, she said she was sorry, but they just didn’t go out and do that anymore.

I was furious. I remembered all of those miles that my little mother had covered in her years as the Relief Society president and I felt that she had earned the right to be taken care of. I didn’t say anything of this to her, nor did I call the bishop, but I did ask her if she didn’t know of someone who would come and help; I would be glad to pay them. She said if she heard of anyone, she would let me know. I didn’t hear any more from her and she never did come to the home to see how my mother was, and I was deeply hurt. I didn’t tell my mother anything about it; I’m sure that she didn’t know that this happened.

Keith and Ruth got home, and of course they were terribly sorry that this had happened while they were away and so very sorry that they had been as long as they were getting back. No one could blame them because they had no way of knowing that such a thing was going to happen. By the time they got back, Mother was much improved, but she never did get very well after that. Ruth would watch out for her during the day while I was gone, and I would be with her at night. She was very restless at night and I got very little sleep, and I got rather run down during that summer.

It was in August that I wakened and went to work leaving her asleep, which was not unusual to do, because she would be awake nearly all night and by morning she would be exhausted and would fall into a sleep. She had done that this night, so when I went to work she was still sleeping. About 11 o’clock Ruth called me and said that they had not been able to waken her. She was in a coma for thirty-six hours and then she passed away without waking.[1] I remember running down stairs—those back stairs—when the undertaker came to take her body away and finding poor Max huddled on the bed on the back porch crying. I sat down by him and we sat with our arms around one another while my mother’s body was being taken away.

Fred and Roy arrived rather soon after Mother’s death, but we were in a dilemma about what to do about Jack. He had been teaching in Washington D.C. that summer and had his family with him. They had decided that they would come home by way of Canada and make a rather extended trip out of it, and we were not expecting them home for about two or three weeks. We didn’t feel that we should wait that long before Mother should be buried. Dr. Strandquist made the decision for us. He seemed to feel that I couldn’t take quite that long a time. I had gotten quite tired and worn down and for some reason or other I was unable to cry. He felt this was the result of nerves.

We went ahead with the preparation for Mother’s funeral, and her body was brought back to the house, as was common in those days, for a day or two so that friends and neighbors could come in and see her and visit with us. This of course, was in lieu of what we now do when we have a viewing. I remember during that time standing in the living room looking at Mother there in the casket. She looked so very beautiful, so rested and peaceful, and my eyes went instinctively to her hands. Mother had beautiful hands. With all of the work that she had done and with all of the arthritis and problems that she had had, it had not affected her hands. Her joints were not swollen, her fingers were long and tapered and very pretty. She had lovely hands.

As I stood and looked at her, I realized that she didn’t have her wedding ring on, and I suddenly remembered the many times she had said to me, “I mustn’t be buried without my wedding ring.” Her hands would sometimes swell, and she would have to take the ring off, and of course in the forty-some-odd years she had worn it, it had become rather worn and thin (it was just a plain gold band), and she had gently put it away. Now I thought, well Mother must not be buried without this wedding ring. I remembered her saying that Charlie might not know her if she got up there without her wedding ring. I dashed upstairs and started tearing the room apart trying to find the ring. I finally did find it, carefully wrapped in a handkerchief in the bottom of one of the dresser drawers. I took it down and put it on her hand. As I stood there looking at her, things seemed to fall in place and everything seemed to be all right. I remembered that she had told me the day before she went into her coma that my father had been there with her, and I remembered the dream that she had had, and I thought that after these twelve years of waiting, that the time had finally come when he had come for her and they could talk again. And then I cried.

Mother’s funeral was held in the Fifth Ward. I don’t remember who the speakers were, other than Harold Eldredge. Harold had visited us while Mother was ill, and I remember him saying at the funeral that both he and Mother had realized that they were saying goodbye to each other when he left. Ruth’s uncle Nephi J. Brown sang Mother’s favorite song, “The Holy City.” After the services she was taken to Heber City for burial, and there were a number of old friends there when we arrived. She was buried next to her baby, Ruth. It was not very long after that that my brothers brought my father’s remains from Myton and buried him there beside Mother.[2]

Jack was heartbroken when he got home and found that Mother had died and been buried without him. We had felt awfully bad about it. They got into Salt Lake late in the evening and telephoned us as soon as they arrived and came directly up when we had told them what had happened. I’m not sure that Jack ever did quite forgive us. He said that he never quite could realize that his mother had gone, the fact that he had not been there at the time of her funeral, which also reminded me of how Roy felt when Father died when he was in the mission field. I remembered so clearly when he came home that all of us had made the adjustment to Father’s death, but he had not, and it seemed that when we would be talking he would sort of be expecting Father. I suppose that’s the way Jack felt, and I’ve always been sorry about it. It did teach us, as a family, a lesson though. That is, we have made very sure since then that everyone knew where everyone else was, so that if any emergency did arise, we were able to get in touch with all of the members of the family and that no one would be put in this position again.

I missed Mother terribly, but I stayed on with Keith and Ruth and their family. It was now 1935, and except for the few times that Mother and I had had an apartment, she and I had lived with them. We had a very close relationship with them. I had always been very close to the big boys, and of course I loved each of Ruth’s children as they came along, and it was very fortunate for me that I had them to be with, or I’m sure I would have been much more lonely.

Ruth and I had rather a unique relationship. We had neither of us ever had a sister, and so we had sort of adopted each other and we had always had a very close relationship. I had appreciated so much her kindness to Mother during her illness. We always had a lot of fun together. I remember one time we went to a show before one of the children was born, I don’t remember which one. We went to the—I can’t remember what the name of the show house was—just above Washington Boulevard on 25th Street—and as we came out, it had been snowing and it was very slick. Ruth was quite pregnant at the time, and as we started down the hill, both her feet went out from under her and she started to fall. I knew that would be bad, so I grabbed her under the arms, and—we’ve laughed about it so many times—we, both of us, slid down the hill, me with my hands under her arms as if she were a wheelbarrow, until we reached Washington Boulevard, where she was able to stand up.

I don’t remember too much what happened that next winter at the store, probably some of the things that I’ve already told you, because as you know, I’ve just been telling you things as I happened to think of them. I’m quite sure that was the year, however, that Mr. Ferris became very ill and had surgery and was away from the store for several months. Gus Wright put me in charge. I did all of the buying and supervised the department and the girls, and it was really quite a wonderful experience for me. I used to go up—after Mr. Ferris got out of the hospital of course—to his place at night and talk everything over with him, and he would tell me what he thought I should do.

That spring Keith had arranged through a friend of his for me to work at Zion Canyon in the Curio Store. I wasn’t at all sure that I should do this, but when I talked to Mr. Ferris and Gus Wright, they both agreed that they thought it would be a good idea and not to worry about it, because my job would be there when I came back. I’m sure Keith did this thinking that I needed this change. I went, and it was really a wonderful experience for me.

It was the first time I had ever been away from home of course, away from some of the family, and I did miss them. It was also the first time that I had ever had any experience with this type of merchandise or with this type of living. We lived in cabins by the lodge, and we ate our meals in the lodge in the guest dining room. This wasn’t true of everybody who worked there. The waitresses and the maids and the bellhops all ate out in the kitchen. We who worked in the Curio Store were considered rather a different group, and we had many privileges that were not allowed the others. In fact, the maids were expected to make up our cabins. That, too, was a new experience for me.

We had a lot of beautiful Indian merchandise, lots of beautiful jewelry, some of it marked “Made in Jersey,” but maybe they had Indians in Jersey too; I don’t know. We had the jackets and the rugs, Navajo rugs, and the serapes. We had a lot of pottery and just a wealth of Indian merchandise. That was the only thing we did carry, was Indian merchandise, except of course for candy bars and cigarettes and things of that type. At one end of the Curio Store also, there was a soda fountain and there was a young fellow hired there to be the soda jerk. When he was out to lunch, we took turns taking care of it. At any time we were allowed to go back to the counter and get ourselves a soda or a sundae or whatever, the result of which I gained ten pounds, which I needed then.

Staff at Zion Canyon Park, Mabel the tallest in the center.

We did carry a great many postcards. It was quite a thing to see those big buses of tourists come rolling up to the lodge and the tourists come swarming out of them and into the store. Their first question was always, “How soon will we see a Mormon?” My answer was always, “Just look right straight ahead.” I was quite a disappointment to them. I didn’t look at all like a Mormon was supposed to look: no horns. One thing that always surprised me about tourists was that they all gathered around the postcards rack and bought any amount of postcards, stood in the curio store and wrote the postcards to Aunt Susie and everybody that they knew, got their stamps, went and mailed them, climbed back on the bus, and away they went. That was as much as many of them saw of the park, but they could go home and tell their friends that they had been to Zion National Park. There were others, busloads, who came and stayed overnight or even a few days, and they did see the Park. And so did we.

Our hours were arranged in such a way that we could see the Park. In the store, we went to work, for example, at 2 o’clock on Monday and worked until 10 at night when the store was closed, with time off for our dinner. The next morning we went to work when the store opened, at 6 or at 7, and worked that day until 2, when the other girls came on. In this way, you see, we had a full evening and a full morning together to see the Park, and then we were on duty again from 2 the one day until 2 the next day. I really saw Zion Park, all the way from miles up the Narrows to the top of Angel’s Landing. That was a really beautiful sight from Angel’s Landing, directly across from the Great White Throne. You could see it so much better from there than you could from down in the bottom of the canyon. That was quite an eventful day. That was one place we had to go with a group of tourists and with a guide.

We went up the trail on mules, and when we reached the top, we were way above the timber line and had a beautiful view of the canyon. The only problem was that the guide had forgotten to bring his water bags. It was hot as could be up there, and dry, and we were equally dry. I never was so thirsty in all my life. A group of young fellows had some cans of beer, which they opened and very accommodatingly passed around. I will admit I was so thirsty I took a sip of that warm beer. It was horrible. I suppose it was a good experience for me because I certainly lost my desire to ever drink beer. Despite our discomfort, it was still a wonderful day. There were so many beautiful places to see in Zion Canyon. To me it’s the prettiest of all of the canyons, probably because it’s more accessible. You can climb around and see so many sights.

I made some very good friends while I was there. The majority of the younger people there were LDS, but not all of the officials. The best friend I made during that time was Faye Williams from Morgan. She doesn’t happen to be LDS but had been raised among Mormons. They have the Williams Department Store, I think still, in Morgan. Faye was a lovely girl, was loads of fun. She and I were friends for many, many years; in fact, I suppose we still are friends, but we don’t see each other a great deal since I’ve been retired. It used to be that when she would be in Ogden, she would occasionally come in, and we would have lunch together.

It was Faye who arranged for Frank, when he was running for his first time to be District Judge, to speak on the same program at Morgan with Doug Stringfellow. He might consider that a rather dubious honor now, but at that time he was rather pleased about it because Doug Stringfellow was the real thing in those days. It was before his downfall.[3]

Mabel at Zion Canyon

Faye and I didn’t room together. I roomed with the girl who was the nurse. We were good friends too, but not nearly so close as Faye and I. I did have the experience of tagging around for awhile with the fellow who was there to take the photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, that owned the Parks at that time, and from which they made the postcards. After the first few times, this was a little tiresome, because he was an expert in his work and sometimes we would have to sit and wait for hours for the sun to get just right, or for that cloud to move to exactly the right spot, or for something to happen that would make his picture especially good. It was an interesting experience and I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed selling the merchandise too. It was really interesting to look at and to learn more about. There were some perfectly beautiful things. We had a little Navajo jeweler there who made up rings and things for people, and it was very interesting to watch his work with the turquoise, setting it into rings for people. I’m trying to think of his name. I think it must be rather a common name that was adopted by many of the Indians, because any time that I was ever back at the Park, there was always a jeweler there and he always had the same name.

We weren’t paid very much. We got just $30 a month, but this included our room and board. It was very nice board, and there really was no place to spend any money, except an occasional bar of candy, unless you wanted to buy a lot of the merchandise that was in the store. I loved it and would have liked to have bought much of it, but I had learned before then that I couldn’t buy everything that I wanted to buy, and so I came home with most of the money that I had earned in my pocket.

I hadn’t been back at Wright’s very long that fall until I realized that something was wrong. When I would go to Mr. Ferris and suggest that we should buy something, he would put me off with, “Well, let’s wait a little while.” Our stocks began running down and we were out of so many things that people came to buy. Finally, I guess Mr. Ferris could see that I was getting impatient because we weren’t replacing our stocks, and finally he told me that the store was going to go out of business. During the Depression, Wright’s had extended a great deal of credit to their customers and had in turn bought on credit, and things were beginning to catch up with them. The wholesale houses that they had bought from had no doubt bought on credit and were being squeezed by the manufacturers, and they in turn were squeezing the store. Wright’s made an effort to collect from their customers, but their customers didn’t seem to be very much concerned. As a result, it was just becoming apparent that they would not be able to go on any great length of time this way.

People are very funny, I think. During that time, Penney’s were in business down where The Bon is now, in the old building, and they were doing business on cash. How they got the reputation, I don’t know, because it actually was not true, but people seemed to feel that they sold a little bit cheaper than Wright’s did. If someone had cash, they always went to Penney’s to buy, but if they wanted to charge, if they didn’t have cash, then they came to Wright’s and charged it.

I’m sure Wright’s could have worked their way out of their problem and gone on with their business, but none of the sons had chosen to be interested in retailing, and there were none of them that ever worked in the store, to my knowledge. I think that Arthur and Gus and their sister decided that it was a good time to close the store and to go on to other endeavors. Almost as soon as it was being rumored that they were going to close, Penney’s were immediately anxious to get a lease on their building. If I have my figures correct, they do have, from the time Wright’s closed, a 40-year lease on that building, at $30,000 a year, which was an immense figure at that time. It probably doesn’t sound so big now, but it meant $10,000 a year for each of the three members of the family, which in those days was not a bad living.

I really don’t know exactly when it was announced that they would close, and when we started our close-out sale. Seeing the demise of an old institution like that, that had served the community so many years is really sad to watch. We started marking down merchandise and selling and not replacing it. By the time that I left the store, which was probably about a week before they closed, we were down to almost bare tables, and they were then beginning to sell the tables and the other store fixtures.

I had had an opportunity that year to manage the curio store at Zion Canyon. Miss Foley, who had been the manager, and that I worked under, was going on to Grand Canyon as a manager there. I considered taking the job, but it would have meant that I would have had to go down to Cedar City in April in order to get the merchandise marked and selected, and then get on down to the Canyon to get it in place and be ready to open on Decoration Day, which is when they always opened the store. Many people said, “Well, dummy, why don’t you do that? After all, you’re going to be out of a job here right away.” Somehow I felt the responsibility of staying on and helping with the sale. I felt that I owed Wright’s a debt, and I felt that I owed a great deal to Mr. Ferris. It was going to be the end of work so far as Mr. Ferris was concerned, because he was near retirement, but he probably could have gone on for a few more years had the store continued.

We began our sale along about April, and I left near the end of June. They had offered me a place to come to at the Grand Canyon for the balance of the summer. Miss Foley had written and had said that she could use me. Here again, some people thought I was rather stupid that I went down there for two months, knowing that when I got through that I would be out of a job and would be having to look for a job. I had written a letter to Auerbach’s and had received an answer that they would interview me, and also from Montgomery Ward. A number of the salesmen that I had worked with had told me that they would help me to find something in the area. Many people suggested that I apply at Penney’s.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to apply at Penney’s. I think part of it was that there had been a certain amount of rivalry between the two stores for a long time, and part of it was that I didn’t feel that, and it was true at that time, they didn’t carry the quality of merchandise that we did at Wright’s and that I had become accustomed to sell. Penney’s have traded up considerably in the past few years, but even now I think that I would not be especially happy working at Penney’s.

I took the job at Grand Canyon and spent two months down there, all of July and August. I think I was there into September. I did enjoy it tremendously. At Grand Canyon I was on the north rim. They always say that the north rim is the most beautiful, but you have to be on the south rim to see it. It is beautiful even if you’re on the north rim. The lodge has burned down since, the lodge that was there when I was there, and it was a beautiful old place. It was all entirely different from Zion, where you were in the bottom of the canyon looking up. At Grand Canyon, you were at the rim of the canyon looking down. It was entirely a reverse situation. It’s considerably higher than Zion, than the bottom, naturally, of Zion Canyon, so we had some things that were different in our activities. We stayed in cabins as we had done at Zion and ate in the dining room and had all the privileges that we had had at Zion. There were so many deer there, that was one thing that was interesting. They were protected, and as you went along the paths in the forest—the Kaibab Forest covers that area and you were in more of a forest—and you would see a lot of deer.

I think one of the funniest things that happened to me there was when I left to go down there, several people came down to the bus to see me off, and they gave me a big box of nuts, salted nuts. I had them with me, and I didn’t have a roommate, I was in a cabin by myself. I had this box of salted nuts open on the bed that I was not sleeping in, and when I came in from work at night, I would take a handful of these salted nuts. I noticed that the nuts were going down pretty fast, and I thought, well, the maids were enjoying them, and I knew that I didn’t need all of those nuts, so I just left them out for the maids to enjoy. One day when I came in, to my surprise, it was not the maids, but a bunch of squirrels that were on the bed eating my nuts! As I disturbed them, they scurried through the window and out. I didn’t eat any more of the nuts, but later when I went to take down my sweater or a jacket (I don’t remember which) as the mornings got cooler, and tipped it upside down, nuts went rolling all over the floor. They had been hiding them—the squirrels had been hiding them in the pockets.

Squirrels are most interesting and can be quite damaging in a place such as this. We had the same experience at the store. We had peanuts and various kinds of nuts in little cellophane bags as we see them all the time. We had them on a rack where they hung. In the mornings when we’d come to work, we would discover that the bags would be empty. You wouldn’t really know that they had ever been touched, except that just right across the very bottom of the bag it would be slit. I don’t know how they did it; you’d have thought they must have had a knife or scissors or something to slit the bottom of the bag and let the nuts fall out. I remember one day I was waiting on a tourist and was showing the serape jackets that were hanging along the side of the wall, and as I got them down, why, here came the nuts rolling out of the jacket onto the floor. Here again, the pack rats and the squirrels had been busily getting their winter store in, not realizing that those jackets were going to be packed up and sent into Cedar City for the winter and they would be not of any use to them when winter came.

Our merchandise was about the same as we had had at Zion Canyon, and the selling was about the same, and the tourists were about the same. One of the interesting things that I did was to take a mule trip down into the canyon, down to the bottom of the canyon. This was quite an experience and something that I enjoyed doing.

I did like the work very much, and here again, I had an opportunity to work the southern parts in the summer, and then that year Sun Valley was going to be opened, and then I could go to Sun Valley and work the winter months in Sun Valley, making it a year-round job. I gave this some consideration because I thought it would be a great deal of fun, but I finally came to the conclusion that it would be fun for a few years, but that it held very little future for me, and no doubt it wouldn’t be too long a time until I would not enjoy living that type of life, living always in a hotel or a cabin and eating in a hotel and not having a permanent home situation. I turned that down.

When I came home, I went into Auerbach’s and had an interview there and was given a job in their piece goods and domestic departments. I was to go to work the following week. As I was in Salt Lake, I thought I would walk up to ZCMI and see what they might have to offer. As you know, I had worked at ZCMI a short time from the time we came from Myton until Eva died. I went into ZCMI and up to the personnel department this time and was interviewed by Mr. Adams. They offered me a job in their hosiery department. I had never worked in hosiery, other than at Waugh’s we had hose, but I thought somehow I would rather work at ZCMI. The salary was going to be the same, and my friend Ruth was still there, and there were several reasons that I thought I might prefer to work at ZCMI.

I still was going to live in Ogden and commute back and forth, which I did that winter. It got a little tiresome. I would leave home at 6:30 in the morning in order to get my ride, which left from 24th Street, and then we’d get in to Salt Lake about 8:30. I rode with a fellow named George Nashville. He was working for a jewelry company in Salt Lake, and he had to be to work at that time. We couldn’t get into ZCMI until 9, and so we had a half-hour wait there. We used to go into ZCMI or Deseret Book Store, which was right next door and did open early, and read the gift card verses until we could get into the store.

Bea Gale was also working at ZCMI in the drapery department and also rode with George Nashville, and so did Fern Henchcliff. The three of us had worked at Wright’s together. We had quite a lot of fun in our rides back and forth. In the winter we used to spend some time in the ladies’ restroom in the basement of the Hotel Utah. We used to take our crocheting and sit down there and crochet for half an hour until we could get into the store. At night we had the same problem that we did in the morning. We got off work about half an hour earlier than George did, and so we would have to kill time until we could get our ride back. We used to get back into Ogden around 7:00, and by the time I caught my bus and got back home, it would be in the neighborhood of 7:30, so it made a rather long day and left very little time for anything else except the job.

I rather soon found out that I didn’t care too much for selling hosiery. I had worked always where I had had a lot of various things to sell, and I got so weary of people coming in to say, “I’d like to buy a pair of hose.” I decided it just wasn’t for me, and the long day and the long ride also got very tiresome, and it made me unhappy at ZCMI, because I’d worked on jobs where I worked many hours longer than that, and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. I think that it was rather that I was just plain bored with the job because it had so little challenge. There really wasn’t much you could do in a hosiery department besides sell a pair of hose. We had silk hose in two or three weights, and we had rayon hose by this time; we still didn’t have nylon. We had the rayons in one or two different weights, and of course we had the cotton lisles for the older ladies, and we had anklets and knee length socks for the girls, and that was just about it. Oh, that same year Belle-Sharmear came out with proportioned lengths, and that did complicate things just a little.

When a lady walked up to you and said, “I want a pair of hose,” the first thing you had to find out was what size she wanted to buy; otherwise, you would start to clutter the counter with everything. If she wanted anything, no matter how large she was, if she wanted anything larger than a size 9½ , she always wanted it for a friend. I’ve never been able to figure that out, why people were so embarrassed to say that they wore a 10½ like I do. Well, the friend introduced a third party into the sale and so from then on you had to always talk to the customer in terms of her friend. Would her friend like a lightweight silk hose for a dress? Or would she like a heavier hose for everyday? Or would she like rayons? And so on, until you finally established what the friend would like, and then you could begin showing merchandise. After she had made her selection on the type of merchandise, then you went into colors and she had a choice of a very limited number of colors in those days. Each thing required going into the matter of what her friend would like. We had to discuss what her friend’s dresses were so she would know what colors to wear with them, and so on, and it was a very long, belabored ordeal. If it hadn’t been quite so boring it would have been rather amusing. The only thing that you could do to improve your sale was to get her to buy a box of three pair instead of just one pair. Very often she wanted only one pair, but she always wanted the box so she could wrap them for a gift for her friend, and so you could get her to buy three.

Now if I had been selling a lovely linen tablecloth and the lady had taken all of this time to decide just what she wanted in a beautiful cloth that she was going to use all of her life and hand down to her children to be used through their lives and probably down to another generation, it would have seemed worthwhile, and I would thoroughly have enjoyed it. But to me a pair of hose was just something you bought one week and the next week they had a run in them, and I couldn’t see taking all of that time in making the selection.

They claim there’s something to do with boredom and your physical health; I don’t know, but I really didn’t know why it should make your feet hurt so bad. I never in my whole life, in all the years that I’ve worked, my somewhat 45 years, even tramping the streets of New York on a hot summer day, I don’t think my feet ever got so sore and so tired as they did that winter at ZCMI. At night I spent most of the time after I did get home with my feet in a pan full of water, trying to get them in shape for the next day. I’ve worked on cement floors and on cement pavements and anywhere you could mention, but I never have had that much trouble with my feet before. Could boredom do that? I wonder.

There was another thing I didn’t like about ZCMI at that time. All of the General Authorities[4] got discounts—their wives got discounts. I knew most of the General Authorities and I liked them and respected them very much, but I didn’t know their wives. Some of them, I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but some of them were just a plain pain in the neck. They were so very uppity and were really not at all courteous or polite to a salesperson. This wasn’t true of all of them; some of them were very sweet. When it came time to make out the sales check and you didn’t give them their discount, some of them would become very disagreeable. I didn’t know who they were by sight, and I would have to go to the buyer and have her okay it, and by the time we got the whole thing all straightened out, I would be made to feel like a little worm crawling along the floor somewhere. The third time I worked at ZCMI they had corrected that, and all of the discounts were given in the office, and the list was kept up there, and you didn’t put the discount on the sales slip in the department. That’s the way it should have been all the time, but I guess it takes a little while to work all of these things out. I really became very unimpressed with some of our General Authorities’ wives.

Christmas time came, and we were extremely busy. I’ll never forget those days, and I thought Christmas Eve when we walked out of the store if I never saw another pair of hose, I would be just as happy. I got up on Christmas morning and started opening my packages, and would you believe it? I got 21 pair of hose for Christmas that year! Many of them had come from salesmen, and some of them had come from girls that worked in the department and so on, but that was my Christmas, those 21 pair of hose. The day after Christmas, we had to go back for the big hosiery sale.

This went on until along about April [1938], I guess it was. I had hesitated on anything I wanted to come back to Ogden for. As I have told you before, I had this feeling that I didn’t want to work at Penney’s. There wasn’t any place else to work in Ogden, except the Emporium. The Emporium was a nice little store, a small store, almost as small as a specialty shop. However, they did have fabrics and domestics in a small way. Finally, I decided that I would go in and ask them for a job. They were owned by Thorstesons, or at least they were the big owners at that time, and it was being pretty much run by a young George Thorsteson, who was very recently out of college and had majored in business somewhere in an eastern school and really knew his stuff when it came to how an inventory in a store should look on a piece of paper.

They hired me, and they gave me a buyer’s job to buy the domestics and piece goods. I know the handbags were part of my department, and the jewelry, and the hosiery, I’m afraid. I can’t remember what else. Again it was a disaster so far as I was concerned. I liked the Thorstesons; I liked George very much—he was a very fine young fellow—and I liked the girls I worked with, and we had a nice clientele. The only trouble was we didn’t have any merchandise. We had merchandise on paper in George’s inventory upstairs, but it was springtime and people were ready to buy white bags and white gloves and summer jewelry and things of that sort, and we still had a nice supply of black bags and brown bags and dark gloves, and nothing that looked like spring. George had been taught that you did not over-buy. I’d been taught that too, but how were you going to sell this winter merchandise and not have any summer merchandise in your department? My period at the Emporium was spent most of the time in George’s office arguing about the fact that we had to get rid of the old merchandise at any price, even if we did lose money, so that we could buy the new merchandise. Sometimes I won, and sometimes I didn’t. I wasn’t at the Emporium very long.

About that time, C.C. Anderson opened and everybody was scrambling to get a job with them (they opened in the old Penney’s building). C.C. Anderson was a chain from Idaho that had been taken over during the Depression years by a New York company called Allied Purchasing Corporation. I went down and applied for a job with them and got one. I should say that one thing that made me come to the Emporium was that they paid me $80 a month, which sounded really big after $50, which was the most I had ever earned up until that time. That was what they offered me at C.C. Anderson, $80. They had not opened yet; they were still in the process of getting the building ready.

While they’re getting the building ready, I’ll go back and tell you a little bit about what the family had been doing during that time.

I really don’t know the reason why Keith sold the 25th Street house. I don’t know whether he discovered that it was more than he could handle financially, or whether they just decided that it was too big, and more room than we needed. I know that Ruth had to have help quite a bit of the time while we were there, because she wasn’t too well, and the stairs were always quite hard for her. The bathroom was upstairs, and that and other things about the house, even though it was such a lovely home, were not too convenient, and that may have had something to do with their deciding to move. I am more inclined to think that it probably was that with his desire to go on to summer school and to get more education, Keith just couldn’t quite handle that and the house too. At any rate, he sold it and we moved out to Washington Blvd. again.

I don’t know just how long we lived in the house on 25th Street; probably four or five years at the most. Mother died while we lived there, and I know that we were living there the winter after I worked at Zion Canyon. I know that we were living out on Washington in the Bingham house the winter after I worked at Grand Canyon, so it was some time during that time that we moved. I don’t remember a thing about the move, whether they moved while I was down at Grand Canyon, or whether my memory is just not with it about the move, but I know we did leave there and rented a house on Washington, in the 700 block on Washington. It was rather a nice home.

One of the things that I remember about the Bingham house was the day that Keith [Ruth and Keith’s son] was born. He was born on the 24th of July and was a pretty good-sized kid before he realized that that wasn’t what they had the parade for on the 24th of July.[5] It was always “his” parade. That particular day, I remember Mrs. Folkman came in, Ruth’s mother, and took Joe and Elizabeth to the parade. Keith was at the hospital with Ruth, and I remember I was doing the washing on the back porch.

I don’t know exactly when Keith started working on his book about Reed Smoot, but I do know that winter, and I guess most of the time we were in the Bingham house he was working on it. I remember my bedroom was just off the dining room, and I know he used to work far into the night writing, and I know he worked harder than he should, with his daytime work, trying to get this book finished.[6]

I know that one of the years that we were in the Bingham house, that Max and I were there alone during the summer while Keith and Ruth and the smaller children, Ruth’s children, went over to Greeley for summer school, for Keith to attend summer school. Grant and Frank went out to stay at my brother Fred’s on their farm down in the Roy Valley.

This house, of course, put us back into the Eighth Ward, and I was able to renew all my acquaintances in the Eighth Ward again. I hadn’t really lost the ones that I had been close to: this little club that I told you about had been going on all of the time, and I had been a member and had met with the girls every other week throughout all of these years in between.

I’m not just sure how long we were there at the Bingham place. I know that little Keith was a very small boy when we bought the Barker home that the family owns now, and where I live. I remember very well when we moved that it was in the wintertime, and we couldn’t get little Keith to take his coat off. He went around all day with his coat on and cried to go home, and he didn’t want to stay in this strange house. We had quite a time getting him to go to bed at night.

I’m beginning to find out that this is just like eating bread and jam: I just simply can’t come out even. I’m either way ahead on what the family’s doing, or ahead on what I’m doing with my work. At this point now, I’m far ahead of myself and I’m going to have to go clear back to when I went to C.C. Anderson to work. I’m sure that that would be a year or so further back. I would guess that from now on, I’m just not going to be able to keep the two stories straight, and I just hope that I don’t get them so mixed up that you won’t be able to understand them.

I hope that I have made you realize that several years have gone by now and the big boys are getting to be pretty good-sized fellows; Ruth and Keith have been married a number of years by now. I had been with them all of this time and they have been just a very important part of my life.

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Notes:

1. Elizabeth Campbell Wahlquist died 17 August 1935.
2. Mabel and Ruth discussed many times the story Keith told that when he and his brothers dug up their father’s casket in Myton, they decided to open it because Roy had not been there at his death and wanted to see him once more. For a brief moment, their father was perfectly preserved, looking as if he were asleep. Suddenly his body disintegrated into dust. As the brothers rode with the casket from Myton to Heber on a wagon, Keith recited all of Hamlet’s speech beginning, “Poor Yorick. . .”.
3. Doug Stringfellow was an ex-congressman from Utah who made up stories about his World War II experiences. He used to speak often to various groups about these experiences, and he even appeared on This Is Your Life before he was exposed as a fraud.
4. The General Authorities refers to the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There might have been around two dozen that got discounts in those days.
5. In Utah, the 24th of July is celebrated as Pioneer Day, the day in 1847 when Brigham Young and his first colonizing wagon train entered the Salt Lake Valley.
6. Although Keith finished the book on Reed Smoot, he died before he could try to have it published.

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Go to Part 15 here.
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