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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Mabel’s Memories, part 13

This is part 13 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 12, Mabel and her mother had moved to Ogden and were living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family off and on while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. This part concerns 1933 and other years; she worked at Wright’s for nine years.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

I suppose it would be sometime around 1933 that we moved from 23rd Street into the house on 25th. It was the first house that Keith and Ruth bought. Up until that time the houses we had lived in had been rented. They were both in love with the house; we all were. It was a lovely big house with ample room and some to spare. The Depression was in full swing at that time, and it wasn’t too long after we moved there that Roy and his family came to live with us for awhile. I think they were there all of one summer, perhaps a little longer. Roy and Maude had been farming her father’s farm in Roosevelt. Roy had never been awfully well from the time he came home from his mission. He had had malaria twice while he was in the South, and each summer it would come back. He would get a fever and be very tired and listless and it was not pleasant, farming. He had continued to do this until one summer he developed tularemia, or what might be more commonly called rabbit fever, and he was very ill. I remember that Mother and Keith and his family and I went out to see him at the time, and he really was in very bad shape. That again made it so that farming was going to be very hard for him. I guess the thing that finally settled them to leave the farm was the Depression. The Great Depression was in full swing and farm prices had hit rock bottom. That particular spring they were faced with what the Basin may be faced with again this summer, drought, and they had no feed for their animals. At that time the government bought up a lot of horses and cows and things at $5 a head, and a lot of farmers were forced to accept these prices or else just go out and shoot their animals. With all of it combined, and with some convincing from Keith and Jack, Roy was finally convinced to come into Ogden and go to Weber College and prepare to teach school. Since we had moved into this big home that would be large enough, Keith had invited them to come and live with us until they were able to do something on their own. Maude had the three boys then (Reed was a baby), and she helped Ruth with the housework while Roy went to school.

I think it was rather a hard experience for Maude, she being the type of person that she is. She was unable to accept it as brotherly love; she felt that it was charity, and she felt that she had to do her part. Reed was a very small baby at the time, and she was still nursing him. I know that every time she had to go upstairs and nurse him and give him some attention, which he did require, she felt guilty. She felt that she should be always working and doing. There always was work to do, and she seemed to feel that a great deal of it rested on her. I think that it was extremely difficult for her. She and Ruth were not very well acquainted, and of course Mother was not at all well by this time.

After a few months they found a little place out in North Ogden. It was Ruth’s Uncle Tom’s place, her Uncle Tom Berrett. It was just a tiny little house, and they moved out there. From then on Roy would walk down to Washington Blvd. and catch the street car there into town, unless he happened to get a ride. Weber College then was on the corner of 25th and Jefferson, and he would often walk up there. He got a job working nights in the gymnasium as sort of the watchman or janitor, and he had to work until about eleven or twelve at night. Very often it would be after the street car had left, or at least it would be if there had been a ball game. Then sometimes he would walk all of the way to North Ogden. Otherwise, he would ride again out to Five Points [North Ogden] and then walk from there.[1] He was in school all day, so I’m sure that it was very hard on him, and that he really earned his education the hard way.

Fortunately, people in those days were much nicer about picking up people to give them rides than it’s possible for them to be today. I’m sure that many people got to know Roy and would pick him up along the way when they saw him walking. There were times, I’m sure, when he did walk the full distance. I don’t know just how long they did this, at what point they moved back into town. I should ask Maude that so that I have it somewhere near right. They did later on move into the little house on 24th Street right through the lot from us on 25th, and they lived there until they bought their home on Kershaw, which Maude still owns today.

Once Roy got his certificate to teach, he got a job at Madison School, and then he was on his way. He taught there and later became principal at Madison, and I think from there went to Ogden High School to teach and later to become principal. From there he went to be assistant superintendent of Ogden City Schools and was there until the time of his retirement. We all know that along the way Roy had several bad heart attacks and was ill much of the time. One would hardly have known it because of his attitude toward his illness. He didn’t let it hold him down or keep him back any more than was absolutely necessary.

During the first years, of course, when he was going to school and first started teaching, Maude had worked at Wright’s, and she worked at The Bon, and also at Penney’s, clerking, and was a great help financially to the family. Maude also worked for the government at the Ogden Supply Depot, had rather a good job when she quit, but I really don’t know what she did because that was during the time when I was away from Ogden, and I’m not familiar with what her work was.[2]

Roy was bishop of the Highland Ward for many years and was always very active in his church work, as was Maude, and as were all of the family. All of the three boys filled missions, and Mark and Reed were in the service. Maude and Roy have written their own histories, so anything more that I could tell you about them would probably be a repetition of what they have already written. I remember the many wonderful times I’ve had with them. I always enjoyed going to visit with them. I remember back to the first time I went to visit them after I came back from New York, my first trip that I ever made to New York when I was working in Boise. I’ve told this story many times. Reed was just a little fellow then, probably six years old or so, and we were visiting in the living room. It was when they still lived on 24th Street. Pretty soon in comes Reed with about six little boys following behind him, and they stood in a semi-circle around me and Reed said, “This is my Aunt Mabel from New York.”

I used to go there quite frequently on Thanksgiving or on Sundays for dinner and visit with the family, and I always enjoyed it so very much. I’ve always felt so close to Roy’s and Maude’s children. Nowadays Austin and his little family come out and spend an evening with me quite frequently and I always enjoy having them. I’ve really been very proud of what Roy’s been able to do, what he and Maude have been able to do, in spite of all of his many illnesses, and of the wonderful family that they have raised.

I was in California (I had been staying at Jack’s) when Roy died [May 1973]. The day that he died, I guess I had gone over to Joe’s, and when the phone call came to Jack’s, he called Joe’s to tell me that Roy had died. I was so sorry that I was not here at the time, and yet when I left to go to California, I stopped and visited with Roy a few minutes, and I realized that it wasn’t going to be too long until he would leave us. I was not sure that I would get home before the time came. I guess he’ll always be very special to me because in our growing up years we were so close together, so near the same age, and we usually got into the same troubles as little kids. He usually managed to break my dolls, and I usually managed to create problems for him. We went away to school together, and it seemed like our lives were always closely linked.

I worked at Wright’s for about nine years, and except for those few weeks in the cosmetics and drug department, they were spent in Mr. Ferris’s department. I not only learned a lot about buying from Mr. Ferris, I also learned a lot about the art of salesmanship. He had piece goods, as I mentioned before, but he also had the linens and domestics. There was no place that I loved quite as much as the linen counter. Linens in those days didn’t consist of pretty printed luncheon cloths and fancy doilies and things of that sort as they do now. Everything was white, except we always had a bolt of red and white and a bolt of blue and white check, large check, of cotton, coarse fabric that was used for tablecloths.

People lived quite differently in those days than they do now. The family, I think, was a much closer unit. People spent much more of their time together. They had their meals together and did their entertaining at home and things were, as I say, very different from many families today.

Down in one end of the store, we had a big rack with many rolls of oilcloth on it, and we sold a lot of this. It was measured off by the yard and sold for kitchen tables and counter tops and anyplace else that you wanted to be protected. There wasn’t such a thing as formica then, everything was wood and it could easily be stained by a wet glass or a hot dish, and so areas that you wanted protected were covered by oilcloth. During the week the family pretty much ate in the kitchen at the kitchen table, off the oilcloth tablecloth. On Sunday, every family who could possibly afford it at all ate in the dining room with a white tablecloth. Sometimes this tablecloth would be cotton, and with more affluent families it would be linen. There were apparently a good many affluent people in Ogden at that time, because we did have a lovely assortment of linens. In fact, I think that women vied to have the nicest linen and it rather told your status in the community, the type of table that you could set in the way of linens and lovely china and silver and things of that sort. We did have some beautiful linens from Ireland and Denmark and all over Europe. They were beautiful satin embossed linens, woven in lovely designs of roses and chrysanthemums and lily of the valley, and various other patterns that were particularly popular at that time.

Mr. Ferris was extremely fussy about that counter, and I think that’s one reason a lot of the girls didn’t like to sell there, because if you unfolded a lovely linen tablecloth to show a customer, it must be folded back again in exactly the same folds that it was in before so that it fitted again perfectly in the box that it came in, and the lid was put back on it. The lids must be kept carefully so that the edges weren’t scratched or broken, and so everything always looked brand-new and beautiful in that department. We had this long counter where we showed the linens, and stools in front where the ladies sat while they looked. The more the woman had to spend, the nicer the linens that you were able to show. I dearly loved to show those linens. I loved to unfold so gently and carefully those beautiful linens, because I liked to look at them myself and drool over them.

Any of you people who want to be salesmen, though, must learn that the first lesson in selling is that it’s your job, and necessary, that you must make the customer, the person to whom you are selling, want what you are selling more than he wants the money in his pocket. Now if you’re selling necessities like bread and milk and butter, that’s not hard to do. When you’re selling luxury merchandise like fine linens, it becomes an art. Under Mr. Ferris’s tutelage, I learned to spread out these linens with such care and such love that the customer caught that from me and handled them with the same gentleness and care that I did. Otherwise she would probably have grabbed hold of them with her gloved hand and scrunched up the corners and Mr. Ferris would have quietly died right there. You learn when you handle lovely merchandise that if you handle it gently and with care and reverence, that the person who’s looking at it handles it in exactly the same way. That’s what Mr. Ferris taught me to do. It also makes the person who is buying realize the preciousness and the loveliness of what she is looking at.

It would be my job to get these boxes of linens out, the different patterns, put them carefully out, and watch the customer very carefully to see where her interest lay and usually about the price that she began to be interested in, and then I would learn the pattern in that price range that she showed the most preference for and quietly and gently put aside the other cloths so they wouldn’t get wrinkled or messed up. You opened up the napkin so she could see how beautifully the pattern was arranged on the napkin, and she would know that it would be arranged the same way on the cloth. It was really an art and it was fascinating, and I loved the challenge of selling that type of merchandise.

You didn’t always make the sale the first time. In fact, you rarely ever did. Usually a woman came back two or three times to look at a cloth before she finally made up her mind. When she finally did decide on the one that she thought was the very nicest that she could afford and the prettiest of them all, and decided that it was worth more to her than the money in her purse—she finally parted with the money and you wrapped up the cloth and gave her her package, still making her feel that she had the loveliest thing in the world. You could see her go out of the store proudly clutching her package, and you knew that she was mentally deciding right then and there who she was going to invite to dinner next Sunday so she could show it off!

I did have one amusing experience. We had a lady, and I’m sure many of you would know her if I mentioned her name, so I shan’t, and she was a very difficult shopper in any department. She came into the linen department and looked at a cloth, and after several times looking, she decided on the one she wanted. Then she said, “Now put it away, and I’ll come back in a day or two and get it.” So I did this. In a few days she came back and looked at it again: “Now put it away, and I’ll be back in a few days and get it.” This went on for a couple of weeks as I showed her this cloth a dozen times or more, but each time it was, “Well, put it away and I’ll come back and get it.”

Mr. Ferris’ desk was right by the counter where we showed the linens. That had been hard right at first because it was rather embarrassing until I became more self-confident to show these beautiful linens and to try to sell them, knowing that he was listening. Very often after the customer left, he would tell me things that I might have said and where I made my mistakes and so on, but after awhile, I got so I felt fairly comfortable even with him there. After this particular lady came back for the umpteenth time and went out, I had the cloth all folded carefully back into the box and was going to put it back into the drawer where I had been saving it for her, when he said, “Give me that.” He took it and opened the bottom drawer of his own desk, which was empty, and put the box in there. He said, “Now the next time she comes in to look at that cloth, it’s sold.” I said, “Oh, Mr. Ferris, I can’t do that! I’ve promised her I’d save it for her.” He said, “It’s sold, and that’s all you need to tell her.”

The next time she came in to see the cloth, I said, “Well, I’m sorry Mrs. So-and-So, but it’s sold.” Oh, she threw a real tantrum: what kind of a person was I, here I had promised to keep it for her and it was the only one she had seen that she had liked and she must have that cloth. As Mr. Ferris had told me to, I said, “Well, I guess you’ll have to see Mr. Ferris, the manager.”

You bet she would see Mr. Ferris, and she would tell him what type of a clerk I was.

So she went to Mr. Ferris. He was a very quiet man, very gentle, and he always knew how to handle the women. I’m sure he had already made up his mind exactly what he was going to do. He said, “Well you know these things do happen; the other girls sometimes get into the drawer and sell things that are being held for another clerk.” He said, “Let’s look through my catalogs and maybe I’ll be able to reorder this for you, get another one for you. It will be special and there won’t be any more like it.” They looked through the catalog and it was there, as Mr. Ferris knew that it would be. He said, “Yes, I can get it for you, and this catalog will be out of date next month, so if you want it, you’d better order it right now.” Well, how long would it take? It would take about three weeks. She decided that’s what she would like, yes, and she was even more proud now because she was going to have the last one. He had told her that’s the only one he had ever had like it. She said to do that, and so he wrote the order out very carefully while she was there, and she was to come back in three weeks and get the cloth. Oh, and he also told her that Mr. Wright insisted on a special order that it be paid for in advance. So she had parted with her money, and the cloth was all paid for. As soon as she left, giving me a very triumphant look, he tore the sheet out of his order book and tore it up, and he said, “Now when she comes back in three weeks, you can give her the cloth.”

She came in two or three times during the three weeks, but she didn’t come to me, she went to Mr. Ferris each time, and he told her that no, it hadn’t come yet, for which I was glad, because I didn’t want to lie to her. Finally one morning he took the cloth out of his drawer, the bottom drawer of his desk, and gave it to me. He said, “Now when she comes in the next time, you tell her the cloth is here.” I saw her coming, and I said, “Oh, Mrs. So-and-So, your cloth is here.” I got it out of the drawer and I said he had put it there for her, and I wrapped it very carefully, and away she went with her cloth, as happy as you please.

I had one frightening experience at that linen counter too. I was showing a lady linens and I had them all spread out. I usually watched the customer’s face quite carefully to see what impression she was getting on various patterns and prices and so on. I had looked down for some reason for a minute, and when I looked up, she was starting to fall off of the stool that she was sitting on, and I didn’t know what to do! Her face was so distorted. I reached forward and grabbed her by the arms to hold her on the stool and called for somebody to help me. One of the girls came from behind and held her until I could get around the counter, and between us, we eased her down onto the floor. She was having an epileptic seizure. It was the first one I had seen—I did see one later in another store—we got a pencil between her teeth so that she couldn’t bite her tongue and I think Mr. Ferris came along about that time and told us to just let her lie there. He knew her, so he phoned her husband and by the time she was coming out of the seizure, he was there ready to take her home. That was one of the most frightening things that I can ever remember having happened to me.

Another fun thing that we used to do at Wright’s was our summer blanket layaway sale. Mr. Ferris used to order one of each color of 25% wool double blankets, which of course you never see any more. That used to amount to about 12 or 16 blankets, enough to make a nice display on one table. Then he would order one of each of North Star Woolen blankets, just one color, and then a color card to go with them, and that would be enough for another table. Then he would put up a big sign: “Lay away your blankets now and pay as you go and have them paid for by winter.” We were all given a little sales pitch to this effect. Along with this there was a contest, and we would receive 25¢ for a wool blanket up to a certain price, and 50¢ for each blanket we sold of the higher-priced woolen blankets.

Those were Depression days, and we were all of us making only about $50 a month, so we were quite eager to earn this extra money. It was really a race to the customers, they got beautiful service through that period. I remember Loretta Medcraft and I used to usually win, one or the other of us, this contest. Leyonna Van Kampen usually came in second. She probably would have been first, except she was in the silk department at that time, and she had to run all the way around the counter to get out to the tables, and so Loretta or I could usually beat her to the customer. Many times I would make several dollars a week for the month that we would have this sale, and I always counted on that a great deal.

The salesman for North Star finally got in on the act and he thought it was such a clever thing that he decided that he would give the girl who sold the most of his blankets a blanket free. He did that a year or two, and I know I won one of those. I saw that blanket just the other day down at Keith’s on a shelf in one of their closets, and it still looked like it’s in pretty good shape. It would have to be nearly fifty years old by now, which is quite a recommendation for North Star blankets. The North Star salesman was a very nice young chap, and Loretta was just sure he would be just right for me since he was a bachelor. He would have been just right for her, she thought, except that she was already married. He and I did become very good friends and I knew him for many years. In fact, I think we corresponded off and on until the time of his death when he was about 61. I’ll probably tell you more about him when I get to Minneapolis.[3]

The interesting part about that sale was that, so far as the customer knew, her blankets were being laid away that minute for her to have next winter when she got them paid for, but of course they had never yet been ordered. Mr. Ferris would just buy the samples and then when we had sold several, he would write an order, about once a week, for the ones that were sold, for the blankets to come in. It worked very well, and it was very seldom that a person ever came for the blankets before they had arrived. I used that technique several times after I became a buyer for C.C. Anderson Company, and it worked well as long as the sales people didn’t get too affluent, but after awhile that 25¢ didn’t mean enough to them to make them work hard for the sale. When the sale began falling rather flat, I finally gave it up.

I want to tell you just one more thing and then I think I’ll leave Wright’s for awhile. I mentioned that it was Depression time and it reminded me of how different people were then than they are now. It wasn’t necessary for them to have as many of us clerking as they had, and so it was very obvious to all of us that somebody was going to be laid off. There were six of us in the department, and we got together and decided that if it would be all right with management, each one of us would take a day off and lose that day’s pay and that would be the equivalent of them laying off a person. We approached management with this idea, and they accepted it. There was quite awhile that each of us took our day off without pay in order to save one of us, and no one knew which one would have been laid off. I sometimes wonder if people nowadays, would be as generous with one another as they were then.

Before I leave Wright’s I’ll tell you one more little story because I might forget it later on. It was when I worked in the woolens and lining area, which was right next to the silk department (I later did get the silk department), Leyonna Van Kampen had by this time married a brother to President Wolthuis[4] and she was pregnant and was worrying about what in the world she was going to do if management found out that she was pregnant, because then she would have to be laid off, and she couldn’t afford to be laid off. The Wolthuis family had, not too long before that [1928], arrived from Europe and her husband didn’t speak English well, and so he had not been able to get a very good paying job. I think he had a milk route at that time. Leyonna was always wondering what in the world she was going to do, and she was having a lot of trouble with morning sickness. The only thing that seemed to help the morning sickness was oranges. We didn’t leave the department for long periods as salespeople do today. I don’t recall that we had any breaks other than just our lunch hour break. The law now requires that a girl must have a morning and an afternoon break, but that had not come into effect. The only way that Leyonna could eat her oranges was to duck behind the counter and eat them. Everyone was going to notice what she was doing—the other girls—and she didn’t want them to know because someone was sure to tell and management would find out. She got the idea that I must get a liking for oranges too, and I agreed. For several weeks she and I took turns ducking behind the counter to eat a few sections of an orange. I don’t think I ever ate quite so many oranges. I loved them and was really quite sorry when Leyonna got over her morning sickness.

The 25th Street house in Ogden

The 25th Street house was quite the nicest house we had ever lived in, or I guess had really ever expected to live in. It was a beautiful old home and still is, on 25th Street between Madison and Monroe. I don’t know who built the home or who had owned it, but I’m sure when it had been built, it had been intended to be a showplace. As the society people moved farther east, up the hill, whoever had owned it had decided to move with them and it was for sale. Keith was able to buy it at rather a good price. Since it was the charm of an older home that we liked, of course we were delighted with it.

As you entered, you went into a large entrance hall, and going up the right side of this entrance hall was a beautiful spiral staircase with a lovely polished banister. On the other side there was a sliding door opening into a lovely, large living room with a big sectional window to the front. Off from the living room was what I suppose in that day had been a sitting room or parlor, another large room. At the end of the entrance hall through another sliding door you went into a nice big dining room. Now these three rooms formed a sort of an L and they were all quite large and had very high ceilings. There was a large window in the end of the dining room and also in the sitting room, which made for a rather large open area. They were all open with just the colonnade, which was a popular way of designing architecture at that time. I imagine in entertaining, whoever owned it had been able to entertain quite a large crowd rather elaborately by opening these three big rooms to each other. Back of the dining room was a big kitchen, large enough that we ate in it most of the time. There were nice front and back porches. Going up the spiral staircase, at the top of it, you came to another long hall, and from it on either side were three good big bedrooms and a large bathroom. At the end of the hall was a huge bedroom, and down the right side of that room there was another staircase leading back down into the kitchen.

The spiral stair

It was really quite an elaborate home, though as I say, it was old and it was somewhat run down and needed quite a bit of repair, which Keith knew that he could attend to himself, because he was pretty good at painting and papering and all that sort of thing. You can tell from this description that we had ample room for Roy’s family. All of the boys slept in this big bedroom at the back, including Mark and Austin while Roy was there, and there was a room for Roy and Maude, and one for Keith and Ruth, and one for Mother and I, and we had ample room for us all. In fact, after Roy and his family moved out, we realized it was, we had just a little bit more room than we needed, and for part of the time, I know we rented one of the bedrooms. I don’t know whether it was because there was a shortage of rooms in Ogden, or whether there was a shortage of money in Keith’s pocket. I would be rather inclined to think it was the latter.

As I said, Keith decided that it needed quite a bit of repair, so he started doing some painting, and since the ceilings were so high, he had some sawhorses and a large heavy, thick plank across the sawhorses to stand on, and he proceeded to do the painting. He had to have that in order to reach the ceilings, which were high, even though he was rather tall. This worked very well, and he did a lovely job on the downstairs and in the entrance hall, but suddenly we became faced with how in the world he was going to do the walls along this spiral staircase. There wasn’t exactly anywhere to put a sawhorse over a staircase, and the wall was two stories high, not just the one. This gave him a little problem, but he thought it through, and he came up with the startling suggestion that he would put the plank out over the banister and Ruth and I would sit on one end of the plank while he walked out on the other end to do his painting. We rebelled, but as usual, Keith prevailed, and that’s exactly what we did. Ruth and I sat on one end of the plank, or on one side of the plank, while he worked from the other side. We had to very gently wriggle back and forth as he was working so that the plank would be evenly balanced with him on the one side. It was a terrifying experience, and I’m sure that both Ruth and I were a nervous wreck before the day was over. Meanwhile, Keith did a beautiful job and he was very proud of it.

First landing of the spiral stair

I’ve often wondered where Mother went during that time. I’m sure she never could have watched anything so precarious. She must have hid out in the basement all day.

We did a lot of living in that old house, some of it happy and some not so happy. Ruth had a miscarriage while we were living there, and she also had pneumonia very badly during the time we were there. Mother’s last illness and her death also occurred while we were there. We were in the Fifth Ward. Bishop Shaw was the bishop at that time, and we were all active in the ward except of course Mother, who was not well enough to be doing any church work by this time. The boys were in Sunday School and Mutual and growing up. I worked in Mutual, I remember, and did some of my home dramatics while we were living in the Fifth Ward. We enjoyed the Fifth Ward very much. I would say on the whole, we did have a very lovely time during the years we lived there, in spite of the usual problems that affect most families.

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Notes:

1. It was three miles from Uncle Tom Berrett’s house in North Ogden to Five Points (about 1st Street in Ogden) and then another three miles to Weber College. Maude Wahlquist said that the street car ran all the way into North Ogden until a certain time of night, after which it stopped at Five Points. Roy often had to walk from Five Points the rest of the way home.
2. Maude stopped working upon the birth of their daughter during the War.
3. The North Star blanket salesman was Jim McEleney. By the time Mabel moved to Minneapolis, where Jim lived, marriage was no longer an issue, as Ruth Wahlquist later told her children, because of their family obligations and religious differences. They remained close friends until Jim’s death.
4. Bart Wolthius was their LDS stake president in the 1970s. He was also their dentist up to 1990. Leyonna had married his older brother Frank in 1930. They had four children and divorced.

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Go to Part 14 here.

Mabel’s Memories, part 12

This is part 12 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 11, Mabel and her mother had moved to Ogden in 1928 and begun living with and helping Mabel’s brother Keith with his family. This part concerns from about 1930 to 1933. Meanwhile, Mabel’s career continued its upward trajectory.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden

About a year and a half after Eva died, Keith started seeing Ruth. I shouldn’t say started seeing her, because he’d been seeing her every day: she taught English there at Weber High School where he was principal. But it was at about that time that he began taking her out and began thinking in terms of remarrying. In July, a little over two years after Eva’s death, Keith and Ruth were married in the Logan Temple, and they left almost immediately afterwards for Laramie, Wyoming, where he attended the second session of summer school that year.

Ruth’s mother had fought the idea of the marriage tooth and toenail. She was a very determined person and didn’t give in very easily. I think she had hopes of something better for her only child than to marry a widower eleven years her senior and the father of three children. As I recall, it wasn’t until the very last minute that she finally even consented to go with them to the temple to see them married. After it was all over, I think she took it with good grace. She liked Keith and she was quite proud of the fact that he was a high school principal and even more proud when he became superintendent of the Weber County Schools. She did not seem to resent the children, too much. She didn’t let them call her Grandma; they called her Aunt Em. She used to visit quite frequently and very often had the family out there for dinner.

Ruth’s father was quite a different person. He was a very gentle, kindly person, and he liked Keith very much, and he was always very good to the children. They all remember Uncle Joe with great fondness. He didn’t live too many years after Keith and Ruth were married. I don’t know just how long, but long enough for the children to become well acquainted with him and to learn to love him.[1]

Mother and I stayed with the children the summer that Keith and Ruth were married while they were away at school, and it was a very uneasy summer for the children. I don’t know why people are as cruel as they are, but it was not unusual for the children to come home very worried and sometimes in tears to tell us what someone had said to them about what would happen to them now that they had a stepmother—how mean she would be to them and all of the bad things that were going to happen. They began to dread very much the thought of Keith and Ruth returning. As children will, they said (particularly Max) “Well if she’s not nice to us, we’ll just tell Grandma.” Mother realized that if Ruth was to have any chance at all with the children, we must not be there, because they would naturally turn to Mother in case of any problems in discipline. We immediately began looking for an apartment and thinking in terms of being ready to leave as soon as they returned. I don’t really remember very much about their coming back and our leaving. I do remember looking for the apartment and finding it, and I know that we did leave almost as soon as they returned.

Keith and Ruth were very good to us after we moved, and we spent lots of Sundays with them and kept in quite close touch with the children. In fact, Max used to come to visit us quite often if he’d had any little disagreement with anyone and pour out his troubles to Mother. She always very wisely helped him get over them and sent him back home feeling better. Keith and Ruth had moved from where we were living up onto 20th Street, and it was quite a hike for Max to come clear down to where we were.

We had found an apartment on the corner of 26th and Adams. The place is still there and is still an apartment house. It made a very convenient place for us. It was just three and a half blocks from Wright’s, and when you get to 26th, the hill is not very steep, so Mother was able to walk downtown to a show and things of that sort. We were in the Second Ward—I don’t really know why, because I have told you that Washington Boulevard was the dividing line of the stakes, and I thought it was, and the Second Ward of course was on Grant Avenue, below Washington. But that was the ward that we were in. Judge Cowley’s family was also in that ward. Judge Cowley’s wife was a very good friend of Ruth’s, and we had known her quite well. We attended church very regularly, and I taught the adult Sunday School class that winter that we were in that ward. We enjoyed it, that particular area, very much.

I might tell you something about the apartment. I don’t remember how much we paid for it; I think it was only about $15, but it could have been more. It was one large room. I think it had been intended for two rooms but the colonnades had been taken out from the side so that it was just a long, narrow room. The front part of it of course was the living room, and the back part was the bedroom. It had a bed that came down out of the wall. It could be put up in the day out of the way, but I don’t think we ever put it up, because Mother had to lie down a good part of the day and that was about the only place, it was the only place where she could lie down. There was a tiny little kitchen that I’m sure wasn’t more than a clothes closet. In it was just a hot plate and a little sink. It was heated with a coal stove in the living room, a coal heater, and that was very handy for us, because Mother was awake a lot at night and up at night, and we could always stir up the fire and get it warm for her so that she could sit by the fire when she had to be up. There was no bathroom inside the apartment, but there was one across a hall; there was a long hall that went down the side past both rooms, and at the end of this hall was the toilet that we used. I guess we were the only people that did use it since there was no other apartment on that side. The front door coming into that hall from a big, long porch that ran across the front was always left unlocked; I don’t know why. We had a key to both of our doors, and we locked them very carefully every night.

We sort of liked the place; it wasn’t anything great, but it was fairly comfortable. We did have a few rather interesting experiences there, one in particular that we’ve laughed about many times. Mother got acquainted with the people who lived in the apartment in back of us. They didn’t come in the same way as we did; they came in from the side door, so we had no reason to see them a great deal. They were a couple, oh, I would guess that they might have been in their early forties or late thirties at that time. Mother and the lady got to be quite friendly. Since the man worked nights, he was home a good deal, and Mother got acquainted with him and liked him very much. Then much to her horror, she finally discovered that he was a professional card player, and that he was hired by one of the houses down 25th Street to play cards.[2] Of course it was intended that he would always win, and if he didn’t, I suppose he wouldn’t have kept his job very long. That was Mother’s first experience with crime close up, and it was very hard for her to like the criminal, yet she couldn’t help but like the man because he was a very pleasant person and very, very nice to her. I think she really thought that if we needed them, that we could go to these people at any time. I used to kid her quite a bit about her criminal friends.

One time while we were living there, suddenly we heard a hammering on our door. I went to the door, and a voice which sounded disguised—it sounded like a girl and yet it could have been a man—asked to be let in. Mother said, “Oh no, no, no, don’t you let them in,” and so I questioned the person and was told that it was a girl and that someone was after her and that she had to get in away from him. Mother would not let me let them in, and I didn’t. All night we could hear this person in the hall, and the next morning there were dozens of cigarette stubs in this toilet that we used. Whether or not it had really been some poor little girl that needed to come in, or whether it was someone trying to get in to harm us, I think was something that Mother had on her conscience for a long time, because had it been someone who needed to come in, she would certainly have wanted to have let them come in. We asked the lady who owned the apartment the next day what she knew about it, and she had not heard any of the noise at all. We had no telephone, so there had been nothing we could do but simply wait for daylight. We didn’t see the person leave, so we never did find out who it was.

I used to go home each day for lunch while we lived there, and I guess we would have been there for a considerably longer time, except that Martha Campbell had come to Wright’s to work. Martha Campbell was Uncle Bill Campbell’s daughter, and you remember me telling you that that’s where we always stayed any time we were in Salt Lake, and that’s where Keith had stayed when he was getting over his bout with spinal meningitis after he left Fort Douglas. Martha was a few years younger than Keith. She had had pneumonia when she was a child, and rheumatic fever, and it had left her with a bad heart, and she had not gone to school very much. When she was about fourteen, someone who wanted to help her out, because she was very restless at home, suggested that she get a job in Auerbach’s millinery workroom. She was a very artistic girl and did lots of creative things with her hands. She did so well there that they (Consolidated Millinery Company, who owned the department at Auerbach’s) had hired her and had taken her to San Francisco and had trained her there and then later sent her out to manage several stores. She had now ended up as manager of the millinery department at Wright’s, which was also owned by Consolidated.

Buying a hat in those days was quite an experience that you gals nowadays might enjoy hearing about. No self-respecting woman would have been seen on the street in those days without a hat. If she was coming downtown shopping, or going to the neighbor’s, or to church, or to a show, or anywhere, she would have worn a hat. She would have had as many hats as she could possibly afford to match her various dresses. The millinery business was big business in those days. When you went in the store to buy a hat, you were seated at a table with a mirror in front of you, and the clerk proceeded to try on hats for you. She kept on trying on hats until you found one that she and you agreed suited your face and complimented your hairstyle and so on. After this was done, then someone was called from the millinery workroom to come out. They began putting a rose here or a flower or bows or veiling here and there in various positions on the hat, deciding what, again, most complimented your face, what might make you look taller or shorter as you chose to be, or make your face look wider or narrower, as you chose it to be. It was really quite an art. When you and they were satisfied that it was right, then she went back to the workroom with whatever things you had agreed to put on the hat, and the hat was completed. This, of course, was what Martha had learned to do, and along with it, she had also learned the business end of managing a millinery department: what hats to order, and how many, and what materials to buy to trim the hats, and how to manage the work in the workroom.

I had not known Martha, but of course Keith did, and Mother, and we soon became very close friends. She was a beautiful girl and just as sweet as she was beautiful. She was living at the hotel at the time, and she expressed a wish that she might live with us if we had had room for her. That idea took seed very quickly, and so among us, we decided to find a place where we could all live together.

Arthur Wright, who was one of the brothers who owned Wright’s and Sons, had a house up on 24th Street, just next door to Mr. Ferris, and in the back of his house, he had a small apartment that he rented. Fortunately, this apartment became available, and we quickly snapped it up. Our front yard was Ferris’s back yard, and they had a beautiful back lawn. It was a very attractive little apartment, the nicest we had ever had. We could afford to pay a little bit more for it with Martha sharing the expense. It had a nice living room, and a bedroom which actually was a closed-in porch. It had a nice little kitchen, and a bathroom. It was quite nicely furnished. So we moved in there. It was just a block and a half up from the store, up 24th Street, and it looked like it was going to be just ideal. We were all real excited about it. The only thing we found out, and that very soon, was that Martha had trouble climbing that 24th Street hill. It bothered her heart. At first she had come home for lunch with me, but soon she started having her lunch at the store, and it wasn’t too many months until she began taking a taxi home because she couldn’t take the hill. This worried my mother a great deal, and I’m sure it worried Martha’s mother a great deal, but she still didn’t want to move; she wanted to be with us.

Martha had become a Christian Scientist. Her family was not affiliated with the LDS Church in any way. At that time they were holding Christian Science meetings in the old Legion Hall, which was about halfway up 24th Street, between Washington and Adams. I attended a few meetings with her there, and I never could quite see what was going on, but it did give her a great deal of comfort, and that was what was important.

She lived with us all of that winter. We moved there, I think, in the spring, and she was there all that summer, but I guess not all of the winter. Then she had to move back to the hotel because her heart got bad, and the doctors felt that she couldn’t stand the hill.[3]

That was a very pleasant winter for all of us for many reasons. Mother enjoyed Martha a great deal, and so did I. I particularly enjoyed being right next door to the Ferrises, and Mother did too. Mother and Mrs. Ferris became very good friends and visited a great deal during the day and enjoyed each other very much. I spent many evenings over there when Mr. Ferris would be telling me about his trips to St. Louis, which was where he usually went at that time to do his buying, and about his various experiences in the retail business. I learned an awfully lot, and I gained such a deep desire to be a buyer and to have these marvelous experiences that he had had. He used to talk to me about them for hours at a time. At that time he was gradually beginning to let me help him select the merchandise at the store. He was getting older and he wasn’t quite as well, and I used to go to the hotel with him to look at lines of merchandise there, and also to work with salesmen in the store selecting merchandise. This all thrilled me a great deal, and I really and truly loved it. I think that time that we lived there by Mr. Ferris was one of the happiest times that I could remember.

Of course, after Martha left us, Mother and I could not afford to stay on in this apartment, so we moved directly across the street into a little apartment in the back of Aaron Tracy’s home. Aaron Tracy taught at Weber College. We lived there for not too long; it was not a very pleasant apartment. It did have a living room and a very small bedroom and a porch, but it was colder than sin in that place. It had radiators, and I can remember that about the only way we ever would get any heat in there would be if we would pound on those radiators, and then Mrs. Tracy would hear us and turn up the heat.

Mother liked Mrs. Tracy very much and felt very sorry for her. I don’t know how many children they had, but they were numerous, and it seemed that she was always having another. She was having one during the time we stayed there, and Mother was always very out of patience with Aaron Tracy. I suppose he was just being a very good church member and was very busy with all of the things he was doing, but it seemed like he was never home. Poor Mrs. Tracy dragged herself around trying to take care of the house and her family, and Mother was utterly sorry for her all of the time.

Mother was not a bit well during the time that we lived there. I remember us having to have the doctor a time or two while she was there. One thing that I do remember that happened while we were there was one of the big events in Mother’s life—that was where we got our first radio. It came Christmas time and Mother had been so alone, and her eyes were beginning to get so she didn’t read as much as she had done before, and I got this brainstorm to buy her a radio. It cost $19, I remember, and I was going to pay a dollar a month for it.

On Christmas Eve, I had arranged for the driver to deliver it at the house. I didn’t know any way I could avoid her not knowing about it on Christmas Eve. When he went to deliver it, Mother got very upset, because she “knew” that it was not for us, because she knew that we couldn’t possibly afford to have a radio. I had told him to expect that and to refuse to take it, to tell her that he would have to leave it. The minute I got home that night, she started to worry because there was somebody who was not going to have their Christmas present Christmas morning, and here we had this radio that belonged to somebody and someone would be so disappointed. I finally had to tell her that night that it was for her. I don’t know of anything in the world that my mother enjoyed as much as she did that little $19 radio. It’s still down in our basement here. She used to sit by the hour and knew every single program, Amos and Andy, and Harriet and whatever-his-name-was, and oh, I can’t remember all of the programs, Helen Trent, well, all of them. She listened to that by the hour every day. Every night when I got home, she had to recount to me the stories of all of these various shows that she had listened to during the day. I don’t know of anything that ever paid off as well as that little radio.

I don’t know whether it was because of Mother’s health or Ruth’s, I can’t remember, but at about that time, they were moving into a place on 12th Street, on Washington and 12th, and Keith asked us to move with them, which we did, and left the Tracy place and went out to live with them on Washington and 12th [about 1932]. Joe was the baby at that time, and so there were the three big boys and him. It wasn’t a very large place, and we were rather crowded there, so we soon moved up on 23rd Street, up almost to the Thirteenth Ward. Mother and I lived with Keith and Ruth and the family most of the time from then on, except a couple of short periods when I felt that she was getting too nervous and too tired with the noise of the children and the work she insisted on doing, and we moved out into an apartment. Each time we were only in the apartment for a very short time when Keith would get so worried about us that he would come and insist that we move back in with them, which I was usually happy to do.

I’m sure I’ve told you a thousand times about how nervous Mother was. Everything bothered her, not for herself—she was always worrying about somebody else, and someone else’s problems and the things that might happen to them. Her stomach was very bad, which I suppose was partly due to her nerves. She had a dreadful time eating and ate very little, she was losing weight rapidly, and her health was really generally not good. Dr. Strandquist had given me a tonic for her to take. I knew that the tonic (because he told me) was wine, and she was to take a jigger of this wine each night before she went to bed. I knew Mother wouldn’t do it if she knew what it was, and so he put a prescription label on the bottle, and Mother took her tonic. I think this was one thing that got us back to Keith’s in a hurry. Keith came to see Mother one afternoon, and he was awfully tired and had a headache—he was given to having migraine headaches—so Mother insisted that he must take some of her tonic, which he did. Afterwards he said to me, “Don’t you know that Mother’s drinking wine? That that’s wine that you’re giving her at night?” He was very upset with me. I said, “Yes, I know it, but it helps her to get to sleep, and it gives her rest, and Dr. Strandquist says that’s what she needs, and so she has it.” I can’t remember the outcome of that, whether Mother still continued to have her tonic or not.[4]

One other thing that I guess poor Mother worried a lot about: she drank tea. She had tried many, many years not to drink tea. She would drink Postum and she drank cocoa and she drank different things, but they upset her stomach. Finally again, Dr. Strandquist said, “Well now, I can give your mother something for her stomach and her nerves, or she can have her cup of tea. As far as I’m concerned, I think the cup of tea would do more for her and maybe with it she might eat a little toast and jelly or something that would give her a little strength, instead of just giving her a pill.” I encouraged Mother again to drink her tea. She liked green tea.

This created a problem one time, Jack. (I guess I did a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about.) Jack wanted Mother to come down and stay with them for a while. It was when we were living in one of the apartments at some time, I don’t remember which one. He came and got her and she went. In about two days, who should come back but Jack, bringing Mother. He was very upset about it, and he said, “Mother just didn’t want to stay, she wanted to come home.” He said, “I don’t know why she didn’t want to stay with us.” He was very hurt about it, I could tell that.

After he was gone I asked her, “Mother, why didn’t you stay? Weren’t they nice to you, or what happened that you wanted to come home?”

She said, “Well, no, they were very nice, but,” she said, “I didn’t have my tea.”

I said, “Well, Mother, why didn’t you just tell them that you had to have tea, and I’m sure they would have gotten a package of tea and let you have your tea.”

Oh no, she said, she couldn’t do that. I said, “Well you had money with you,” because I always saw that she did. “You could have gone down to the little store just a block from where Jack and Grace live and bought you some tea yourself, and then made you a cup of tea.”

She said, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that, because maybe they wouldn’t want me to make it in their house in front of their boys.”

I said, “Oh Mother, that’s silly. You could have done that. Or if you didn’t want to do that, you could have ordered a cup of tea down at the little corner drugstore that was just a little ways away, and had your tea down there.” Well, she didn’t always want to walk down there when she happened to need the tea, so anyway she had come home.

I don’t think anything was ever said about that until just after Grace had her stroke. I was in Paradise [California] with them, and she and I were talking about it. I told her about this incident, and she said, “Well I don’t know that I would have let her make her tea, because we just didn’t make tea or coffee or have anything like that in our home.” They never had tea or coffee in their home; she wouldn’t have liked to have seen it served! Maybe Mother was better informed than I thought she was. Anyway, she didn’t stay because of her tea.

I do remember too, when she was sick that she would never ask Ruth to make her a cup of tea. When I came home at noon or at night, she would say to me, “Won’t you please make me a cup of tea? I haven’t had any all day.” I would go downstairs to make some tea for her, and Ruth would say, “Your mother just hasn’t had a thing to eat all day and I’ve offered to fix something for her, but she’s told me that she didn’t want anything.” Here again, Mother thought it was so sinful or something, that she drank this tea, that she wouldn’t ask anyone else to make it for her, even though she knew that they knew she drank it. I couldn’t quite see the logic of it all, but I’m sure Mother did some way.

Ruth and Mother always got along very well. I think sometimes it took a bit of doing on both of their parts. Ruth was always very kind to Mother and very good to her, and I’m sure did everything that she thought Mother would want her to do. She has told me many times that she could talk with Mother much easier than she could talk with her own mother about many things. They were able to discuss many of her personal problems better than she could discuss them with her own mother, which I suppose is natural.

There were times I’m sure when it was very hard for Mother not to interfere when she felt that one of the older boys was being chastised unduly or something of that sort. Naturally her sympathies were always with the children, but sometimes she wouldn’t know what the problem was. I think sometimes that it would have been all right for her to have said something, but Mother was always very careful not to interfere with anything that she didn’t think it was her place to. I’m sure there were times when she had to perhaps bite her tongue and leave the room rather than say something that she thought might create problems. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what the same thing was true with Ruth, that she had to keep still sometimes at something that Mother or I did. I learned a long time ago that, and Mother used to say, that no house was big enough for two women, and when you’ve got three women, I’m sure it needed to be even bigger. I think we all had to learn that in order to live together in any sort of harmony, that it was necessary at times for us to do a lot of give and take. I’m sure that was true with Ruth as much as with us. I’ve always thought a great deal of Ruth because of the courtesy and the kindness and understanding that she showed my mother, because I’m sure there were many times when it was hard for her to be as kind and as understanding as she was.

I think one reason Mother and Ruth were always able to get along together was that they were both so fun-loving. With all her nervousness and worry and everything that Mother had, she had a marvelous sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous, and so did Ruth. They could always see the funny side of any situation. I think that really saved the day many times when, if they had, either of them, been different, they might have had problems.

I remember when Joe was a little fellow, how much fun Mother used to have with him. She was just as crazy about Ruth’s children as they came along as she had been with the older children. Joe was such a cute little fellow. When he learned to walk, the bigger boys were playing basketball by then, and football, and so on. I can remember how she used to laugh at Joe when he would run and play and pretend that he was playing football and would tackle anybody and everybody that came within reach. He was such a cute little happy-go-lucky fellow anyway, and she had a great deal of fun with him.

We were living up on 23rd Street when Elizabeth was born. I remember that very well. I remember that Mother got a big charge out of Ruth. Ruth had a very long labor. She got sick quite early in the morning, but she didn’t go to the hospital until well in the afternoon. I’m sure that her kids all remember that Ruth did like to eat, and one of the things that she especially loved was apples. She had been in quite a bit of pain all day, and she was making a little fuss about her pain, and Mother was feeling very sorry for her and worrying about her. After she left to go to the hospital and Mother was cleaning up the room, why, here were just scores of apple cores back of the bed. Mother wondered where in the world they came from, and she asked the kids about it. I can’t remember whether it would have been Frank or Grant, probably, because he was the one that always Ruth called on for things—but whoever it was had been carrying her apples all day. Between her pains, she had been eating apples all day. I remember Mother wondering what all those apples were going to do while she was in the hospital!

Ruth Wahlquist with Joe and Elizabeth

By this time Mother had reached a point where she wasn’t able to do a lot of housework, but she was an awfully good babysitter. I’ve often heard her tell and have watched her when she used to play with the children. Joe had a marvelous imagination when he was a little boy. He used to play by the hour with his little truck and a little telephone. He would race around with the truck and he would have a wreck. Then he would call on his telephone for the wrecker to come. He would wait and wait and Mother would sympathize with him and they’d talk about it, the truck not coming—the wrecker not coming. Then he would call for it again and the wrecker still wouldn’t come. They would just go on forever, but finally the wrecker would come and they would get the truck out of the way. They could play this way for the longest time, and Mother would go right along with the story. They could spend hours without her ever having to get up or pick him up or anything of that sort that would be heavy for her.

The same was true with Elizabeth. She would play with Elizabeth by the hour, and Elizabeth seemed to know that Mother couldn’t pick her up, so she would sit on the couch beside her. Mother had a box of buttons, and she’d count out the buttons and then she’d count them back into the box. Mother would slip one under a pillow or somewhere and Elizabeth would always know that it was gone, and she would hunt and hunt for the button. I suppose that Mother was just about the best thing in babysitters that Ruth ever had.

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Notes:

1. Joseph M. Folkman, Ruth’s father, died in April 1939.
2. Houses of prostitution in Ogden were on the west part of 25th Street between Washington Blvd. and the railroad yards.
3. Martha Violet Campbell was born in April 1897 and died near the beginning of March 1934. Her death certificate says that she last worked in her occupation as a milliner in October 1931, which is probably when she had to leave the apartment with her cousin Mabel and aunt Elizabeth. At that time Martha moved home to her parents’ place in Salt Lake City, where she died two and a half years later.
4. Ruth told her children this story about the tonic, remembering that her husband had thought it very funny; but it also had made him realize how unwell his mother really was. The LDS health code, the Word of Wisdom, prohibited alcoholic drinks and “hot drinks,” which were understood to be tea and coffee, and of course Mrs. Elizabeth Wahlquist would have been very concerned about adhering to it.

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Go to Part 13 here.