Mabel’s Memories, part 17

This is part 17 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 16, Mabel was working for C.C. Anderson and Co., which had joined Allied Corporation for its purchasing power in the main markets, and Mabel was sent to New York to learn to be a buyer. This part continues her adventures in merchandising beginning with her initial return from New York to establish her new home base in Boise, Idaho.


Chapter 9
Adventures in Merchandising

When I got back to Boise, the first thing I had to do was find me an apartment. The first month I lived with Ann Atkinson. Ann was my Uncle Joe Campbell’s daughter, and she was married and living in Boise, and she was very kind and let me stay with her while I looked for an apartment. I think I was there a good part of a month.

In Boise they had set up a special office on the third floor for this new group who were to work during the war. We each had our own little private cubbyhole, and we shared secretaries with the main office. Later we moved to the third floor of another office building there in Boise, and we each had our own office room and our own secretary. That came a year or so later. We got home and settled in our offices, and we had a big warehouse in Boise where this merchandise that we had bought in New York started to arrive. The first thing we had to do was to get it sorted out and shipped out to the stores. I spent many, many hours in the warehouse sorting out so many house dresses to go to Cascade, Idaho; or McCall, Idaho; or Weiser, Oregon; or Pendleton, Oregon; or Ontario, Oregon; or Pueblo, Colorado; or Grand Junction, Colorado; Ogden, Logan, Idaho Falls, Gooding, Twin Falls; Buell; Nampa, Idaho, to all of the various stores.

CC Anderson store in Nampa, Idaho
(photo: https://nampapolice.org/DocumentCenter/View/
8671/Historic-Walking-Tour-FOR-DISTRIBUTION)

There again, I was green, because I didn’t know the size of any of these stores. I had not visited them, and so I had to go by what these three supervisors told me. We had a long order form which had the names of each store, beginning with the largest store and ending up with the smallest, which was Cascade, Idaho—or maybe it was McCall. Anyway, we would sit down with these forms and, at least for the first few times, for example, when a group of house dresses came in, we would line them all up on a rack and sort out so many to go to each one of these stores, judging by the size. The little stores might only get six or eight house dresses of each style, and the bigger stores would get two or three dozen perhaps. The same with all of the infants’ wear. They did seem very pleased with what they got.

We had a manager’s meeting right after we came home, and I’ll never forget how wonderful those managers were to me and how they complimented me and congratulated me that I had been able to get this merchandise for them that they needed so desperately. I’m sure this was true for the other buyers too, but I was more aware of my own circumstances.

After we got the merchandise pretty well sorted out, we started out to visit the stores. We could pretty well visit the stores at that time by car, and about six of us would travel together in a car and make the rounds of the stores. We had a pretty good route worked out. We would start out and go to Ontario and Weiser, Oregon, and Payette, Idaho, and Pendleton, Oregon, and all the stores in that group. Then we would go down to southern Idaho and do that group. We’d go into the stores and look at their stocks and take their inventories and prepare our lists of what we needed to get for them, and then we would return to Boise and get it all consolidated, and then we would head back to the market. This went on all through the war and for a year or two afterwards.

While merchandise was scarce, it was rather interesting going into the stores. Those darn managers and the girls in the departments would hide the merchandise you had sent them and would look you straight in the eye and tell you it was all sold, sometimes when you knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. We had to learn to be regular detectives and look under the counters and in the drawers and hunt for the merchandise to be sure that they were not hoarding it. We weren’t as smart as they were—they did hoard lots of merchandise, much to our dismay.

As the war came to an end and merchandise became more available, it was almost as hard to get those managers to realize that we could get plenty of merchandise. They kept asking for more and more, until they had their stores loaded, and at the end of the war we took a lot of mark-downs and lost money, because when we could get more than they wanted, then they started digging things out from their corners and wanted to return merchandise to the warehouses. We had to take it back (because they couldn’t sell it) and try as we had done during the war—during that time it was very easy to shift it from one store to another, but after the war we found that they all had good stocks of merchandise. It created some very serious problems at the end of the war, which I may go into later, I don’t know.

After we had been out to the stores, we would head back to the markets. We would go to New York, and go into Chicago, and for lingerie I used to stop at St. Louis, and I went up to Minneapolis several times where I bought merchandise from Munsingwear. We learned if we could get right to the manufacturer, very often we could get merchandise, even when we couldn’t get it in the showrooms in New York. I remember one trip going to Dallas, Texas, and for children’s wear we went to Los Angeles. I did cover the United States pretty well at various times through the war looking for merchandise.

There were some wonderful people out in the stores. The managers were always very nice to us, and the girls in the departments were too. We often worked in a store—we worked hard. We worked long hours. We would go into a store; there wasn’t a lot you could do during the day while customers were in the store, so we would travel during the day from one store to another. The small stores we could work in, but a lot of times we would—the minute the store closed—we would go in and work until 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning sometimes, doing their inventories, and hunting out this merchandise that they had hidden under the counters, and arranging it on top of the counters so that it could be sold.

I remember one funny incident about us getting into Gooding, Idaho. One thing I would like to say, that in all of my experience I have never worked with a nicer group than the group of girls and fellows in Boise, Idaho. We worked very closely as a group. We traveled together all the time by car. All of the fellows were married, and Mable Nye and I were the two single girls in the group, and Kathryn was the one married woman. When we were in New York—I’ve never been in New York during that time when I had to eat my dinner at night alone. When you were in New York, the only girl in New York would always get a call from one of the fellows to have dinner with them. When we were out in the stores, we all had dinner together, and we had our breakfast together. We were almost like a family, and we were very close to each other. They were kind of a drinking bunch; they all had to have their cocktail before dinner, and I’ve seen them get drunk in New York sometimes, but I’ve never seen the time when they weren’t just as gentlemanly and courteous, and see that Mabel got back to the hotel okay. They were always very nice to me, and I have always respected them and thought a great deal of them. This hasn’t been true when I’ve worked in individual stores. The buyers were not nearly so close and there always was a lot of jealousy among them. But our particular group during the war, we were all working for a cause, and we were a very closely-knit group.

That brings me back again to this little story that I was going to tell you. We were in Gooding, Idaho; we got in during the afternoon and went over to the store and worked awhile. We had left our suitcases in the car, and later we went to the little hotel—there was only one little hotel there in Gooding—and they assigned us our rooms. I went up to my room (it was on the second floor; there were only two floors in the building) and there was no lock on the door. I had asked her, when I got my suitcase, for the key and she had said, “Oh there isn’t any key.”

I said, “I’d kind of like to have a key.”

She said, “Well, there isn’t one here.”

So I thought, Maybe it’s in the lock. When I got up to the room, there was no key, and I couldn’t lock my door. I was a little bit concerned about it, so I went back downstairs, and I said, “I wonder if we couldn’t find a key for that door.”

She just handed me a double handful of loose keys and said, “Well, take these and try them and maybe you’ll find one that fits.” Here I was, going back upstairs with both my hands full of keys, and I met Harvey Karren coming down, and he said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m going to try to find a key for my room.”

He laughed and he said, “My room’s got a key. You give me those keys and come along and bring your suitcase and I’ll trade rooms with you.” He said, “If I don’t have a key, if I can’t find a key, I probably can deal with anybody that might happen to come in.”

We knew that no one was going to rob us or anything like that, but you never did know but what somebody might mistakenly be a little bit under the influence and forget which room he had. That was the thing that always concerned me, and of course that didn’t bother the fellows so much. We did have a lot of funny little experiences like that in some of those little towns.

I remember one night we got into McCall, Idaho—or Cascade?—I always get those two mixed up. We stopped to have dinner, and we went into this little restaurant, the only one in town. We were all sitting around the table. We had just ordered some hamburgers, as I recall. There was a cat that was winding around between our legs under the table, going around and around, and just as the waitress yelled out, “Six hamburgers!”—the cook in his apron came tearing out into the dining room and picked up this cat and carried it back out into the kitchen. One of the fellows said, “Well, there’s our hamburgers.” Mable Nye and I were together that trip with them, and that took care of us. We couldn’t stand to eat the hamburgers, so we all got up and left and went over to a grocery store and bought some crackers and cookies and cheese and a little of this and that and went up to one of the rooms and ate this meal. We had a lot of fun little experiences like that in those little towns.

We did have an interesting experience in Cascade. It was a time when they had found some new star that the scientists were going to check on, and so they all gathered in Cascade because it was very high. It was in all the papers and the magazines, and back east they were talking about these scientists in Cascade, Idaho. We had a dress manufacturer who was going to ship some dresses to each one of the stores, and he had his list of how many to ship, and Cascade usually only got three. But we had a national ad in the paper, in a girls’ magazine, and they got orders for 50 dresses, which was more than they had sold in a year before, because everybody was hearing about Cascade, Idaho. It was just a little bit of a place with two or three hundred people, and we just had a small store there; half of it was groceries, and half of it was dry goods. It was similar to Waugh’s, where I started out, and I always felt very much at home in Cascade.

I’ve always thought that that’s the reason I got along so well during that period—because I could relate to those stores. I had worked in stores as small as the smallest one, and the largest store we had was the store in Ogden, where I had worked for many years. I was a little bit more able to judge what they would need than anyone. Once I had seen all the stores, I was pretty well able to judge what their sales might be and the figures made more sense to me than they had when we were in New York that first trip.

During this time, whenever we made a trip to Ogden I was able to visit with the family, and all of my vacation and my holidays were spent in Ogden. I came down as much as possible and visited with the family, so I did see them quite often, but I did miss them a great deal too.

I remember one time being in the store in Ogden—I guess I’d been away two or three years, and it just goes to show how funny people can be—it was in the summertime, and I didn’t have a hat on, and a lady came rushing up to me and said, “It’s about time I found you in. Every time I come into this store you’re out to lunch.” We often laughed about that.

It was always fun to come home and visit. Ruth made a visit up to Boise and visited with me. She came up once with Faye Williams to a Republican rally, and I was able to visit with her then. Elizabeth came up with me once, and we had quite a time. I had been down here on a trip and she was going to go back with me on the train, and we got a roomette. A roomette bed is just a single bed, and that was what we shared back to Boise that night. We left in the evening and got there in the morning, and she spent a week with me. I couldn’t spend a lot of time entertaining her. There wasn’t a great deal for her to do, but she spent a lot of time in my office at a little table drawing pictures and I don’t know what all she did. Ann Atkinson had her over to her place for an afternoon or two. I don’t know if she remembers that trip with very much pleasantness or not, but I certainly enjoyed having her.

When Grant got married, Ruth and Keith and Andrew went up with Ruth for the wedding. I had intended to go, but something came up at the office, and I was not able to go. The three of them went up, and on their way back, they stopped and spent a few days in Boise with me. I remember when Ruth came back, her telling about at Grant’s wedding, Andrew had had to go to the bathroom. Andrew and Keith were still little fellows then, and they had little sailor suits. Grant and Bobbie were in the line, in the reception line with Bobbie’s parents and Ruth and others. Andrew came back from the bathroom with Keith right behind him very much upset, because Andrew “had” to have Grant do up his pants. Keith could have done it, but Andrew was there to see Grant and so Grant was to do this. Everybody got such a kick out of it and Ruth thought it was so funny.[1]

Grant, Mabel, Max

I also had an opportunity once to visit Max, when he was in the hospital in Spokane. We were up that way visiting stores, and I took an extra day and went over to Spokane and visited with him.[2] So I did try to keep in touch with the family, and of course we always had a wonderful time at holidays when I would come home, and I always did come home as long as I was in Boise. I wasn’t always able to after I went to Minneapolis.

This might be as good a time as any to say that I was in New York when Grant came home from Germany from the service. At that time Frank was stationed just out of New York. He came in to New York and together we went down to the dock and saw Grant’s boat come in. We thought at the time that we would be able to see him, but as we stood on the side of the fence where we were told to stand, we saw the soldiers whisked away to the delousing area, and from there they were sent directly home, so we never did get to see Grant. Frank was particularly put out about it because he was not sure just where he was headed for right then, but he knew it wasn’t home, and so he knew it would be some time before he would have another opportunity to see Grant.

The year after the war ended, the first summer, Grant and Bobbie lived with me in Boise. I was away a good part of the time, but they lived there in my apartment. Bobbie was pregnant at the time with Jeff and was very miserable. It was the early part of her pregnancy. Ruth came up then and stayed for a few days with us and we had an awfully nice time. Later, I visited with Grant in Moscow, Idaho. He and Bobbie went up to Moscow to school that next winter. That summer Grant took a course in barbering in Boise, and that was the way he earned part of his money for his schooling, was barbering the students up at Moscow.

I was in New York once when Austin [Roy’s son] came into New York and spent a weekend with me. I was also there when, I think it was Bryan, one of Fred’s boys, went on his mission, and I had an opportunity to spend some time with him.

Frank came down to New York several times while he was stationed there. I remember we saw the Macy’s Thanksgiving-Christmas Parade together one time from our office window, and it was rather an unforgettable thing to see. Carl visited me, too, once while I was in New York, and of course I spent several times visiting with Don when I was in Minneapolis and he was living in New York before he came up to live with me.[3] I went to Washington D.C. one time and visited with Frank while he was stationed there. All in all, I did get to see various members of the family quite frequently during those first years.

In later years Elizabeth visited with me in New York. The first year that she went up to Bread Loaf summer school, she stopped on her way home from Bread Loaf and visited with me in New York. I was also in New York when Keith and Heinz came, when Keith came home from his mission and brought Heinz home with him. I did go down to the boat and was able to meet them at the boat, and we took a cab back to my hotel and I had arranged a hotel room for them. I visited with them in New York for a couple of days, and then I came home. I flew home and they came by train, so I got home in time to go down to the train and meet them when they came home.[4] The same was true with Elizabeth. I put her on the bus to come home, and then I flew home and got home in time to go to the bus to meet her.

Which goes to show that flying does have some compensations. I didn’t mind flying; in fact, I rather enjoyed flying, except for the fact that I loved the leisurely way of traveling on the train, and it was about the only time that we did have leisure, because the minute we got into New York we had to get registered and get ourselves cleaned up and get right to work.

It was always fun to have the kids come, because they hadn’t any of them seen a lot of New York, and it was fun to take them out to see the Statue of Liberty, and up to St. Patrick’s Church, and to Radio City, and the various interesting spots in New York.

I must not forget the times that I visited with Andrew in New York—that was much later, after I came back to Ogden to work. I visited with Andrew when he was in New York one year studying acting. He came to the hotel several times and we had dinner together and saw a few shows together. I went down to see his apartment, which gave me chills, because it was night and the minute we turned the lights on, the cockroaches went in all directions. He lived down in Greenwich Village, and it was supposed to be an average New York Greenwich Village apartment, but it looked rather barren to me. I think the lady must have stored all her furniture and not told the kids, because I’m quite sure that she didn’t live like that. She was a friend of a friend of Ruth’s who also lived in New York, and who Elizabeth always stayed with when she was in New York, and Ruth stayed with several times in New York.[5]

I want to tell you more of the things that happened to me during the time that I was traveling for C.C. Anderson during those war years. I’m going to tell you a few highlights and hope that you won’t get too bored with them. They make awfully nice memories for me now that I’m not working. I’m never short of something to think about.

I told you that I’d tell you something about the blackouts. My first experience with blackouts was at the office. Evelyn Muller and I had gone back to work late at the office. We were getting out some orders, and we found that we were the only ones there, the only people there in the Allied office, except the night janitor who was a black man who had been drinking quite heavily. His breath smelled to high heaven, and he was being just a little bit fresh. We had let him know that we were not interested in joking with him and that we were very busy, and he had gone about his business. While we were sitting there concentrating on our work, suddenly everything went black. I don’t believe that it would be possible to even describe to you how black black really is in New York when every single light goes out. Standing where we were, I don’t remember which floor, but quite high up, and looking down, even the cabs and cars had to turn their lights off when a blackout came, so there wasn’t a solitary bit of light. With all of those high buildings, the streets looked like canyons anyway, and in the dark you could see absolutely nothing. You couldn’t look up and see anything because of the high buildings above you. It was an awful feeling.

We started to make our way to the elevator, foolishly thinking that we could go down. We didn’t want to get caught up there with that drunk Negro. When we did get to the elevator, we realized that the elevators were not working either, because of the blackout. All of the power had gone off all over the city. One thing we did, trying to keep our courage up, we laughed and said to each other, “Well, at least we’ll know if he’s coming, because we can smell him before he gets here.” We were there by the elevator for several minutes before finally the lights came on and we were able to get on the elevator and go down and get back to our hotel.

In the hotels, on the back of the door to your room, there was a chart that showed the area you were to go to in case of a blackout. Each floor had an area where people were supposed to go. I assume that in the event of an emergency they wanted everybody in one spot so they could try to get them out as quickly as they could. When I first went to New York, the first few times, whenever there would be a blackout—you’d be working in your room writing orders and all the lights would go out—we would feel our way along the hall to this area where everyone was to go. But long before the blackouts were over, we had decided that we were about as safe in our rooms as we were out in the halls with some of the people that we ran into, so we would just stay in our room until the blackout was over. One thing I always hoped was that I would never be caught on a subway in a blackout, and fortunately, I never was.

Everybody in New York is in a hurry. There’s no one that ever seems to have any leisure time. You go out on the street and everyone is rushing in both directions, especially at evening time when it’s time for them to go home. On one occasion, well, on any occasion that you were waiting for an elevator, if you happened to be about the third floor of a high building, by the time the elevators would get down to that floor, they would all be filled. There would be banks of elevators, maybe twenty elevators, but they would all be filled; an elevator would go past and leave you on the floor waiting for the next one to come, and it would be full and it would go past. That would go on for ever so long before you would finally get an elevator.

One day Evelyn Muller and I decided that we wouldn’t wait any longer. We had waited for quite awhile, and then we decided that we would walk down. We went to the stairs and started to walk down. There was a heavy door that we had to open to go down the stairs, and then at the bottom another heavy door to open. We were about halfway down when the blackout came, and there we were in the stairway. This was on a Friday night at about 5:30 or so, so we crept on down to the bottom of the stairs, and we couldn’t open the door; it was locked. We groped our way back up to the next floor, thinking that we could get out there, but that door was locked also. I don’t know whether they automatically locked when the lights went out or what happened, but anyway, here we were caught between floors and were unable to get either out or upstairs or down at the foot, at the bottom floor, and on Friday night, and we wondered if we would still be there on Monday morning. We banged and banged and banged on the door. Finally a janitor heard us and came and unlocked the door, and we were able to get out.

The blackouts came very often. Sometimes you might be in a restaurant in the middle of a meal and suddenly all of the lights would go out, or you could be in a cab and he would get to the side of the road as quickly as he could, and his lights would be out. It was a wonder there weren’t more pileups in the heavy traffic than there were.

Speaking of elevators, I might tell you a little experience Mable Nye and I had on an elevator. The elevators would get extremely crowded. People would jam in until you would just be crowded so closely, and if you were in the back of the elevator and you’d been high up, sometimes the air would just about be gone by the time you would get down. It was uncommon, but it did happen occasionally that someone would pass out in an elevator. Usually it would be from panic or fear of some sort. I remember one day we were in an elevator and it was extremely crowded. The men who smoked would get onto the elevator with their cigarettes and hold them down to their side because they were not supposed to smoke in the elevator. Mable was wearing a coat with a deep wool pile, and when we got outside into the air, all of a sudden she screamed, “I’m on fire!” and sure enough, a cigarette had embedded itself into her coat, and the air made it burst into flame, and it burned a big hole in her coat.

I usually went to the Manhattan Branch of the LDS Church on Sundays. They had quite a large group there. They met in what had been a lodge hall of some sort, rather a nice building, but in a bad location. It was up on 81st Street between Broadway and—I really don’t know just what that would be there—Broadway, as you know, runs catty-corner through the city. I used to take the subway up to 79th and then walk along Broadway for two blocks and then walk about two blocks crosstown to get to the building, and it was right through what was then the Puerto Rican area and Negro area. It was a very bad area for a white woman to walk through.

I must tell you about one other time when I went to a different church. It was, I think, one of the very first Sundays that I was in New York. I’m sure all of you have heard about the Little Church Around the Corner in New York. It’s shown in a lot of films and a lot of movie people are married there. It’s a small church; it’s right downtown, right in the heart of the business section, and you go around the corner from one of the big office buildings to this little, quiet church. It sits back a ways and there’s a lawn around it and quite a few pieces of sculpture, and it’s rather a pretty little setting. I think it’s Episcopalian, I’m not quite sure. One Sunday morning, Mr. Hinshaw and Mr. Barker and Mable Nye and I decided that we would go to church there. Mr. Barker was Episcopalian, Mr. Hinshaw was a Quaker, and I don’t think Mable Nye was anything. Anyway, we went down to the Little Church Around the Corner. We were late, and as we went in, we were a little bit embarrassed, because there were no seats in the back and we had to walk quite a way down toward the front. As we got to our seats, Mr. Barker was leading the way, because after all, he was the Episcopalian in the crowd, and we were looking at all of the beautiful sights. The windows are simply beautiful there; they have all been donated by members of the congregation at various times and are just beautiful windows. As we got to our seats, Mr. Barker suddenly knelt before going into the pews, which is a proper thing for an Episcopalian to do; Mr. Hinshaw was right behind him and we two girls were a little further back. When he knelt, Mr. Hinshaw happened to be looking off in some direction and wasn’t aware of it, and so he went right over the top of him and landed flat on his back in the main aisle! The priest—I don’t know whether he was giving a prayer or a sermon, it was in Latin and we didn’t understand it—but we couldn’t help but laugh. Everyone I guess was very shocked, and we were very embarrassed, and poor Mr. Barker was completely humiliated. Mr. Hinshaw always loved to tell how no one had ever seen the Little Church Around the Corner from the same angle that he had seen it, flat on his back looking up.

We did visit other churches on occasion too. We visited St. Patrick’s; in fact, we visited St. Pat’s many times. We were there once at Easter time, and we didn’t go into the church that day, but we stood across the street and saw the Easter parade of the people going into St. Pat’s in their beautiful gowns and hats and the men dressed in their formal morning dress. It was a beautiful sight to see. We often went into St. Patrick’s. Whenever we took anyone new to New York, one of the places you always took them was to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is very famous. We also went up Riverside Drive to St. John’s, the beautiful church up there, which has, to my knowledge, never been completed. It’s a fabulous church, simply immense. Right in our market area, of course, was the church where Norman Vincent Peale preached [Marble Collegiate Church]. It is a church where President Roosevelt worshipped and where several of the presidents have worshipped. It’s not a very ornate-looking church from the outside, much less so than many of the other churches throughout the city. When we went down to Wall Street, we did see that beautiful old church down there that sits right at the end of Wall Street, but the name of it escapes me—oh! Trinity Church.

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Notes:

1. Grant married Bobbie Roberts in 1943 in Washington State. Grant was called back into the Army for the Korean War and ended up being the most decorated soldier from the state of Washington.
2. This was when Max had been sent home from the Philippines to recover from jungle fever.
3. Carl and Don were Jack’s sons.
4. This was in 1960. Keith met Heinz Christiansen in Flensburg, West Germany. Mabel decided to sponsor his emigration to the U.S., paying for his passage and subsequent schooling and LDS missionary service.
5. The friend of Ruth who sublet her Greenwich Village apartment to Andrew was Mrs. Elma Taylor Wadsworth.

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Go to Part 18 here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 16

This is part 16 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 15, Mabel went to work for C.C. Anderson and Co., and her brother Keith died. In this part, Mabel begins working as a buyer for Allied Corporation and goes to New York.


Chapter 8
Buyer from Boise in New York

The office was set up, I’m quite sure, in 1943. About two days before Christmas of ‘42, I got a phone call from Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the C.C. Anderson stores, telling me that I was to be one of this group who were to set up this new office in Boise. He didn’t say, “Would you like to be?”; he simply said, “You are to be.” I was to be in Pocatello on the 27th of December to meet the other buyers who would be coming down from Boise on the Portland Rose railroad, and I would meet them there and go with them into New York to meet with the Allied people and with the supervisors who were already in New York and to set up an organization to look for merchandise for the stores. You can imagine my surprise! I never dreamed—well, I did dream, always, and had done clear back from the years that I worked with Mr. Ferris—of doing something of this sort, but I actually never expected the dream to come true. It really was a dream when he called me that morning.

I was so excited I didn’t know what to do, but there in the back of my mind was how was I going to leave Ruth and the children and my promise to Keith that I would help to take care of them. I was really torn with what I should do. I really had not too much of a choice on what I was to do: as I say, he didn’t ask me would I like to, he simply told me that I had been chosen to do it, and where I was to be and when. I talked it over with Ruth, and she felt that I should do it, and I talked it over with Roy and he felt that I should go. One of the great advantages of it was that I was going to make $200 a month, and that against the $80 that I was making was not to be discounted. We felt that I could be financially perhaps more beneficial and make more of a contribution to the family than I could by staying in Ogden, even if I were to go somewhere else and get a job.

I don’t know how I got through those two days before Christmas at the store. Christmas was on a Saturday that year, so I had Saturday and Sunday at home, and then on Monday afternoon I took the train to Pocatello. The store had made the arrangements for me to—for the train and also for me to stay overnight at the Hotel Bannuck, in Pocatello, and then meet the train the next day. I frantically bought a few things to wear, because I really had a very meager wardrobe, but I couldn’t buy too much. I took the train; I think it left here about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and arrived in Pocatello around 9 o’clock that night.

It was the first time I had ridden on a train of this kind. I had ridden a couple of times on the Heber Creeper when we moved to Provo and back, and I had ridden the old Bamberger electric train quite a lot of times back and forth between Salt Lake and Ogden when I was working down there. This was my first experience on a real train. I had a chair seat going up, and I really felt important, I guess you might say, to be going on this job. I was so frightened, I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do. I felt very unqualified to take the job. I assumed that I would be buying piece goods and domestics and the same things that I had been buying, and I would know something of what I was doing.

I got into Pocatello, as I said, around nine, and took a cab, probably the first one I had ever taken, to the hotel, and spent my very first night alone in a hotel. As I said, I had stayed in a hotel one night in Los Angeles with these other ladies. But oh, that seemed like such a lonesome place to be there, and I was feeling so badly about the job requiring me to leave home, even if Boise wasn’t very far away, and I knew that I would be able to get home quite often.

Anyway, the next day I wandered around town and it seemed like the longest day in the world. By 4 o’clock I had my things down at the depot waiting for the train to come in to meet these other people. They had told me that Kathryn Karren and Evelyn Muller, who bought for the Boise store, and Mable Nye, who was also new in the office, would be coming in on that train and that they would get off and pick me up. The train made a stop in Pocatello for water and was usually there for 15 or 20 minutes. I was waiting for them when they came in. I had seen Kathryn; she had been down when the store opened, and I think Evelyn Muller was too, but I wasn’t sure that I would know either one of them, and I didn’t have any idea that they would know me. But the minute I saw those three gals get off the train, I knew who they were: three beautifully dressed, smart-looking young women, who looked like they might just have stepped out of Vogue Magazine. I stood there, looking like I had just come out of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. If I could have, I would have gone right through the floor. They didn’t have any trouble picking me out, either. But they were very sweet, and they bought some candy and various things there in the station, and we all got on the train together.

When we got on the train, I found that the four of us were to share a double bedroom. I don’t know about other people, but to me one of the saddest things I know of is the demise of those beautiful old trains like the Portland Rose and the Chief and the Super Chief that we used to travel in so much. I’m sure that many of you younger people have never even seen that type of train, and so I’m going to take just a minute to explain what a double bedroom is.

It’s simply two single bedrooms. A bedroom has an upper and lower berth, but during the day the upper berth is pushed completely out of sight. The lower berth sort of doubles up and makes a lovely velvet-covered seat. It’s very comfortable. Also in this little bedroom is a wash basin that pulls out from the wall and folds back completely out of sight, and what looks to you like a nice chair or seat, but the lid comes up and you have a toilet. A double bedroom is just two of these bedrooms with a collapsible door pulled back so that it makes one room. In each room too is a little closet in the wall where you can hang your coats and at the bottom a place for you to put your shoes. From the outside, from the corridor, the porter at night will pick up your shoes and polish them and put them back all nice and shiny for you for the next morning.

Those old trains had every luxury that there could possibly be on a train, and to travel across the country leisurely on one of those lovely velvet seats, looking out the window and watching the countryside go by is just my idea of the way to travel. At night, when you’re ready to go to bed, you call the porter and he lets down the upper berth and unfolds the lower berth, and you’re ready to get undressed and washed and climb into bed. I had the upper berth and Mable Nye had the lower berth of our bedroom.

We had been on the train a little while just talking about things before I realized that I was not going to be buying domestics and piece goods and the things that I was familiar with. I was going to be buying children’s wear and house dresses and foundation garments, none of which I knew anything about. I was just absolutely stunned when I heard this. I know now, or did know soon afterwards why this happened to be. I had been planned to buy the domestics and piece goods, but one of the people from the New York office, a young Irish fellow, had wanted this job, and the company felt that it would be good for him to have this experience, and so they had suggested him for the job. He was buying domestics and piece goods for the New York office and doing a very good job. That is, he wasn’t the head buyer, but he was in the department. He also had a lot of connections and they thought that he could handle it best. So I was given these other departments, which up until this time had been part of Kathryn Karren’s job. I think she resented just a little bit me getting them, though she realized that she had not been able to justify keeping them. Mable Nye was to buy the accessories and handbags and things of that nature. She had had no experience at all in buying anything. She had been Mr. Hinshaw’s secretary and had always wanted to go into merchandising, and I think had taken some classes in it in college, but had had no practical experience.

It was rather amusing. She had a briefcase just packed full of catalogs and bulletins and everything necessary to learn something about her job. Here I was: I didn’t even have a pencil, let alone a piece of paper. I had come totally unprepared to do any work on the train. I afterwards learned that that’s where you did a lot of your work, but I hadn’t known what to expect of the job as we went. I’m sure I wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway, partly from excitement and partly because I really didn’t know a great deal about what I was going to do until I got to New York.

One of the other fun things on a train is going into the dining room for your meals. Now you don’t go into a diner like we think of them today. You went into a beautiful dining room. Every table had a lovely white tablecloth and beautiful shiny silver, and the dishes that you were served in were, all the serving dishes were silver, and lovely glass goblets to drink from. Everything was just as you would have found it in the finest restaurant in the world, and a nice long menu to choose from and perfectly luscious food to eat. It was just a wonderful experience to me to eat in the dining cars. Then they had the lounge car, which you could go to if you chose, one little car of restful chairs and couches and benches. If you wanted to, you could have tables brought so you could play cards or do anything that you chose. All of this was really luxury; the draperies and everything were beautiful. Those were really wonderful days.

During the war, a lot of the trains got beat up a great deal when they were forced to carry a lot of the military, and things were not as comfortable as they were in peace time. The trains were full of military. Going back and forth across the country, I sometimes wondered why, if you went east, they were all traveling east, and if you went west, they were all traveling west. I often wondered why they had to shuttle them back and forth across the country so much as they seemed to do.

We had a nice trip across the country. Every place that they had to take on water, they had regular stops. We always stopped at Green River or at Cheyenne, and Omaha in Nebraska, and into Chicago. In Chicago we always had several hours to wait, and we’d leave the train and go uptown and window shop or even go to a show sometimes between trains, and then get back on the train and go on into New York. As I said, train travel was delightful, and that was one of the things that I enjoyed very much about the years that I spent in Boise. I guess that I ought to get back to telling you something about the job, because after all that’s what we were there for. I won’t either for a minute, because I’m going to tell you a few other things.

We got into New York on New Year’s Eve, and we were staying at the Lincoln Hotel, which is now called the Manhattan Hotel. It was rather an old hotel, but up until then had been rather a fine hotel. It was taken over by the military just afterwards. At the time, we stayed there a time or two, and then we started staying at the Astor, which was right next to it on Broadway. The Astor at that time was one of the fine old hotels in New York. It has since been torn down, but it was a lovely place to stay. Anyway, this night we were at the Lincoln.

New Year’s Eve is something that everyone ought to experience once in New York City on Broadway. At the time we got there, my first trip there, New York was still having the blackouts, and there were no lights except little shaded lights. On each block there would be a light that would have a shade over it. All of the big signs that many of you who’ve been to New York are familiar with were all turned off; there were none of those. The streets were really very dark. We went up to Broadway, and I think they said that night there were, I don’t know how many millions of people, on Broadway in about a two-block area from the Times building up to the Duffy Monument. We tried to stay sort of on the outside of the crowd. Kathryn Karren was with us, and she had lived in New York for quite a long time and was sort of herding us around. Mable Nye was having her first trip to New York too, so she and I were both very much excited about everything. They had said that they would turn the lights on for just a moment at 12 o’clock, but about the time that it was 12 o’clock we could hear planes overhead, and so the lights were never turned on and it remained dark.

We went back to the hotel, and Kathryn (she had just been out to Boise for this meeting arranging for the new office), she and Harvey lived in Queens. She suggested that we all go over there for a little while for New Year’s Eve, but Ev Muller didn’t want to go. She was tired, and felt that she would rather just go to bed. Mable and I were out for anything that was going on, so we went with Kathryn over to Queens. We went over on the subway, which was my first time on the subway. From the old Lincoln Hotel you used to go down right into the 42nd Street subway, and so we thought that would be very easy, and when we came back we could get off the train there and go right up into the hotel.

After we had spent the evening, well, I should say early morning I guess, out there, Harvey put us back on the train and we came back into town, and we got off the subway when they announced the 42nd Street subway, not realizing that the 42nd Street subway station is about two blocks long. We started trying to find the right stairway to come up out of to get into the Lincoln Hotel. I guess we came up about six or eight different stairways. We found ourselves on Broadway, and we found ourselves on Eighth Avenue, and several different places. By this time it would have been about 3 o’clock in the morning and there was no one much down there but us and a bunch of drunks. A policeman finally took pity on us and approached us and asked us where we wanted to go, and we told him, and he took us to the right subway entrance and we got up into the hotel. From there it was no problem to find our room. By the time we got back, Evelyn was beginning to get quite worried about us and wondered if she had lost us on our very first night in New York.

I mentioned that many of the hotels in New York were taken over by soldiers, and this did happen to the Lincoln Hotel. They had a group of soldiers stay there who were coming back from Europe, and on one occasion when we stayed there, in the middle of the night I sort of felt itchy, and I got up and turned on the lights and found out that I had a bed full of bedbugs that apparently had come along with some soldier who had had the room before me. Because of this, we quit staying at the Lincoln Hotel.

In fact, the hotel was closed down after the war. It was kept for soldiers as long as the war lasted, and then it was closed down and was remodeled, as I’ve said before, and is now called the Manhattan. It’s a beautiful-looking hotel, both inside and out. I’ve never stayed there, but I’ve been there with people for luncheons and meetings that manufacturers have had there. They have a nice room there for meetings and I’ve been there a number of times. I never go in there but what I remember the occasion when we stayed there when I first went to New York.

I think one of the things that impressed me that night on Broadway on that New Year’s Eve was the policemen. They said there were 9,000 policemen in that two-block area that night. They stood in the middle of the street with their arms locked together so that they couldn’t be separated, so that the crowd had to move in the same direction all the way around them, because if people had gotten going crosswise or trying to get mixed in among them, people would have been crushed. On the outside there were hundreds more of the policemen on horseback circling the crowd and keeping everybody moving in the same direction so that people wouldn’t get crushed. I always loved to see those policemen on horseback, and the horses that they rode were beautiful. We used to always take a few lumps of sugar from the sugar bowl when we ate our meals and as we would go along and see a policeman on horseback, we would give the horse a lump of sugar. They were used to that; lots of people did it, lots of tourists did it, and they just loved to stop and nibble at sugar out of your hand.

I might say that the first time that I ever went back to New York after the lights were turned on, after the war, and saw all of those great signs lit that you see on television sometimes when they’re showing the New Year’s programs and all, and I saw all of those lights and Broadway just as light as day (The Great White Way as it’s always called), it was almost like going to New York for the first time. I was really excited to see it. It wasn’t until then that I realized how dark it had been the first time that I went, on several times afterward that I went. As I go along, I’ll tell you about a few of the blackouts that I was caught in during that time, during the war, because I had some rather frightening experiences with blackouts during the war.

It was rather a short night, that night that I’ve told you about. The next morning we all got up and got ready and went over to the Allied office, to the C.C. Anderson office that was there, to learn something about our new jobs. We used to walk from the Lincoln or the Astor Hotel over to our office, which at that time was on Broadway. When I was in New York a couple of years ago, I felt so badly to find so many of the old places gone that I knew. We always ate at Schraff’s or at Fontenetti’s, which were our two favorite restaurants, moderate-priced restaurants, really very nice. They were both gone, along with so many of the places that I knew. I almost felt like a stranger in New York. I thought I was going to all these various places I had known, but a great many of them for some reason had vanished. I couldn’t help but notice how different New York was in that particular area. Down in the area where I worked it was always dirty and messy, but up on Fifth Avenue and in the nicer parts of New York it was so clean and shiny and pretty when I first started going, and now even those have gone downhill a great deal, and it’s apparent to see that New York has changed a very great deal in the last few years.

I know I’m not going to be able to keep anything in any kind of chronological order through the time that I was working in Boise, so I guess I’ll just try to tell you some of the highlights and some of the things that I did and not try to put any continuity or any dates to them. It was a fascinating time in my life. I loved New York; I loved those great, tall buildings, and I loved the many sights that you could see. You could see anything in New York that you could ever see anywhere. We did a lot of sightseeing the first few trips that I made, and each time someone else new came, we did it all over again to show them. I think it’s almost more fun showing somebody else than doing it yourself the first time. It was a long time before I even knew where I was going. As long as I could see the Astor Hotel and the Empire State Building, I knew something about where I was.

I’ll try to be just a little more brief about things from here on. Probably no one would be interested in my description of the trains; the younger people probably could care less and the older ones already know. To me, it is such a shame to see those trains gone that I couldn’t resist making another trip on them myself in my mind. If you didn’t enjoy it, at least I did.

As I started to say, we went over to the office the morning after our big night at Karrens’. We were introduced to various people in the office. I was introduced to the lady who bought the infants’ wear for Allied. Her name was Gladys Munz. She was a lovely person, and I also met several of the other buyers: the one who bought foundation garments and house dresses and lingerie. I didn’t mention before that I was also to buy lingerie. For the life of me, I can’t remember her name right now, but I’m sure it will come to me. We were very good friends. After I’d met everybody, the three supervisors from the C.C. Anderson stores and I went into one of the conference rooms to plan our strategy for the day. As you know, I didn’t know a thing about what I was doing. The stores were divided into three groups: the small and the medium and the large size stores, and there was a supervisor for each one. I sat down with these three men. They had all previously made the trip—which from then on I would make—to all of the stores before they came in, and they had with them inventories of what the stores had and what they needed and the quantities they needed and that I must buy. They had consolidated them all into one grand total and I was just to look for 500 dozen shirts and 600 dozen of something else and so on, to buy for the various stores.

I suppose it was rather funny if I hadn’t been so scared. Here these men sat with their list of layette items, which was where we were going to start, because that seemed to be where we were shortest of merchandise in the stores. They had on it the shirts in so many sizes and rubber pants, and stockings, and receiving blankets and other blankets, and so on, everything that you would need to dress a baby, and the quantities that I would have to buy in each of these. They had put down the manufacturer’s names and addresses that they preferred that I work with, but I should get merchandise wherever I could find it in those days, because as I have told you before, the merchandise was already on quota, and our stores being very small, we didn’t have very big quotas. After we had gone over all of the items and they had given me my instructions, they said, “Okay, well, we’ll see you tonight.” I had been looking frantically around for Miss Munz or somebody to come who was going to work with me that day. I had no idea that they would send poor little old green me out into New York to look for merchandise on my very first day.

I guess Mr. Burke saw my dismay, and he did go down the elevator with me and out to the front door of the building where we had our offices and explained to me that there were only three directions in New York. You didn’t talk about east and west and north and south, you went uptown or downtown or crosstown. Fortunately, all of the manufacturers that I was to visit that day were on Broadway and they were all, as he pointed the direction to me (which to me was south), were downtown. You might be interested in knowing, too, in New York the buildings are numbered, but the number of the building has absolutely nothing to do with the street on which it is; that is, as we have here 24th, 25th, 26th Street, and so on, with all the numbers between them on the cross streets going from 2400 to 2500 or 2500 to 2600; there 1224 Broadway, which was one building that I was to visit, happened to be on 34th Street, and another building numbered 1200-something would maybe be on 36th Street. There was no continuity to the numbering of the buildings like at home, and if you were to walk one block crosstown, up to Fifth Avenue, which to me was like going east a block, you would find that the same number—a building on the same corner that was 1224 on Broadway was 105 on Fifth Avenue. It was a little bit confusing to me. There were maps one could get, but Mr. Burke explained to me that the maps were even more confusing than him telling me. He told me just to walk down the street until I came to a building that had the number that was on my piece of paper and go in and look at the register in the hall, as we have them here, and then go on up in the elevator to the floor and find the manufacturer. With that he left me, and I went off downtown with my list of what I was to find clutched tightly in my arms, and my heart in my mouth, until I came to the first address. I went in and went upstairs and started.

It was a very complicated thing in those days to get merchandise. You went into a showroom, and the showrooms were several little showrooms partitioned off in the room, with a table in each and a couple of chairs behind them. You would go in and sit down at one of these tables and the salesman would come to you, eventually, and say, “Where are you from?” You would tell him, and then he would go and get his list and see how many dozen of whatever you wanted that your store had allotted to them out of the merchandise they had. They had already been required to give so much of their merchandise, or sell it (I shouldn’t say give because they got very good prices for it) to the government for the government’s supplies for overseas and for the camps here and so on.

I would say I was from C.C. Anderson and Company, and they would go and get their list and come back. Very often the first comment was “You’re too little, you just won’t have anything coming.” I soon learned to say, “Will you please check and see?”

They would come out in a very superior tone, some of them, and say, “You have ten dozen infant shirts, or ten dozen hose, or something,” and I would say, “I’ll take them.”

“Well, that’s not going to do you any good.”

I’d say, “If you didn’t have any in your store, it would do you some good.”

I made a lot of friends that first trip. I had worked with salesmen quite a lot and so I wasn’t quite so frightened talking to the salesmen themselves. They were always interested in the west, and they had heard about Hill Field, and many of them had sons or brothers at Hill Field or at some of the western encampments in various places, and they would be interested in them. I learned to sort of get that into the conversation rather quickly, and pretty soon I would make friends, not always, but I would make friends with most of the salesmen. I have seen salesmen on many occasions sit with their lists, and after I had talked to them for some time, reminded them that we had so many of their eastern people now on the west coast that were in need of merchandise, I would see them erase a number by the side of a large store, say, for instance, Jordan Marsh, and say, “He’ll never miss that; I’ll give you fifteen dozen.” He’d go down the list a ways to some other store: “They’ll never miss that, I’ll give you ten dozen there,” and so on, until maybe by the time I got through I would have picked up 25, 50 dozen of two or three different items that I needed. That was the way I bought merchandise during that time, because as little as we were, we actually did not have any merchandise given to us.

I learned a few other techniques too. I remember one day I was tired and hot and disgusted, and I had barely opened the door and started to walk in to a showroom, and there were four fellows seated around one of the tables playing cards. They just looked up at me and one of them said, “Oh, come back after the war.”

I said, “Well I’m sorry, but there will be lots of places that I can go after the war, and I probably won’t be back here.” That startled them enough that they invited me to come in and found out where I was from, and I got a few dozen things there. Another thing I often said when they’d say, “You don’t have any allotment; come back after the war and maybe we can work out something,” I’d say, “If I don’t get something today, I may not have a job after the war, so you probably won’t see me again.” They’d take pity on me for that.

All in all, I soon learned that I was buying more merchandise than the supervisors had anticipated that I would, and I realized that they were very pleased with the amount of merchandise that I was getting. Part of the trouble before was that Kathryn and Harvey just didn’t have time to make all these calls that I was making. I remember one particular day that I made 42 calls and didn’t buy one single piece of merchandise, and if you don’t think that is discouraging, you ought to try it sometime. Each morning I would meet with the supervisors; we’d sit down together and I would turn in my orders of the things that I had bought the day before. They would add all of those up and tally them against what they needed and let me know how much more we needed of that particular item, and each day they would add a few more items to my list.

This went on day after day and week after week, until I had been in New York for some six or seven weeks before I covered all of the resources for all of the various types of merchandise that I had to buy. Some areas were much more difficult than others, and at that particular time of course the infants’ department was one of the worst, because of the big baby boom that the war had brought on.

It was very interesting work, and I enjoyed it. I gradually learned to get around a little bit better. I have a very poor sense of direction, as you all know, and I hadn’t the slightest idea of which direction I should walk when I would come out of a building, until I would look up and see the Astor Hotel. If it was time to go home, I would know to walk in that direction, because the office was in that direction. If it wasn’t time to go home, then I would walk in the opposite direction until I’d come to my next address. That was the way I spent my first six or seven weeks in New York. Gradually I didn’t find all my resources on Broadway, and I had to learn to go crosstown, not uptown, because none of my market was uptown at that time. Some of it was up on Fifth, much of it was down on Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and I had to learn how to walk down there and which streets my resources were on.

I really had had a good education in New York and also in merchandising before I got through with that first trip, so I don’t think I’ll try to repeat another trip to you. I’ll just tell you some of the more interesting or funny things that happened in various trips and not try even to keep them consecutive. Before I start that though, maybe I’d better get myself back in Boise and tell you a little of the arrangements there and what we had to do from there.


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Go to Part 17 here.
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