Where Was the Editor?

In Georgette Heyer’s 1937 mystery novel, They Found Him Dead, there’s a curious mix-up in the correct relationships between family members that appears within the first nine pages.

Silas Kane is having a 60th birthday party, and the guests are described by their relationship to him. He is the head of the business firm of Kane and Mansell, which was started the previous century by old Matthew Kane.

Old Matthew Kane founded the firm in the 1800s. He and his unnamed wife had four sons. The first was John, who married a woman named Emily Fricker. At the time of this story, John had died and Emily is an 80-something-year-old widow. Their only child Silas is the head of the firm.

The second son had only one child, now-39-year-old Clement, heir of Silas, and married to the shallow-minded gold-digging Rosemary.

The third son went to Australia and had just one son before dying; the son also died and left a daughter named Maud who married Edwin Leighton.

The fourth son, James, married a woman named Norma and produced a son, James (Jim), and then a daughter who died young. The elder James died at Gallipoli during the Great War, about 1915. Jim is in his late twenties or 30 and is single. He doesn’t work for the family firm; he works for the national Treasury.

This would all be fairly clear, if complicated, but it gets difficult to understand because the author identifies Jim Kane as the nephew of Silas, when he is actually a first cousin. She also says that Clement is a nephew of Silas Kane, and again, he is another first cousin. It is true that Silas’s mother, Emily, is the aunt of Clement and James. The erroneous relationships are repeated up until page 9, when suddenly they are all straightened out and thereafter all called “cousins” correctly.

When you are just getting into a mystery and know that you need to understand the family relationships because it’s a cozy, and everyone knows in cozies the first relationships mentioned are going to be vital, it’s pretty disconcerting to have the relationships change like this. Where was the editor? Probably someone who never heard the word “genealogy.”

For shame, Editor.

Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet

I just read a 1924 novel by Patricia Wentworth, The Black Cabinet, and thought I would jot down my thoughts about this 95-year-old suspense novel. I have been reading mysteries written by the authors who gained fame in the British Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and although this does not actually qualify as it has no detective, it was a lot of fun to read. Beware, spoilers are throughout this piece, so if you want to read the book, quit reading this right now.

In this mystery, pretty, poor 20-year-old Chloe Dane works for a dressmaker and is given the ticket and dress to go to a society ball, where her mysterious old distant cousin Mitchell Dane observes her and approves of her appearance of good breeding. She accepts his invitation to Danesborough, the family seat, but declines to accept living there as his heir. She had lived there as a child when her grandfather owned it. Mitchell Dane shows her the safe he has had installed inside an old family heirloom, a Chinese lacquer black cabinet and teaches her how to open it and tells her he will send her the combination. Which he does.

Meanwhile, she has met Michael Foster, the chauffeur of a terrible old lady, a few times: first when she bicycles to Rambourne to a tea dance held by Monica Gresson, her old schoolfellow, and she stops to help the broken-down car occupant by taking a spoiled Pekinese to Rambourne in her bike basket. She likes the looks of that chauffeur. Second, when she goes to tea with her old schoolmistress, Miss Tankerville, he comes to tea too, and he is revealed as the son of a former pupil who married into minor aristocracy. Third, he waits for her to come out of work and they decide to go to the pictures with her roommate Rose and Rose’s fiance.

Two big clues are buried in these early chapters. First, Martin Fosseter dances with Chloe at the tea dance and thinks to himself that this is the Chloe Dane whom Mitchell Dane is going to come and look over. We should keep it in mind—that he knows and is familiar with the plans of Mitchell Dane—when Martin reappears near Danesborough. Second, after the tea at Miss Tankerville’s, Michael Foster writes to his mother and includes his business plans for putting his Uncle Horace’s money into the car business where he’s been acting as a chauffeur. These facts make it clear who is on whose side. But we lose track because of the complexity of the following events, and especially because the next night after work, in Michael’s place stands Mitchell Dane, and the juxtaposition of the two names in the same place sets up a mistaken impression. Furthering the mistaken impression is Chloe’s attraction to Martin at the ball and Martin’s seeming indifference, after his undeniable warmth at the tea dance.

When Mitchell Dane shows Chloe the black cabinet, he provides several more clues we need to keep in mind as Chloe does. He tells her the handling of his stock in trade is something he does not want to fall into any of his former business partners’ hands. He also says that his secretary, Mr. Wroughton, knows about the cabinet because he helped build it. He says that “Stran” is rendered harmless by the receipts in the safe. He warns Chloe not to trust anybody.

Two weeks after Chloe rejects Mitchell Dane’s offers and returns to working for Miss Allerdyce, Dane dies and leaves everything to her anyway. It’s November and she won’t turn 21 until February, so Dane’s solicitor and secretary assume responsibility for her. She has to live at Danesborough, and the oppressive atmosphere becomes overwhelming. She has discovered the contents of the black cabinet safe are heaps of compromising letters that Dane used for blackmail to build up his fortune of half a million pounds. She is horrified and seeks to destroy some of the letters. Wroughton seeks to block her and tries to get her to give him access to the safe. He and his wife and cronies tell her there’s a quarantine on the house, they send away all the cars and disconnect the telephone so she is a prisoner. Their Plan A is to marry her to Martin Fosseter and have him “persuade” her to give them the contents of the safe. Plan B is to have her committed to an asylum.

Chloe successfully empties the safe of the letters and hides them until she can escape the house with Martin Fosseter, whose role she doesn’t know yet, but as soon as they get to London she catches him trying to deceive her. She gives him the slip and hides with the niece of her old governess. Comic scenes and cat-and-mouse chases ensue, with Michael Foster turning up to rescue and hide Chloe at his old nanny’s place when the Baduns find her address. Chloe gives Michael the receipt for the suitcases and he destroys the letters. She loses her job and ends up marrying Michael for support, protection, and also because he loves her and she loves him. But in signing the marriage register, she finds out he’s actually “Michael Stranways Fosseter.” She thinks he must be the “Stran” that Mitchell Dane warned her was a devil, so she runs away and hides. She comes to her senses and goes back, asking for his side of the story, and they reconcile.

Stuff I wonder:

• Aren’t there a lot of important male characters with similar first names? Michael, Martin, Mitchell. It almost requires a chart. Hm.
• Classism is rampant in the society of the time. Chloe’s “breeding” tells, first in her overall appearance at the ball, and then in her speech and demeanor in applying as a charwoman, then in the ease of her changing jobs to that of a secretary. But would they really accept a charwoman who could speak like a lady? See My Fair Lady. See also note about Hiding Places, below. Everybody allows a “lady” to get away with anything in this world.
• The villains’ plans are unclear. Plan A (my name for it) is explicit, but suddenly Plan B pops out while Chloe is living at Danesborough, with no reason why it was going into effect and why Plan A was apparently being discarded, especially as Plan A seems to be in fine shape when Martin persuades Chloe to “escape” with him.
• How is it that Chloe mistakes Michael’s last name and not Martin’s? Where would she have seen Martin’s name written down? As far as we know, she is introduced to him, so she should have heard the same last name, “Foster,” at the tea dance as she hears the next day at Miss Tankerville’s when Michael comes and is introduced to her. Is this fair of the author to deceive us by writing one name with its correct spelling and the other name with its pronunciation?
• HOW do the villains find her address when she hides in London? Do we assume they spotted her and kept her under surveillance? Wasn’t that awfully lucky, to spot this one girl out of the whole of London and not have her spot them, and not tell the readers either? Is that fair??
• Same with Michael. What a convenient coincidence that he should spot her in London in time to come to her rescue!
• Also, how did they find out the compromising letters were in the two suitcases at Victoria Station’s Left Luggage? Hm, since Chloe escaped Danesborough and Martin helped her with a) two suitcases, and b) a cardboard clothes box, and she kept the clothes box with her, he could deduce she didn’t need the suitcases, ergo, they were Something Else.
• For a girl who knows “nobody” in London, doesn’t Chloe have a lot of hiding places? First the niece of her nanny or whoever-that-was who moved to Australia. Loved this comic relief. Then Michael turns up and can let her live in the flat of HIS old nanny. Here we see Old Nannies Provide Hiding Places. Finally, she throws herself on the mercy of the relative of the girl at the organization where she worked for a short time, and this relative takes her in without references or anything (see note about Classism above, also about Looks, below).
• Why does Chloe trust her intrinsic reactions to people—liking Michael Foster at first sight, disliking Mitchell Dane and Mr Wroughton—and so suddenly turning against her feelings about Michael? Okay, there’s some experience to justify her. At first she liked the doctor in the village near Danesborough, but then she finds out he’s one of the Bad’uns. At first she liked Martin Fosseter, but then she finds out he’s lied to her and she reacts immediately by suspecting him, rightly as it happens, of being a Bad’un too. So when she sees the fatal name “Stranways” on the register, she’s shocked into reacting without thinking, just as she did with Martin.
• Chloe certainly gets to trade on her looks a lot. She definitely has merit underneath, but still. People accept her at face value because she’s pretty and apparently can look sincere. She should have become a master criminal herself; she has the talent for it: acting ability, innocent looks, resourcefulness, quick thinking, and hubris. Yes, hubris. How else does she so self-justifyingly reject Michael and then come back and barely apologize and instead turn the scene into a pity party for her own broken heart?
• Yeah. That reconciliation scene. It could have been so much better had Chloe humbled herself to the point of accepting that she bore equal blame for breaking Michael’s heart first by rejecting him and running away, before she got her own heart broken when he rejected her apology. As it stands, he has to assume most of the responsibility for the situation, which I thought was really unfair when it was so obvious that Chloe owes him the effort of becoming more understanding.
• Feminism takes a hit when Chloe, after exhibiting exceptional brains in foiling and eluding the Bad’uns all that time, falls back on allowing herself to be rescued by the Man and Marriage. Just because she marries Michael, she’s not suddenly safe, except from having to marry Martin. The Bad’uns could still have kidnapped her and gotten her committed to an asylum under a false name and then faked her death, going to a lot of trouble before they discover the destruction of all the letters and before Michael could find her (doesn’t this now remind you of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White?) and come to the rescue. All she really has to do is to write a letter to Danesborough that the contents of the safe have been destroyed, and the persecution would all end. Then we could have had a feminist win if Chloe had chosen the Man and the Marriage at the end of her adventures, not for any other reason than her own happiness.
• How could this much happen and it’s STILL NOT February???

Georgette Heyer Rewrites the Story

My book club recently decided to read a Georgette Heyer novel, and I was the one who ended up choosing which one and hosting the discussion. I picked Regency Buck, because it is the only one of her long list of works that combines mystery elements with the Regency period that she became so well known for evoking in period romances. I found out that it was actually a rewrite of an earlier contemporary murder mystery that she had published in 1933, Why Shoot a Butler?, so I read that one and led the discussion using notes I took on reading the mystery and then rereading the romance novel. I wrote up a very rough essay out of my notes and am not going to polish it; here it is for the benefit of my friends who were not able to be there that night who wanted to know the stuff we discussed.


Georgette Heyer: Same Story, Changed Setting

In showing how Georgette Heyer rewrote her contemporary murder mystery Why Shoot A Butler? as a Regency-period romance with mystery and suspense elements, I’m assuming we all read Regency Buck and are pretty familiar with it, so I’ll go over the plot of Why Shoot a Butler? first in some detail.

Why Shoot A Butler?

1933, south of England, within reach of the Kentish coast.

When barrister Frank Amberley is enroute to his uncle and aunt’s home, Greythorne, he stops to help a woman standing beside a stopped car on a lonely foggy road. A man in the car is shot dead, she is holding a gun, but she says she didn’t do it. Frank drives on and reports it to the police, omitting any mention of the girl, and begins to solve the case.

Dawson, the corpse in the case, was the butler at Norton Manor, home of the late Jasper Fountain. Jasper Fountain had no direct heirs, only a nephew, Basil, whose half-sister Joan is engaged to marry Anthony Corkran, an old school-fellow of Frank. Basil and Joan have taken possession of Norton Manor. Unbeknownst to us is that Jasper had made a last-minute will bequeathing the manor to his grandchildren Shirley and Mark Fountain, children of his disinherited son who died a dissolute drunk in South Africa. Dawson the butler and Collins the valet witnessed the will. When Basil Fountain takes over the manor, the two servants begin to blackmail him because of the will, which they have stolen and torn in half, each keeping a half for security. But Collins shoots Dawson because he suspects the butler of softening towards Mark and Shirley, who are “hiding” under the surname Brown, and who have taken Ivy Cottage in the vicinity to see what they can possibly do to get their inheritance. Dawson made an assignation in the lane with one of the Browns (can’t remember which), and that’s why Shirley comes upon him already shot dead in his car.

There’s a fancy-dress ball at Norton Manor to celebrate Joan’s and Anthony’s engagement. Shirley dresses up and crashes the ball, looking for Dawson’s half of the will. Collins is also looking for it. Frank (the almost-omniscient investigator) sees an 18th-century portrait of an ancestor who looks like Shirley, and he guesses she’s family. He sees her and Collins trying to look in a tallboy and each thwarting the other. While they are both trying to keep the other away, Frank opens the tallboy and finds the half of the will hidden there by Dawson-the-dead-butler.

Mark goes to the manor late one night and threatens to shoot Collins, but he’s so drunk he doesn’t really know what he’s doing or why.

Frank guesses some more. Puts a tail on Mark Brown, but the police don’t think it’s vital, and Basil has the chance to push Mark in the river when he’s reeling home from the pub, drunk as usual. Collins was tailing Mark, trying to stop his damaging the situation further, and tries to save him from drowning, to no avail. Nobody saw Basil, but of course, Frank guesses that it was him.

Frank’s uncle Sir Humphrey Matthews, local Justice etc., goes to Norton Manor with his daughter Felicity and borrows an old book from the library. Basil pays no attention to his book treasures. This book is where Collins hid his half of the will though. Collins is frantic. Sir Humphrey and Felicity stop at the Inn where Shirley is staying after her brother’s death (she doesn’t want to stay alone in Ivy Cottage), and Sir Humphrey accidentally leaves the book there. She finds Collins’ half of the will in it but thinks it was Dawson’s, and she takes it. Sir Humphrey returns for the book and she’s all gracious about it.

Then Greythorne (Frank’s aunt & uncle’s place) is burgled twice, papers and books scattered. Frank guesses that the other half will has gone missing. He still has his half, which had been Dawson’s.

Collins thinks Shirley has Dawson’s half of the will and that the Matthews family have his half. Shirley thinks Collins still has his own half and that she has Dawson’s half, but she has Collins’s half which had been hidden in that book. Frank knows he has Dawson’s half, and he thinks the other half is still in Norton Manor.

Shirley makes an appointment to meet Collins, thinking she can get the missing half from him. Basil tracks her through the woods, trying to kill her. But Frank is also tracking her, and he’s put his own valet, Peterson, into Norton Manor as a butler named Baker, and Baker is trailing Basil everywhere while looking for the will in his off hours. Frank gets Shirley safely out of the wood.

Shirley posts her half of the will to Marion, Lady Matthews, who has seen her resemblance to the older members of the Fountain family, has guessed her relationship, and has guessed that something shady has happened about the inheritance and that’s why Basil and all those Norton Manor servants have been acting so oddly. (Frank and his aunt are really annoyingly omniscient.)

Finally Cousin Felicity remembers to tell Frank that the book had been out of Uncle Humphrey’s hands for ten minutes when he left it with Shirley, and Frank realizes Shirley has half the will and is in danger from Basil twice over, once for knowing about and possessing half the will, and once for being his uncle’s true heir. Nobody had been suspecting Basil because he loves to have company over and to entertain everybody with good food, drink, and all the comforts. He’s the perfect host. Frank suspects him anyway. Because Frank Knows Everything.

Basil kidnaps Shirley, ties her up and takes her to his cottage at Littlehaven on the coast. He has a motorboat that is reputedly powerful enough to cross the Channel to France, and Frank is afraid he’s either taking Shirley there to kill her, or he’ll throw her overboard enroute. Frank and Sergeant Gubbins go tearing after them down to Littlehaven to rescue Shirley. Basil hates confrontations and can’t watch someone suffer, so he’s apologized all over the place to her as he’s weighted and chained her to a little dinghy that he tows behind his big motorboat. He cuts the dinghy loose and it swamps, and Frank reaches it and cuts Shirley free just as she begins to sink.

Basil escapes back to Norton Manor, where he’s arrested. The police egos get in the way and they ignore the sergeant telling them they need to handcuff Basil, so they let him get something from his desk. It’s a gun that he shoots himself in the head with.

Shirley Fountain, sole heiress of Norton Manor, agrees to marry Frank Amberley. He’s arrogant, but he’s extremely clever and always right. She’s bull-headed, but she’s got intelligence and courage aplenty. They’ll make a good pair.

Georgette Heyer apparently knew this book wasn’t as strong as it could have been, and she set out to rewrite it, changing the setting to the Regency Period. By putting the central focus on the heroine, the story gains considerable strength and a much-needed balance between the hero and heroine as the elements of the mystery unfold. If you recently read the Regency romance, skip this summary and go to the bullet list below.

Regency Buck

Judith Taverner, a beautiful young heiress, travels from Yorkshire to London with her younger brother, Peregrine (Perry), to join high society. In a small town where they stop for the night, they meet two important characters without learning their names or relationships to themselves until later in London. One is their gentleman cousin Bernard Taverner, whose manners impress the siblings. The other is a rude gentleman who nearly runs them down at a precarious place on one of the roads outside the town. He treats them badly and insults Judith; they are shocked later to discover that he is their unwilling guardian, Julian, fifth Earl of Worth.

Judith soon becomes a sensation in London, with no less a celebrated personage than Beau Brummel teaching her how to be very popular. She gets many offers of marriage (including one from the Duke of Clarence). Worth does not permit her to marry any one. This initially makes Judith very angry, but she comes to appreciate it later. Cousin Bernard Taverner seems always so kind and attentive, though there is little love lost between him and Worth. Meanwhile Perry, who is handsome, has very little sense and too much money to spare, is always getting into trouble. He is challenged to a duel, gets held up, and nearly gets poisoned. Worth suspects that Bernard is the villain and he sends his brother, Captain the Hon. Charles Audley to watch over Perry. Meanwhile, Bernard tries to convince Judith that it is Worth who is the villain. In the end, Worth provokes Taverner into kidnapping Judith and trying to force her to marry him, and Worth of course rescues her and all ends happily, for the two of them and for Perry too.

Elements of Regency Buck and Why Shoot a Butler that are kept the same, or close:

• First meeting of the hero and heroine: a road accident.
• Romance: the hero falls in love with the heroine at first sight. She takes an instant dislike to him which has to be overcome.
• Rich old guy who has died, and who has a dodgy relative: Jasper Fountain and his dissolute son who died in South Africa. Sir Whatsit Taverner (Judith & Perry’s late father) and his brother the Admiral, Bernard’s father.
• Seemingly nice but homicidal other relative: Basil Fountain, Bernard Taverner.
• Heroine’s younger brother: Mark “Brown” Fountain; a drunk who gets murdered by his cousin. “Perry” Taverner, gambler, bad driver, 19-yr-old kid; gets provoked to fight by Farnaby, who, hired by Perry’s cousin Bernard, is supposed to kill him in a duel, but the duel is stopped because the provocation was done at a very public cock fight and Perry’s guardian finds out; then Perry gets shot at twice on the commons on the way home from another fight, but Worth’s bodyguard shoots back, as does Perry; then Perry gets poisoned by the anonymous gift of special snuff, but Worth suspects and replaces it with a harmless copy; finally a plot is made to knock Perry out and put him aboard a ship for the West Indies where he will never arrive, but Worth has his tiger tailing Bernard and makes Perry come to his house to sign papers but drugs his wine and bundles him off aboard his own yacht for a week; meanwhile, Worth drugs the groom Bernard had persuaded Perry to hire who was to have knocked Perry out, and the groom instead is bundled to the West Indies ship. Perry is saved. It really was a mistake in the first book to kill off the younger brother. I’m glad in the rewrite he gets a happy ending! (See final bullet point here for how this is taken care of.)
• Kidnapping the heroine: Basil takes Shirley to Littlehaven where he tries to drown her. Bernard takes Judith to a little house out in the country to force her to marry him. In each case, the hero is hard on their heels and saves her.
• Saving the heroine where she says “Thanks” in a way to make the hero realize he has a chance: Shirley, chained to the sinking dinghy when Frank gets to her and cuts her free, clings to him and says “Thanks!” Judith, compelled to go with the Prince Regent into a salon of the Pavilion alone where he tries to take advantage of her, faints and comes to with Worth bending over her, and she grips his hand and says (meaningfully) “Thanks!”
• Second set of young lovers as foils to the main pair: Anthony Corkran and Joan Fountain (she’s the younger sister of the villain). Perry Taverner and Harriet Fairford (he’s the younger brother of the heroine).

I found it interesting that Georgette Heyer used so many real people who appear as characters in Regency Buck. Here is a list of the most famous (not all the princes listed here appear in the novel, but they were so interesting that I had to include them all):

• Beau Brummel. Born about 1778, he joined the 10th Hussars regiment which was attached to the Prince of Wales, and it was extremely expensive. Clothes cost £52,000 in today’s money. He was extremely careful with his money, never gambling nor racing until he was older (and no longer in his right mind because of disease). Left the regiment. Fashion expert and companion of Prince Regent; in fact, he was able to continue to be fashionable even after falling out with the Prince. Began to gamble and had to flee to France where he died of syphilis in an insane asylum.
• George, Prince Regent. First son of King George III, b 1762. The King, suffering from porphyria, went mad for a short time 1788-89, and then went mad again in 1811 and did not recover. Both times Parliament appointed George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent. He did not take much of an active role in government, leaving most things to his ministers and to Parliament. He was a wastrel who had enormous debts in the 1790s that his father only agreed to clear if he would marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick. They married, produced a daughter the next year, and parted forever, hating each other. The prince had illegally married Maria Fitzherbert in the 1780s and had a son with her; he reportedly had illegitimate children with a number of mistresses. He was a glutton who was immensely fat; his corset was made for a waist of 50 in. He forced painters of his portraits to take most of his fat off. One odd thing about his appearance in this novel is that in May 1812, when he was supposed to be entertaining in the Pavilion, his Prime Minister was murdered and he had to be in London about the business of forming a new government and getting a new Prime Minister. His only legitimate child, his daughter Charlotte, died in childbirth in 1817. He became the King upon the death of George III in 1820. After Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, the race was on among his younger brothers to produce another legitimate heir to the throne.
• Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. Second son of King George III, b 1763. Career soldier, fought in a number of Napoleonic wars. Resigned as Commander-in-Chief of Army in 1809 because his mistress, Mary Ann Clarke, was supposed to be selling army commissions with his help. But she was working for someone else, it was found, and he was reappointed later. He was married to a German cousin, but they were unhappy together and lived apart. They had no children. He died before his elder brother.
• Prince William, Duke of Clarence. Third son of King George III, b 1765. Had a naval career in his youth and in 1811 was appointed Admiral of the Fleet, strictly an honorary position. Lived with Dorothea Bland “Mrs Jordan,” an actress, for 20 years, having ten children. The affair ended in 1811, reportedly because William was so in debt. He tried to marry Catherine Tylney-Long, but was unsuccessful. William then wed Princess Adelaide, a German princess who was half William’s age. Their two daughters died young, and Adelaide suffered a number of miscarriages. William became king after his brother George IV died. He had no children outlive him.
• Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. Fourth son of King George III, b 1767. Lived with mistresses until death of Princess Charlotte, and then he raced with his unmarried brothers to provide an heir to the throne. He married a German princess and produced Victoria in 1819, who would become Queen Victoria in 1837 when her uncle William died.
• Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Eighth child and fifth son of King George III. Had a military career. Did not have public love affairs; married his cousin Frederica and they were very happy together. Ascended the throne of Hanover upon death of King William IV (Victoria could not inherit because of her gender.)
• Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex. Ninth child and sixth son of King George III, b 1773. Married Lady Augusta Murray 1793 w/out king’s consent or knowledge; annulled. They had two children. Had at least one mistress, then after Lady Augusta died, he married again. Was Queen Victoria’s favorite uncle.
• Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge. Tenth child and seventh son of King George III, b 1774. Married a German princess in 1818 and produced a son and two daughters.

Mabel’s Memories: Epilogue

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


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

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

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

Ruth and Mabel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim McEleney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel’s Memories, part 20

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


Chapter 20
An Executive in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

Donaldson’s in Minneapolis

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

The duplex Mabel bought in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas 1949 - Mabel and the missionaries

Christmas 1949, Mabel in her home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- * - * - * -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel never taped any more of her memories after this.

*******************************
Go to the Epilogue here.
*******************************

Mabel’s Memories, part 19

This is part 19 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 18, Mabel was traveling for C.C. Anderson and Co. as a merchandise buyer, and was having all sorts of adventures. In this part, Mabel tells of how she was part of the team that opened new stores for the company, beginning during the War and continuing through 1946.


Chapter 10
Opening New Stores

I don’t remember exactly at what point we started to open new stores, but during the time that I was in the Boise office we did open seven new stores. Six of them were in the state of Washington. We opened one at Spokane, Tacoma, Everett, Yakima, Walla Walla, and Bellingham. All of these stores are now branches of The Bon Marche in Seattle. I’ve often wondered why The Bon didn’t do it in the first place, but for some reason, at that particular time they had our office buy and open these stores. We also bought and reopened the Paris at Great Falls, Montana. As you can imagine, doing these new stores made our work much heavier, but it was a great deal of fun.

It was a very exciting experience to be part of opening a new store. Before we did anything, all of the public relations work had been done by management. They had been in the town and surveyed the stores and made all of the contacts with the Chamber of Commerce and so on, and made their decision as to whether or not they wanted the store. Once all of the details had been taken care of and they had arranged for the store, then it was our job it go in and decide what merchandise should be bought and in what quantities. It would mean that we would go into a town and go into the store and get acquainted with the people in the departments and see what stock they carried, and what they had so far as quantities were concerned in relation to their sales, to see what brands of merchandise they carried, whether or not they were the same brands that we carried, or whether or not we would have to make new contacts in the market for them. It was also our job to go out and survey the other stores in the town and see what they did in relation to the store that we were buying and to see what lines of merchandise they were carrying also, so that we would know what our competition would be and whether we would be duplicating the things that they had, to compare their prices and to observe what type of customers they had in their stores, and also in the store that we were going to buy. We spent many hours in the library in the town looking over the advertising for both the store that we were opening and also for the other stores in the town, to see what had been advertised and what appeared to be the general method of operating these various stores in the city as nearly as we could. All of this was necessary for us to know what type of a store we wanted ours to be, and what place in the community we could best fill in order to be the most profitable to us and to make the best contribution in the community in which we were going. I won’t attempt to tell you what we did in each one of these stores. I think if I just tell you about one or two of them it will be representative of all of them, because we had very much the same experiences in all of them except for a few peculiar things that we ran into.

One of the most interesting of all of the stores we opened was at Richland, Washington. This was a new store that we built and opened completely from scratch, and it was opened for the benefit of the people who worked at the nuclear plant at Hanford, Washington, up where part of the work on the atomic bomb was done, and where a lot of the work on plastic was done. This store was peculiar in every sense of the word. It had complete government priorities. For the Richland store we could buy anything that we wanted to, in any quantities that we wanted to. If we went into a manufacturer to buy anything for that store, it had a government priority and we would get it. It was a nice little store. It wasn’t large, but it was a nice building. We had such fun with a store where everything was brand new. You didn’t have any old things that were left over from the old store that you bought, or that you had to get rid of some way; just everything was brand, spanking new.

There was also a very peculiar sensation in the town. It was a very heavily guarded town. Not that you would observe it or know, and that was part of the thing about it that made it just a little bit spooky. You didn’t know who the guy next to you was. The girls who worked in the store told us that very often when they would go back to their rooms at night, they would be able to tell that the drawers in their dressers and their rooms had been completely searched throughout the day. It was a very guarded place. At that particular time, no one knew what was being built or made over at the Hanford Plant. I heard a senator in Minnesota give a talk and tell what was going on there as if he knew, and I think he thought he did know, and I thought I was very well informed and later discovered that he had it all wrong, and nothing that he said was correct about what was being built. I guess that was one of the best-guarded secrets of the war. I don’t even know if it could be guarded that well now, the way the press gets hold of everything so quickly. It just simply was not known, really, nothing very definite about the atomic bomb until it landed on Hiroshima.

It was fascinating though, and we knew that something very hush-hush was going on in that particular little town. It wasn’t very far from Yakima. The people who worked in the store and lived anywhere except right in Richland had to have clearance to come into Richland every day and to leave, and when we made visits to the store, we had to have clearance to come into that little town and out again.

I guess we had more trouble with the Spokane store than any other store that we opened. It wasn’t the first store; I think we opened both Tacoma and Everett before we did Spokane. We built a new building at Spokane. It was an old store that we bought, but we didn’t open on that site at all; we built new. We did have some merchandise that we had to take from the old store. The problems we had were mainly with the unions. Spokane was an extremely unionized town. We had trouble with the electric union, and we had trouble with the bricklayers union, and just about the time we would think we were almost ready to open, somebody would go on strike and delay us for several weeks. We actually bought the inventory for that store completely at least twice, and some fashion items, dresses and things that had to be in and out of stock in a hurry, were bought at least three times. We would get stock in there and then there would be a delay, and so we would ship it out into the other stores as they needed it, and we would buy again for Spokane.

This saved the day for us in the Walla Walla store. I think it was one of the funniest stores we opened of all. It was an old, old store. I don’t know who the owner had been. As I remember, he was an elderly man, and he had the funniest idea of running a store. None of his merchandise was “departmentized” by age or anything but classification. All the sweaters were together, from the tiniest infant sweater to the adult sweaters. All the stockings, from the tiniest infant stocking to the ladies’ stockings, all of the underwear from the infants’ underwear to the women’s underwear, everything was stocked together in that manner. They didn’t have a children’s department at all. The children’s dresses were in with the women’s dresses. It was rather disturbing to me when I went in and found out I didn’t have any department, because all of the merchandise was mixed in with the other merchandise of its class.

About the first thing I did was start my department. There was a balcony that had had the beauty parlor on it, and I remember Ed Karren and I worked all one night there. We cleaned out that balcony, we even mopped it ourselves, scrubbed it on our knees and cleaned it up, and we got tables from everywhere we could find them all through the store, and then we went all through the stock and pulled out all of the infants’ wear that we could find, the sweaters and shirts and everything of the infants’ wear, and arranged them on these tables. Very early in the evening we could tell that we weren’t going to have nearly enough merchandise to make a respectable looking infants’ wear department at all, and that most of what we did have was quite old.

We hurried and dispatched a truck to Spokane to load up infants’ and children’s outings, little boys’ overalls and shirts, girls’ dresses, and so on, to bring back to Walla Walla. They got into Walla Walla probably, oh, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. We had pretty well pulled out everything that was in the store for our new department and got it arranged there on the balcony when the truck arrived, and it was unloaded, and we proceeded to get all this new merchandise out and build an infants’ wear department. We got through barely in time to go back to the hotel and get a bath and get cleaned up and eat our breakfast and get back to the store when the store opened, but it opened with an infants’ and children’s department.

It was just fantastic that day, the amount of business that we did up on that balcony. To start with, we didn’t even have a cash register, but we found a cash register and a table to put it on. They didn’t have any clerk, because they had had no department, so I was the clerk and Ed Karren worked right along with me, and I think we did borrow a girl from some other department. We sold several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise that day in our brand new infants’ and children’s department.

That’s the sort of thing that we did in some of these new stores that we opened. In the Walla Walla store, in the shoe department, we found old-fashioned, high-heeled, high-top, lace shoes, women’s shoes, and much of the oldest old-fashioned merchandise that you can imagine. We brought a lot of it back to Boise and made a little antique gallery out of it. It wasn’t merchandise that we could possibly ever have sold. I don’t know why he had never gotten rid of it, unless it was for sentimental reasons.

You can imagine that I was pretty tired at 6 o’clock on that opening day at Walla Walla, and I had been watching the clock pretty well for the last couple of hours. But I wasn’t through by any means. The department was a shambles; all the merchandise was unfolded and just in a heap. We quickly got a bite to eat, and then we started getting it back into order for the following morning. Some of the merchandise had to be filled in, and all of the counters had to be straightened, and everything had to be so that we could work the next morning. It must have been close to midnight when Mable Nye and I went back to the hotel. She had had the same type of problem in her hosiery department. I guess all of us had had trouble, but I think she and I were about the last two that finished up, or maybe we were the first, but for some reason we went back to the hotel alone.

Who should we meet in the lobby but Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the company, and a man from New York that they had sent out for the opening of the store. They immediately grabbed us and we were to go up to their room for a drink. It’s a little bit hard to be rude to the president of the company and to visitors from New York, and I could see that Mable wanted to go, so I said, “Well, just for a few minutes.” I was awfully tired.

We went up to the room, and after they had had a couple of drinks and I had had all the ginger ale I could hold, I said, “I think I’m going to go to bed.” I could tell immediately that Mr. Hinshaw was not going to be pleased. He was set for a long evening. Well, he hadn’t worked all day like the rest of us had, with no sleep the night before. He had observed what was going on and gloated over our success, but he hadn’t done very much work. Of course if I left, that meant Mable had to leave; she couldn’t very well be left with these two men. I suppose that I should have stayed, but I felt like it was going to be rather something I didn’t care to be a part of, and anyway, I was just too darn tired.

I started to leave, and Mr. Hinshaw, I remember, eased over by me and said, “You leave and I’ll fire you in the morning.” I was so mad at that, because I felt he should have realized how hard we had worked those days, all night long, because they had all talked about it—what a job we had had to get that children’s department ready.

I was just mad enough that I said, “Okay! I’ll see you at breakfast,” and I went to my room, and instead of worrying about it, I went sound asleep immediately. The next morning I went down to breakfast. Mr. Hinshaw wasn’t there, but he arrived before I finished breakfast and left to go over to the store. He didn’t say anything about the previous night and I didn’t either, and it was never mentioned again. We had a very successful day the next day and a very successful opening at Walla Walla, and I lived to open a few more stores.

Nylon hose were just becoming popular during the time that I was in the Boise office, and I remember that when we would go out to a store, we would often take, oh, three or four dozen pairs of nylon hose. They were very scarce, and women would just be begging for nylon hose. We would have a hard time getting them, but we’d get a bunch in to the warehouse and we’d parcel them out to the stores a few dozen at a time. It was a funny thing how people could possibly know, but I’ll swear that we couldn’t hit the parking lot of a store and get inside, but what that store would immediately fill up with women coming, hoping that we had brought nylon hose. I remember that happening once in Idaho Falls, and we hadn’t even gotten into the store when the front doors opened and women just flocked in. We had brought a few dozen hose and they were gone before you could hardly bat an eye.

I bought foundation garments about that time and I’ve often thought it took me quite a while to figure out what my mistake was. The lady in Idaho Falls was always writing me, very upset because I was buying her too many heavy garments. She always had too many heavy foundation garments on hand, and would I please not buy them? About fifteen miles away in Blackfoot, Idaho, where we also had a store, the lady was always writing to me: would I please send more heavy foundation garments, why did I send her all these little light things that nobody wanted? I hadn’t been down to those two stores for quite a while, as we had been so busy up in Washington opening our new stores, so I really couldn’t understand the situation. Why in that fifteen mile radius should there be such a difference in the kind of foundation garments that they would need? Finally I got a chance to go down and visit those two stores, and then I saw the reason. The lady in Idaho Falls was a cute, little, trim woman about as big as a minute, who wore a very light foundation garment and who attracted to her that type of customer, apparently, who wore the same type of things that she did. The lady over at Blackfoot was a large, quite buxom woman who wore heavy foundation garments and seemed to attract that type of customer to her. That was a great lesson to me, that we do have a tendency to sell the type of merchandise that we like. I always used that as an illustration in trying to teach girls in selling after that to not think of themselves or what they liked, but to remember that it was the customer they were waiting on that should be pleased. Both of those women could have brought trade into their stores that they missed because they thought too much about their own preference and not enough about the customers.

That reminds me of when we opened a store in Ogden, and little Elva Stokes came tearing back to my office and said, “I’ve got a lady on the phone who wants two cheap, white wool blankets, and the cheapest ones we’ve got in stock are $25.”

I said, “How do you know that to her $25 isn’t cheap? Perhaps she’s a doctor’s wife or someone who has plenty of money and $25 doesn’t sound expensive to her. It does to you and it does to me; it sounds like quite a bit of money, but to her maybe that is a cheap blanket. Why don’t you just go back and tell her that we have two nice ones and that they are $25 each?”

She did, and the lady said, “That’s fine, that’s just about the price I’d like to pay,” and she took them both. After that I had no trouble with Elva Stokes. She became one of the best sales people I have ever known. She could line up every doctor’s wife, or every well-to-do woman in town would wait for her to buy from, because she always showed them the type of merchandise that they appreciated and that they liked. It would just absolutely flabbergast her, the things that they would buy, but she would always come back and say, “I just figured maybe they would think it was cheap, like you told me about those white blankets.” She never forgot that story.

Perhaps I’ve told you enough to let you know something about how busy we were during those War years. I remember one time keeping track—I kept an apartment in Boise in order to have a place to keep the wardrobe I wasn’t carrying with me, and I figured out that I spent two and a half months of the year in my apartment. It did get used some by my relatives. I remember once when I was in New York, being awakened about 3 o’clock in the morning by a telephone call from Frank, announcing that he was going to be married, and that since he and Marge were, perhaps not broke, but not feeling very affluent, they wondered if they might just go up and use my apartment for a week for their honeymoon. I told them where to get the key and they used my apartment.

Opening the Paris store in Great Falls, Montana gave me the reason for my first airplane ride. A lot of the girls had traveled on planes before that time, before the Second World War. It seemed that they had rather luxurious planes. They were rather slow, slow enough that they had sleeping compartments on them, because it took them that long to get to New York. I never did see any of those. I went up to Great Falls in the train, and getting to Great Falls on the train was really quite hard. You had to come down from Boise to Pocatello, and then you waited for the Union Pacific to come up from Salt Lake to Pocatello, and then it went on to Idaho Falls and up through St. Anthony and on up into Montana. I had left Boise early in the morning, and I got into Great Falls between 3 and 4 o’clock the following morning. It was a rule that no matter when you got into a town, you always got to a store when it opened. I had rather a short night.

When I got to the store, I found that Ed Karren and one of the fellows who bought hard lines had arrived there from Chicago. We worked the store that day, and Ed was going to stay for a few days, but the other fellow was flying back to Boise, and he insisted that I should fly back with him: why take the train? It would be so much simpler to fly; they had flown in from Chicago, and he had thoroughly enjoyed the flight, and it was just great. They had come in on a regular sized plane, and I think it had been his first ride. When we got out to the airport (I decided finally, after some persuasion, that I would go with him), we discovered that we were going to fly to Pocatello in a little one-engine, two-passenger plane. That didn’t make any difference to me, and apparently at the time it didn’t make any difference to him, so we started for Pocatello.

It was a beautiful ride. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. We flew like a bird, and I really mean like a bird. We dipped down into the canyons and up onto the tops of the mountains, and barely skimmed the trees oftentimes as we went sailing over the forests. It was just beautiful country. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was so pretty. The mountains were very heavily wooded, and being such a small plane, it was flying very low. It was just what I had imagined flying would be, ever since I saw my first airplane back in Myton when I was a young girl, just floating along with all the ups and downs that a bird would have while flying.

I noticed that this fellow was getting a little bit pale, but I thought, well, he was tired. We really had had a long day the day before. All of a sudden, I noticed that there was a fair-sized round cardboard carton, about a pint size, fastened to the seat in front of us, which was the pilot’s seat, and I said, “Oh, they’ve even brought us our lunch.”

The pilot laughed and said, “No, that’s where you put your lunch when you can’t hold it down any longer.”

That was all it took for that poor guy. He was so sick, and he just was so miserable all of the rest of the way home.

But I had a glorious time and thought it was a very delightful experience. Then when I did fly in a large plane, it seemed rather dull, because as all of you who are used to flying know, you just sit there and don’t feel like you’re going anywhere. You have no sense of movement unless you happen to be in turbulence of some sort, and the only way you can tell you’re moving is to sit by a window and look down and see the things on the ground moving along. I’ll never forget that first experience.

I never experienced airsickness, so I have no idea how miserable people are who have it, but they certainly look like they’re going through a lot. I wasn’t afraid of flying and I enjoyed it, though not as much as the leisurely train trips that we had had earlier.

I did have a couple of times that I could have been glad to be safely on the ground. One of them was coming down from Minneapolis one time. We had just left Minneapolis, and we landed in Milwaukee and then we were going to land again in Buffalo, New York, across the lake [Lake Michigan]. I don’t know how far out onto the lake we had gotten (it was a two-engine plane and I was sitting in a window seat), and I looked out, I had been reading and as I looked out, to my astonishment, the propeller wasn’t going around. I thought, Well, that’s sort of funny. I really didn’t get too alarmed until in a few minutes the hostess came bringing us our coats and told us all to put our coats on. Then I knew that we were having trouble and I wondered about that cold water down below. It wasn’t long until we landed, and it wasn’t until I got into the airport that I discovered that we had landed in Chicago. I suppose it had been closer than to go back to Milwaukee, and so the pilot had headed straight for Chicago. They put us on another plane and we proceeded to New York.

Another time, coming home from New York, I had an experience that I have never forgotten, and that I’ve really learned a good lesson from. I was sitting next to a fellow who was just coming from Iceland or Greenland, rather a rough fellow, but very nice, a gentlemanly fellow. We had visited quite a bit during the flight. It had started to storm just after we left New York, and it seemed like the storm got worse and worse. There was a great deal of turbulence and they weren’t able to serve us our meal and it was just generally quite a wild flight.

When we got into Chicago, the pilot announced to us that we were not going to be able to land immediately, because they had such a pileup of planes waiting to land in Chicago. At that time, O’Hare had not yet been built and all of the planes had to land at Midway, which is a smaller airport. Chicago was always a main place for planes to land going in all directions, east and west or north and south, and it can get pretty hairy at times. We were flying round and round and round and round in a circle in this storm, really a terrible storm. The lightning was flashing and I just felt sure it hit the wings several times.

I guess I began showing my nervousness, and this fellow whom I had been talking with spoke to me very calmly and said, “You know, you have to remember something.” He said, “When you got on this plane, you made the commitment that you were going to get on it and you knew what the chances were, and so you have to live with that commitment.” He continued talking to me and said, “I learned that a long time ago through various things that have happened to me, that whenever I start to do something, once I’ve made the commitment, I know I must live with it.” He talked that way to me very calmly and he helped me a great deal.

Eventually we were able to land, but not until after the pilot had announced that we were almost out of gas and that they had to let us come down because we didn’t have enough gas to get us anywhere else, to any other landing field. But that idea the man told me has stayed with me and has helped me many times, and I’m sure it saved me from making some mistakes in my life when I had thought that once I do this, I have made the commitment and I must live with it, so I’d better think it through and know that’s what I want to live with before I go ahead and do it.

****************************
Go to Part 20 here.
****************************