This is part 16 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 15, Mabel went to work for C.C. Anderson and Co., and her brother Keith died. In this part, Mabel begins working as a buyer for Allied Corporation and goes to New York.
Chapter 8
Buyer from Boise in New York
The office was set up, I’m quite sure, in 1943. About two days before Christmas of ‘42, I got a phone call from Mr. Hinshaw, the president of the C.C. Anderson stores, telling me that I was to be one of this group who were to set up this new office in Boise. He didn’t say, “Would you like to be?”; he simply said, “You are to be.” I was to be in Pocatello on the 27th of December to meet the other buyers who would be coming down from Boise on the Portland Rose railroad, and I would meet them there and go with them into New York to meet with the Allied people and with the supervisors who were already in New York and to set up an organization to look for merchandise for the stores. You can imagine my surprise! I never dreamed—well, I did dream, always, and had done clear back from the years that I worked with Mr. Ferris—of doing something of this sort, but I actually never expected the dream to come true. It really was a dream when he called me that morning.
I was so excited I didn’t know what to do, but there in the back of my mind was how was I going to leave Ruth and the children and my promise to Keith that I would help to take care of them. I was really torn with what I should do. I really had not too much of a choice on what I was to do: as I say, he didn’t ask me would I like to, he simply told me that I had been chosen to do it, and where I was to be and when. I talked it over with Ruth, and she felt that I should do it, and I talked it over with Roy and he felt that I should go. One of the great advantages of it was that I was going to make $200 a month, and that against the $80 that I was making was not to be discounted. We felt that I could be financially perhaps more beneficial and make more of a contribution to the family than I could by staying in Ogden, even if I were to go somewhere else and get a job.
I don’t know how I got through those two days before Christmas at the store. Christmas was on a Saturday that year, so I had Saturday and Sunday at home, and then on Monday afternoon I took the train to Pocatello. The store had made the arrangements for me to—for the train and also for me to stay overnight at the Hotel Bannuck, in Pocatello, and then meet the train the next day. I frantically bought a few things to wear, because I really had a very meager wardrobe, but I couldn’t buy too much. I took the train; I think it left here about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and arrived in Pocatello around 9 o’clock that night.
It was the first time I had ridden on a train of this kind. I had ridden a couple of times on the Heber Creeper when we moved to Provo and back, and I had ridden the old Bamberger electric train quite a lot of times back and forth between Salt Lake and Ogden when I was working down there. This was my first experience on a real train. I had a chair seat going up, and I really felt important, I guess you might say, to be going on this job. I was so frightened, I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do. I felt very unqualified to take the job. I assumed that I would be buying piece goods and domestics and the same things that I had been buying, and I would know something of what I was doing.
I got into Pocatello, as I said, around nine, and took a cab, probably the first one I had ever taken, to the hotel, and spent my very first night alone in a hotel. As I said, I had stayed in a hotel one night in Los Angeles with these other ladies. But oh, that seemed like such a lonesome place to be there, and I was feeling so badly about the job requiring me to leave home, even if Boise wasn’t very far away, and I knew that I would be able to get home quite often.
Anyway, the next day I wandered around town and it seemed like the longest day in the world. By 4 o’clock I had my things down at the depot waiting for the train to come in to meet these other people. They had told me that Kathryn Karren and Evelyn Muller, who bought for the Boise store, and Mable Nye, who was also new in the office, would be coming in on that train and that they would get off and pick me up. The train made a stop in Pocatello for water and was usually there for 15 or 20 minutes. I was waiting for them when they came in. I had seen Kathryn; she had been down when the store opened, and I think Evelyn Muller was too, but I wasn’t sure that I would know either one of them, and I didn’t have any idea that they would know me. But the minute I saw those three gals get off the train, I knew who they were: three beautifully dressed, smart-looking young women, who looked like they might just have stepped out of Vogue Magazine. I stood there, looking like I had just come out of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. If I could have, I would have gone right through the floor. They didn’t have any trouble picking me out, either. But they were very sweet, and they bought some candy and various things there in the station, and we all got on the train together.
When we got on the train, I found that the four of us were to share a double bedroom. I don’t know about other people, but to me one of the saddest things I know of is the demise of those beautiful old trains like the Portland Rose and the Chief and the Super Chief that we used to travel in so much. I’m sure that many of you younger people have never even seen that type of train, and so I’m going to take just a minute to explain what a double bedroom is.
It’s simply two single bedrooms. A bedroom has an upper and lower berth, but during the day the upper berth is pushed completely out of sight. The lower berth sort of doubles up and makes a lovely velvet-covered seat. It’s very comfortable. Also in this little bedroom is a wash basin that pulls out from the wall and folds back completely out of sight, and what looks to you like a nice chair or seat, but the lid comes up and you have a toilet. A double bedroom is just two of these bedrooms with a collapsible door pulled back so that it makes one room. In each room too is a little closet in the wall where you can hang your coats and at the bottom a place for you to put your shoes. From the outside, from the corridor, the porter at night will pick up your shoes and polish them and put them back all nice and shiny for you for the next morning.
Those old trains had every luxury that there could possibly be on a train, and to travel across the country leisurely on one of those lovely velvet seats, looking out the window and watching the countryside go by is just my idea of the way to travel. At night, when you’re ready to go to bed, you call the porter and he lets down the upper berth and unfolds the lower berth, and you’re ready to get undressed and washed and climb into bed. I had the upper berth and Mable Nye had the lower berth of our bedroom.
We had been on the train a little while just talking about things before I realized that I was not going to be buying domestics and piece goods and the things that I was familiar with. I was going to be buying children’s wear and house dresses and foundation garments, none of which I knew anything about. I was just absolutely stunned when I heard this. I know now, or did know soon afterwards why this happened to be. I had been planned to buy the domestics and piece goods, but one of the people from the New York office, a young Irish fellow, had wanted this job, and the company felt that it would be good for him to have this experience, and so they had suggested him for the job. He was buying domestics and piece goods for the New York office and doing a very good job. That is, he wasn’t the head buyer, but he was in the department. He also had a lot of connections and they thought that he could handle it best. So I was given these other departments, which up until this time had been part of Kathryn Karren’s job. I think she resented just a little bit me getting them, though she realized that she had not been able to justify keeping them. Mable Nye was to buy the accessories and handbags and things of that nature. She had had no experience at all in buying anything. She had been Mr. Hinshaw’s secretary and had always wanted to go into merchandising, and I think had taken some classes in it in college, but had had no practical experience.
It was rather amusing. She had a briefcase just packed full of catalogs and bulletins and everything necessary to learn something about her job. Here I was: I didn’t even have a pencil, let alone a piece of paper. I had come totally unprepared to do any work on the train. I afterwards learned that that’s where you did a lot of your work, but I hadn’t known what to expect of the job as we went. I’m sure I wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway, partly from excitement and partly because I really didn’t know a great deal about what I was going to do until I got to New York.
One of the other fun things on a train is going into the dining room for your meals. Now you don’t go into a diner like we think of them today. You went into a beautiful dining room. Every table had a lovely white tablecloth and beautiful shiny silver, and the dishes that you were served in were, all the serving dishes were silver, and lovely glass goblets to drink from. Everything was just as you would have found it in the finest restaurant in the world, and a nice long menu to choose from and perfectly luscious food to eat. It was just a wonderful experience to me to eat in the dining cars. Then they had the lounge car, which you could go to if you chose, one little car of restful chairs and couches and benches. If you wanted to, you could have tables brought so you could play cards or do anything that you chose. All of this was really luxury; the draperies and everything were beautiful. Those were really wonderful days.
During the war, a lot of the trains got beat up a great deal when they were forced to carry a lot of the military, and things were not as comfortable as they were in peace time. The trains were full of military. Going back and forth across the country, I sometimes wondered why, if you went east, they were all traveling east, and if you went west, they were all traveling west. I often wondered why they had to shuttle them back and forth across the country so much as they seemed to do.
We had a nice trip across the country. Every place that they had to take on water, they had regular stops. We always stopped at Green River or at Cheyenne, and Omaha in Nebraska, and into Chicago. In Chicago we always had several hours to wait, and we’d leave the train and go uptown and window shop or even go to a show sometimes between trains, and then get back on the train and go on into New York. As I said, train travel was delightful, and that was one of the things that I enjoyed very much about the years that I spent in Boise. I guess that I ought to get back to telling you something about the job, because after all that’s what we were there for. I won’t either for a minute, because I’m going to tell you a few other things.
We got into New York on New Year’s Eve, and we were staying at the Lincoln Hotel, which is now called the Manhattan Hotel. It was rather an old hotel, but up until then had been rather a fine hotel. It was taken over by the military just afterwards. At the time, we stayed there a time or two, and then we started staying at the Astor, which was right next to it on Broadway. The Astor at that time was one of the fine old hotels in New York. It has since been torn down, but it was a lovely place to stay. Anyway, this night we were at the Lincoln.
New Year’s Eve is something that everyone ought to experience once in New York City on Broadway. At the time we got there, my first trip there, New York was still having the blackouts, and there were no lights except little shaded lights. On each block there would be a light that would have a shade over it. All of the big signs that many of you who’ve been to New York are familiar with were all turned off; there were none of those. The streets were really very dark. We went up to Broadway, and I think they said that night there were, I don’t know how many millions of people, on Broadway in about a two-block area from the Times building up to the Duffy Monument. We tried to stay sort of on the outside of the crowd. Kathryn Karren was with us, and she had lived in New York for quite a long time and was sort of herding us around. Mable Nye was having her first trip to New York too, so she and I were both very much excited about everything. They had said that they would turn the lights on for just a moment at 12 o’clock, but about the time that it was 12 o’clock we could hear planes overhead, and so the lights were never turned on and it remained dark.
We went back to the hotel, and Kathryn (she had just been out to Boise for this meeting arranging for the new office), she and Harvey lived in Queens. She suggested that we all go over there for a little while for New Year’s Eve, but Ev Muller didn’t want to go. She was tired, and felt that she would rather just go to bed. Mable and I were out for anything that was going on, so we went with Kathryn over to Queens. We went over on the subway, which was my first time on the subway. From the old Lincoln Hotel you used to go down right into the 42nd Street subway, and so we thought that would be very easy, and when we came back we could get off the train there and go right up into the hotel.
After we had spent the evening, well, I should say early morning I guess, out there, Harvey put us back on the train and we came back into town, and we got off the subway when they announced the 42nd Street subway, not realizing that the 42nd Street subway station is about two blocks long. We started trying to find the right stairway to come up out of to get into the Lincoln Hotel. I guess we came up about six or eight different stairways. We found ourselves on Broadway, and we found ourselves on Eighth Avenue, and several different places. By this time it would have been about 3 o’clock in the morning and there was no one much down there but us and a bunch of drunks. A policeman finally took pity on us and approached us and asked us where we wanted to go, and we told him, and he took us to the right subway entrance and we got up into the hotel. From there it was no problem to find our room. By the time we got back, Evelyn was beginning to get quite worried about us and wondered if she had lost us on our very first night in New York.
I mentioned that many of the hotels in New York were taken over by soldiers, and this did happen to the Lincoln Hotel. They had a group of soldiers stay there who were coming back from Europe, and on one occasion when we stayed there, in the middle of the night I sort of felt itchy, and I got up and turned on the lights and found out that I had a bed full of bedbugs that apparently had come along with some soldier who had had the room before me. Because of this, we quit staying at the Lincoln Hotel.
In fact, the hotel was closed down after the war. It was kept for soldiers as long as the war lasted, and then it was closed down and was remodeled, as I’ve said before, and is now called the Manhattan. It’s a beautiful-looking hotel, both inside and out. I’ve never stayed there, but I’ve been there with people for luncheons and meetings that manufacturers have had there. They have a nice room there for meetings and I’ve been there a number of times. I never go in there but what I remember the occasion when we stayed there when I first went to New York.
I think one of the things that impressed me that night on Broadway on that New Year’s Eve was the policemen. They said there were 9,000 policemen in that two-block area that night. They stood in the middle of the street with their arms locked together so that they couldn’t be separated, so that the crowd had to move in the same direction all the way around them, because if people had gotten going crosswise or trying to get mixed in among them, people would have been crushed. On the outside there were hundreds more of the policemen on horseback circling the crowd and keeping everybody moving in the same direction so that people wouldn’t get crushed. I always loved to see those policemen on horseback, and the horses that they rode were beautiful. We used to always take a few lumps of sugar from the sugar bowl when we ate our meals and as we would go along and see a policeman on horseback, we would give the horse a lump of sugar. They were used to that; lots of people did it, lots of tourists did it, and they just loved to stop and nibble at sugar out of your hand.
I might say that the first time that I ever went back to New York after the lights were turned on, after the war, and saw all of those great signs lit that you see on television sometimes when they’re showing the New Year’s programs and all, and I saw all of those lights and Broadway just as light as day (The Great White Way as it’s always called), it was almost like going to New York for the first time. I was really excited to see it. It wasn’t until then that I realized how dark it had been the first time that I went, on several times afterward that I went. As I go along, I’ll tell you about a few of the blackouts that I was caught in during that time, during the war, because I had some rather frightening experiences with blackouts during the war.
It was rather a short night, that night that I’ve told you about. The next morning we all got up and got ready and went over to the Allied office, to the C.C. Anderson office that was there, to learn something about our new jobs. We used to walk from the Lincoln or the Astor Hotel over to our office, which at that time was on Broadway. When I was in New York a couple of years ago, I felt so badly to find so many of the old places gone that I knew. We always ate at Schraff’s or at Fontenetti’s, which were our two favorite restaurants, moderate-priced restaurants, really very nice. They were both gone, along with so many of the places that I knew. I almost felt like a stranger in New York. I thought I was going to all these various places I had known, but a great many of them for some reason had vanished. I couldn’t help but notice how different New York was in that particular area. Down in the area where I worked it was always dirty and messy, but up on Fifth Avenue and in the nicer parts of New York it was so clean and shiny and pretty when I first started going, and now even those have gone downhill a great deal, and it’s apparent to see that New York has changed a very great deal in the last few years.
I know I’m not going to be able to keep anything in any kind of chronological order through the time that I was working in Boise, so I guess I’ll just try to tell you some of the highlights and some of the things that I did and not try to put any continuity or any dates to them. It was a fascinating time in my life. I loved New York; I loved those great, tall buildings, and I loved the many sights that you could see. You could see anything in New York that you could ever see anywhere. We did a lot of sightseeing the first few trips that I made, and each time someone else new came, we did it all over again to show them. I think it’s almost more fun showing somebody else than doing it yourself the first time. It was a long time before I even knew where I was going. As long as I could see the Astor Hotel and the Empire State Building, I knew something about where I was.
I’ll try to be just a little more brief about things from here on. Probably no one would be interested in my description of the trains; the younger people probably could care less and the older ones already know. To me, it is such a shame to see those trains gone that I couldn’t resist making another trip on them myself in my mind. If you didn’t enjoy it, at least I did.
As I started to say, we went over to the office the morning after our big night at Karrens’. We were introduced to various people in the office. I was introduced to the lady who bought the infants’ wear for Allied. Her name was Gladys Munz. She was a lovely person, and I also met several of the other buyers: the one who bought foundation garments and house dresses and lingerie. I didn’t mention before that I was also to buy lingerie. For the life of me, I can’t remember her name right now, but I’m sure it will come to me. We were very good friends. After I’d met everybody, the three supervisors from the C.C. Anderson stores and I went into one of the conference rooms to plan our strategy for the day. As you know, I didn’t know a thing about what I was doing. The stores were divided into three groups: the small and the medium and the large size stores, and there was a supervisor for each one. I sat down with these three men. They had all previously made the trip—which from then on I would make—to all of the stores before they came in, and they had with them inventories of what the stores had and what they needed and the quantities they needed and that I must buy. They had consolidated them all into one grand total and I was just to look for 500 dozen shirts and 600 dozen of something else and so on, to buy for the various stores.
I suppose it was rather funny if I hadn’t been so scared. Here these men sat with their list of layette items, which was where we were going to start, because that seemed to be where we were shortest of merchandise in the stores. They had on it the shirts in so many sizes and rubber pants, and stockings, and receiving blankets and other blankets, and so on, everything that you would need to dress a baby, and the quantities that I would have to buy in each of these. They had put down the manufacturer’s names and addresses that they preferred that I work with, but I should get merchandise wherever I could find it in those days, because as I have told you before, the merchandise was already on quota, and our stores being very small, we didn’t have very big quotas. After we had gone over all of the items and they had given me my instructions, they said, “Okay, well, we’ll see you tonight.” I had been looking frantically around for Miss Munz or somebody to come who was going to work with me that day. I had no idea that they would send poor little old green me out into New York to look for merchandise on my very first day.
I guess Mr. Burke saw my dismay, and he did go down the elevator with me and out to the front door of the building where we had our offices and explained to me that there were only three directions in New York. You didn’t talk about east and west and north and south, you went uptown or downtown or crosstown. Fortunately, all of the manufacturers that I was to visit that day were on Broadway and they were all, as he pointed the direction to me (which to me was south), were downtown. You might be interested in knowing, too, in New York the buildings are numbered, but the number of the building has absolutely nothing to do with the street on which it is; that is, as we have here 24th, 25th, 26th Street, and so on, with all the numbers between them on the cross streets going from 2400 to 2500 or 2500 to 2600; there 1224 Broadway, which was one building that I was to visit, happened to be on 34th Street, and another building numbered 1200-something would maybe be on 36th Street. There was no continuity to the numbering of the buildings like at home, and if you were to walk one block crosstown, up to Fifth Avenue, which to me was like going east a block, you would find that the same number—a building on the same corner that was 1224 on Broadway was 105 on Fifth Avenue. It was a little bit confusing to me. There were maps one could get, but Mr. Burke explained to me that the maps were even more confusing than him telling me. He told me just to walk down the street until I came to a building that had the number that was on my piece of paper and go in and look at the register in the hall, as we have them here, and then go on up in the elevator to the floor and find the manufacturer. With that he left me, and I went off downtown with my list of what I was to find clutched tightly in my arms, and my heart in my mouth, until I came to the first address. I went in and went upstairs and started.
It was a very complicated thing in those days to get merchandise. You went into a showroom, and the showrooms were several little showrooms partitioned off in the room, with a table in each and a couple of chairs behind them. You would go in and sit down at one of these tables and the salesman would come to you, eventually, and say, “Where are you from?” You would tell him, and then he would go and get his list and see how many dozen of whatever you wanted that your store had allotted to them out of the merchandise they had. They had already been required to give so much of their merchandise, or sell it (I shouldn’t say give because they got very good prices for it) to the government for the government’s supplies for overseas and for the camps here and so on.
I would say I was from C.C. Anderson and Company, and they would go and get their list and come back. Very often the first comment was “You’re too little, you just won’t have anything coming.”
I soon learned to say, “Will you please check and see?”
They would come out in a very superior tone, some of them, and say, “You have ten dozen infant shirts, or ten dozen hose, or something,” and I would say, “I’ll take them.”
“Well, that’s not going to do you any good.”
I’d say, “If you didn’t have any in your store, it would do you some good.”
I made a lot of friends that first trip. I had worked with salesmen quite a lot and so I wasn’t quite so frightened talking to the salesmen themselves. They were always interested in the west, and they had heard about Hill Field, and many of them had sons or brothers at Hill Field or at some of the western encampments in various places, and they would be interested in them. I learned to sort of get that into the conversation rather quickly, and pretty soon I would make friends, not always, but I would make friends with most of the salesmen. I have seen salesmen on many occasions sit with their lists, and after I had talked to them for some time, reminded them that we had so many of their eastern people now on the west coast that were in need of merchandise, I would see them erase a number by the side of a large store, say, for instance, Jordan Marsh, and say, “He’ll never miss that; I’ll give you fifteen dozen.” He’d go down the list a ways to some other store: “They’ll never miss that, I’ll give you ten dozen there,” and so on, until maybe by the time I got through I would have picked up 25, 50 dozen of two or three different items that I needed. That was the way I bought merchandise during that time, because as little as we were, we actually did not have any merchandise given to us.
I learned a few other techniques too. I remember one day I was tired and hot and disgusted, and I had barely opened the door and started to walk in to a showroom, and there were four fellows seated around one of the tables playing cards. They just looked up at me and one of them said, “Oh, come back after the war.”
I said, “Well I’m sorry, but there will be lots of places that I can go after the war, and I probably won’t be back here.” That startled them enough that they invited me to come in and found out where I was from, and I got a few dozen things there. Another thing I often said when they’d say, “You don’t have any allotment; come back after the war and maybe we can work out something,” I’d say, “If I don’t get something today, I may not have a job after the war, so you probably won’t see me again.” They’d take pity on me for that.
All in all, I soon learned that I was buying more merchandise than the supervisors had anticipated that I would, and I realized that they were very pleased with the amount of merchandise that I was getting. Part of the trouble before was that Kathryn and Harvey just didn’t have time to make all these calls that I was making. I remember one particular day that I made 42 calls and didn’t buy one single piece of merchandise, and if you don’t think that is discouraging, you ought to try it sometime. Each morning I would meet with the supervisors; we’d sit down together and I would turn in my orders of the things that I had bought the day before. They would add all of those up and tally them against what they needed and let me know how much more we needed of that particular item, and each day they would add a few more items to my list.
This went on day after day and week after week, until I had been in New York for some six or seven weeks before I covered all of the resources for all of the various types of merchandise that I had to buy. Some areas were much more difficult than others, and at that particular time of course the infants’ department was one of the worst, because of the big baby boom that the war had brought on.
It was very interesting work, and I enjoyed it. I gradually learned to get around a little bit better. I have a very poor sense of direction, as you all know, and I hadn’t the slightest idea of which direction I should walk when I would come out of a building, until I would look up and see the Astor Hotel. If it was time to go home, I would know to walk in that direction, because the office was in that direction. If it wasn’t time to go home, then I would walk in the opposite direction until I’d come to my next address. That was the way I spent my first six or seven weeks in New York. Gradually I didn’t find all my resources on Broadway, and I had to learn to go crosstown, not uptown, because none of my market was uptown at that time. Some of it was up on Fifth, much of it was down on Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and I had to learn how to walk down there and which streets my resources were on.
I really had had a good education in New York and also in merchandising before I got through with that first trip, so I don’t think I’ll try to repeat another trip to you. I’ll just tell you some of the more interesting or funny things that happened in various trips and not try even to keep them consecutive. Before I start that though, maybe I’d better get myself back in Boise and tell you a little of the arrangements there and what we had to do from there.
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Go to Part 17 here.
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Showing posts with label CC Anderson Store Ogden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CC Anderson Store Ogden. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Monday, May 20, 2019
Mabel’s Memories, part 15
This is part 15 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 14, Mabel and her mother had been living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family in Ogden while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. Mabel’s mother died in 1935. This part concerns 1938 to 1940, beginning with when Mabel went to work for C.C. Anderson and Co., and ending with the death of her brother Keith.
Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)
I left the Emporium on the last day of October and went to work at C.C. Anderson on the first day of November [1938]. We didn’t open the store until the day after Armistice Day. In those days Armistice Day was a holiday on which we honored the veterans of the First World War, and everything was closed. I did work that Armistice Day. We had been busy those two weeks getting the store ready to open, marking merchandise and unpacking it and arranging it on the shelves, and getting ready for that great day. No one can appreciate, unless they have worked in retailing and have helped to open a new store, what an exciting time it is. It is just something that builds up like the expectations of Christmas. It’s been my lot to help open a number of stores, and I’ve found that the thrill and the excitement of it never wear off. Looking over your merchandise and making it look as exciting as you can make it, and finding a nook and a corner for every single piece of merchandise to be put where it will attract the most attention and look the most inviting to the customer, well, all of it is just more fun than a picnic.
As exciting as my new job was my new boss. He was so much like Mr. Ferris in his ideas and approaches to merchandise that by the time I had worked with him a few hours, we both felt that we had worked together for years. I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Barker. It was also really exciting to meet all of the people who came down from the Boise office and also from New York for the opening of the store. This was my first contact with these very bright, fast-working people from New York and from New York-type markets and merchandising. It was a brand new experience, real fun, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t always agree with them. Neither did Mr. Barker. He had grown up as an old-time merchant, and sometimes he thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves. Sometimes when he could see that I wasn’t entirely agreeing with them, he would come around quietly and say, “Now, do it their way and they’ll be gone next week and we’ll do it our way.” That was sort of a joke between us.
The opening day was really something. People jammed the store such as I had never seen before. In fact, they were very much afraid that the floor was not going to hold up. I don’t remember how many people were supposed to be on the floor at one time, but we had twice that many most of the day. At least the floor managed to hold the crowd. It was a most thrilling day.
The people of Ogden had things to learn about this new type of merchandising. While they came and bought and bought and bought, they soon learned that they could not extend their credit over six months in a year as they had done at Wright’s. If their bills were not paid in 30 days, they received notice that they were to be paid or else their accounts would be closed. This angered many people and it hurt our business at the beginning of the opening of the store, and it affected business for a few years afterwards.
That first year at C.C. Anderson Company was a very happy one for me, even though I realized that we were not quite coming up to expectations. I think there were several reasons for this. One, of course, was their strict credit policy. Another was the fact that J.C. Penney had moved into Wright’s old building, and in doing so, they had seemed to gain quite a bit of respectability. I think perhaps had we gone into that building, things would have been much better. Also, I will have to say that Penney’s at this particular time had a very popular manager. He was well accepted in the community and belonged to the country club. He drew a lot of trade to J.C. Penney. J.C. Penney of course is a chain, and C.C. Anderson had been a chain, but in joining Allied Purchasing Corporation, they had ceased to be a chain. But somehow people in the community who were unhappy loved to call us “those New York Jews.”
I’m going to take just a moment even though it’s not part of my story to explain, if I can, the difference between a chain and a corporation. All stores of any size use the help of a buying office in New York or Chicago or California, usually all three. It saves them a great deal in not having to send their buyers into market nearly so much, and it keeps them more alert and aware of new things that are coming out. Toward the end of the Depression and afterwards, there were many stores that found themselves in exactly the same spot that Wright’s had been, big stores like the Bon Marche in Seattle, and Donaldson’s in Minneapolis, and Joske’s in San Antonio, Jordan Marsh in Boston, and even Stern’s in New York, and many others. A group of those stores, along with C. C. Anderson and Company, joined together as a corporation. Naturally, much of the money did come from New York. The New York office, the Allied buying office, which held a lot of the paper for their extending credit to them, agreed to trade their accounts for stock, so they did own a certain amount of stock in each of these stores that joined the corporation. I don’t know what the other stores did, but I know that Mr. Anderson sold 49% of his stock to Allied and kept 51%, or a controlling interest in his stores. For many years he was Chairman of the Board of Allied. All of these stores banding together were able to go into the market and buy in quantities comparable to what Penney’s, or Sears, or Montgomery Ward which was quite strong at that time, were able to buy. That was very necessary in order to offer the public the same kind of prices that the chains could offer. While the Allied stores were quite largely owned by their own communities, or people in their own communities, they were very often thought of by people who didn’t know what the deal was as chains, and they were thought of as being controlled by New York Jewish money. I don’t really know whether it matters whether money is Jewish or something else. I’ve worked with so many Jewish people that I have a very high respect for them and particularly for their financial ability.
Another thing that made that year a nice year for me was the fact that I was able to be at home more and join in the fun. I was able to be home in time for dinner, and that’s when we always had a lot of fun at our house, at the dinner table, just as we did at home when I was a child. Keith liked to carry on that same tradition, that dinner time was a family time. Ruth entered into that spirit a great deal. She was always a great hand who liked to do things nicely, and she taught the children how to behave at mealtime at the table. She always said that you couldn’t take kids out to eat unless they knew how to behave themselves and to handle themselves, and that it was important as the boys were growing up that as they went out to other people’s homes or took girls on dates or anything of that sort, that they should know the proper etiquette so as not to be embarrassed. I certainly agreed with her on that, because I remember as a young girl how much better I felt going out when I did know somewhat how to behave myself and the proper things to do. Anyway, we did have a lot of fun at the table.
One thing that I still have trouble with my friends about when they come to visit is the matter of napkins. Ruth hated paper napkins. We always had to have a tablecloth and cloth napkins on the table. She hated plastic tablecloths too, and we never ate off a plastic tablecloth. We always had some sort of a tablecloth on the table and we always had cloth napkins. To this day when I entertain and my friends say, “Oh, you shouldn’t give us these cloth napkins,” I say, “Well, if I didn’t, Ruth would probably just turn over in her grave if I were ever to use paper napkins at a dinner table in our house.”
Ruth and I did quite a lot of things together that year and other years; I don’t remember exactly which years we did what though, so I’ll just have to tell you little stories of things as I remember them, and they may not be in the right spots at all. I do remember one night us going to a show. We came home from the show and the lights were on and when we came in, we heard someone out in the kitchen. We went out in the kitchen and here was Keith, frying bacon and eggs, and a tramp was sitting holding the baby. Of course he had, by this time, washed and combed his hair and looked fairly respectable. Keith, here again, was like my father. He always insisted that tramps must be fed and must be treated as people. Ruth was quite taken aback and quite shocked when she came in and saw the tramp holding the baby. He had his meal and had intended to walk out to where the highway met the railroad tracks and then he was going to catch a freight train there. Keith then got out his car and told him he would give him a ride out to that point, which he did. When he came back, he told us that as the tramp got out of the car, he thanked him for the meal and for his courtesy, and he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t do this again.” He said, “When I came to your home, I had every intention of leaving with whatever money you had and with your car.” But he said, “You were so nice to me and as I held that little baby in my arms and all, and as the evening progressed and then you offered me this ride, I realized that I could not do that to you. But,” he said, “if I were you, I would not do what you have done for me again.” I don’t know whether Keith learned anything from that or not. I can’t ever remember the time when we were not good to tramps who came to our house.
Mr. C.C. Anderson was a scary little old man until you got to know him. I really didn’t get to know him until many years after the store had opened, but I do recall my first encounter with him. He was a small man, a little bit heavy-set. He had a thatch of gray hair and real bushy gray eyebrows and the most piercing eyes that you can ever imagine. He didn’t have very much to say, but when he talked, you listened. The first time I remember talking with him was shortly after the store opened, and I hadn’t really known who he was. I saw this little man standing by the counter as I was finishing up with a customer and was wrapping her package. I will admit that I did wrap a good package. That was one of the things that Mr. Ferris had always insisted on. We didn’t have bags like we have nowadays that the clerk can just stuff your items in and hand to you. Our packages had to be wrapped in paper and tied up with string. Mr. Ferris always insisted that the fabric, if it was fabric you were selling, must be folded in a way that would wrinkle it the very least in the wrapping of it, or whatever else you were selling—you must think how you were wrapping it and wrap it as carefully as you could so that it would look just as fresh as possible when the customer opened it. I guess I had just learned to do this automatically, and so I had wrapped this lady’s package and handed it to her.
Then I turned to this little man standing there to ask him what I could do for him, and he said, “Girl”—he always called me “Girl”; as long as I ever knew Mr. Anderson, I was always just “Girl” to him—but on this occasion he said, “Girl, I hope when that lady gets home and opens her package she will be as pleased with her purchase as she was when she left the store.” I thought at first he meant the wrapping of it, and he did compliment me on the wrapping, but he said, “I didn’t hear you make the sale, but,” he said, “I hope you told her what the merchandise would do, what it wouldn’t do, how to take care of it, and if it was something to be stored in the winter, how it should be stored, and all of the essential things that she must know about that merchandise.” I said yes, I thought I had, and he said, “Good,” and turned and walked away.
That impressed me very much, and I have told girls that have worked for me about that many times, that in making a sale, so often we’re more inclined just to work on selling the merchandise to the customer and not letting her know what her responsibility to that merchandise is as she cares for it after she gets it home. I’ve always remembered that about him. As I did know Mr. Anderson in later years, I found out that he was just a great big bluff. He scared you to death until you knew better. Then you realized that he was just having a right good time and was very much amused when he could put the fear of his condemnation on you. He really became one of my favorite people in the company.
Things went along beautifully for about a year at the store. I loved my work, and of course I loved the opportunity of being able to be at home more with the family. I thought I really had it made at last. But after about a year, suddenly, with no warning at all, Mr. Barker was transferred to Grand Junction, Colorado, and we received a brand new manager by the name of Mr. Jessey. I was heartbroken, but I made up my mind that the only honest thing that I could do would be to accept the new manager and give him all of the loyalty and all of the help that I could. I soon learned that he didn’t want any help from anybody. He was a very arrogant person and had an extremely bad temper, and it was just impossible for us to like him. He would gather us together in a meeting, and he would start out very nicely, telling us what he wanted us to do, and as the meeting progressed, he would get louder and more angry, and by the time the meeting was over he would just be giving us the worst lecture you could imagine. His language was terrible. If he became angry with a girl on the selling floor, he would swear at her and call her “stupid” and “dumb” and anything that he chose. He would do this in front of a customer, which was very embarrassing to the clerk and certainly shocking to the customer.
We all decided that we were sure that he must have had a mental breakdown or something, because his oldest daughter worked in the store (he gave her the job), and we soon noticed that whenever he got into one of these extremely bad moods, that it would only be a few minutes until his wife would come and get him and take him home. The girls who worked near his daughter said that she would go to the phone and call her mother.
He came from California and had worked in one of the better stores there (I really don’t know which one) and was supposed to be a marvelous manager and a really high-powered man in business. He certainly did not know how to handle people, and he was not liked by any of the people in the store, or at least not by very many, nor by the people in the community, because he could not hold his temper. That period after he came changed things completely, and we didn’t find the store nearly as happy as it had been.
Chapter 7
Changes: Keith’s Death and the War
Going back home, Andrew had come along by this time. He was a real cute, happy, healthy baby, and we enjoyed him very much. That spring Keith and Ruth decided to take the younger children and go back over to Greeley to summer school again.[1] Again, Frank and Grant went out to stay at Uncle Fred’s, and Max stayed at home with me. I don’t know how much help Frank and Grant were out at Fred’s. They were big enough boys to be quite a lot of help by this time. I think Frank was about 15 and that would make Grant nearly 17. Fred had a bunch of boys of his own, and I’ve often thought of my father’s saying that two boys were half as good as one boy, and three boys were just no good at all. I wondered sometimes how Fred got along with all of these boys.[2] Knowing Fred, I’m sure he managed.
I really get a lot of fun out of listening to Wayne and Frank, when they’re here at the house at the same time, discuss some of the things that happened out at the farm that summer. One of the things that Wayne particularly likes to rib Frank about is the time he ran the truck into the well. In fact, their stories are just a little bit different on how it happened, and I don’t know which one is correct. The thing that seems to have stayed with Frank more than anything else was how calmly Fred came out of the house and looked the situation over, and his only remark was, “Have you figured out how you’re going to get it out?” I don’t know just how they got it out, but apparently they did, and it all worked out well.
Fred was always like that: very quiet and very gentle. Yet, if he did get mad, he could be about as mad as anybody I’ve ever known. But he rarely ever got mad at people. He sometimes got mad at things, and he got mad at situations and things of that sort, but he was always pretty much able to control his temper where people were concerned. He always had a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of empathy, particularly with young people.
My relationship with Mr. Jessey deteriorated very rapidly that summer. I guess I can get mad too, and when he would get angry with my girls and would say disagreeable things to them and actually swear at them and demand apologies and what not, I just couldn’t take it. I would make all the effort that I could to defend them, and of course this displeased him very much. I think had it not been that I had gained a fairly good place in the company, as far as the people from the Boise office and the New York people were concerned, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have fired me on one or two occasions when I told him in rather clear terms how I felt about the way he was treating some of my girls. It was starting to be a really rather unhappy summer for me. I couldn’t come home and talk it over with Keith and Ruth because they were gone, and I don’t suppose that helped matters any either.
It was along toward the end of June on a Sunday, we were just sitting down to the table for dinner, Max and I, and I’m not sure whether Roy and Maude were here for dinner. It seems to me there were more than Max and I here, but I’m not sure just who was here. It could have been Ruth’s mother here having dinner with us. I remember the telephone rang and it was Ruth to tell us that Keith was in the hospital and very desperately ill, and for us to bring the boys and come at once, else we might not be able to see him before he passed away, that the doctors were holding out practically no hope for recovery. During that winter and spring, Keith had had a number of boils on his neck, and as I’ve told you, he never did get over having a lot of infections and blood poisoning and so on from the time that he had had spinal meningitis in the army. It seemed that on Saturday morning he had shaved and had cut a pimple on his upper lip and by Saturday night he was in the hospital in very bad condition with blood poisoning. There was nothing to treat blood poisoning with except sulfa at that period, and so by noon the next day, on Sunday, the doctors had suggested to Ruth that perhaps she should call the other members of his family.
We were stunned, but we hurried and got ready to leave. I’m not sure whether Roy had a car then. I guess he did; if not, he arranged to get someone else’s car. Mrs. Folkman got a few things together and I did, and Max, and we started out. Roy drove; Maude did not go with us. We were to pick up Grant and Frank out at Fred’s and bring them with us. It was a very smooth trip over there. We certainly were blessed with no trouble with the car and in making excellent time. When we got to Fred’s—we had phoned ahead, and the boys were ready. We merely stopped a very few minutes, and Fred said that he would clean up what work he could and that he would follow us the next day. We drove all night, and the boys were terribly upset. I will never forget Grant saying on the way over that if Dad died, he would never pray again. He told me later that he never did pray again until he was in the foxholes in Germany.
We went by way of Denver[3] and got into Denver about daylight and drove right through the city and on to Greeley. I don’t know just what time we got into Greeley, but it was probably around noon. Keith’s room faced the street, so Ruth had been watching for us and when she saw the car drive up, she came down the steps to meet us. She had been with him all night, and she said that he was in very bad shape. Someone had taken care of the children for her so that she wouldn’t need to be away—so she could be with him, except that she had had to go home to nurse Andrew. T.O. Smith was over in Greeley that same summer. I’m not sure that Mrs. Smith was with him—I don’t believe she was—but he had been very good to Ruth, and he had taken her back and forth and had stayed with her through the night.[4]
We saw Keith, of course, and we realized that he was very ill, and we talked with the doctors. I don’t know just how long Roy stayed. Fred arrived the next day, and he and Roy stayed for a few days. They decided that it was going to be a long, drawn-out illness. Whether or not he would make it or not, they weren’t sure, but they decided that it would be some time. It would just be a matter of whether his body would be able to withstand the illness. Fred and Roy decided that they would have to get back to their work, and Ruth suggested that they take Grant and Frank back with them. I had made up my mind that I would stay.[5]
It was a terrible month. Keith lived until the 25th of July. Ruth had the car there and we stayed at the hospital all day. Mrs. Folkman took care of the children and Ruth would go home periodically when it was time to nurse Andrew for a little while and come back. Then at night I guess T.O.—I never can remember just how it happened—but I guess T.O. Smith would take her home and they would leave the car at the hospital and I would sleep in the back seat of the car at night, if you could call it sleep. I used to sit so that I could see when the light would come on in his room, and when it did, I would go up to see what was going on. The next morning Ruth would come back with T.O. and then take me home to the little apartment that they had, and I would have a shower and sleep perhaps for a few hours and then walk back to the hospital. I just didn’t seem to be able to stay away from the hospital. I couldn’t think of anybody or anything else.
I knew that Mrs. Folkman had her hands full with the children, although the missionaries by this time had come to our rescue too, and they would take the children to the park and spend a great deal of time with them.
Keith was in a great deal of pain and a tremendous amount of distress. He was delirious a good part of the time; his temperature was very high. They had him in an oxygen tent practically all of the time. The sulfa affected his kidneys and he was not able to tolerate it. For some time they used sulfathiazole, which was the first time I had ever heard of it (it was still in the experimental stage); it would be flown in from Chicago every day, and then each day they had to report back to Chicago what his reaction to it had been.
The nights were pretty awful sometimes. I would go up when I would see the light come on, and at first the nurses were not going to let me in, but soon I was spending a great deal of time in his room. In fact, they finally put a cot in his room and I could lie down in there sometimes. They would not touch him except with rubber gloves. I’m sure they were rubber and not plastic, though they could have been. I don’t think we had plastic then; I think they would have had to have been rubber. They would be cold and clammy, and as he was in this oxygen tent, he would have the feeling that he was down in a well, and he used to beg me to get him out of the well. He seemed to always know me. I don’t recall any time when he didn’t know who I was. They would tell me not to touch him, but I used to open the tent and put my hands in and take hold of his hands, because I knew how horrible it must be for him with these clammy rubber gloves and the clammy cold air from the oxygen tent. I could talk to him and usually quiet him so he would go back to sleep a bit. The nurses finally just gave in and put a bowl of disinfectant water by the side of the bed, and after I would touch him, I was supposed to wash my hands and dry them.
This went on night after night after night throughout that month, and I’m sure during the day of course Ruth would try to comfort him and talk to him. I tried to comfort her, and we comforted each other. One thing I must tell you, though. While he was still in the oxygen tent, I remember one night we had a terrific electric storm and the lights went off in the hospital, which shut off the oxygen tent. I’ll never forget that night. The power was off for perhaps an hour or so, and they had all of the windows open, and we stood over him with fans to fan the air to try to keep enough air for him, but before the lights went back on he was really gasping for air. Finally he seemed to be getting a little better. He became rational and things began looking a little better. He had got well enough that they had taken the oxygen tent off him and he was beginning to feel better. We were beginning to talk about when he came out of the hospital, that I would get a little apartment and stay in Denver for awhile with him until he was able to come home, and that Ruth and the children would come back.
You must realize that by this time we were getting pretty broke between us, and I decided that I would try and get a job. I went down to Penney’s and asked for a job. The Penney’s store in Greeley was rather a nice Penney’s store, and I think it was one of the better stores in town, though I really don’t remember much about Greeley. They gave me a job, and it was in the corset department, and that was one department that I had never ever had any experience in. I didn’t know the first thing about fitting a lady in a foundation garment, and I don’t know that I ever tried. I think they just put me at a counter where I was supposed to sell brassieres and things, and lightweight garments and things that women bought without trying on.
I was still sleeping all night in the car and then I would go down and get a shower and get cleaned up and go to the store. Actually, there were not enough beds in the apartment, so there would have been no place for me to have slept at night if I’d have wanted to. I would crawl into somebody’s bed and sleep a few hours before I could go to work. I was living on No-Doz. It’s my one and only experience with No-Doz and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. I was so tired—and so worried, of course—I really just didn’t know what I was doing. I must have been a terrible salesperson, and I’m sure they regretted ever having hired me. I was only there about a week, and I doubt very much that I would have been there another week, because the manager had already talked to me two or three times about my sales. It’s the first time in all of the history of my work up until that time that I felt that I was a failure so far as my work was concerned. I just simply could not concentrate on what I was doing. I was so near asleep, or else it was the No-Doz or something, but I was only about half-conscious.
After I had been there just a week, the missionaries suddenly came into the store and told me that I must come at once, that Keith had had a heart attack and was dying. I simply left my customer. I don’t know what ever happened to her. I never said anything to management; I just ran with them and we got in the car and rushed back to the hospital and found that Keith by this time had gone unconscious. I don’t know how much pain he had had, but by the time I got there, the pain was gone and he was unconscious and was barely breathing. I stood there with Ruth until he ceased to breathe.
I’ve always felt that Ruth held Keith probably longer than he would have lived otherwise. She simply could not understand that he was not going to get well, and I remember the very first words that she said as the doctor told us that he had gone: she said, “I didn’t believe that it would happen.”
I’ve often felt that Keith may have had a premonition that he was not going to get well. I’m sure he tried very hard to live and fought very hard (I don’t know if I have said or not, but he had both staphylococcus and streptococcus and it was an impossible combination), but I remember when he was beginning to get a little better and we were talking about me staying over there and getting a job and taking care of him until he was well enough to come home, he and I were alone at the time, and he said to me, “Mabel, don’t worry about getting a job. Just think about going home and helping Ruth with the children.” I wondered afterwards if he knew at that time that he was perhaps not going to make it.
An odd thing happened just as he died that Ruth and I have talked about many times. It was a perfectly clear day, but just as he died, there was one great big clap of thunder. Our family has a rather funny feeling about this. It seems like we have nearly always had some Thing that we’ve known—just before my father died, a similar thing happened—somehow we seem to have this feeling that we have known when some one of the family were going to leave us.
Everyone was kind to us. I’m sure the doctors and nurses who had worked so hard to save Keith felt very sorry when he died, and they were extremely kind to us. The missionaries received permission from the president of the mission to help us to get home, to drive Keith’s car home. T.O. Smith brought Ruth and some of the children. The missionaries drove Ruth’s car and I rode with them. I don’t remember how we were arranged in the cars, but we came home with the two cars. We had notified Fred, and he brought Grant and Frank, and they arrived here very shortly after we had arrived home. Keith’s body was brought by train. They were still having the bodies brought to the home rather than viewings at the mortuaries, and so his body was here in the front room for a few days, and friends called here to visit. Ruth and the little children—it was touching to see them go and look at their father there in the casket, Joe and Elizabeth and Keith.
Keith’s funeral was held in the Ogden tabernacle. It was a very nice service; it was an awfully long service I know. In addition to the regular service there was an army tribute paid to him, and then he was buried in Salt Lake at Wasatch Lawn next to his first wife, Eva. It was an interesting thing that he was married just about the same length of time to Eva and to Ruth: just about ten years to each of them.
Ruth did a very good job of holding up. I really felt that she was a very courageous person. It was that same fall that she went back to teaching school. She got a job teaching out at Lincoln I think, teaching elementary school. Before school started, she had to have all of her teeth removed, and she started teaching school with a brand-new set of false teeth. She was still nursing Andrew, so she had to come home at recess to nurse him and rush back over to school for several months after school started. The worst problem that we had was getting help, getting someone to stay with the children so that she and I could both be gone. The people in the ward helped quite a bit in that respect. We did get a girl who stayed with us for some time, from North Ogden, and I’ll tell you a few more things about that as we go along.
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Notes:
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Go to Part 16 here.
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Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)
I left the Emporium on the last day of October and went to work at C.C. Anderson on the first day of November [1938]. We didn’t open the store until the day after Armistice Day. In those days Armistice Day was a holiday on which we honored the veterans of the First World War, and everything was closed. I did work that Armistice Day. We had been busy those two weeks getting the store ready to open, marking merchandise and unpacking it and arranging it on the shelves, and getting ready for that great day. No one can appreciate, unless they have worked in retailing and have helped to open a new store, what an exciting time it is. It is just something that builds up like the expectations of Christmas. It’s been my lot to help open a number of stores, and I’ve found that the thrill and the excitement of it never wear off. Looking over your merchandise and making it look as exciting as you can make it, and finding a nook and a corner for every single piece of merchandise to be put where it will attract the most attention and look the most inviting to the customer, well, all of it is just more fun than a picnic.
As exciting as my new job was my new boss. He was so much like Mr. Ferris in his ideas and approaches to merchandise that by the time I had worked with him a few hours, we both felt that we had worked together for years. I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Barker. It was also really exciting to meet all of the people who came down from the Boise office and also from New York for the opening of the store. This was my first contact with these very bright, fast-working people from New York and from New York-type markets and merchandising. It was a brand new experience, real fun, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t always agree with them. Neither did Mr. Barker. He had grown up as an old-time merchant, and sometimes he thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves. Sometimes when he could see that I wasn’t entirely agreeing with them, he would come around quietly and say, “Now, do it their way and they’ll be gone next week and we’ll do it our way.” That was sort of a joke between us.
The opening day was really something. People jammed the store such as I had never seen before. In fact, they were very much afraid that the floor was not going to hold up. I don’t remember how many people were supposed to be on the floor at one time, but we had twice that many most of the day. At least the floor managed to hold the crowd. It was a most thrilling day.
The people of Ogden had things to learn about this new type of merchandising. While they came and bought and bought and bought, they soon learned that they could not extend their credit over six months in a year as they had done at Wright’s. If their bills were not paid in 30 days, they received notice that they were to be paid or else their accounts would be closed. This angered many people and it hurt our business at the beginning of the opening of the store, and it affected business for a few years afterwards.
That first year at C.C. Anderson Company was a very happy one for me, even though I realized that we were not quite coming up to expectations. I think there were several reasons for this. One, of course, was their strict credit policy. Another was the fact that J.C. Penney had moved into Wright’s old building, and in doing so, they had seemed to gain quite a bit of respectability. I think perhaps had we gone into that building, things would have been much better. Also, I will have to say that Penney’s at this particular time had a very popular manager. He was well accepted in the community and belonged to the country club. He drew a lot of trade to J.C. Penney. J.C. Penney of course is a chain, and C.C. Anderson had been a chain, but in joining Allied Purchasing Corporation, they had ceased to be a chain. But somehow people in the community who were unhappy loved to call us “those New York Jews.”
I’m going to take just a moment even though it’s not part of my story to explain, if I can, the difference between a chain and a corporation. All stores of any size use the help of a buying office in New York or Chicago or California, usually all three. It saves them a great deal in not having to send their buyers into market nearly so much, and it keeps them more alert and aware of new things that are coming out. Toward the end of the Depression and afterwards, there were many stores that found themselves in exactly the same spot that Wright’s had been, big stores like the Bon Marche in Seattle, and Donaldson’s in Minneapolis, and Joske’s in San Antonio, Jordan Marsh in Boston, and even Stern’s in New York, and many others. A group of those stores, along with C. C. Anderson and Company, joined together as a corporation. Naturally, much of the money did come from New York. The New York office, the Allied buying office, which held a lot of the paper for their extending credit to them, agreed to trade their accounts for stock, so they did own a certain amount of stock in each of these stores that joined the corporation. I don’t know what the other stores did, but I know that Mr. Anderson sold 49% of his stock to Allied and kept 51%, or a controlling interest in his stores. For many years he was Chairman of the Board of Allied. All of these stores banding together were able to go into the market and buy in quantities comparable to what Penney’s, or Sears, or Montgomery Ward which was quite strong at that time, were able to buy. That was very necessary in order to offer the public the same kind of prices that the chains could offer. While the Allied stores were quite largely owned by their own communities, or people in their own communities, they were very often thought of by people who didn’t know what the deal was as chains, and they were thought of as being controlled by New York Jewish money. I don’t really know whether it matters whether money is Jewish or something else. I’ve worked with so many Jewish people that I have a very high respect for them and particularly for their financial ability.
Another thing that made that year a nice year for me was the fact that I was able to be at home more and join in the fun. I was able to be home in time for dinner, and that’s when we always had a lot of fun at our house, at the dinner table, just as we did at home when I was a child. Keith liked to carry on that same tradition, that dinner time was a family time. Ruth entered into that spirit a great deal. She was always a great hand who liked to do things nicely, and she taught the children how to behave at mealtime at the table. She always said that you couldn’t take kids out to eat unless they knew how to behave themselves and to handle themselves, and that it was important as the boys were growing up that as they went out to other people’s homes or took girls on dates or anything of that sort, that they should know the proper etiquette so as not to be embarrassed. I certainly agreed with her on that, because I remember as a young girl how much better I felt going out when I did know somewhat how to behave myself and the proper things to do. Anyway, we did have a lot of fun at the table.
One thing that I still have trouble with my friends about when they come to visit is the matter of napkins. Ruth hated paper napkins. We always had to have a tablecloth and cloth napkins on the table. She hated plastic tablecloths too, and we never ate off a plastic tablecloth. We always had some sort of a tablecloth on the table and we always had cloth napkins. To this day when I entertain and my friends say, “Oh, you shouldn’t give us these cloth napkins,” I say, “Well, if I didn’t, Ruth would probably just turn over in her grave if I were ever to use paper napkins at a dinner table in our house.”
Ruth and I did quite a lot of things together that year and other years; I don’t remember exactly which years we did what though, so I’ll just have to tell you little stories of things as I remember them, and they may not be in the right spots at all. I do remember one night us going to a show. We came home from the show and the lights were on and when we came in, we heard someone out in the kitchen. We went out in the kitchen and here was Keith, frying bacon and eggs, and a tramp was sitting holding the baby. Of course he had, by this time, washed and combed his hair and looked fairly respectable. Keith, here again, was like my father. He always insisted that tramps must be fed and must be treated as people. Ruth was quite taken aback and quite shocked when she came in and saw the tramp holding the baby. He had his meal and had intended to walk out to where the highway met the railroad tracks and then he was going to catch a freight train there. Keith then got out his car and told him he would give him a ride out to that point, which he did. When he came back, he told us that as the tramp got out of the car, he thanked him for the meal and for his courtesy, and he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t do this again.” He said, “When I came to your home, I had every intention of leaving with whatever money you had and with your car.” But he said, “You were so nice to me and as I held that little baby in my arms and all, and as the evening progressed and then you offered me this ride, I realized that I could not do that to you. But,” he said, “if I were you, I would not do what you have done for me again.” I don’t know whether Keith learned anything from that or not. I can’t ever remember the time when we were not good to tramps who came to our house.
Mr. C.C. Anderson was a scary little old man until you got to know him. I really didn’t get to know him until many years after the store had opened, but I do recall my first encounter with him. He was a small man, a little bit heavy-set. He had a thatch of gray hair and real bushy gray eyebrows and the most piercing eyes that you can ever imagine. He didn’t have very much to say, but when he talked, you listened. The first time I remember talking with him was shortly after the store opened, and I hadn’t really known who he was. I saw this little man standing by the counter as I was finishing up with a customer and was wrapping her package. I will admit that I did wrap a good package. That was one of the things that Mr. Ferris had always insisted on. We didn’t have bags like we have nowadays that the clerk can just stuff your items in and hand to you. Our packages had to be wrapped in paper and tied up with string. Mr. Ferris always insisted that the fabric, if it was fabric you were selling, must be folded in a way that would wrinkle it the very least in the wrapping of it, or whatever else you were selling—you must think how you were wrapping it and wrap it as carefully as you could so that it would look just as fresh as possible when the customer opened it. I guess I had just learned to do this automatically, and so I had wrapped this lady’s package and handed it to her.
Then I turned to this little man standing there to ask him what I could do for him, and he said, “Girl”—he always called me “Girl”; as long as I ever knew Mr. Anderson, I was always just “Girl” to him—but on this occasion he said, “Girl, I hope when that lady gets home and opens her package she will be as pleased with her purchase as she was when she left the store.” I thought at first he meant the wrapping of it, and he did compliment me on the wrapping, but he said, “I didn’t hear you make the sale, but,” he said, “I hope you told her what the merchandise would do, what it wouldn’t do, how to take care of it, and if it was something to be stored in the winter, how it should be stored, and all of the essential things that she must know about that merchandise.” I said yes, I thought I had, and he said, “Good,” and turned and walked away.
That impressed me very much, and I have told girls that have worked for me about that many times, that in making a sale, so often we’re more inclined just to work on selling the merchandise to the customer and not letting her know what her responsibility to that merchandise is as she cares for it after she gets it home. I’ve always remembered that about him. As I did know Mr. Anderson in later years, I found out that he was just a great big bluff. He scared you to death until you knew better. Then you realized that he was just having a right good time and was very much amused when he could put the fear of his condemnation on you. He really became one of my favorite people in the company.
Things went along beautifully for about a year at the store. I loved my work, and of course I loved the opportunity of being able to be at home more with the family. I thought I really had it made at last. But after about a year, suddenly, with no warning at all, Mr. Barker was transferred to Grand Junction, Colorado, and we received a brand new manager by the name of Mr. Jessey. I was heartbroken, but I made up my mind that the only honest thing that I could do would be to accept the new manager and give him all of the loyalty and all of the help that I could. I soon learned that he didn’t want any help from anybody. He was a very arrogant person and had an extremely bad temper, and it was just impossible for us to like him. He would gather us together in a meeting, and he would start out very nicely, telling us what he wanted us to do, and as the meeting progressed, he would get louder and more angry, and by the time the meeting was over he would just be giving us the worst lecture you could imagine. His language was terrible. If he became angry with a girl on the selling floor, he would swear at her and call her “stupid” and “dumb” and anything that he chose. He would do this in front of a customer, which was very embarrassing to the clerk and certainly shocking to the customer.
We all decided that we were sure that he must have had a mental breakdown or something, because his oldest daughter worked in the store (he gave her the job), and we soon noticed that whenever he got into one of these extremely bad moods, that it would only be a few minutes until his wife would come and get him and take him home. The girls who worked near his daughter said that she would go to the phone and call her mother.
He came from California and had worked in one of the better stores there (I really don’t know which one) and was supposed to be a marvelous manager and a really high-powered man in business. He certainly did not know how to handle people, and he was not liked by any of the people in the store, or at least not by very many, nor by the people in the community, because he could not hold his temper. That period after he came changed things completely, and we didn’t find the store nearly as happy as it had been.
Chapter 7
Changes: Keith’s Death and the War
Going back home, Andrew had come along by this time. He was a real cute, happy, healthy baby, and we enjoyed him very much. That spring Keith and Ruth decided to take the younger children and go back over to Greeley to summer school again.[1] Again, Frank and Grant went out to stay at Uncle Fred’s, and Max stayed at home with me. I don’t know how much help Frank and Grant were out at Fred’s. They were big enough boys to be quite a lot of help by this time. I think Frank was about 15 and that would make Grant nearly 17. Fred had a bunch of boys of his own, and I’ve often thought of my father’s saying that two boys were half as good as one boy, and three boys were just no good at all. I wondered sometimes how Fred got along with all of these boys.[2] Knowing Fred, I’m sure he managed.
I really get a lot of fun out of listening to Wayne and Frank, when they’re here at the house at the same time, discuss some of the things that happened out at the farm that summer. One of the things that Wayne particularly likes to rib Frank about is the time he ran the truck into the well. In fact, their stories are just a little bit different on how it happened, and I don’t know which one is correct. The thing that seems to have stayed with Frank more than anything else was how calmly Fred came out of the house and looked the situation over, and his only remark was, “Have you figured out how you’re going to get it out?” I don’t know just how they got it out, but apparently they did, and it all worked out well.
Fred was always like that: very quiet and very gentle. Yet, if he did get mad, he could be about as mad as anybody I’ve ever known. But he rarely ever got mad at people. He sometimes got mad at things, and he got mad at situations and things of that sort, but he was always pretty much able to control his temper where people were concerned. He always had a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of empathy, particularly with young people.
My relationship with Mr. Jessey deteriorated very rapidly that summer. I guess I can get mad too, and when he would get angry with my girls and would say disagreeable things to them and actually swear at them and demand apologies and what not, I just couldn’t take it. I would make all the effort that I could to defend them, and of course this displeased him very much. I think had it not been that I had gained a fairly good place in the company, as far as the people from the Boise office and the New York people were concerned, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have fired me on one or two occasions when I told him in rather clear terms how I felt about the way he was treating some of my girls. It was starting to be a really rather unhappy summer for me. I couldn’t come home and talk it over with Keith and Ruth because they were gone, and I don’t suppose that helped matters any either.
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| Keith C Wahlquist |
We were stunned, but we hurried and got ready to leave. I’m not sure whether Roy had a car then. I guess he did; if not, he arranged to get someone else’s car. Mrs. Folkman got a few things together and I did, and Max, and we started out. Roy drove; Maude did not go with us. We were to pick up Grant and Frank out at Fred’s and bring them with us. It was a very smooth trip over there. We certainly were blessed with no trouble with the car and in making excellent time. When we got to Fred’s—we had phoned ahead, and the boys were ready. We merely stopped a very few minutes, and Fred said that he would clean up what work he could and that he would follow us the next day. We drove all night, and the boys were terribly upset. I will never forget Grant saying on the way over that if Dad died, he would never pray again. He told me later that he never did pray again until he was in the foxholes in Germany.
We went by way of Denver[3] and got into Denver about daylight and drove right through the city and on to Greeley. I don’t know just what time we got into Greeley, but it was probably around noon. Keith’s room faced the street, so Ruth had been watching for us and when she saw the car drive up, she came down the steps to meet us. She had been with him all night, and she said that he was in very bad shape. Someone had taken care of the children for her so that she wouldn’t need to be away—so she could be with him, except that she had had to go home to nurse Andrew. T.O. Smith was over in Greeley that same summer. I’m not sure that Mrs. Smith was with him—I don’t believe she was—but he had been very good to Ruth, and he had taken her back and forth and had stayed with her through the night.[4]
We saw Keith, of course, and we realized that he was very ill, and we talked with the doctors. I don’t know just how long Roy stayed. Fred arrived the next day, and he and Roy stayed for a few days. They decided that it was going to be a long, drawn-out illness. Whether or not he would make it or not, they weren’t sure, but they decided that it would be some time. It would just be a matter of whether his body would be able to withstand the illness. Fred and Roy decided that they would have to get back to their work, and Ruth suggested that they take Grant and Frank back with them. I had made up my mind that I would stay.[5]
It was a terrible month. Keith lived until the 25th of July. Ruth had the car there and we stayed at the hospital all day. Mrs. Folkman took care of the children and Ruth would go home periodically when it was time to nurse Andrew for a little while and come back. Then at night I guess T.O.—I never can remember just how it happened—but I guess T.O. Smith would take her home and they would leave the car at the hospital and I would sleep in the back seat of the car at night, if you could call it sleep. I used to sit so that I could see when the light would come on in his room, and when it did, I would go up to see what was going on. The next morning Ruth would come back with T.O. and then take me home to the little apartment that they had, and I would have a shower and sleep perhaps for a few hours and then walk back to the hospital. I just didn’t seem to be able to stay away from the hospital. I couldn’t think of anybody or anything else.
I knew that Mrs. Folkman had her hands full with the children, although the missionaries by this time had come to our rescue too, and they would take the children to the park and spend a great deal of time with them.
Keith was in a great deal of pain and a tremendous amount of distress. He was delirious a good part of the time; his temperature was very high. They had him in an oxygen tent practically all of the time. The sulfa affected his kidneys and he was not able to tolerate it. For some time they used sulfathiazole, which was the first time I had ever heard of it (it was still in the experimental stage); it would be flown in from Chicago every day, and then each day they had to report back to Chicago what his reaction to it had been.
The nights were pretty awful sometimes. I would go up when I would see the light come on, and at first the nurses were not going to let me in, but soon I was spending a great deal of time in his room. In fact, they finally put a cot in his room and I could lie down in there sometimes. They would not touch him except with rubber gloves. I’m sure they were rubber and not plastic, though they could have been. I don’t think we had plastic then; I think they would have had to have been rubber. They would be cold and clammy, and as he was in this oxygen tent, he would have the feeling that he was down in a well, and he used to beg me to get him out of the well. He seemed to always know me. I don’t recall any time when he didn’t know who I was. They would tell me not to touch him, but I used to open the tent and put my hands in and take hold of his hands, because I knew how horrible it must be for him with these clammy rubber gloves and the clammy cold air from the oxygen tent. I could talk to him and usually quiet him so he would go back to sleep a bit. The nurses finally just gave in and put a bowl of disinfectant water by the side of the bed, and after I would touch him, I was supposed to wash my hands and dry them.
This went on night after night after night throughout that month, and I’m sure during the day of course Ruth would try to comfort him and talk to him. I tried to comfort her, and we comforted each other. One thing I must tell you, though. While he was still in the oxygen tent, I remember one night we had a terrific electric storm and the lights went off in the hospital, which shut off the oxygen tent. I’ll never forget that night. The power was off for perhaps an hour or so, and they had all of the windows open, and we stood over him with fans to fan the air to try to keep enough air for him, but before the lights went back on he was really gasping for air. Finally he seemed to be getting a little better. He became rational and things began looking a little better. He had got well enough that they had taken the oxygen tent off him and he was beginning to feel better. We were beginning to talk about when he came out of the hospital, that I would get a little apartment and stay in Denver for awhile with him until he was able to come home, and that Ruth and the children would come back.
You must realize that by this time we were getting pretty broke between us, and I decided that I would try and get a job. I went down to Penney’s and asked for a job. The Penney’s store in Greeley was rather a nice Penney’s store, and I think it was one of the better stores in town, though I really don’t remember much about Greeley. They gave me a job, and it was in the corset department, and that was one department that I had never ever had any experience in. I didn’t know the first thing about fitting a lady in a foundation garment, and I don’t know that I ever tried. I think they just put me at a counter where I was supposed to sell brassieres and things, and lightweight garments and things that women bought without trying on.
I was still sleeping all night in the car and then I would go down and get a shower and get cleaned up and go to the store. Actually, there were not enough beds in the apartment, so there would have been no place for me to have slept at night if I’d have wanted to. I would crawl into somebody’s bed and sleep a few hours before I could go to work. I was living on No-Doz. It’s my one and only experience with No-Doz and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. I was so tired—and so worried, of course—I really just didn’t know what I was doing. I must have been a terrible salesperson, and I’m sure they regretted ever having hired me. I was only there about a week, and I doubt very much that I would have been there another week, because the manager had already talked to me two or three times about my sales. It’s the first time in all of the history of my work up until that time that I felt that I was a failure so far as my work was concerned. I just simply could not concentrate on what I was doing. I was so near asleep, or else it was the No-Doz or something, but I was only about half-conscious.
After I had been there just a week, the missionaries suddenly came into the store and told me that I must come at once, that Keith had had a heart attack and was dying. I simply left my customer. I don’t know what ever happened to her. I never said anything to management; I just ran with them and we got in the car and rushed back to the hospital and found that Keith by this time had gone unconscious. I don’t know how much pain he had had, but by the time I got there, the pain was gone and he was unconscious and was barely breathing. I stood there with Ruth until he ceased to breathe.
I’ve always felt that Ruth held Keith probably longer than he would have lived otherwise. She simply could not understand that he was not going to get well, and I remember the very first words that she said as the doctor told us that he had gone: she said, “I didn’t believe that it would happen.”
I’ve often felt that Keith may have had a premonition that he was not going to get well. I’m sure he tried very hard to live and fought very hard (I don’t know if I have said or not, but he had both staphylococcus and streptococcus and it was an impossible combination), but I remember when he was beginning to get a little better and we were talking about me staying over there and getting a job and taking care of him until he was well enough to come home, he and I were alone at the time, and he said to me, “Mabel, don’t worry about getting a job. Just think about going home and helping Ruth with the children.” I wondered afterwards if he knew at that time that he was perhaps not going to make it.
An odd thing happened just as he died that Ruth and I have talked about many times. It was a perfectly clear day, but just as he died, there was one great big clap of thunder. Our family has a rather funny feeling about this. It seems like we have nearly always had some Thing that we’ve known—just before my father died, a similar thing happened—somehow we seem to have this feeling that we have known when some one of the family were going to leave us.
Everyone was kind to us. I’m sure the doctors and nurses who had worked so hard to save Keith felt very sorry when he died, and they were extremely kind to us. The missionaries received permission from the president of the mission to help us to get home, to drive Keith’s car home. T.O. Smith brought Ruth and some of the children. The missionaries drove Ruth’s car and I rode with them. I don’t remember how we were arranged in the cars, but we came home with the two cars. We had notified Fred, and he brought Grant and Frank, and they arrived here very shortly after we had arrived home. Keith’s body was brought by train. They were still having the bodies brought to the home rather than viewings at the mortuaries, and so his body was here in the front room for a few days, and friends called here to visit. Ruth and the little children—it was touching to see them go and look at their father there in the casket, Joe and Elizabeth and Keith.
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| Keith’s children after his death: Max, Grant, Frank; Joe, Elizabeth, Keith, and Andrew |
Ruth did a very good job of holding up. I really felt that she was a very courageous person. It was that same fall that she went back to teaching school. She got a job teaching out at Lincoln I think, teaching elementary school. Before school started, she had to have all of her teeth removed, and she started teaching school with a brand-new set of false teeth. She was still nursing Andrew, so she had to come home at recess to nurse him and rush back over to school for several months after school started. The worst problem that we had was getting help, getting someone to stay with the children so that she and I could both be gone. The people in the ward helped quite a bit in that respect. We did get a girl who stayed with us for some time, from North Ogden, and I’ll tell you a few more things about that as we go along.
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Notes:
- Keith was going to finish his doctoral degree that summer. He was the Superintendent of Weber County Schools. The faculty at the college in Greeley actually had him teach the classes he needed to finish the degree as he had already mastered all of the material; they were paying him and would give him the credits he needed. He had finished his dissertation already as well.
- Fred’s children at this time, besides the twins Charles and Fred, were Bryan, Wayne, Glen, and Earl. Brent, their last, was born after this time.
- With no interstate freeways, they would have connected with Highway 40 near Vernal, Utah, and followed it over the Continental Divide at Berthoud Pass (elev. 11,307 ft) and down into Denver; then they would have taken Route 85 northeast to Greeley.
- T.O. (Thomas Ole) Smith was one of Keith Wahlquist’s best friends. He was eight years younger than Keith and was principal of Lincoln Elementary School in Ogden (later he became principal of Washington Junior High, then Ogden High School, and finally superintendent of the Ogden City Schools). He and Keith had previously spent a summer school session living in a tent together in Logan and attending classes at the Agricultural College (now Utah State University). They had decided to spend that summer session in Greeley together. T.O. Smith never went back to Greeley after that summer; Ruth said that he could not stand to be there afterwards. Mrs. Smith was there in Greeley that summer, probably with all their children, including their daughter, Olene, who became Governor of Utah in 2003. Olene, age 9 at the time, played with the Wahlquist children. T.O. Smith gave Ruth Wahlquist the job teaching at Lincoln Elementary that fall.
- Mabel did not say whether Max went back to Utah with his brothers or whether he stayed in Greeley that month. It seems most logical to think that Max went home with Roy to Ogden.
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Go to Part 16 here.
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