Mabel’s Memories: Epilogue

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


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

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

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

Ruth and Mabel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim McEleney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel’s Memories, part 20

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


Chapter 20
An Executive in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

Donaldson’s in Minneapolis

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

The duplex Mabel bought in Minneapolis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas 1949 - Mabel and the missionaries

Christmas 1949, Mabel in her home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- * - * - * -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mabel never taped any more of her memories after this.

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Go to the Epilogue here.
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