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.

Keith C Wahlquist

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 children after his death: Max, Grant, Frank;
Joe, Elizabeth, Keith, and Andrew

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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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Mabel’s Memories, part 13

This is part 13 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. In Part 12, Mabel and her mother had moved to Ogden and were living with Mabel’s brother Keith and his family off and on while Mabel pursued her career in retail sales and took care of her mother. This part concerns 1933 and other years; she worked at Wright’s for nine years.


Chapter 6
Life in Ogden (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 25th Street house in Ogden

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

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

The spiral stair

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

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

First landing of the spiral stair

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

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

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Notes:

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

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Go to Part 14 here.

Mabel’s Memories, part 9

This is part 9 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 through 8. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there about twelve years.


Chapter 4
Beginnings of a Career (continued)

Without living through it, I think people could have very little idea of the hardships of those early settlers out in Uintah Basin. I got one of my best and most lasting lessons on the Word of Wisdom[1] from a little lady one day in Waugh’s Store. There was very little water out there. There hadn’t been too many canals dug yet, and the little orchards or fruit trees here and there, and the berry bushes and gardens were almost all literally watered by hand. People carried water from the ditches to water their trees and their bushes, and there was practically no fruit to be had, because it was too far for it to be hauled out there. It would spoil before it could ever arrive, and it would be too expensive for people to buy even if it were brought out.

This one day a little lady came in, in her buggy with her eggs to trade for groceries, and while she was buying things, she was telling me that she had raised some raspberries. Her raspberries were finally bearing that year, and she was going to have a few to bottle. She was so pleased and so proud, she was just bubbling, she was so excited about it. Among the other things that she bought was 50¢ worth of sugar to put up these raspberries. She lived out on North Myton Bench, and it must have taken her two or three hours to make the drive in, in the buggy. It was a hot day.

After she had left, she had been gone at least an hour, maybe more, when she—I saw her come back in, and she had this package of sugar with her, and there were tears in her eyes. She said, “You know, could you take this sugar back and let me have some tobacco?” She said, “I forgot to get my husband’s tobacco.” She said, “All of the other things I just have to have, but I can do without the sugar and not put up the fruit. We can eat the berries.” And she said at the end, “My husband will be so cross if I go home without his tobacco.”

I put the sugar back and she took her husband’s tobacco. Then and there I realized what the habit of tobacco could do to a family. Here was his wife and these children, deprived of such a wonderful luxury as these bottled raspberries were going to be, all so he could have his tobacco. I wished that she would have taken the sugar home and asked him to bring it back for the tobacco. I’ve often wondered if he would have had what it takes to do it.

There may still be room here to tell you a more amusing incident about tobacco. There were a lot of construction crews digging ditches and making roads and so on, and a lot of our business came from these crews. They would bring their order in when they came in. The whole bunch would come in on Saturday afternoon and leave their grocery order in the store and then go across to the pool hall and play pool and gamble all afternoon, because it would be their payday. Harold and I would put up their order of groceries, and then before they left at night, they would pick it up. Sometimes we’d have to wait until 9 or 10 o’clock for them to get through and come and get their order.

This one day I was putting up their order, and on it, it said—I don’t remember how many, but several—cartons of “Beechnut.” I knew about Beechnut chewing gum, and it never occurred to me to even think about Beechnut chewing or smoking tobacco. So what they got was however many cartons they wanted of Beechnut chewing gum. It was my turn to open the store on Monday morning, and on Monday morning when I got back to the store, here was the whole crew on the front steps waiting to get in. They had been the whole weekend without any tobacco. They’d had chewing gum, but they had had no tobacco, and they could scarcely wait for me to get the door open and let them get inside to get their tobacco. They either lit up if they smoked it, or stuffed it in their mouths if they chewed it, before they could even start back to work. They never did quit teasing me about that. I’m sure at the time that it happened, they could have done a lot worse than tease. I bet I got a lot of things said about me over that weekend, but finally when they all got cheered up with their cigarettes or plug in their mouth, they could laugh. And from then on, whenever they came, it would always be underscored: “Chewing tobacco, Beechnut tobacco,” not chewing gum.

Harold and I used to have some great times in the store. I wish that we could talk more about them. He’s so very hard of hearing now that it’s rather hard to talk to him. At Roy’s funeral he was there, and he and I got in a corner and got to talking about things that happened at the store, and of course I had to talk loudly to him, and some of the things struck us funny and we laughed. I’m sure that people thought that we were being very irreverent to laugh as we did.

One time I remember, well, lots of afternoons it used to get pretty slow in the store and there would be an hour or so that would be rather quiet. Sometimes Harold would go down in the basement and work during that time and clean up down there, and I would work upstairs. One afternoon I had been to a dance the night before, and I was just so sleepy I didn’t know what to do. We kept our overalls under the counter toward the back of the store, and I crawled in on top of the overalls and went sound asleep. I don’t know how long I may have slept, but I could hear people walking back and forth in the store, and I could hear Harold just bustling about and taking care of customers, and I thought, “Oh my word. I’ve got to get out of here some way.” I crawled out very quietly from underneath the counter, and as I raised my head up above the counter, here stood a great big Indian, one that I didn’t know or hadn’t ever seen before, and I think he thought I was a ghost or something—it scared him almost more than it scared me! Anyway, I managed to crawl out and wait on the customers, and we laughed and laughed about that afterwards.

Another funny thing that happened, Harold—oh, I won’t tell you that right yet. Harold got married along a couple or so years after I was in the store. He too went outside; however, he only went to Kamas [a Utah town about 100 miles away] and married a childhood sweetheart, a girl he had known when they went to school. They weren’t old enough to be married at the time he moved out to the Basin, but she had never married, and of course he hadn’t, and so they started corresponding, and he went back for a visit, and they got married. Erma was a very fastidious, particular girl. She liked things just so. One day we got a bunch of hats in, and Harold loved to try on these women’s hats; he always had. This day he tried on all the hats, and one he thought was particularly funny-looking on him. He thought it just really did something for him, and we laughed and laughed over this hat. Then he went downstairs in the basement to work, and Erma came in. She started trying on the hats, and lo and behold, she fell in love with this hat that Harold had made so much fun of, and she bought it.

I didn’t say a word to Harold about it (this was on a Saturday, too). On Sunday morning, I played the piano at church as usual, and Harold was the superintendent of the Sunday School. Erma was usually late for church—I don’t know why, but she was one of these people who are always late. They only lived across the street, maybe that’s why. Anyway, Erma came in late. We were singing the first song when she came in, and I was playing the piano, and all of a sudden I heard a gasp from up in front, and without even looking, I knew what had happened. Erma had arrived in her new hat. I got the giggles, and Harold got the giggles up in front ‘til he couldn’t sing or lead the singing—which he did even though he was superintendent—and neither one of us dared to tell Erma why we were so amused. It was really just hilarious, and she wore that hat all summer. I don’t think she ever did know about how much fun we had made of the hat before she bought it. It was real fun for me to tease Harold about that hat afterwards.

Inventory at the store was done almost as carelessly as the bookkeeping for Mr. Waugh was done, and every year we were going to do it better next year. We had this one drawer in which we kept laces and trimmings and a little bit of ribbon and things of that sort for the ladies who did their sewing at home. Each year Mr. Waugh would look in that drawer about three or four times during the year and say, “Now, when inventory comes again, we’re going to measure this. This has got to be measured so we know what we’ve got here.”Each year I’d get it out and I’d start to measure the lace and so on, and he’d come along and he’d look at—he’d open that drawer and look in it for a minute, and then he’d say, “Oh hell,” and he’d shut the drawer and that was the end of measuring the ribbon. In all the time I worked there, the laces and the ribbons never ever got more than one or two pieces measured at inventory time. I don’t know if the rest of the inventory was taken quite that carelessly or not; I think we did do better on other things, but when it came to that drawer, he just couldn’t be bothered.

Many people owed a great deal to Mr. Waugh. Many of the farmers and the homesteaders could never have made it without Mr. Waugh. He used to carry them all summer until their crop came in, in the fall. If it came in, why, then they would pay him. But if the storms came and the frosts, or if there was no rain and the crops burned up and they didn’t have any crop, why of course he didn’t get paid. I’m sure he lost thousands of dollars trying to carry farmers, and then I have already told you about the money he used to hand out to the Indians. He was a wonderful man. As he grew older of course, and as the Depression started to come on, the ‘29 Depression, he began to lose money rapidly, and it looked very much like he was going to lose the store.[2] Finally it reached a point where he simply had to say no to these people that he had been carrying for so many years, because he just couldn’t do it. So they lit on the plan that he would not come in the store. He would stay out on his ranch, or on his farm out on South Myton Bench, and Harold and I ran the store, because we could say, “Well, Mr. Waugh isn’t here, and we have no authority to let you have any credit.” This is what we did for the last year that I was in the store [1927].

When the hard time came, it got to a point where we only had on the shelves what we could actually use that week, and as the salesmen came through, we would give the orders for just the things that we were just absolutely out of. At one point—our creditors were mostly ZCMI Wholesale and Patrick Dry Goods—and at one time they came out with their trucks and took back cartons and cartons and cartons of merchandise to try to make up some of the debt that Mr. Waugh owed that he was unable to pay them, because the ranchers had not paid him. We’d live from hand to mouth. Harold and I didn’t draw any salary at all; we took just as little as we possibly could from the store and just barely what was needed to live on. I’m sure that Harold sacrificed even more than I did during that time, because it was all of his living, and of course we did have Fred’s salary and cows.

We would do almost anything to have saved the store for Mr. Waugh and through doing that way, through living from week to week on what we could sell, we were able to save the store. It was just heartbreaking to see how angry these people could be, how harsh they could be, because they could not get credit, and how hard it was for them to understand that the reason for his nearly losing his whole livelihood and his whole lifelong labor was because of the kindness and the goodness that he had shown to them while he was able to do it.

Remember, Mother and I were alone for about four years in Myton after Roy and Fred were married.[3]

You might be interested in who our neighbors were. On the west of us we had that old, empty hotel building that I’ve talked so much about. On the east we had McKuen, the Indian medicine man, and on the north were our corrals, and then right next to our corrals was a very small house where a Mexican family lived. There was a wife and a number of children and a husband who was home occasionally. On the south of us there was a family (I can’t remember their name), and they were not the most desirable neighbors in the world. Now I’m sure they were reasonably respectable, but some people would have thought that was rather a dreary spot to be in, but I don’t recall us worrying a great deal about it.

We did have one rather interesting thing happen with the neighbors. It was on a Sunday morning that we were just getting ready to go to Sunday School, when suddenly I heard somebody running across the porch and a voice crying, “I keel him! I keel him!”

I ran to the door and looked out, and here came this little Mexican lady, and she had a gun and she was pointing it directly at me, and her hand was shaking so badly that I was afraid it might go off accidentally. I don’t know how I got the courage, but I suppose you do things without really thinking; I walked toward her and was able to take the gun out of her hand. I asked her what the problem was, and she said that her husband had come home—no, her husband was away, and a friend of his had come who had been at the house before with her. Some time in the past he had made some advances and had frightened her, and so she had told her husband about him. Her husband had got her a gun and had told her that if he came again that she was to scare him away with this gun.

This day he came, and she got the gun and told him to leave, but he wouldn’t, so she started to threaten him with the gun, and she had chased him around the house three or four times, but she said that the trigger on the gun was so stiff that she couldn’t pull it. Anyway, she had succeeded in frightening him enough that he had left. Apparently he had been very drunk. Then she had run over to us and left her children asleep in the house, and she was very frightened.

Once I got the gun in my hands I was very frightened too. Up until then I hadn’t thought much, but then I realized what could have happened. I went out the back way, and there was a gate at the back of our yard, and I went through there and up to the sheriff’s place. He lived probably three blocks from us. He came down and talked to the lady and they went up to the pool hall, and sure enough, they found the man there and arrested him and took him over to the jail.

Before I went to the sheriff, I had gone with her back over to her house to see if her children were all right, because she was very worried about them and to make sure that he wasn’t still there lurking somewhere around the house. Then I came back and went for the sheriff. I was really rather frightened by this time, because I didn’t know what he might do.

I myself wasn’t very good with guns. I had shot a gun a few times; in fact, I almost killed a fellow one time when we were out hiking and one of the fellows had a gun with him and they were shooting tin cans off the post, as kids will do. When it came my turn to shoot, just as I went to shoot the gun, this fellow spoke to me, and I turned, pointing the gun with me as I turned, and shot. It just whizzed by his head. After that, I had not had anything to do with guns.

I don’t know at just what point the boys decided to remodel our house a bit. I might say that our house was in a sort of an L shape. There was the living room and then my parents’ bedroom, and then the room that I’ve talked about so often that we used as sort of a bedroom or a dining room, whichever it was needed for. After my father’s death it also had his old roll-top desk in there. The room that formed the L was the kitchen. From the kitchen to the front of the house past my parents’ bedroom and the living room was a wide porch. I’m sure it was wide enough that it could have been partitioned off and made into a couple of small bedrooms, but we never did do that. We had, along the way, boarded it up partway and screened the rest. That was where we took care of our milk and had our separator during the during the years that we sold milk. At one time along the way, we had boarded in one end of it so that we could have a bed out there in the summertime. It wasn’t finished well enough to be warm enough for the winter. This arrangement had its advantages and its disadvantages. In the wintertime, by keeping the door between the living room and the front bedroom open, you could get quite a lot of heat into the bedroom from the stove in the living room and you could also get quite a lot of heat from the kitchen stove into the other room and all of the house could be a little bit warm. The disadvantage of course was that if you wanted to go from the living room to the kitchen, you had to walk through both bedrooms. That wasn’t always pleasant. I’m sure it was after Father died, the boys decided that it would be a good idea to cut a door from the front bedroom onto the porch and make that room our kitchen, and the two back rooms into bedrooms. This worked very well, except the fact that those two back bedrooms were pretty cold in the wintertime.

While Mother and I were alone, at least two years, we kept boarders. We had two lady schoolteachers, and they slept in the bedroom that had been our kitchen, and Mother and I in the other room. Then we had the front room and the kitchen next to each other. That made a very nice arrangement, except I remember the girls used to always get undressed by the fire in either the front room or the kitchen, and make one wild dash for their cold bed, each with a hot water bottle. As Mother got so that she was not so well, we finally put the couch, which I told you I slept on in the front room for so many years, into the kitchen. The last year, we didn’t have boarders, and she didn’t make an effort to keep a fire in the front room all the time. She spent much of her time just in the kitchen on this couch.

I can well remember when I was working at Waugh’s, at night when I would be going home, there was a certain spot at which I could see the window of the room that was now the kitchen. If the light was on, I would know that she was up fixing my dinner, and that she was all right. But sometimes she would have gone to sleep and wouldn’t have gotten up and turned the light on, and I wouldn’t be able to see the light, and I know that when I couldn’t see the light at that particular spot between the houses, then I started to run, and I ran until I was home because I was so afraid that she had gotten sick or that she had fallen, or that something had happened to her. That always was a terrifying experience.

With all our worries and problems, we had a lot of fun in that little house in those last years that Mother and I lived there. It was sort of a center of activity. As I’ve told you before, there were very few young people there, and especially in the winter when the girls were with us, the men teachers used to come down and we’d spend lots of evenings playing Flinch and Rook and making fudge and just generally making our own good times. We all sort of went together in a bunch to dances, both in our own branch and to neighboring towns. I wasn’t always able to go, because if Mother was not well, I didn’t leave her. But we did have a lot of fun. We had a lot going on in our own branch. I was very big in dramatics—I loved that—and we had lots of plays, and I guess I was a ham just like my dad. I did enjoy that very much.

Roy and Maude, Fred and Loreen, Harold and Erma were all very good about coming to visit with us and we had a lot of fun with them. We especially enjoyed the twins when they came along.[4] Mother and I used to tend them while Fred and Loreen went to Roosevelt for leadership meetings or if they had some other function that they wanted to go to. They were cute little mutts. The only trouble with them was that if one woke up and cried, they both woke up and cried. You’d just barely get one asleep and the other one would wake up. But they were good babies and we loved to have them. Austin was born before we left Myton, and we used to enjoy having him too, and tending him while Maude and Roy did other things.[5]

Fred with his twin boys

Mabel and Roy, before 1925
(because Mabel had not yet cut her hair)

It was during this time that I managed to have measles and chicken pox and mumps, one at a time, of course. I guess being the youngest of the family, I hadn’t had them when I was a child, and since I always had to play with everybody’s baby that came to the store, I suppose it was inevitable that I would get them. Since all the rest of our bunch had had them, they had a famous time coming to watch me suffer. I remember that they all thought I was particularly amusing when I had the mumps.

Speaking of dramatics made me think of Archie Palmer again. I hadn’t thought of him for years, and I have no idea whatever became of him. He was older than the rest of us; in fact, I think he had even gotten in on a few months of the very end of World War I. During that time he had learned some bad habits, one of which was drinking, and the other one was forging his father’s name on checks, which didn’t please his father very much. After a few times, his father decided that it might be well for him to spend a few months in jail, which Archie did. His mother was a lovely person. She was my mother’s counselor in the Relief Society presidency. When Archie came home from the pen, we all decided that we would get Archie and reform him. We got him going to Mutual and we found out that he dearly loved dramatics. He was very good at them too. The only problem that we had with Arch was that even though it was Prohibition, as soon as we got into a strange town, some way he had an uncanny knack of getting hold of a bottle. We solved it by giving him a part that had a drunk in it, and this worked very well. Arch would always be pretty good in the first act, and very good in the second act, and absolutely stupendous in the third act. He always stole the show.

We all liked Arch, and Arch liked me for some reason, except when he was drunk. His mother used to say to my mother, “Now don’t you worry about Mabel, because Archie will take care of her,” and Archie did, except as I say when he got drunk. Then he would have nothing to do with me whatsoever. One night this almost became a disaster. It looked like one of us was going to have to walk home from Roosevelt [ten miles]. The other car had gone, and Arch refused to get into the car that I was riding in. We finally resolved it by just waiting until Arch went to sleep, and then the fellows hoisted him into the back seat and I got into the front seat. All the way home, Arch was mumbling, “I’m not gonna ride with her.”

For some reason or other we never really had much luck in reforming Arch, and as I say, I don’t know whatever became of him. I haven’t heard of him, or for that matter, thought of him for years until we were talking about dramatics for these tapes.


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Notes:

1. Latter-day Saints have a rather strict health code called “The Word of Wisdom” which includes not smoking or chewing tobacco.
2. Before the stock market crash in October 1929 that started the Great Depression, Utah farms were losing money rapidly. The same extreme, prolonged drought that caused the Great Plains to become the Great Dust Bowl had also affected the Uintah Basin, and starting around 1925, farms and ranches all around Myton failed by the dozens and then by the hundreds as the years passed.
3. Actually, it was four years after her father died that Mabel and her mother moved to Salt Lake City, and either Fred or Roy had been living with them, with the exception of the six months that Roy was gone on his second mission, and the six or eight months after Roy's marriage.
4. Fred and Loreen’s twins were born at the end of the summer of 1926.
5. Roy and Maude’s first boy was born in the summer of 1927.

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Go to Part 10 here.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 7

This is part 7 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 and 6. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there over ten years.


Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)

I’ve mentioned these pot-bellied stoves a number of times. I think I’ll tell you an experience Fred had that at least I think was partly, at least, due to the pot-bellied stove. I guess this probably happened after Father died, because I know I had helped Fred milk the cows that morning, and I didn’t learn to milk the cows until after Father’s death when Fred was the only one at home. I had to milk cows that winter in order to help him get his chores done in time to get to school. It was on a Sunday, a fast Sunday, and he had been asked to go up to one of those little communities up that way, I think it was Neola, anyway it was to speak at a funeral. It was rather an upsetting thing for him, because the funeral was for a young man who had committed suicide, and I’m sure it was Fred’s first experience with something of that sort. I didn’t know the young man myself, and I really don’t know how Fred happened to know him, unless it was through his stake MIA [Mutual Improvement Association] work. I would imagine that he had gotten acquainted with him in some way through that. Anyway, he had been asked to speak at the funeral.

We had done the chores and gone to Sunday School and come home, and it being fast day, Mother had urged Fred to eat something, but he wouldn’t. She had quietly suggested to me that I might suggest to Fred that I would like to go with him. I did, and he consented, and so I went along. I’m sure he didn’t know that Mother had made such a suggestion. Mother and I got into cahoots on a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about. We left, and my impression is that we went in the buggy with old Buttermilk, but I can’t imagine why we would have done that, because I know we had my father’s famous car by that time, unless it was out of order. Anyway, it was an extremely cold day and we were just simply frozen before we got there. There was a bad wind blowing, and if you’ve ever been out on North Myton Bench in the middle of the winter in a wind storm, you know how very cold it can be. When we got there we were both just frozen.

We got there just about time for the funeral to begin. I was real happy that they had put Fred rather close to the pot-bellied stove, because we were both just frozen stiff, and I thought at least he would be a little bit thawed out before it was time for him to speak. I was at the back of the hall, and I couldn’t feel any heat at all and was still chilled through. When it came time for Fred to get up and speak, I guess he had gotten too warm beside this pot-bellied stove, or at least he had gotten warm too fast, and with a stomach which was too empty to churn, he was quite upset. He seemed very calm as he started to speak, but I noticed that he began to get whiter and whiter, and his voice began to get slower and slower, and I could tell that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts in order, and I realized that he was going to faint. No one seemed to be very concerned; the people behind him of course couldn’t see. As I saw him start to sway, I started running down the aisle, and just then someone back of him caught him before he fell. They asked for some water, and of course there wasn’t any there, and they sent someone after some to the closest neighbor, and he finally got back with some about thirty minutes after Fred had fainted. Fred was unconscious for quite awhile, and I was terrified.

After he came to, we were taken to the bishop’s home, and he rested there awhile, and I’m quite sure we were given something to eat there. They did finish the funeral, and we did go to the cemetery, and with it all, we were very late getting back. Mother was beside herself with worry by the time we arrived home, and Fred had me sworn to silence by that time that I was not to tell her what had happened and worry her further. I’ve always thought that it was that pot-bellied stove and getting so close to it after being so cold, and getting the heat from it so quickly that caused him to have that experience.

I’ve had one other experience with a person who committed suicide. In those days it was not customary to have the funeral for a person who had committed suicide held in a chapel, and on this occasion it was held in the family home. This man had been ill a long time and had become very despondent, and while his wife was away at work he had shot himself. As I’ve told you before, I usually played the piano for all of our church activities, and this was no exception. There was a piano in the home, and Father of course was conducting the funeral, and I went along to play the hymns. Most of the people from our branch were there in attendance. I have always thought my father was very wise that day in the choice of music. Apparently the wife had been so very disturbed that she had not been any help in making any of the arrangements, and Father had made the arrangements. The song that we sang was “Nay, Speak No Ill,” and we never sing that hymn in church but I don’t think of that particular incident. I remember how right I thought that song was for that occasion.

I hate to leave this on a dreary note, so maybe I can tell you about the time Harold Eldredge rode down the middle of Myton Main Street in the hearse. They had a little hearse at the hardware store. He got somebody to drive it and he stretched out in it, and they drove down Main Street. Just when they got in front of the saloon, Harold sat up. You should have seen those drunks scatter.

There was one time when the branch people didn’t go along with my father. I guess medicine or superstition or something has come a long way since that time. It was learned that there was an old man living out by himself who was very ill, and when my father went down to see him, it was discovered that he had syphilis. He was wearing LDS garments and he maintained to the end of his life, which was really only a few days after Father found him, that he was innocent.[1] When it came time to get him to prepare him for burial, no one would come near because of the danger of syphilis. It fell to my father to prepare him for burial. As I’ve told you before, we had no undertaker, and when someone passed away, it would usually fall to friends and neighbors and branch members to prepare the bodies for burial. When Father had dressed him, he put his garments on, because the man had been wearing them all of these years, and some people were very upset. Father said that was between the man and the Lord. If he had felt innocent enough to wear them all of those years, as far as he was concerned, the Lord could make the final judgment. But the people in the branch did refuse to have the service in our chapel. I remember it was on a Thanksgiving morning that Fred and Father hitched up the wagon and went and got the man’s body. They had a grave dug and they took it to the cemetery and buried the body and dedicated the grave. Since the men who had dug the grave weren’t sticking around for fear of what might happen to them, Father and Fred filled in the grave and then came home. Mother had a good supply of hot water for them to use and they washed and cleaned up and changed their clothing before our Thanksgiving dinner. I know that we today can’t realize the things that people believed and the lack of knowledge that people had at that time.

Charles John Wahlquist

It was in April 1923 that my father died. I was nineteen at the time. He died on a Sunday afternoon from a massive coronary thrombosis type of ailment.

He had been in Vernal for a few days on a case, and we learned later from Mrs. Richardson, where he always stayed, that he had not felt well on Saturday. He hadn’t finished up at court early enough on Saturday to drive home, and she said he had been ill again in the night, Saturday night. On Sunday morning she had tried to persuade him to stay over and not attempt the drive home, but he had smiled and said no, that if he was going to be sick, he wanted to get home so Mama could take care of him. He had had rather a bad trip home—it had taken him about five hours to make the trip. It had been raining, or snowing, sort of a slushy April storm, and the roads were quite slick. Some people who had passed him reported that he smiled and waved to them. One person said that when he passed him, he was stopped with his engine stalled and was trying to crank his car. Of course, stalling his engine was not an unusual thing for my father. We don’t know how ill he was or how much pain he may have suffered.

As I said, it was on Sunday, and when it came time for Sacrament meeting, Mother said for Fred and me to go to Sacrament meeting, and she would stay home to be there when he got home and get him something to eat. We could tell of course that she was getting worried about him by this time, and of course we were too.

I suppose in the years that Mother was sick so many, many times, so seriously ill, we had given some thought to her death and to what our reactions might be and what we would do. In fact, I know my father worried a great deal about her when he had to be away, because whenever he was leaving, when he was giving me my goodbye hug, his last words to me were always, “Take good care of Mama.” I don’t think any of us had ever thought in terms of Father’s death. He was only 57 and he was an unusually healthy person. I don’t ever remember him being sick enough to stay in bed all day. He could out-work almost anybody and was always very cheerful and very happy and very eager in everything that he did-he had a real zest for living. And I don’t think that the thought of his not being with us had ever occurred to any of us.

Fred and I had gone to church, and after the meeting we had a committee meeting to plan some program for Mutual that we were working on. We had looked out the back door of the chapel and could see our father’s car in front of the house, so we knew that he was at home. We hadn’t worried and had stayed as long as we needed to. But when we were coming home, we just came up over the brow of the bench from Old Town where our chapel was and saw Mother standing on the porch calling to us and waving her apron, and of course we knew that something was wrong, and we started to run.

Fred beat me home and we hurried into the house. Father was on the bed in the room right next to the kitchen, which I have described before, just lying on top of the bed. Mother told us afterwards that when he got home, she had told him she would fix him something to eat, and he had told her he felt rather tired and he thought he would lie down for a few minutes, and so he had gone in there. She had stepped out into the kitchen and was doing something when she heard a little sound and hurried back into the room, and he was unconscious. She couldn’t revive him, and she had run out onto the porch hoping she could see someone to help her and had seen us coming.

When we went into the room, his face was a deep purple, and I don’t know what anyone else did; I went directly through the door from that room into my parents’ bedroom and knelt down and started to pray. The only words that I seemed to be able to say were, “Please let my father live!” I said this over and over again, sometimes I guess pleading and sometimes I’m afraid almost demanding. I didn’t seem to be able to close my prayer—I wanted to and to get back into the room where he was—then suddenly it occurred to me that I must pray as my father had taught us to, and say, “Thy will be done.” With this realization I also realized that if I said those words my father would die, and so I was determined that I would not say that. I don’t know how long I was there—it could have been seconds or minutes—it seemed quite awhile to me. Finally I was able to say the words, “Thy will be done,” and I knew when I got up and went back into the other room that he would be gone. As I stepped into the door into the other room, Mother put her arm around me and said, “He’s going.” The purple had cleared out of his face and he looked very peaceful and natural.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about those next few days. I do know that Harold came; I don’t know who told him, perhaps somebody passing by the house; we didn’t have a telephone and neither did he, but I know Harold was there, and other members of the branch were there. They washed my father and prepared him for burial, and a casket was brought and he was placed in the front room. In those days the body was not taken to the mortuary as it is now, it was just prepared by family and friends, and the body remained in the home until time for the service. I know that people came; I couldn’t tell you who, except the story that I have already told you about Mr. Cook.

I don’t remember going to the funeral. I know that it was held in the opera house and that it was full. I don’t remember any flowers, but I know the articles telling about the funeral say that there were many beautiful floral offerings. I’ve saved all of the clippings about the funeral and I will attach them to this when it’s transcribed so that you may know what happened. I know that Congressman Don B. Colton, who was a close friend of my father’s, spoke, though I don’t remember him speaking. I don’t remember going to the cemetery, or leaving the cemetery, but I know that I did.

I don’t remember when Jack and Keith came, but I know that they did. I don’t remember when they left, but I know they and my brother Fred cleared out my father’s office. I suppose among them they determined that Roy was to remain on his mission—he had been gone just eight months when my father died—but they probably arranged among them how they would support him. I just don’t remember anything about any of it, except worrying about my mother for fear she would not be able to bear up under it. But she did, surprisingly well. I know that the boys came out by way of Price, because Daniels Canyon was closed with snow that late in April, and that was the reason that my father wasn’t brought to Heber for burial and was buried in Myton. It was about 15 years later, after my mother’s death, that the four boys went out together and brought his body back and buried it beside my mother.[2] As I say, I’ll have to let you depend on the newspaper articles for the details of my father’s funeral.

Because of the snow in Daniels Canyon and through Strawberry Valley, none of my mother’s family were able to come to Father’s funeral, which would have been a real comfort to her, I’m sure. The following summer the two sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Agnes, and her brother Jim, who were the only three living then, did each come and spend a few days with her. I’m sure she derived a great deal of comfort and pleasure in visiting with them.

The period after his death I suppose we got back to normal living, as people do at such times. I know that the following Sunday we were all in our places at church, me playing the piano and Fred up in front directing the Sunday School. I suppose we went ahead with our life pretty much as before, though it hardly seemed possible that such a thing could happen, that life could go on without my father there to direct us. Mother continued in her work as president of the Relief Society and Fred and I were extremely busy in our church work. I was president of the Mutual at that time and I think Fred was still president of the Young Men’s.

Roy was still on his mission, and Keith and Jack were both married and living on the outside.[3] They were both teaching school at that time. There were just Mother and Fred and I at home. Fred was to teach school in Myton that year. I think that was the first year that he taught in Myton, before that he had made these long horseback rides, as I’ve told you about before. I sort of wished that I could teach school, but there wasn’t any way that I could go away to school, because Mother was not well enough, though she was well enough so that I could leave her during the daytime. The School Board offered to let Fred and I teach together in a little school called Antelope, between Myton and Duchesne. It would be about ten miles from Myton and we would have had to ride that distance morning and night all through the winter, or else stay up there. We knew we couldn’t stay up there because we had to come home and milk cows and it would have been impossible to have left Mother home alone at nights, and we knew the worry that it would be to her to know that we were making that long trek morning and night, which under the conditions at that time would really have been quite a trip.

We were debating about this, but we decided I would have to stay home. The winter after Father died Mother’s health was not too good, and the decision was made that I would stay at home. That’s the year I learned how to milk cows. Up until that time, with four men, four boys in the family, Mother had never thought that I should learn to milk the cows. As I told you, I herded the cows, and I went and got them at night and brought them home, ready so they would be there to milk when the boys came home, but I had never milked them. My only experience of being around the cows when they were milked was as a little girl standing with my tin cup while Father squirted warm milk from the cow into my cup for me to drink.

I do remember one frantic experience when my mother, who didn’t know any more about the cows than I did at that time, had to stick a cow. I’m sure you don’t know, all of you, what I mean by that, but when the cows in the springtime would eat certain grass or alfalfa, they would bloat. There is a spot in a cow where if you insert a knife, the air and gas and whatnot from what the cow has eaten will come out. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for Father or the boys to have to stick a cow, but Mother had never done this. One afternoon we found that one of the cows was down and was bloated badly and would die if it were not helped. Mother very fearfully went out with the butcher knife and inserted it where she had been told it was supposed to be done, and I went along with her for moral support. Somehow or other we must have done it all right, because the cow got well.

Anyway, back to my milking. I did learn to milk the cows that winter, and I milked six cows in the morning and at night all of that winter, and Fred milked the other six. As I recall, we were milking twelve. I don’t know what we were doing about the milk then; my impression is that we were probably separating the milk and selling the cream, but I’m not sure. Anyway, helping in the house because Mother’s health was failing and she was particularly miserable that winter, and helping Fred with the chores was a good part of my day.

We did have a boarder that winter. That’s the first time we ever did anything like that. A young fellow named Ernest Bramwell, who had come out there to teach school for his first year’s teaching, lived with us. He slept with Fred and was with us the whole winter. He was a very nice young fellow and very pleasant to be around. He was very fond of my mother and she was fond of him, and in fact, we were all fond of him and enjoyed the experience of having him stay with us.

The first job that I had was in Phillips’ Store. It was a very small department store, about three doors down from Waugh’s. I don’t remember just how I got the job, whether I asked for it or whether they asked me. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips ran the store themselves without any help, but for some reason they decided to take in a clerk, so I was hired. I don’t recall just how long I stayed there and I don’t remember anything very exciting about it. They were lovely people and I enjoyed my experience there. After, oh, I think just a few months, I got a chance to go to Waugh’s Store and I decided that I would like to do that. The Phillipses asked me if I knew someone who would like the job, and so I suggested Loreen. She was delighted with the idea of coming; she was going to live at our house. They hired Loreen, and she went to be their clerk when I went to Waugh’s.

We had quite a laugh about this the other night; Fred and Loreen were here visiting and I asked Loreen how I got acquainted with her, because I really don’t know when I met Loreen. She didn’t know either. We decided that it must have been just through the fact that both of us worked in the Mutual. Loreen lived up at Ioka, a little community, well, I don’t know how far from Myton, but it could have been to the end of the world the way traveling conditions were at that time. Anyway, I had grown to like her, and we had become quite well acquainted at Mutual leadership meetings, and when we had taken plays up to Ioka to Mutual, and they had brought programs to our ward, and so on. There wasn’t anyone in our branch who was my age; I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I thought it would be so nice to have Loreen come down and we could be friends.

We laughed the other night; she accused me of playing Cupid, but that really wasn’t in my mind, and I was amused when she said that she had already decided that Fred was the boy that she was going to go after. It was a result of her having seen him play ball at Ioka, and she had been impressed by him. I’m sure she had also met him at leadership meetings in Roosevelt, too. I was sort of surprised when she said that, because I really don’t think I had thought in terms of Fred and Loreen at that time. I was delighted when they did fall in love and get married, but Loreen was such a vivacious, popular, pretty girl—she had her beautiful auburn-red hair and her big sparkly brown eyes, and she was very lively and not shy, but popular and a good dancer, and all the things that I wasn’t. I think it rather surprised me that she would think in terms of quiet Fred, who didn’t dance and who didn’t go to many of the parties or things of that sort and was not very much interested in girls. However, he admitted in this same conversation that he had had his eye on Loreen, having met her over at Roosevelt and having heard her speak, and so he was quite delighted when I had this brilliant idea of having Loreen come down to work at Phillips’. Which all goes to show that the wheels of the gods or whatever-it-is they say, grind slowly and things do work out for people.

When Loreen came to stay with us, she and I of course were very good friends, and it was a very happy time for me. We made dresses together and we could go to church together and do so many things together. I don’t know when she and Fred did their romancing; I wasn’t conscious of it. Maybe Mother was, though if she was, she didn’t tell me, and I’m quite sure she would have done.

I well remember the night that Loreen was going to go home for the weekend and how shocked Mother and I both were when Fred announced he was taking her home. They left, and the next morning about 5 o’clock, when Mother awakened thinking it was time for Fred to be up to milk the cows, she discovered that Fred had not arrived home. The only thing she could think of at all was an accident, and so in our usual manner we were out ready to start hiking for Ioka until we found him, when suddenly we saw him coming up through Old Town in the car, and he arrived home very sheepishly to tell us that he and Loreen were engaged to be married.

Fred and Loreen’s marriage changed our lives a great deal.[4] Fred had some land leased out south of Myton about a mile. lt was where we had kept the cows pastured that summer. There was a house on this land and he and Loreen were to live in it. They went into Salt Lake to be married and then had a honeymoon trip down to the canyons in Southern Utah. I remember my part of it all was to be very careful that no one should know when they returned home, because one thing Fred was not going to have was a shivaree. Perhaps you do or don’t know what a shivaree is, or was. Whenever a couple got married, all of the other young people in town would try to get them when they got home the first night and usually separate the girl and the fellow, sometimes taking the fellow away for the whole night, or the girl, and just generally making things very unpleasant. Fred was going to have none of that, so I kept it a very deep, dark secret when they were to be home. When they did get home, they stayed with us the first night. Anyway, they managed to get themselves settled before people knew that they were at home.

They took the cows out there, and this left Mother and I alone, which was a brand-new experience for us and a rather frightening experience for Mother, I’m sure. I know it was a frightening experience to me, because it gave me the full responsibility of Mother. Mother was always very nervous about us being there alone, but our good old dog, Tip, was a good watchdog and took very good care of us. You remember me saying about how much we came to appreciate our neighbor, McKuen, the medicine man. It wasn’t any time after Fred left until McKuen came by one day and said to Mother, “Me watch,” and he always did, bless his old heart. We always knew that in McKuen we had a good friend, and that if anything very seriously went wrong, we could go to him for help and he would be there.

I seem to have done things wrong. Sometimes I think I should never have started this, because whenever one of my brothers is here, they say I’ve got things wrong. Fred insists that Roy was at home when he got married and that Mother and I were not home alone, but the more we talked about it, he couldn’t figure out just how Roy could have been home.[5] Roy had, as I’ve said before, gone on his mission to the southern states, and he was there his full two years and an extra three months. He came home and after he had been home a short time there was a letter came, sent out to all wards and branches in the Church, asking for missionaries, asking each ward to furnish a missionary, preferably one with some experience, to go into the mission field for a special drive that they were doing. These were just to be six-month missions. We really had no one in our ward to send except Roy. He was about the only experienced, well he was the only returned missionary we had in the branch, and so he volunteered to go. The branch theoretically was supposed to support him, but my judgment is that Fred probably provided most of the money. In fact, Fred admitted that when he was here. I think that’s where he was when Fred got married, but Fred thinks he had returned, but we won’t argue about it, and I’m not going to do the record over.

Now, to tell something about Roy and his romances, I don’t know how I got acquainted with Maude either. I assume it was through Loreen.[6] I remember meeting her at Pack’s one time when I went up to visit with them for a few days. That was when I got my hair cut.

Mabel after her hair was bobbed

I think I was the last person in the world to get their hair cut, and I don’t know why, because I never liked my hair long. It was very heavy and it always gave me headaches, and I didn’t do it very attractively. They had already had theirs cut, and they talked me into letting them cut my hair. Very reluctantly, I did. They first cut off the big braid that I had hanging down the back, and then they proceeded to hack off the rest of it. They wouldn’t let me look to see what was going on, and they didn’t let me look into the mirror until after they had it all curled and ready for inspection. I was very pleased with it, and thought it looked very nice. When we went home that night to Myton, there was a dance or ward function of some sort, and I knew Mother would be there. We were so late getting down there that we didn’t have time to go home first, so the first that Mother saw me with my hair cut was on the dance floor, and she was very shocked. However, she liked my hair, and everything turned out very well on that score.

Another time I remember spending with Maude was when I had the first of my many benign tumors removed. I’d had this tumor in my leg for, oh, many years, since I was just a very young girl. We had never thought much about it; my father didn’t worry about it, but it suddenly started growing quite rapidly, and it got so it showed quite badly on my leg beneath my dresses, and also my leg had got so it ached quite badly. I went over to Roosevelt (I don’t know who with at that time), to Dr. Miles, who was a woman doctor, rather a good doctor, and also a surgeon. She said that it should be taken out because it might be attached to the bone in my leg and might cause serious trouble. So Maude invited me to stay with her at her place while I had it out.

I think she and Roy were probably going together by this time (he had returned home). I went and I had the surgery done that day, and that night I went to Maude’s. She was going to be extra nice to me, and they had a very wide windowsill in their living room. Now, I don’t know whether they didn’t have the extra bed—I’m sure they did—but I think she must have thought that would be a pleasant place for me to be, so I could sit up and look out this window. She put a feather tick on the seat of the window—it had no pad on it—and that was where I slept. It was real soft and comfortable and cozy when I first went to bed, but during the night my leg ached quite a bit, and of course the windowsill was a little short for me, being rather tall, and by morning the feathers had all gone to both sides and were all over me in all directions, and I was sleeping on just the fabric of the tick under me on this hard window seat. I didn’t say anything to Maude, because I knew that she was trying to be very kind.

We went to the doctor the next day—I’m sure we must have walked—and of course Dr. Miles’ office was on the second floor of the building, and we climbed the stairs, and with it all I had torn several of the stitches and the wound had begun to hemorrhage. I had quite a little trouble getting it to heal up, and I did stay there in Roosevelt for three or four days before I returned home. It healed fine eventually, and instead of having a lump show underneath my dress, I had a nice long scar for many years.

Another time I remember being with Maude before she and Roy were married, I went with her over to Fort Duchesne for the U.B.I.C. That’s the Uintah Basin Industrial Convention, which used to be held every year, and I think still is. Fort Duchesne was quite an interesting place. It was built very much on the same pattern as Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, and the officers’ homes were really very nice homes—nice two-story buildings, and they were in rather a sort of a semi-circle. There were the long barracks for the soldiers that stayed, though there were no soldiers there at that time, and some of the officers’ homes were occupied by families there at the fort. There was a store there and a few other government offices, and these government men lived in the homes that had been the officers’ homes. That was my first time, I think, of going to Fort Duchesne to stay.

U.B.I.C. in 1926 when Mabel and Maude attended.

I’d been through there once before, and it was my first experience of going over to what was called “The Strip.” I don’t know exactly how to explain that, but apparently there was a narrow piece of land that did not belong to the fort and did not belong to the Indian reservation and did not belong to Uintah County, so it was not really under any legal jurisdiction. During the time that the fort had been in operation, apparently it had been a very wild spot, with many saloons and gambling places. It had been the place for wild life for the soldiers and many others, but at that time there was very little there except the Chinaman’s Store. The Chinaman had an Indian trading post there and it was quite a large store, I guess about the biggest thing around. He had just everything in the way of clothing and groceries and what-have-you, and did a very lucrative business. He got business from everywhere; everyone went over to the Chinaman’s because he had the reputation that if he couldn’t get you to buy it any other way, he would make you a deal. As I say, that was another experience I had with Maude.

I liked Maude and I was happy when she and Roy were married.[7] At the time Roy and Maude were married, Fred and Roy divided up the cows and the horses and the farm implements and everything they had worked with in common. Roy had leased some land down on the river, just across the river, really. There was a house on the land, an old log house, that they lived in. It wasn’t too far from the grist mill, which was run by a man named Waterson or Waterman, who was their closest neighbor.

Roy and Maude didn’t quite escape the shivaree; they weren’t quite as lucky as Fred and Loreen. It was just a few of us who went out there the evening that they got home, I think the four schoolteachers and myself and few others, I don’t even recall who. They didn’t have anything to give us to eat—they hadn’t gotten groceries much into the house yet—so the fellows disappeared and in a little while they came back with a couple of chickens and a couple of nice, big watermelons. The chickens still had their feathers, but not their heads, so we had to pull the feathers off the chickens and clean them and cook them before we had our midnight supper. I’m sure neither Roy nor Maude was very happy about this, because it was quite obvious to all, though nothing was said, that they had not bought the chickens, nor had they bought the watermelons. I guess Roy thought that it was better than being taken off somewhere to walk home through the night in his bare feet, and Maude thought it was better than being left alone. Nothing was said and we cooked the chickens and we had a nice dinner in lieu of a shivaree.

The next day—I was working at Waugh’s by this time—and the next day, Mr. Waterson came in to the store and he was just as mad as a hatter about young people having gotten into his chickens and stolen two of the chickens and also taken some of his watermelons. I tried very hard to look as innocent as I could; I don’t know how well I succeeded. I finally managed to escape to the basement. I didn’t fool Harold; he immediately caught on and kidded me about it afterwards and kidded Roy about it afterwards. These teachers who had come from outside had had such a hilarious time and it had been such an experience for them that they could not feel sorry about it. We all just sort of said nothing and I’m sure Mr. Waterson knew who got his chickens and his watermelons, but though he said he was going to make a great fuss about it, he didn’t.

I guess I’d better tell you about the “outside” and the “inside.” When you lived in Uintah Basin at that time, if you were living in the Uintah Basin, you were living “inside,” and if you lived outside Uintah Basin, you lived “outside.” I don’t know how that came about, unless it was just that so many people in earlier days maybe didn’t either want to explain or couldn’t explain or didn’t want to say, “I came from New Jersey (or New Mexico, or wherever it might be)”; they just came from the outside. So that was the term that was always used. If you didn’t live in the Basin, you lived on the outside.

When I played this record for Maude the other day, she assured me that Roy had gone to Mr. Waterson and confessed all and had paid for the chickens and the watermelons.


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Notes:

1. For faithful Latter-day Saints, the garment they wear as underwear symbolizes their commitment to covenants with God. Once a church member is authorized to wear the garment, only a complete removal from church membership requires that the garment no longer be worn by that person. Charles Wahlquist was right to leave the choice to the man himself.
2. Mabel’s brothers went to Myton to get their father’s body between 1935 and 1938.
3. Jack had married Grace Dorius that summer, August 30, 1923.
4. Fred married Loreen Pack on August 26, 1925.
5. Roy was gone from October 1922–March 1925 and November 1925–March 1926; so he was home for Fred’s wedding.
6. Maude and Loreen were first cousins.
7. Roy and Maude were married on October 20, 1926.

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Go to Part 8.
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