An architect’s rendering of the remodel of Daly’s Fourth and F storefront. Photos via the Humboldt Historian.
A sense of loss overwhelmed me when I
learned that Daly’s Department Store was closing
its doors after 100 years. For some reason, I have
always felt that I could dash in there and do a little
shopping on my trips back home to Humboldt
County. Eureka’s own department store with its huge
plate glass display windows has played an important part in my life and in the lives of many others. It
is sad to think of it being gone. I suspect it is another victim of the shopping malls.
My first memory of Daly’s Department Store is a shopping
trip with my mother and younger sister. I must have been about
eight years old and was still a little uncertain which department store was which — J.C. Penney or Daly’s. But this was
definitely Daly’s — right across F Street from the Montgomery
Ward store and the two big dime stores — Kress and
Woolworth’s. Toward Fifth Street on the Daly’s side of the
street were Matthew’s Music House, the Bon Boniere, and
Arthur Johnson’s Menswear.
In the 1930s, a trip “downtown” was a rare occasion. We
wore our best clothes and took along our best manners. It was
a time when ladies always wore a nice dress and coat, silk
stockings, dress shoes, and a hat and gloves. We entered the
big double plate-glass doors on F Street and were dazzled by
the gleaming glass display cases of the Center Aisle. These
cases held gorgeous costume jewelry and fabulous perfumes
and makeup. To our right were the Hosiery and Shoe Departments, and behind the Shoe Department was the Girl’s Department with racks of beautiful dresses, sweaters and skirts.
I vaguely remember tiny dressing rooms at each corner of this
department.
Mother usually made our clothes, but this time she decided
to buy ready-made dresses for us. My little sister’s dress was
a high-waisted, puffed-sleeved dress with a full circle skirt
that whirled out beautifully when she spun around in circles.
The hem was trimmed with two rows of braid, and the fabric
was a cotton print of tiny flowers. She loved this dress so
much, she saved it, even after the skirt fabric was faded and
worn and split across the front from many washings and
wearings. It probably cost around $3.98 plus tax.
I shall never forget the dress I got that day. It was a lovely
shade of powder blue with just a hint of turquoise. The skirt
was separate from the top and had pleats all the way around.
The top was a short-sleeved jacket with big buttons marching
down the front. It cost $4.98 plus three percent California State
sales tax. This was a great deal of money at that time to spend
on a child’s dress which might be outgrown in a month or a
year. I wore that dress every chance I had. I wore it to shreds.
My mother undoubtedly got her money’s worth from these
purchases.
When we finished shopping, we went across the street to
one of the dime stores where we were each allowed to choose
10 cents worth of candy at one of the candy counters with big
covered glass displays of all kinds of confections-gum drops,
lemon drops, round chocolates covered with white sprinkles
called dragées, rocky road, licorice, chocolate stars, horehound
drops, red and white striped peppermints, pastel pink, white
and green tea mints-a veritable treasure-trove of goodies to
pick from. I always chose chocolate stars.
On other shopping trips downtown, we went directly to the
Yardage Department at Daly’s. On these trips, we turned to
the left of the glittering Center Aisle, and walked past the Ladies Glove Department to Patterns and Yardage. Beyond the
tables of fabrics, near the back of the store, were the Bedding
and Linen and Houseware Departments.
I loved to look at all the fabrics and smell their newness. I
imagined what I would make from each one. Sometimes
Mother would let me choose a quarter of a yard of this or a
quarter of a yard of that to sew new clothes for my Shirley
Temple doll. I learned to use my mother’s sewing machine
when I was seven years old by turning the wheel by hand. She
would not let me use the electric control for fear I might sew
my fingers! At that time, I longed to be a fashion designer and
make beautiful clothing.
Buyers traveled regularly to New York. This trip took place in the 1940s.
As a child, I never dreamed that I might one day work in
this store with all its wonderful merchandise.
I don’t think I ever explored the departments on the second
floor until I was in high school. These departments were
reached by the wide staircase or the elevator at the rear of the
store, leading directly from the Center Aisle. There was a
Beauty Salon, too, tucked away on the landing where the staircase turned to go up to Ladies Dresses, Coats, Hats, Sportswear, and Lingerie. The office and employee’s lunch room
and coat room were up there, too. The Men’s and Boy’s Departments were reached by a short ramp between the wrapping desk and the elevator. It was on another level, due to the
slope of Fourth Street at that point.
Once in a while as teens, my sisters and I were allowed to
ride the city bus down J Street to Fifth and F streets to do our
own shopping. Bus fare was five cents. Mother had a charge
account at Daly’s, and on special occasions we were allowed
to charge something “on approval”-meaning that we could
take it back if our mother didn’t approve of our purchase. In
those days, Daly’s had a delivery service and would send things
out to your house, so shoppers didn’t have to carry a lot of
packages around. Both hands were freed to do more shopping!
My older sister went to work in the office right out of junior college, and continued until after her marriage and the birth
of her first son. She must have been instrumental in getting
me a job there one Christmas season at the wrapping desk that
was tucked under the stairs. This must have been the Christmas of 1944, as I had just turned 17. My father died that Christmas, and my sisters and I felt we needed to help our mother as
much as possible.
The other wrapping desk girls and I worked at a long table,
wrapping gifts with double sheets of white tissue paper and
spools of ribbed ribbon in a rainbow of colors. We wrapped
double rows of ribbon in square or diagonal patterns, and
topped them off with curly poodle dog bows made of long
lengths of the ribbon that were curled with the sharp edge of a
scissors.
One day when the Christmas season was over, I showed up
for work, not knowing I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had
punched in on the time clock as usual. Charlie Daly came
down to the wrapping desk from his office on the second floor
and fixed me with a stem look. He usually cleared his throat
before speaking to any of the people who worked there, and
this time was no exception. I’m not sure who felt worse in this
situation, he or I, especially when years later I found out he
had gone to Eureka High School with my mother!
“Hammph,” he said. “Didn’t your sister tell you not to come
in to work today?”
DIDN’T MY SISTER WHAT? screamed my thoughts inside my head!
“N-no, she didn’t,” I managed to stammer, twisting my
clammy hands together and staring at the polished toes of his
shoes, not knowing what to do. Sometimes it is truly painful
to be young and unworldly. My sister might have forgotten to
tell me, or she might have felt she couldn’t tell me such an
awful thing.
The happy outcome of this was that Tillie Atwell, the office manager, took me under
her wing, tested my change-making ability, and put me
to work on the “tubes” — an
invention designed to speed
up service, eliminate theft,
and drive cashiers crazy.
Pneumatic tubes serpentined to and from all the departments in the store, ending in the office where they
opened onto a chute into two
troughs on a long wooden
table. There was room for
four cashiers — two on each
side. Our metal tills were designed to fit securely in a
second row of troughs, one
on each side of the tube
troughs.
Each cashier started with
fifty dollars in change in a
till that was made up ahead
of time, and locked and
stored in the safe until a
cashier needed it. When she received her till, she unlocked it,
and it was her responsibility to count that till before she started
using it and to balance it at the end of the day. When she went
to lunch, or left her till for any reason, she locked it and kept
the key. If it was short by more than a few cents, I think the
shortage came out of her pay. We always balanced within a
few cents. By that time the minimum wage was 50 cents an
hour.
The store opened at 10 a.m., but employees were there by
9:45. We closed at 5:30, with an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks according to the law — one in the morning
and one in the afternoon. Lunches were in three shifts-the
first at 11 a.m. — too early, in my estimation. As the extra help, I
nearly always had to take that time. Then the whole afternoon dragged interminably. Each day, one of the cashiers had to
stay on to take late sales and answer the switchboard while
the others balanced their money and ran a tape of their sales
slips. The late cashier then had to stay later to balance out.
Our pay was given to us in cash in small manila pay envelopes with little pay slips attached to them. When I went back
to school at Humboldt State and could only work Saturdays,
my pay for one day’s work was about $3.60, after taxes.
As sales were made throughout the store, the clerks would
fill out sales slips, adding the 3 percent California State sales
tax that was already figured out for them on a chart in each
sales book. They made a note at the top of the sales slip of the
amount of money paid, folded the slip and its carbon copy
with the money into a cannister about eight inches long and
three inches in diameter, and sent it on its way through the
pneumatic system to us-the cashiers.
Once it reached the office, it announced its arrival by banging loudly as it spewed out the vacuum system, slid down the
incline and landed in front of us. Whoever was closest or quickest grabbed it, twisted it open, and spilled the contents onto
the narrow work space in front of the tills. We counted the
money, checking to see if it agreed with the amount the clerk
had filled in. If it didn’t agree, we phoned the clerk and returned the cannister intact for him or her to correct. Then when
it came back, we made the change, kept the original sales slip
for our till, and folded the carbon copy with the change back
into the little cylinder and returned it to the department.
The return vacuum tubes were in a double row of six, between and a little above us — 12 in all, numbered for each department. The cannisters had the department numbers on them
too.
An additional tube had been added at the outside end of the
rack of tubes, after the original system was installed. It was
number thirteen-Boys’ Department-and was a little hard to
reach if you happened to be on the switchboard, or sitting across
from the switchboard that day. Number thirteen always made
a high-pitched whistling noise whenever it was in use. We
always knew when we were dealing with the Boys’ Department, long before the cannister arrived.
Once in a while we would receive a fifty-dollar bill, on
more rare occasions, a one hundred-dollar bill. The average
sales per till per day were about six or seven hundred dollars.
During a Christmas season, I can remember taking in a little
over one thousand dollars on very busy days. One time, someone was passing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. We all got a
lesson on how to identify them, and the whole office was in a
turmoil for several days.
Cashiers also ran the switchboard, a quaint relic of the Victorian Age, or so it seems now in these electronic times. Then
we thought it was a state-of-the-art system, and we all liked to
work on the switchboard. But you must remember this was in
the days of one telephone to a household, if people were lucky
enough to have a telephone, and two or four party lines on
many of those.
All the telephones in the store were routed through this
board. Small metal-lined holes connected to wires inside the
board. Two little lights, one red and one white were under
each hole. The names of the departments and the people in the
store with private telephones were fastened under their proper
holes. These were Office Manager Tillie Atwell and Credit
Manager Gladys Meline, among other telephones in the main
office, and the Dalys —John S., Jack F., Cornelius D. and
Charles.
There were four or five outside lines on the switchboard,
and as the lights came on indicating an incoming call, the
switchboard operator would plug a fabric-covered snake-like
line into that hole, open the “key” and say in a sweet, musical
voice,
“Good morning (or afternoon), Daly Brothers.”
Then she would bring up the corresponding cord and plug
it into the department requested, close the key, and ring the
phone. If she was not careful, she might push the key the wrong
way, and ring in somebody’s ear — a no-no!
Some sales were not cash sales. Many people had charge
accounts. When a charge sale came winging to us in one of
the little cannisters, we had to call out the customer’s name
loud and clear to Gladys Meline, the credit manager, whose
desk was adjacent to the tube system. She would then okay it,
or not. Other people in the office were qualified to okay charges
if she was out or busy with a customer. Sometimes she would
have to talk to customers on the telephone first, requesting
that they please come to the office and pay a little on their
bills before charging any more. Then she would okay a charge.
Gladys had a very difficult job and did it perfectly. Not
only was she responsible for all the charge accounts at the
store and for treating the customers tactfully and carefully,
she had to keep four giddy young girls in line on the tubes.
Not an easy task.
When things were slow, we liked to talk to pass the time.
This was forbidden. It was not business-like. If we had no
change to make, we must busy ourselves with making sure all
our charge slips were filed in alphabetical order. At billing
time, we were put to work stuffing envelopes with statements
and fliers for perfume or lingerie. Then, if we STILL had nothing to do, we had to go through stacks of old cash sales slips
to make sure a charge slip had not been accidentally included
in the stack. BORING! BORING! BORING! But one day I
found one! I actually found a charge slip that had been inadvertently filed with the cash slips. I don’t remember anyone
else ever finding one. It seemed to make it all worthwhile
somehow.
Sometimes when I came in on a Saturday, I was given the
task of addressing all the statements with a hand-cranked
machine. Names and address of charge customers were stenciled with a ribbonless typewriter on small cards with silkscreen-like centers. The little silk-screens had to be stacked
so they would feed into the machine, along with the statements. Some sort of ink-rolling mechanism picked up the
ink, spread it across the silk-screen and then printed it on
the statement paper as I turned the crank. This was a long,
laborious hand process but faster than typing each statement
individually. It usually took the better part of a Saturday to
do all the addresses. Now a computer would do that in minutes.
I continued to work at Daly Brothers through four years of
college at Humboldt State, every Saturday, every school holiday and every summer vacation, except one summer that I
spent working at Benbow Inn, near Richardson’s Grove. Usually I spent my lunch hour in the lunchroom reading and eating a cheese sandwich and apple that I brought from home to
save money, because I saw too many things I wanted to buy in
the store. Even with my ten percent store discount, less than
four dollars a day didn’t go far.
A 1946 Daly’s newspaper ad encouraged women to purchase hats.
In 1947, a French designer decided women needed a new
look and dropped hemlines to mid-calf. All my short, material-conserving wartime skirts were suddenly out-of-date! For
some strange reason, short skirts actually looked indecent. The
huge sloppy wartime sweaters that revealed six inches of
pleated skirt coming to just above the knees were replaced by
short formfitting sweaters and long straight skirts that were
difficult to walk in, even with short slits up the sides, front, or
back. Dresses had skirts with yards and yards of material.
Brown and white saddle shoes and bobby-sox gave way to
white buck saddle shoes and ankle socks rolled down to show
anklebone.
Even my good wool coat was too short. I cut the coat off to
make a jacket, but it looked like a coat-cut-off-to-make-a-jacket. I was forced by fashion to buy a new-look coat on my
meager earnings, paying for it a little at a time. I did manage
to buy one good long, wool, straight, ankle-length skirt and
two short sweaters.
The new coat was black wool gabardine and cost eighty
dollars. Think how many Saturdays I had to work to pay for
it! Five months of Saturdays, and more. The coat had a scalloped yoke in the front and back, from which flowed princess-style gores that flared out below the waist into a huge
skirt. It wasn’t even a warm coat, but it was in fashion. I’m
not sure if I was allowed to charge it and just turn my pay
envelope back to the store each week, or if I put it on layaway.
I do remember when I finally wore my beautiful new black
coat to work, I hung it carefully on the employees’ coat rack
with dozens of similar coats. When it was time to go home.
my coat was gone. Someone had
taken it, thinking it hers. As I was
fighting tears, the girl who took it
came back into the coat room after
realizing her mistake. What a relief
it was to get that coat back!
When I was starting my junior
year at Humboldt State, the store offered me a full-time job at the fabulous salary of one hundred dollars a
month! I was tempted to take it because I was tired of scraping by with
only two sweaters and one skirt to
my name. But I decided to finish my
education, and in another two years
graduated with a teaching credential
and was able to earn three hundred
dollars a month.
Daly Brothers was very good to
work around my schedule. I had the
opportunity to know some wonderful people. Tillie Atwell was a mother
to everyone-her own large family
and the “store family,” as well as being a very sharp, astute businesswoman and accountant. Gladys
Meline. with her red hair and strict
rules, is a legend in the store. Agnes
did the billing on a huge dinosaur of
a billing machine. I’m sorry I can’t
think of her last name. Francis King
worked in the office during that time.
We discovered that we were cousins
of the same cousin — though we are
not related to each other. I still hear
from her at Christmas. Pat Farrar was
a cashier. I can’t remember the names
of the other cashiers, except one
whose last name was Mackle. Ella
Marie Fanucchi also worked in the
office. I think she was in charge of
the few cash registers scattered
throughout the store in areas that were not convenient to the
tube system. Another girl, whose name was Holly or Polly
something, worked in the office to help her husband pay off a
twenty-five thousand dollar debt on his logging truck. Something had happened to the truck, and he still owed that much
money on it. This was a huge sum, when the minimum wage
was fifty cents an hour, but they both worked hard and paid it
off.
Tillie’s daughter, Anita Atwell, worked in sales. Santina
“Sandy” Del Grande worked in the Center Aisle, Impeccably
dressed, with perfect nails, hair and makeup, and high heels. I
could never understand how she could stand there hour after
hour in heels. Meta Huddleson worked in Lingerie. My older
sister, Pat Roberts, worked in the office before she started her
family and after her boys were old enough to go to school.
My younger sister, Betty Olsen, worked in the Beauty Salon,
after graduating from Beauty College. And my sister-in-law,
Pat Gipson, worked in sportswear.
Although the noise of the “tubes” nearly drove me to distraction at times, I shall always appreciate having had the opportunity to work at Daly’s and make a little extra money while
going to school. The closing of this store is like the closing of
another era — a time gone the way of that Victorian switchboard.
###
The story above was originally printed in the Summer 1996 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.
