MY MOTHER’S STORY BY CARL DOUGLASS

We had to go to Salt Lake City to get married. Karl had to borrow his father’s car, which was lent to him grudgingly. We did not have enough money even to reserve a motel or hotel room for our weekend honeymoon. I asked my skinflint uncle for a week off to have a honeymoon, but he refused to let me go at all, saying I needed to prepare my lessons for the next week. I was so distraught at the idea that I would not only not be able to have a honeymoon, but I would not be able get married in the temple. That argument persuaded Uncle Carl, and he finally and reluctantly relented and gave me the two weekend days off.?

Finally, I married Karl Oscar Nielson March 14, 1928 in the Salt Lake City, Utah temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was raining in a record level deluge on the way back to the mining camp after our wedding. The car could scarcely make it through the mud, and finally, after a wheel fell off, Karl decided that it was unsafe to keep on. In fact, we were stuck in the mud and had no choice. Then, it started to sleet which turned to ice; and the ground became very icy. We were somewhere in Price Canyon. He found a small copse of pine trees which provided a bit of cover from the sleet and snow, and he pitched our borrowed tent to cover us on our wedding night. He and I cut pine boughs to make a bed softer than the rocky forest floor. It was a beautiful, romantic introduction into married life with the man I loved, and I did not then nor have I since regretted the circumstances nor thought of myself as put upon for what we lacked. I did not know anything about sex until that first night, and I learned what I needed to know there on those pine boughs.

By the time Karl and I got back to Spring Canyon it was noon, and I was very late to begin my day of teaching. As bad luck would have it, that very day was when my uncle Carl chose to do his inspection of the school. In my classroom, the kids were all running around like idiots and messing up the room. They were celebrating like Karl and I were, I guess. I know it gave him a bad impression of both of us. He threatened to fire me which would have been terrible—to be a depression school teacher out of a job. But he never did, thank goodness.?

The mine operation slowed way down, and Karl got a good job at the Golden Rule store—sort of like a Pennys; so, when I got pregnant, I could just stay home and take care of myself. I?

was sick a lot of the time. The circumstances of the delivery of our firstborn child are important, not only because we lost our long-awaited baby girl after a very prolonged and exhausting labor and delivery, but the experience convinced Karl that he was going to become the best doctor in the country, and nothing was ever going to stop him. I was in full agreement with my man. I believed that nothing would ever be so daunting that he would not be able to overcome in his quest to become a doctor.?

The baby was butt first in my womb—a breech. I didn’t know anything about having a baby; nobody told me anything. My mother thought it wasn’t nice to talk about it. I decided, “how hard could it be?” The miner’s wives didn’t even go to the hospital. After the baby came, they would get up and do the washing, like the Indians. I was in for a rude awakening and a tough education. After a very long labor and an unproductive effort at delivery, I sort of went into shock, couldn’t close my eyes, couldn’t push. The very inexperienced physician—his name was Dr. Tuttle, like my maiden name--decided that it was past time for him to use obstetrical forceps for the first time in his short career as a tiny town’s doctor. He had not been out of medical school a full year by then. He put the forceps in place and not quite knowing what to do next, he used them to give him a strong purchase on the baby’s chin and jaws. He pulled, twisted, and worked up a sweat to get the baby out. Florence Karlene Nielson was born dead with a severely fractured neck. I had the double misfortune to have a small pelvis and birth canal, and to have a completely green doctor whose first delivery was as difficult as they get. The problems did not end there. I became terribly sick in the postpartum period, and Karl had no faith in the green doctor in the camp. He was desperate; so, he sent for his father to come and help me. It was the dead of winter, but Alexander John William Nielson, M.D. caught the first train out (the only way to get to the camp in the winter) and came to my rescue. My recovery was painful and slow, as it was with each of my babies. I guess I wasn’t much of a birther.

Finally, the Depression closed in on us altogether, and the mine had to shut down. I worked in the ice cream parlor at the Golden Rule for a while, but Karl and I both were let go because there wasn’t enough business or money to keep the store going. That was the last bit of information we needed to move on. Karl determined to go to the University of Utah and that he and I would be able to work our way through even in those dark and dirty days of the Depression. He was nothing if not optimistic, or better described as absolutely determined. And school wasn’t very expensive in those days.

Karl got accepted into pre-medicine at the University of Utah, which was then only a two-year school. The university had a contractual arrangement with Rush Medical School in Chicago; so, being accepted at the U medical school made it a sure thing that Karl would be able to finish his M.D. degree at Chicago four years later. To make ends meet—always a struggle, a close thing which was essentially hand-to-mouth--Karl took a backbreaking job as the night janitor for the University’s huge Kingsbury Hall, and together, we turned our apartment on 12th East into a boarding house and used up our meager savings to buy some second-hand furniture. I found a bakery where I could get a loaf of bread for ten cents, and a round two layer cake for a quarter.

The most interesting boarder, one who became a lifelong friend of Karl’s and one of the most famous of all western writers, was Pulitzer Prize winner, Wallace Stegner, most famous for his novels and nonfictional studies of life in the west: Remembering Laughter (1937), The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West (1946), Joe Hill, (1950); Beyond the Hundreth Meridian (1954), A Shooting Star, (1961), The Gathering of? Zion (1964), All the Little Live Things, (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal) (1967); Angle of Repose, (1971), among many others. Wallace said, “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.” That was pretty much our life.

?We couldn’t afford a car; so, I used to bundle up Carroll Lee and put her into a wagon. Remarkably enough, one of the boarders was the doctor who had killed our baby. He felt wretched, and to make amends, he overpaid his rent, which really helped.

There were a lot of empty apartments in the city because of the Depression. Owners were having them cleaned and fixed up to attract renters. So, Karl and I cleaned apartments. Karl’s father—we called him Papa—was still making a living. Many of his patients paid him with food, bottled fruits, and vegetables, that kind of thing. Sometimes, he would help us out a little bit. We were like everybody else; we went to school on a shoestring. Come summer our first year, the boarders all left; and I had to close down the boarding house. Finally, I had to go home to Spanish Fork. Poor Karl, he had to work at all kinds of jobs and come home to an empty house and often have nothing to eat.

Somehow, by the skin of our teeth money-wise, we made it through the four years at the U. of U. Karl was accepted for the two clinical years at Rush Medical School. That summer, he worked as a field hand twelve hours a day to get some money to be able to start school.

With little more than our hopes and a flimsy strategy, we (Karl, daughter Carroll Lee, age three, and I) loaded up what little we had into a bus—all our household items were wrapped up in an old grey blanket and tied with a piece of rope--and headed east in the depths of the Great Depression (1933) to begin Karl’s medical school training. There, we learned what it meant to be poor—like all the people around us.

We got off the bus carrying our little girl and the rope-tied blanket bundle—the totality of our earthly possessions--and started to walk around to find a place to live. We found an apartment we could more or less afford in one of the poor immigrant parts of the city on Maxwell Street. Some old houses that had once been fine homes had deteriorated badly and had been cut up into separate small apartments with a little stove or a hotplate. I think we got one with a hotplate. During our first night there, we waked up to hear scurrying noises. We turned on the lights to see bunches of bugs running around. That was the first time I ever saw cockroaches.?

Maxwell Streert was a mile long and was located in the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers. You could hardly walk on the street because of the incredible numbers of people, all trying to sell something it seemed. You could buy anything from the latest Paris and New York fashions to shoestrings or thimbles. Every imaginable ethnic group was represented there—negro people, Jews, Armenians, Italians, Polacks, Greeks, Latins, Scandihoovians, you name it.?

Across the hall from us lived the Poilettis--Joe, Helen, Joey who were wonderful to us, especially Ma Poiletti. Their apartment was better than ours because they could have their place constantly fumigated. To say life was hard was a gross understatement. There were times when we shared a carrot for supper and were glad to have it. I got a job in Marshall’s Department store where they let me work by the hour to get around the NRA rules. Karl sold his blood for $25 a pint. The two years in Chicago were years of gradual starvation and deprivation.

Our little three-year-old daughter was very unhappy, cried all the time. She wanted to go back to Spanish Fork. It wasn’t great fun for me either. We had to work all the time to get enough food; so, we didn’t have any time for movies, card playing, or singing like back home. Nobody we knew had a radio. Karl’s Rush Medical School was affiliated with the University of Chicago from 1898 to the period when Karl attended. Following the end of this affiliation, Rush Medical College closed its doors in 1942—seven years after we left Chicago. It remained dormant for the next twenty-seven years.

Karl worked harder than any man should during those grinding years. He came to look like skin and bones, but he was the most courageous and determined man I ever met. Day after backbreaking day he worked more than twenty hours a day, seven days a week. The pre -internship paid a whopping twenty dollars a week. We spent the bulk of our money on Carl’s books and lab fees and Carroll Lee’s food and clothes. She was so cute, we couldn’t let her look like a ragamuffin. Karl and I shared what money was left for our food and rarely had two meals a day. I cannot even now fathom how the man lived on so little. But he was the most driven man in the world. He would succeed to become a doctor or die.

As if his medical student duties and requirements to study were not enough, Karl got a job as a night lab man at the hospital and did all the afterhours autopsies. He used to tell me great stories about the bums and gangsters, and their molls who came into the morgue all slashed or shot up. Karl had to lay low and to keep his mug out of the newspapers for fear that the city would get wind of the cushy jobs the pathologists had—and presumably gave a kick-back to the higher-ups. It couldn’t be known that a mere medical student could do such a specialized job; that would tarnish Rush’s reputation.

I hardly saw him for a month while he was on the obstetrics service. He took care of the wretchedly poor girls on the southside—“the baddest part of town”. Criminals abounded and threatened and injured anyone they caught, except the doctors who delivered their babies. Karl usually had to clean up a table with soap and water, spread it with fresh newspaper (which passed for sterility), and to help the frightened inexperienced girls through the ordeal of birth—made all the worse because of their near complete ignorance. Their mothers thought it nasty to talk about such things, and their husbands and fathers, when they were around, either fainted at the sight of blood or were fumble-fingered pinheads. The gangsters and their molls loved Karl and the Rush Medical School assistants and nurses.

Sometimes I wouldn’t get off work until ten at night, and Ma Poiletti would worry about me. Then, she would send her son Joey to find me and walk me home. I loved them. I was only a little afraid of negroes, not for any very good reason really. I remember one really embarrassing night when I was walking home very late. It was pitch black. I walked right into a negro man and did not recognize that I had bumped into a person until I could see the whites of his eyes. He was very nice about it, said “Beg your pardon, ma’am,” very politely. I felt humiliated because I had not been watching well enough.

I tried to run a boarding house on Maxwell Street, but it was unsuccessful because nobody had any money. We did not have enough to eat. People all around us had nothing to eat, and they looked starved. It wasn’t just that they were poor and couldn’t buy food. There just wasn’t any. Somehow, Karl was superhuman and could live on air and some leftover food he got off patients’ trays in the hospitals. The Poilettis sometimes gave us left over scraps from their table when we looked very hungry.

I wasn’t strong enough, and I began to get sicker. I went to a doctor who told me flat out that I was starving, and either Karl and I would have to quit medical school, or I would die, or I would have to go live somewhere I could get enough food. We could not find any way to come up with money, and it was not possible to cut back any more than we did. We obeyed all of the rules of the dirty thirties: “make do, or do without; a penny saved is a penny earned; save it, fix it, fix it up and use it again.”?

When I made my trips on the “L” to see my doctor, which cost a nickel, Karl would run along underneath the elevated railway to go with me because we did not have a second nickel. My father occasionally sent us a little money. We couldn’t borrow any money from anywhere. Nobody, not even the banks, had money to lend. One good thing at the end was that we had spent so little money that he hadn’t accumulated much debt. Finally, after all of our struggles, we came to the point where we could not go on.

The end came one day when I was walking home from work. I don’t remember too well what happened; but apparently, I fainted on the sidewalk and lay there unconscious. A big black man (it was only proper to call them negroes in those days) knew where I lived; so, he picked me up and carried me home including the five flights of stairs in our walkup. There Mrs. Poiletti nursed me back to where I could rejoin the living; but Karl and I had to swallow our pride and call my father, who drove out to Chicago to pick me up and to take Carroll Lee and me back to Spanish Fork where I could regain my health; and Karl could finish his one last year of medical school. We could not communicate much; long distance telephone calls cost too much; he didn’t have a phone or good access to one.

Karl finally graduated from Rush, and he did his eighteen-month internship in the Salt Lake County Hospital. He was paid $20 a month. That princely sum barely kept him in clothes and with a meager diet. T.A. Dannenberg contacted the University of Utah Intern department pleading for help since he was the only doctor in Wasatch County, and he was worn out. Karl was informed, and T.A. offered him a partnership in the local (and only) hospital in Heber City. T.A. had a good reputation and had kept up with medical progress. At one time he left his practice in Heber—leaving the county with no doctor—and went on a world tour of the great medical centers in order to learn the world’s most up to date practices.

Karl and I drove up to Heber to meet T.A. (Thomas A.). It was March. There were no paved roads, and heavy rains and Spring runoff made the streets into muddy rivers. Heber was not much of a town so far as I could see. It was a dreary looking place, and Karl at first was going to turn around and go back to Provo and forget about that little country town. Howevcr, Karl was impressed with T.A. and his wife, and was particularly taken by the fact that T.A.’s Heber Hospital was one of the very few hospitals in Utah that was running financially in the black. So, he signed on, and we stayed there for the rest of our lives. Karl’s life was too short. After all that starving and work, he died at work in his office when he was 51, leaving me with two sons to raise, the oldest was only 13. That boy wanted to be a doctor like his dad; I told him he must be nuts.