One of my early memories is the yearly visit by the Minnesota Woolen Mills traveling salesman and his wife. Maybe they were both salesmen. Anyway, every year in July or August, this man and his wife would arrive from Minnesota I guess. Their car was full of trunks and suitcases full of clothes. They would go from house to house in Heber to sell their clothes to the mothers of the town.
When they came to The Rock House they always seemed to be welcomed. They would bring their trunks and suitcases into the front room and open them up and we kids would watch in awe. They would then start their sales promotion by telling Mom about the different clothes. They would hold them up, let her take them for a look and then if she said no, they went in a pile and something else was pulled out. This is where my brothers and I got our school clothes. If Mom saw something she liked, she would tell them and the order would go into an order book. It was much better than shopping from a catalogue because you could actually see what you were buying before ordering. We got shirts, pants, underwear, socks and coats. Sometime in late August before school started, packages would begin arriving in the mail from the Minnesota Woolen Mills with the clothing articles families had ordered.
Since every mom in town was shown the same samples of clothes, it was not unusual to find out on the first day of school—and throughout the first few weeks of September—that others in town had ordered exactly the same shirts, pants or coats that you had received. Two or three kids might show up at school wearing the same type shirt or coat. The only difference might be the size. I guess we got used to it and I guess the mothers weren’t too concerned about having their kids dress differently because the same thing happened for many years. Maybe our mothers had read the scriptures and figured out that the best way to prevent their kids from getting caught up in the “wearing of fine twined linen” and getting “caught up in the pride of their hearts” because of being overly proud of their wearing apparel was to have a lot of us dressed more or less the same. Anyway, I don’t think we were afflicted with that particular problem when I was growing up and in grade school. We had no pride!
I don’t know whether the couple died or just quit coming to Heber but eventually we didn’t have the annual ritual. Minnesota was always a mysterious place in my mind and I assumed that it was a place where they manufactured a lot of clothes. When I visited Minnesota later in life I didn’t see a single clothing factory. What a let down! Anyway, the visits by the Minnesota Woolen Mill sales couple and their annual visits remain clearly in my memory.