Selling Sex in the Silver Valley
Page 7
It’s no accident that such phrases and stories are the chorus around town to this day. The madams appealed to the sense of humor and common sense values of the community, both in language and in deed, as they set the tone to subtly align the city’s rhetoric about the houses. As former Day Mines and Sunshine Mines employee Rod Higgins explained, Wallace’s embrace of the commercial sex industry was the result of the brothel managers’ purposeful persuasive strategy: “Everyone viewed them [the brothels] as being an advantage, thanks to the madams’ marketing efforts.” Men and women alike repeatedly told me how “fun” Wallace was during this time, as they expressed gratitude for having the opportunity to grow up in such a great town.
Talking points about the benefits of the sex work in Wallace also offered direct rebuttal to threatening critiques of prostitution that arose periodically during the years. Specific practices, such as doctor’s visits, solidified the madams’ words into a “code of conduct” and built a foundation for the town’s present-day understanding of its past. It was said that the brothels: 1) operated in accordance with a “live and let live” sense of order, providing services that helped keep the local streets safe at night; 2) were restricted to the northeast corner of town, where they were regulated and mostly free from sexually transmitted infections; and 3) contributed to the economy in both direct and indirect ways. Written records of history affirm variants of these arguments, which persisted through the years. The industry served local miners and regional loggers, contributed to the schools and attracted business from truckers, college students and Canadians, drawing men and their money into the community from distant places.
In Wallace, it was said that prostitution’s “image was different—the image they presented and your image of them was different. The community had a high degree of acceptance of the girls and the business.”162 One newspaper article featured a sex worker saying she preferred Wallace to Nevada, where she encountered “a rougher clientele” and was not as “free to come and go as she please[d],” unlike in Wallace, where she could “come up [and work] when I feel like it, work till I’m tired of working, and then I go home.”163 By the mid-1950s, the town of three thousand people would elect only city leaders who allowed the prostitution industry to continue, driving away the few pastors or priests who advocated for reform. As late as the 1980s, former mayor Pellissier told me, a group of women he called the “Golden Girls” said they would not support his bid for mayor unless he promised not to shut down the sex industry; they threatened to campaign against him if he closed the houses and they’d convinced him they wielded enough influence to derail his election.
Looking west along Cedar Street from Seventh Street, 1951. Most of Wallace’s houses are upstairs along the right side of this photo. The sign for the U&I Rooms is visible below the Palm Bar sign. Historic Wallace Preservation Society.
Evidence for the residents’ continuing acceptance of the brothels is not limited to quotes appearing in old newspaper articles and the oral histories I conducted. A study conducted by Robert Miles, who looked at prostitution in Wallace for his master’s thesis in criminal justice at Washington State University, documents community perception during the late 1970s. Miles’s research revealed that both men and women in Wallace accepted the houses as integral to the town’s way of life. Throughout the study, a large majority of respondents agreed that prostitution was not morally wrong, did not lower respect for women and should be decriminalized.164 For example, 69 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that “decriminalizing prostitution would seriously weaken the social fabric of our community,” and 75 percent disagreed with the idea that “decriminalizing prostitution decreases respect for the institution of marriage.”165 In 1984, historians Hart and Nelson wrote that Wallace’s “unabashed and unrepentant acceptance of drinking, gambling and whoring, seen as commonplace…even acquired a certain civic respectability.”166 What’s more, they added, people in the community believed that “prostitution kept together many respectable marriages, that Wallace madams gave generously to deserving charities, and that revenues from prostitution kept the city coffers filled and the streets paved.”167 The madams framed their business as central to the community and then followed up by donating in visible ways.
The houses had historically been a central part of the economic life of Wallace, but madams increased the publicity and scope of their monetary contributions to the town during the 1940s and 1950s. The women wove their work into the structure of the community by circulating small talk that appealed to values like civic service and philanthropy—appeals that were represented by monetary contributions that supported the town’s families, churches and schools. During the 1940s, Magnuson told me, the Salvation Army used to collect every Friday night from the houses and the card tables, and they “did a lot of good with that money.”168 Many research participants told me the madams also contributed in less visible ways, citing as an example the way they would quietly purchase food and leave it at the grocery store available for the clerks to distribute to families in need according to their discretion.
It is difficult to find people who opposed the industry, but Holly Shewmaker, who went to high school in the valley during the early 1960s, spoke with me at length about some of the ways the presence of commercial sex influenced the lives of women who were not madams or whores:
Sex work affected my marriage and degraded my ex-husband, who taught me things based on what he’d been taught up there. “Being with you was like being with a courtesan,” he once told me. I came to think sex was something you did in service of men, got pregnant at sixteen, and had a baby at seventeen.169
It would be a mistake to glorify the madams in any way, Shewmaker cautioned me, because their profession was “based on lies. Prostitution is a lie and it erodes the soul. It destroys something meant to unite people.” Shewmaker added that her dad had “tried to make me feel better because he was a city councilman. ‘Whores built the viaduct,’ he said.”
Even though most women in town believed the sex industry was in their interest to promote, some women felt a tension under the surface because it “was like a secret club in this town between the men and women in the houses, but the other women in Wallace weren’t allowed into the boys’ club. Dolores had a relationship with men that other women were excluded from.”170 Visitors from out of town used to drive by and catcall young girls as they walked down the street. Some men from the region presumed most women in town were sex workers and were blatantly disrespectful when a Wallace girl revealed where she was from. Shewmaker related a story about high school cheerleaders participating in a Spokane parade:
Wallace girls marched in their black sweaters with the large “W” [for Wallace] across their chests. Coins were tossed at them and jeers of “W for whore” rang out.... At this point, I had come to believe I would rather be a madam or a whore than one of the “protected” women of Wallace.171
She added that one of the girls went home and recounted the story to her mother, who told her never again to speak a bad word about those women because they protected young women from being raped and supported the community economically, including their own family’s business.
These stories demonstrate how negative perceptions were countered through sayings that became folded into collective memory, layered within narratives repeated over time and embodied by the madams’ respectability in deed as well as discourse. The women who worked upstairs knew that word would travel as long as they maintained a consistent image. And word did spread. The situation in the Silver Valley became widely known. One of my research participants told a story about working on a radio show in Los Angeles during the early 1970s; when the host, Sammy Jackson, asked her where she was from, she answered, “You would not know where I’m from, Sammy. I mean, it’s a small town in northern Idaho.” After she finally admitted she was from Wallace, Jackson answered, “Oh baby! I spent the best month of my life in Wallace, Idaho.” Then she added to me, “I was just stunne
d that he would even know anything about northern Idaho.”172
When reporters from around the region would come to town to do a story about the houses, the madams promoted their business practices openly and in accordance with the town’s values. Emphasis on the women’s care for single men and physical cleanliness countered the stereotype that sex work is immoral and spreads disease. One Seattle Times newspaper article, for example, quotes a madam saying that the “men need relief ” and “are well taken care of here,” featuring a photo of a neatly prepared bed and narration promising a “spotlessly clean room” because the madam “will not have anything dirty!”173 The women created the perception that their profession was advantageous to the town because the industry operated in an orderly fashion according to community wishes. An article appearing in Boise’s Idaho Statesman features one of the town’s female residents professing, “A mining town needs brothels” and quotes the manager of the U&I Rooms promoting an understanding of justice congruent with the town’s historic mining camp roots: “You don’t have to obey the laws, but you do have to follow the rules.”174
The women were said to bring money into the area and keep that money local. Most often noted, both in the newspapers and around town, was the way in which the sex industry supported the schools. In 1991, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that “madams, for example, helped buy the scoreboard for the high school football team. They also pitched in to help with youth baseball uniforms.”175 Madams notoriously bought the school’s band uniforms, and rumor has it that they funded the uniforms partly in exchange for an agreement that the band would no longer march around the streets to practice early in the morning.176 The houses were said to provide good jobs for women in the community, including those who worked as maids in the houses and others who supported the sex workers’ food, grooming, clothing and transportation needs.177 One woman told me about how she used to give the women rides back and forth from Spokane to Wallace, where she worked at a bar called Sweets and ran food up to the girls during her shifts. She adds that she also “did make a lot of money selling Avon to the girls. They were great customers.”178 The madams’ indirect economic contributions to the town and the residents’ positive small talk about these contributions kept the sex industry integrated into the town’s social and institutional fabric.
One of the famous school band uniforms paid for by prostitution in Wallace. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.
It is possible to estimate the numbers of women who came into town and worked in the houses from 1940 to 1960 or so because Nellie Stockbridge, whose photography studio was just across the street from the U&I Rooms, took pictures of all the sex workers during this time for licensing and record-keeping purposes. These photos are now housed in the Barnard-Stockbridge Collection at the University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives. Many are stiff and look like mug shots, but some of them are softer and feature the women in relaxed and smiling poses so they could buy the portraits and give them as gifts to relatives, friends and others.179 The women were rumored to have been good customers of the Stockbridge business. The Barnard-Stockbridge Collection photos indicate that an average of 30 to 60 women came into town per year. The mid-’50s were particularly busy. During some of these years, 70 or 80 women moved into and out of Wallace’s brothels. Old Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office (SCSO) records document at least 531 women who worked in the houses between 1952 and 1973, although it’s likely that some files were lost over the years.180
POLICIES, PROCEDURES AND PRACTICES
The madams operated according to an unwritten set of “rules” that promoted discretion and family stability, and the policies were well known around town. They were also enforced by small talk that became biting and judgmental if community residents began to feel threatened by boundary transgressions. Sex workers were discouraged from wandering around town aside from taking care of personal errands, and they were rather strictly prohibited from hanging out in the local bars. When research participants repeated variants of the rules to me, they were often related along with stories about notable exceptions. “You weren’t supposed to date the working girls,” but some people did, Penny Michael said, going on to tell a story about breaking into Quinn’s Hot Springs with a woman who was dating her friend.
Sex workers also married local men and became homemakers. Although some of these marriages were socially acceptable, others were affected by stigma that haunted the women in gossip, and one family chose to move away rather than deal with the town’s talk.181 Local girls weren’t supposed to work in the houses, and if they were discovered to be from the area, they were kicked out. This rule appears to have been enforced rather strictly—the Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office files confirm that any time a local woman tried to get hired in the houses, they reported it to the madams and made a note in the file that she was not allowed to work there. One man believes a girl from nearby Mullan worked in one of the houses, but he’s “not sure how she got away with it.”182 This woman may have been the same person described by Tammy Polla, who remembered a girl who came to Wallace to work in the houses and went to Mullan to try to get a high school diploma, which she’d never received. The girl was shamed out of school by the other kids, who made her life miserable after they found out.
Former maid Kristi Gnaedinger described her perception of “the rules” concerning the women’s social life:
They were very discreet around town. They stuck to the rules, but not towards the very end. There was one girl who would come and party with us at my house when she was off. She came over and helped me move to Seattle. They occasionally had boyfriends in the community. They had favorite guys, but if they came up they had to pay. When you were there, you were working. The guys would sit in the rooms, the parlors up front where they could visit and socialize, and sometimes the guys would just come up and drink and drink and hardly ever go back into the rooms. So the girls could socialize, but if there were people who came in and wanted them to work, they would work. It was all money. It was very matter of fact. It was a business.183
The sex workers were commonly referred to as “girls,” even though they were officially required to be over the age of twenty-one. And the term “maid” in Wallace did not simply refer to someone who cleaned the houses. They were also called housekeepers, in a way that was very literal, insofar as they kept the house in order; they did sweep, mop and vacuum, but they also participated in much of the brothel management, answering the door, ensuring everyone stayed busy and knocking on doors to notify the couples that time was up after the timers went off. Sex workers set these timers as they dropped off their money into lockboxes after negotiating services and settling on an appropriate length of time for the encounter. The maids also shopped for food and cooked meals. Former maid Dee Greer said she liked to “spoil them a little bit” by taking them coffee when she woke the women up before their shifts.
The maids were primarily women who were from the area, but some local women were even limited from taking on this role as well. Gnaedinger thought her father “put some pressure on them [the city leaders and brothel manager]” to encourage her to quit because he was not happy with “the fact that his daughter was a maid up at the whorehouse.” He would later become one of the doctors who conducted the sex workers’ health checkups. Gnaedinger explained that she still maintained relationships with the women after she stopped working as a maid:
Lockboxes and timeclocks. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.
I still went up there to visit. I took my [infant] daughter up there to visit. At the time, Doc Peterson was still the doctor that took care of them and when he retired my dad took over. He really liked Tanya. He was very fond of her. She was a pretty special person. But my mother, probably more so than my dad, was worried about what people would say. “You can’t do that. We have a reputation.” Get a life, Mom. People were accepting of the houses, but you just didn’t talk about it. M
y mother was worried about the family reputation. Lee told me that the city told her they had to get rid of me.184
It wasn’t just families worried about reputations who were concerned about the women who were employed as maids. The madams were also careful not to hire someone who could be perceived as personally connected to too many people in the town.
Sue Hansen related a story about applying for a housekeeping job at the Lux when Gennie Freeman was retiring.
So I went up to see Dolores, and Gennie put me in this room. I remember there was a jukebox in there. It was a nice room. And I waited for a few minutes and pretty soon, Dolores came in. Beautiful, beautiful, classy lady. And so she shook my hand and we started talking and she asked me if I’d ever done that kind of work before. And I said, well, yes. Because I used to clean for Millie Mara and a few other people. And she said, “Do you have any children?” And I said yeah, I have a little girl, about six months old. And she said, “Are you married?” And I said yes, well, and she said, “Does your husband mind, does he have a problem with it?” And I said, “Oh, no.” So about that time Gennie knocks on the door, and she comes in and whispers something to Dolores, and Dolores goes, “Oh…I’m sorry honey, I was interviewing you for a different job.”185