Selling Sex in the Silver Valley

by Dr. Heather Branstetter

  Dolores just worked and saved her money and as soon as she got enough, that was when she went down and rented that building. And she went and put her own place in it and she had the best. That place was the best in town. That was the class. Because of Dolores, because she had class. Did you know she used to be married to the mayor of Mullan? And he lived up in the Lux Rooms for a while. He was a great big tall guy.... She did [have a relationship with Hank Day], because he was in love with her. He’d pay money to shut the whole place down for a few weeks so he could have it to himself....

  “Frenchie,” 1970s. Richard Caron Collection.

  There was a guy named Turpack who worked for the railroad and blew all $5,000 of his retirement savings in the Lux Rooms, said he’d like to be up there until the money ran out. Bubble bath, bubbles and booze everywhere.

  This town here was the funnest place. I was born in 1945. This town, when I grew up in the ’50s, this was the best place in the world to grow up in. This town was unbelievable.

  You would have loved her. She was so gracious, and so classy.

  Dolores had a big standard poodle named Mike, and Mike was white and he had a diamond choke chain collar. She’d take Mike out for a ride, and he’d sit in the passenger seat, the top fucking dog in the whole town. He was a dandy, that Mike. Beautiful dog.

  The girls didn’t drink or smoke—it was all business.... When Dolores ran those places, it was the cleanest place you were ever in in your life. The girls didn’t drink. Dolores never drank, never smoked, never cursed. The lady, unbelievable. It was all business....

  So with the cathouses they understood this, this was business. All of Dolores’s girls loved her because there wasn’t nothing she wouldn’t do for them. She was pretty, she was just beautiful. Look at Hedy Lamarr, that’s who she looked like.

  Dolores she saved her money and then she went down and leased that place. You know what used to be underneath the Lux Rooms there? The Swan Bar. Joe Swan. Dolores rented the upstairs and put the Lux Rooms in up there. Then Dolores ended up buying the building, eventually.266

  A CONVERSATION WITH SONNY PARSONS

  Some of these guys, that’s all they did was go up to the cathouses.… [Name redacted] said Tammy was his girlfriend. I said, bullshit, Tammy was my goddamn girlfriend. You’re the one who introduced me.

  He did introduce me. I was working down at the Osburn Club [in the town between Wallace and Kellogg]. She came in there. [Even though the girls didn’t go out to the bars in Wallace, they often went to the Osburn Club when they wanted to go out on the town.]

  He came up to me when I was working at the bar down there, and he says, “You see that girl down the bar there?” You couldn’t miss her, she was like five-seven and blond. She was gorgeous.

  [He] says, “You see that girl down the bar there? She wants a Manhattan, and she wants to give you fifty thousand dollars.” I said, “Right on.” Fix her a Manhattan. He’s kinda giggling down there at the end of the bar. He comes back and says, “Fix her another one, and now she wants to give you a corvette.”

  I said, “Let’s fix another damn Manhattan.” Her and [him] are down there, kinda giggling and stuff. And when she left, she looked me right in the eye. I’m just a young man. And she looked right in my eye and said, “I’ll see you later.” And that’s how it started. I went up there. I went up there after I closed the bar.

  [He] later says to me, “You weren’t her only boyfriend.”

  She treated me like I was her boyfriend and that’s what counts.…

  It was a business. The girls were over here doing what they were doing. Tammy had her own apartment up there. We used to go to Coeur d’Alene, rent the finest places, do this and that. My opinion, the business she was running didn’t bother me at all, because she was a nice, nice person. A very nice person. And I was kinda trapped between a moral issue, you know. I talked to a lot of the girls. One of the girls was from Montana, and she was a single mother, had two kids, mom and dad lived in Missoula. They didn’t know what she was doing, but she had no other choice and she was over here making money, and would go back to Missoula as a normal person.…

  Put a little humor into it, my mother worked at the First National Bank on the corner [of Sixth and Cedar across from where Tammy worked], and I had a brand-new Thunderbird, and in the mornings it would be parked out right over here in front of the corner, Arment Rooms, and my mother was a great woman.

  She called up, and she said, “Son, I’ve never gotten involved in your business, but I want you to park that Thunderbird around back from now on.” Because she’d come to work and her son’s Thunderbird would be in front of the Arment Rooms. Well, in my view, it was just like she had an apartment and she was my girlfriend.

  Maybe a couple years, and then the padlock was on the door [in 1973], and I’d never see her again. Never seen her again. They shut it down for, I want to say, two or three months, opened up again, I didn’t know anybody. Tammy was gone. It broke my heart when there was a lock on the door and I never seen her again since. Actually, I really thought she was cool. She had a lot of charisma. I’d go up there after work.… She’d cook a steak. A lot of kissing and hugging. Sex wasn’t a big deal. It was just neat. That whole time in my life, I don’t regret a bit of it. I thought it was just awesome....

  Not many people knew about it except my mom because she saw my car. I didn’t brag about it or anything.

  Met them all. All of them were very nice girls, they all had their own story to tell. One of the things I never could understand, was all these drunk tramp miners would come in and all these girls were very nice, I just can’t imagine them laying down some of these drunk miners. Picture that in your mind.

  [Another guy interrupted our conversation to say that, in fact, his best friend met his wife in a Wallace whorehouse. He and his friends all bet money that it would never last. It did, but the couple is not alive anymore.]

  The thing is, the sex is the sex. I don’t know how much you want to elaborate on that. But as far as the women go, there were some neat women. I gotta defend them, you know what I mean.... It was mostly just girls sitting on your lap, mostly camaraderie. Sex wasn’t really huge. If you wanted sex, you could have sex. You paid for it....

  [The relationship with Tammy] was like a real education for me. Made me kind of a half a man instead of a little boy.... I wasn’t up there screwing all the girls and all that shit when I was with Tammy. I was up there because her and I had a little deal going on. That’s all....

  But I defend brothels.... You know this, they were prominent women. They ran the town. And Dolores Arnold, really, underneath, ran this town. She gave more damn money to charities, to baseball uniforms. Dolores was a prominent woman. And she was a nice gal, too. I liked Dolores. Very nice. She was first class....

  I was sad to see it go. We had a lot of people playing politics with us, a little self-righteous. And that’s for the man upstairs, that’s not for other people. That’s the oldest profession. I don’t think you’re ever going to stop it....

  Some people would say those women were disgusting for working in a brothel. I’d say, “You ever been to a brothel?” No. It’s like prejudice. Prejudice is lack of knowledge. They’re sitting there bad mouthing a brothel. You ever been to a brothel? Well, no, but it’s this, it’s that. Aren’t you speaking with prejudice? You really got to try to understand what it’s all about.…267

  ANONYMOUS 22, ON RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE

  GIRLS AND “STAG NIGHT” AT THE ELKS

  Dolores would invite us up to have dinner in her suite or penthouse. She had a beautiful apartment in the top of the Lux Rooms. So we’d go up and have dinner while my mother did her hair. Dolores would talk about anything. Very intelligent. Classy, very classy woman. Nothing but the best. She did more for people in this town than people really know about. Thanksgiving or Christmas would come along and there was a Combination Foodliner across the street here, down where the Depot is sitting now. And she’d buy $5,000 of
groceries every year and nobody knew where they came from except people at the store.…

  Kelly Building in 2010. The former brothel has become costume storage for the Sixth Street Melodrama Theater. Photo by Heather Branstetter.

  I dated one of the girls at the Arment for three years. When I was younger. That was a great experience. I wouldn’t trade that for nothing.… We would go to the Davenport Hotel on weekends. She had some businessman down there who would pay her a lot of money for a couple hours. And she would hand me a hundred-dollar bill and say, “Go shopping.” He paid her a lot of money, a couple of thousand dollars. When we’d go to Spokane she always got in touch with this guy. She was a classy, classy gal, too. She had like eight years of college education. Her name was Barb. She could talk to you about anything. Very intelligent. Sports or economics or politics or religion. Whatever you wanted to talk about.

  How come you didn’t marry her?

  Well, that’s a long story. I was twenty-one. I had a girlfriend I was also going with at the time. She was a very strict Catholic. And that should tell you something, being a very strict Catholic and two young people. I was going elsewhere to entertain myself. And then I met Barb. I played golf at the time. I played well and was thinking about getting on the pro tour. At that time all you had to do was have $10,000 to get on. And she said, “I’ll sponsor you, put you on the tour, but we have to get married.”

  And all I said was, “Let me think about that.” And that was the end of that.…

  Was it because it came with a payment?

  I guess. I wasn’t in love with her. I didn’t want to marry her. I was twenty-one years old, having fun.

  What did Barb go to school for?

  Don’t know.

  Did you ask her why she started working up there?

  Money. Money was great.

  Did she mind the job, have any qualms about it related to ethics or morality?

  She enjoyed a boyfriend, but when she was with a customer it was strictly business. My mom did a lot of the girls’ hair. Barb used to take my mom and my sister and me to the Davenport Hotel for the weekend. She had called up and said, “Going to go to Spokane for the weekend.”

  My mom couldn’t go and she said, “[Anonymous 22] will take you,” so I went and picked her up at the Safeway in Kellogg. Drove my ’47 Buick down there, parked it in the parking lot.

  She gave me keys to her Cadillac and said, “You’re driving.” That was cool.…

  After an Elks Stag Night, we’d go window-shopping, and go up and have drinks after hours.

  Stag Night?

  At the Elks, they’d have strippers come in, and it’d be wide-open for gambling. They’d have craps tables going and blackjack tables going. Girls would come up, strippers, put on a show for the guys. No touching. Stag Night at the Elks, once a month we used to have that.… Some prominent citizens of Wallace would take some of these strippers into the women’s lounge and have their way with them. For money, I’m sure.

  That’s a big lounge in there.

  Yes. The girls would pick up a few extra bucks. Most of them had a chaperone. Like a bodyguard type of guy with them. And they would strip. They would strip all the way. But they were protected. Nobody forced themselves upon anybody. It was all consensual....

  [These were not girls from the Wallace houses;] these were girls from Spokane. They’d book them from strip clubs in Spokane. Yeah, you could find something to do every weekend in this town.…

  The town accepted the girls. Very few people didn’t like the girls being here. They just accepted them. They weren’t bothering anybody.…

  When you went on dates with the girl you were seeing, did you always go out of town?

  Davenport Hotel in Spokane. Every time. I remember that first date I had with her, we went down and had dinner and she pays for everything. I guess that makes me a gigolo, but I offered to pay.

  “No, no, no, no, no. I’m paying,” [she said].

  I said, “Do you want to go dancing, do you want to go to a movie or something?”

  She said, “No, I’d just as soon go back up to the room.”

  And that was fine with me. Twenty-one-year-old kid, hell yeah. She taught me a lot. I have to say that. I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know nothing.268

  DEE GREER, MAID AT SEVERAL HOUSES

  You want me to tell names about who visited the butt huts?

  Whatever you feel like sharing.

  Well that was one thing we never could talk about. You’d get your ass fired.

  So you were really discreet.

  Oh yeah. You’d be so surprised, I’d open that door and I’d say, “Good evening.” Their mouth was just hanging down and their eyeballs were poking out. It’s like, “Mum’s the word.”

  Maybe we could start by talking about you and how you got started working at the houses.

  I was working at Sweets Café as a waitress, and I was just getting fed up. And we had a cab driver; his name was Jerry. He said they need a maid up at the—and I said, “Oh, are you out of your mind?” I said, “I have kids.”

  “So? The other maids have kids, too.”

  Well for heaven’s sakes.

  I went home and I kinda—he [Greer’s husband] said, “Well that would be okay.” And oh dear, I didn’t want nothing to do with that, it was just kinda—but I went up there. I was a gutsy old broad. And the first one was the Arment Rooms and you know that was above the Silver Corner and the madam, Vicki was her name. And the Oasis, I worked there. Billie was her name, she was the madam there.

  One gal she wanted a car that was in the Steve McQueen movie Bullet. My husband found it for her. But it was too much car for her, and my husband kinda knew better. Billie was a really super nice lady. Call me up on Sundays, “Come on get the kids, let’s go have dinner in Montana or some place.” Vicki was a good gal, too, but she was just crazy. This would have been around 1973. When I first started at the Arment. And I was up there quite a while.

  Then I had the pleasure of meeting one of the nicest ladies, Dolores. What a lady she was. She was a beautiful Italian lady. She was just awesome to work for. One time I’d left. We’d went down to Kansas where his folks were from. And I got all mad. He was out on the road looking for a job, so he said anyways. I just couldn’t handle it, had no money, just out on the farm. I said, “I’m going.” I loaded up a few boxes and sent them up here to Wallace. Loaded up my Thunderbird with a set of silverware, stereo—got to have your music—three kids, a cat and that’s it.

  We came to Wallace. And I sold everything in the house for a thousand dollars. Everything I bought was brand new. And I come home with that thousand dollars. And I went up to Dolores and she said, “You need a job, don’t you?”

  And I said, “Yes.”

  And she said, “Well I just happen to be needing a maid.”

  What year was that when you came back?

  Mid-1970s.

  We had this guy who used to come up and walk Dolores’s dog, Mikey. And the guy’s name was Federico. Did you know Federico? Italian. He was an Italian guy. Sweetheart. Anyways, he got up and left one night, and I was at the table and she looks over at the chair. “Oh, no, Federico left his coat.”

  And I go, “No.”

  And she goes, “Well whose is it, then?”

  I said, “Well, it’s my daddy’s, but I have to wear it because I don’t have one.” And he was a big man and I only weighed like 120 pounds or something.

  And she said, “Oh goodness sakes.” She goes, walks down to her apartment, and she’s gone for a little while, and then she comes back, she had this fur coat. “Here, try this on.”

  I said, “OK,” so I tried it on. It was one of those rolled collars, with the A-frame. And I know when she bought it and what she paid for it. And I was being silly, going up and down the hallway, in the parlors, [showing it off for] all the guys and everybody.

  Then I went back into the kitchen and took it off and handed it and she goes, “No, that
’s for you,” and she handed me money to have it cleaned.

  I said, “Oh, I couldn’t take that, I know what you paid for it.”

  She said, “I just bought it to walk Mikey.”

  I said, “Oh, Dolores.”

  She said, “You take that.” And I had that coat until just a few years ago. It was just falling apart, you know. But what a lady. And come to find out that she was married. She married the mayor of Mullan. Did you know that?

  He had your last name, I believe. I was wondering if there was any relation.

  Oh no. My husband was from Kansas. He had no relation up here. Yeah, that was really weird. I said, well, for heaven’s sakes, we have the same name. And she was a working lady only two years herself, to get that place, the first place.

  Did she tell you that?

  Mmm hmm.

  Did she ever tell you about the story? About how she came to be in Wallace?

  You know, she might have. But I forget so much. I was kind of an alcoholic back then. And I quit twelve or thirteen years ago, but I can still go and have a couple drinks and be silly. And I just love to go bullshit, you know. And I worked at her other place, the Luxette. And Julie was the madam then.

  But you were primarily at the Lux.

  It depended. I spent a lot of time at the Oasis, too.… Julie had known Dolores for a lot of years. She was heavyset. But just a beautiful face. I can imagine what she looked like when she was a working girl. No she never told me the story that I remember about how she got here.… I met nicer ladies up there than I did down here. And most of them were married, you know, they had families. I go, “But you know, how do you do it? Your husband’s OK with it?”