Anonymous 31: Lee gave me $1,000 so I could get on my feet when I first moved here. She told me I didn’t have to pay it back but should just instead make sure I came up to visit once a week.
B. Mooney: Some girls stayed for years.
Anonymous 31: Casey was here fifteen years.
B. Mooney: Lee liked for the girls to have a social life. That was part of her business model, kept the girls here. Sunny was here a long time, died of asthma. If the houses didn’t provide a social life, then the girls quit on them. But that could also get out of control, get away from them, because the girls were easier to control if they were more isolated from people around town....
One guy had a heart attack up here, and they took him out the back, out of concern for his family, so it wasn’t said he died in a whorehouse. [Others have told a version of this story along with the one-liner, “They said he came and then he went.”]275…
Anonymous 10: Poor gals came into town with no shoes, and they left with diamonds.… Canadians would come down here and stay at the Samuels Hotel, run across the street to the hook shops, spend all their money and have to pawn their watches to get back to Canada. Then they’d come back the next month with another wad of cash to spend.
Do you know what Dolores said her biggest problem was? She used to say, “The biggest problem is the high school girls giving it away for free. Only jewel they got and they’re giving it away.”
K. Mooney: When I used to work at the bank we had to drill into one of the girls’ safe deposit box. Inside was a hypodermic needle, so that shows it wasn’t as glamorous as some people make it out to be.276
Kristi Gnaedinger, Maid at the U&I Rooms
When I first started was just a maid, cleaning the rooms, making dinner for the girls, doing the laundry.…I ran the errands for the girls. Kept their rooms straightened. Changed the sheets on their beds, besides having to keep their working rooms clean. Did the dishes. Groceries were delivered. They did their own banking.… Just a week into it, everything kind of fell apart, and Lee had to work. I made $7 a day, plus a dollar from each girl for errands once a week, so another $7. The guys paid for their drinks, and I got to keep all my tips. So that’s where I made my money. After about a week when things fell apart, I started answering the door at night, not every night, but eventually that, too. I answered the door till one or two in the morning, and then Lee would take over the last few hours, because it was quieter. I was paid in cash, doing great, bringing home $125, $150 bucks a week, so I thought I was living high.
I went up there and started working the same day I interviewed. The interview was strange. I was so apprehensive. The very first night I worked, I was doing laundry and had left something in the sink so I flooded the bathroom. I worried I’d get fired on my first night....
We opened pretty early in the afternoon, and one girl would get up early. Most would sleep until two because things didn’t really get hopping until after dinner. They worked every day when they were there, and they had to pay the house half their money.
I made the drinks. I learned how to float the drinks. You didn’t want the guys to get too drunk because then they couldn’t perform. So I’d put alcohol on the very top so they got the flavor of it when they took their first drink. Try to sober them up.
[At the U&I,] the girls would sleep up there in the rooms together. After I wasn’t working anymore, they changed it up there and made it so each girl’s working room was their bedroom. Originally, they had to share one bedroom in the front of the house, and Lee had the bedroom in the very front of the building, and she had to share a bathroom with the girls, too. Wasn’t really a well set-up place up there. Eventually, they put in a second bathroom as well.
I was reading that article about the Oasis, which said that the girls rotated in and out every few months, but most of the girls at the U&I worked there for months and months at a time. Maybe on average of a year at a time. And Tanya was there for years and years. Wendy was there for at least a year. Lydia was there for at least a year. Marsha was there for two or three years, and Sunny was in and out for five or six years. She’d go away for a while, but she always came back. Maybe they were more stable there than some of the places. There were always a few who didn’t make it and they didn’t last very long if they weren’t making money. They’d disappear. [The turnover rates seem to depend on the era and the house.]...
I was stuck in the hospital feeling sorry for myself. She [Lee] told them she was a relative, so they let her in and she came and saw me. When I had ankle surgery. That was the other thing I forgot about. I had to have a ligament replaced in my ankle in September, so I had a walking cast and worked a couple weeks on crutches. She sent me a really nice gift when I was in the hospital at Sacred Heart.
In London, I had this purple tee-shirt that said “Enjoy Wallace” with a logo like Coca-Cola, and this guy got belligerent about me wearing this shirt because he thought it was degrading. But he’d heard about Wallace even over in London. The clientele was from all over—truckers, kids from the college, that was the big thing, you had to come up from the college. Even Spokane, Eastern, Gonzaga—they’d come from all over, the Catholic boys. Also from Missoula, the frat boys. And then there was this circuit of guys that would come from Canada, from Montreal every few months.
The relationships between the women in the houses was similar to any workplace where women worked together. They got along pretty well, but they got into spats, especially because they were stuck there. There was petty—somebody would get mad at somebody for stupid things. But at the U&I when I was working there they had to share bedrooms, because the rooms they were set up in were just for work. They were not for sleeping, but just for working. So you had two or three women sharing spaces, so they got into spats. They would rotate in and out. But mostly they got along.… Most of the girls were between nineteen and twenty-five years old, except for Lee, who was in her forties, and there was another woman who was really old, and she looked like she was forty-five, because she had some years on her.
Sunny, in 1975, holding Gnaedinger’s daughter and leaning on a car at Dave Smith’s in Kellogg. Kristi Gnaedinger Collection.
We always had dinner together every night. I made the dinner, but it was Lee who had absolutely no spices. They weren’t allowed to have any spices—no garlic—the girls weren’t supposed to smell like garlic or have farts or anything. She had seven different meals that the girls would have, on this rotating schedule. They were boring. I’d try to spice them up and was told I couldn’t do that, because you didn’t want those girls farting. I did the laundry, the cooking. I vacuumed and mopped the stairs every day. I hated mopping. After I did that job I hated vacuuming for years. Every day, I’d have to vacuum the place. Never got tired of the laundry, but I hated the vacuum. I answered the doors.
When Lee was around everyone stuck to their schedule. When I was around, sometimes those guys would get a little crazy, loose. You’re supposed to knock on their door and get them to come out when their time was up, when their timer went off. And when I was running the place the guys knew it was looser up there, and they’d come up and party and drink all the booze. And then at the end of the week I would say, “OK, you guys, you’ve used up this booze. Now you’ve got to give me some money for it.”
There was a guy that liked to be spanked, and he came every three or four months.
And then—this is one of the best ones—when I first started working there I was in the kitchen making dinner, standing there, and I turned around, and there was this guy standing there probably about six-foot-five, and he had a wig on, and he was dressed up like a woman, and he goes, “Honey, I got loose, you have to tie me back up.” And I was like, “Lee, Lee…” This guy would come up, and they’d tie him up and do mean things to him and leave him in the room. And charge him for the privilege.
The best times were when Lee would leave town and all my friends would come up and we’d party. Drink up all the booze and pay up at the end.
If Lee knew about it, she never let on.
There was one time when they had this double-headed dildo, I don’t remember what happened, but we were playing around and I was running down the hall, chasing one of the girls with the dildo, and one of the guys saw me do it and they thought I was a little AC/DC [slang for someone who is bisexual, or “goes both ways,” like alternating current/direct current]. It was just a joke, because we were playing with it because it was so ugly. “I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna get you with this dildo.”
Of course the guys were supposed to stay in the rooms unless they were brought out by one of the girls. They would always call out, “On the floor!” And then everybody else had to be kept in the rooms so two guys wouldn’t run into each other in the hallway. Usually, it was the girl who was taking the guy out of the room that would yell, “On the floor,” but that particular time somebody must have forgot to yell it out. We were just playing.…
Some of my girlfriends were jealous because they knew the guys were up there partying, and they wanted to come up there, but they weren’t allowed. I had to learn how to keep my mouth shut, too. Because you’d see people in there that you knew, and “I know your girlfriend,” and you have to keep your mouth shut. It wasn’t just single men. There were married men, every type of men, boyfriends. But you had to keep your mouth shut. Of course there was the story about Hank Day who would go up to the Lux once a week to visit Dolores. But I don’t know if that’s true. When I was a kid everybody used to talk about Hank Day visiting Dolores at the whorehouses. And the story was that his wife drove him.
Would get bored sometimes. In the winter it would be slow at night sometimes, so we’d start playing cards, telling jokes, being stupid. We played a lot of gin rummy, cribbage, read a lot of magazines. That’s when Playgirl first started. We’d thumb through catalogues and look at lingerie. This guy would come into town, kind of like a Fredrick’s of Hollywood–type bus converted to a store. So they’d go down to buy their negligees. Most girls wore swimsuits but would buy negligee when they went home to their pimps. That was the first time I had a negligee, because Lee bought it for me.
Most of them had pimps, and they’d come in and make all this money, and they’d go home on their days off and the pimps would take their money and beat them up and you’d try to talk to them and say that you don’t need this guy. He’s just using you, but they didn’t get it. That was probably due to an inferiority complex and broken homes, so they thought they needed this guy, but they’d take all their money and they’d get nothing. Sometimes, they’d come back with black eyes. You’d think, why are you doing this to yourself ? And there occasionally were a couple of underage girls. They would lie about their age, and the madams were pretty careful to make sure they were legal age, but sometimes they probably weren’t.
There were women using drugs. Speed, mostly. There was one girl who was a really sad case, and she ended up a heroin addict. The other thing that was sad was the abuse they took from their pimps. I was the only one who ever got beat up at the business, as far as I knew, but they would get beat up by their pimps, wanting to show ownership over them. You’ve got to be a pretty ghastly person to be a pimp. Using these women for money. Get a job. You shouldn’t have to live off somebody else. Like that meth commercial on TV, where the guy sells his girlfriend to get drugs. How degrading that you would actually use another human being to make money. It’s like a form of slavery. But they had low self-esteem and felt that they had to have these guys. They don’t love you—they are using you. But they couldn’t see that they were being used. They were used to being abused. A couple of them alluded to sexual abuse when they were kids. One girl had been sexually abused by her father.
There had been a couple of instances where she [Lee] had a boyfriend who tried to beat me up. Lee had this guy who she was seeing in Oregon somewhere, she had this boyfriend on the side [in Wallace] and they’d had an argument. This was in October. I’d been working there for three or four months and she’d left me in charge of the operation. I’m nineteen and running this place, and this guy got really drunk. And he came up and wanted the key to the boxes where they kept the money, and I wouldn’t give it to him. So I was walking down the hall with towels for the girls, and he grabbed me by the back of the head and started pulling me and kicking me. And I was pregnant. I threw him the keys and went running out the door to the sheriff ’s office.
Then they had to stand around and have a debate about whether they would go in and get this guy, because it was illegal, but they couldn’t have this guy beating up women. So they finally went in and got him and took him to the outside of town and told him to get out of there or they would arrest him. Scared him enough that he left.… Then later in February or March of the following year, Lee had set him up with a house here in town. Lee ended up getting pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. So he came up there, and he smashed up the car windows in her car. I saw him walking up the stairs, and I was out the back door as fast as I could. And this time, I didn’t go to the sheriff. I just went to some friends in town and told them. They went up there, brought him down and beat the holy crap out of the guy. He left town then. For good. Years later, I owned a suntan salon in Seattle, and he came into the suntan salon. He didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him. I hoped he didn’t recognize me, because he got beat up really good. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.
When that boyfriend of hers [Lee’s] beat me up, I had a walking cast in addition to being pregnant and having a handful of stuff. And he came up behind me and beat me up. He was a slimeball. But the girls always treated me well. I really enjoyed working with them up there.
Tanya, According to Gnaedinger
Tanya is such a nice person, such an easygoing person. Kind and considerate. But when she first came she was quiet. Her husband had abused her. So she left her children and the husband and ended up with this pimp in Seattle. He had a whole bunch of girls. He sent her over to Wallace, and over time, she liked it and blossomed and realized she didn’t need the guy and got rid of him. She worked for Lee for years, and when Lee decided to retire Tanya took over running the place [from 1985 to 1991]. Now her kids live there in California where she does, and she’s a grandma, and most people probably don’t have a clue what she did, because she’s just a typical grandmother.…
Tanya was a skinny little bean-pole, tall and skinny. Lee was the madam then, and Tanya just came on as a girl from Seattle, pretty sure her pimp was in Seattle. She had a pimp at the time but got smart and got rid of him. Didn’t take her long to figure out she didn’t need a guy.
When Tanya first got there, she’d be lucky if she made fifty bucks a night—it was sad. Then eventually the guys figured out that she really enjoyed her job, and then she was making more money than the rest of them. Tanya was different. She liked working. Most of them, they did their time, whatever they paid for, and it was easy to get them out of the rooms.… A couple of times, I’d have trouble getting Tanya to come out. They were having a great old time. It’s like, “Your time is up.” One time, I had to go in there and grab some guy by the foot and yank him off the bed. “I’m not looking, I’m not looking, but your time is up.”
We’ve kept in touch over the years. I’d been up to see her at the U&I just before they closed down for good. I know that the Oasis says that they were the last one to close, but I really think the U&I was the last one. Because they were open right up until just before the raid. And the Oasis closed down a couple of years before the raid. And I know that I had been up to visit her just before the raid.
A STORY FROM JOHN HANSEN
They were filming Heaven’s Gate [in] 1979. And they had a façade all around my grocery store, where the depot is now. And the caterers set up their tables in that parking lot next to the Oasis Bordello. So when it came time to feed the crew, [Kris] Kristofferson would go over there to eat, and all the hookers would be throwing pictures and matchbooks and notes and telling him to come up and all t
hat, out their window. If I’m not mistaken, the Oasis was on one side and the Luxette was on the other side. And the Arment. And the Oasis, the girls would throw matchbooks, roses, notes. And the gal that starred with Kristofferson [Isabelle Huppert] was up there for a week, learning how to be a hooker for that movie.
I met Kristofferson, but I never met the lady. I’m sure he probably went up there, but it was different hours, I don’t know. And of course there were quite a few, production and carpenters, I’m sure that they were busy all the time up there. They did well, I’m sure.277
A FEW STORIES FROM THE SILVER CORNER BAR
Anonymous 27: Did Magnuson tell you about how he set up his office when they remodeled the courthouse? His office was the one down at the end of the hall and then all the other doors were leading up to it so he could see them as he looked out. He said, “It’s set up like a whorehouse, because that seems like a pretty efficient system.” He was down at the end. The prosecutor’s office, because Dick was the prosecutor [at the time]. Yeah, I was in the “Madam’s Office” there for a while. That’s what he’d told me when I went into the prosecutor’s office, that’s what he told me about how he set up the office.
Posnick [bartender and owner at the time]: Wallace was fun. It was a fun place to be. All the kids who went down to [University of] Idaho, they were always the most popular kids, because everybody wanted to come home with them on weekends. I remember used to be that guys would take their girls to the prom, and they’d take them to a cheap restaurant, because they were saving their money to go up to the whorehouse after they took the girls home....
Selling Sex in the Silver Valley Page 17
