Chapter 6
In 1857, at the age of fourteen, Peter Nielsen Garff pushed and pulled a handcart 1,500 miles across the American frontier with one of the most ill-fitted, poorly led immigrant companies ever to make the journey. Speaking no English, Peter traveled with his parents and four siblings and a large group of Danish converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They had crossed the ocean and embarked on their long trek from Iowa City, Iowa, in mid-June of an unusually hot summer.
Peter’s younger brother Lauritz explained in his short account: “The untold suffering and hardships that we . . . suffered during this long journey from Denmark, would require more time and space [to recount] than will ever be taken in this life, at least.” When they arrived at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, the only Garff still able to walk was Peter. The rest of the ailing family was consigned to a wagon and ox team, while Peter, sometimes alone, pulled the handcart the rest of the way.
By the time the lead handcart with a wilted Danish flag attached to it reached Salt Lake at the end of the eighty-five-day trek, the company had lost fifteen of their number, including Peter’s father and sister. It was left to the fourteen-year-old boy to seek lodging and to care for the family.1
As Peter’s grandson Royal Garff wrote, Peter matured on a farm that “he carved from the primitive and rugged earth and rescued from the gullies, sagebrush and rattlesnakes” in Draper, at the southeast end of the Salt Lake Valley. Peter was twenty-six when he married sixteen-year-old Antomina Sorensen, another Danish convert, who had crossed the plains four years after him.2
Over the next twenty years, Antomina bore twelve children, the sixth of whom was named Royal Brigham in honor of Brigham Young. Royal B. was raised on the Garff farm and at a young age developed an attachment to Rachel Ann Day, who lived on a nearby farm. The childhood sweethearts married in 1902 and named their first son Royal Lovell.
Young Royal worked at his grandparents’ farm and his parents’ grocery store in Salt Lake City. He served a Church mission to New Zealand and attended the University of Utah and Northwestern University in Chicago. Royal’s younger brother Ken had bought a gas station in downtown Salt Lake, which was the beginning of what would be a highly successful auto dealership. During Royal’s Northwestern years, he earned extra money ferrying cars bought at Chicago discount prices to Salt Lake, where Ken sold them.
While visiting back home in Salt Lake in the summer of 1931, Royal met a girl from Alamo, Nevada—Marba Stewart, one of twelve children of prominent Las Vegas cattle ranchers William T. and Artemesia Stewart. Royal and Marba had a whirlwind courtship and married that fall in Evanston, Illinois. They lived in Evanston for a decade, while Royal earned his master’s and PhD degrees from Northwestern. Then he worked for several years as director of retail training for Chicago’s Montgomery Ward company.
The couple was overjoyed at the arrival of their first child, daughter Donna Rae, on June 10, 1935. Their second daughter, Joanne, came nearly three years later. While Marba was pregnant with their third child, Dennis, the Garffs moved to Salt Lake City, where Royal joined the University of Utah as a professor of speech and marketing.
Donna (at right) with her parents, Marba and Royal Garff, and sister Joanne.
Royal and Marba used their savings for a down payment on a home within walking distance of the university. The fourth and last Garff child, Linda, was born in 1943, and the following summer Royal went to New York City, where the legendary motivational trainer Dale Carnegie took note of him and offered him a job. Royal was attending the Carnegie Institute to become a certified course instructor, and the famous and wealthy Carnegie himself sat in on a couple of his speeches. “Royal, you’ve got what it takes!” he inscribed in a gift book to Royal. His instructors added that they had “never been around anyone who had such a good speech background or who had such infectious enthusiasm,” he wrote to Marba. Carnegie was pressing him with a job offer, which meant moving to New York, but that didn’t attract Royal. He concluded that “most of these people in these big cities do nothing but run around even more than I do. . . . I’m really happy to be living out West. I want to see if I can do well with this public speaking business, then try to get out of debt and really enjoy our families, children and life in general.”3
Everything was on an upward trajectory until one day the following spring when Professor Garff uncharacteristically failed to show up for class. Marba had just received the tragic news that she had breast cancer, which in those days was tantamount to a death sentence. Donna was in the fifth grade when her mother had a double mastectomy. At just ten years old, Donna began to cook for the family and to take on other household chores. That summer of 1946, the cancer abated. Marba allowed Donna and Joanne to vacation at her parents’ Las Vegas home, sending them off with a bit of advice: “Have a good time and remember, when you do your part and help the most, that is when you are the happiest. Be careful and don’t do foolish things.”
The financial strain of surgery, hospitalization, and treatments for Marba was heavy on Royal, but his brother Ken Garff, the prosperous car dealer, came to the rescue. “In trying to meet the crisis alone, I could have lost most of our resources,” Royal said. He took a two-year leave from the university, and Ken hired him for an office job at the dealership at nearly three times his university salary.
In early 1947, when Donna was in sixth grade, Marba’s cancer returned. Grasping at alternative treatments, she traveled to Brooklyn, New York, while Royal stayed home with the children. Their good-bye at the Salt Lake City train station was the last time the children ever saw her. Royal eventually joined her in Brooklyn, leaving the children in the care of a friend.
In Royal’s first letter home to Donna from New York, shortly after her twelfth birthday, it was clear that he was putting heavy responsibility on her young shoulders. Hospital expenses were $120 a week, he informed her, and he was trying to live on $1 a day—40 cents for his room and 60 cents for his meals. Some days he subsisted on leftovers from Marba’s hospital meals when she could not eat. It was up to Donna to keep expenses down and to act as his secretary by forwarding his most important correspondence and bills. Donna was also primarily in charge of her siblings.
On July 17, Royal wrote “dearest Donna Rae” to thank her for being so “dependable, our partner in building a good home.” He hoped she was taking her tonic and iron pills every day, but she was not to use his typewriter, or her siblings would be jealous. And she was to use only “a little” lipstick. “We want you to be thought of and respected like your Mother and not to be a loud, showy person. So take it slow and you’ll be a lot happier in the long run.” A week later he wrote, “Your Mother is having a very difficult time—suffering a great deal. It’s certainly hard on your Daddy to sit here and watch it and not be able to do much about it.” Several days after that: “Mother’s stomach is still terribly swollen causing terrible pain.”4
Finally, in a letter dated August 7, Royal wrote Donna, “We are with you and the other [children], sweetheart—no matter where we are or you are. And even if your Mother cannot get better, you must always feel she is near us, as she always will be.” Four days later, Marba died at the age of forty.
Back at home, Royal hired a series of caregivers for the children and went back to work. The next year Royal married a widow, Maxine Rice. She had been determined not to remarry, but after she met Royal’s children, they began to pester him: “Daddy, get married!” And so they did. Maxine encouraged the children never to forget Marba. “I loved Marba, even though I never met her. She bore these darling children.” Within months the children were all calling Maxine “Mother.”
Donna was by nature stoic, rarely showing emotion. She internalized her anxiety, which then created a form of eating disorder and need for excessive sleep. Maxine suggested that Royal take Donna for regular morning walks “in hopes of alleviating her anxiety and building her appetite.” It worked, and Royal cherished the one-on-one time with his daughter. Donna became accomplished at both piano and dance. Her strong suit was the hula, embodying Hawaii’s “Sweet Leilani, Heavenly Flower” when she danced.
Donna registered to attend the University of Utah in the fall of 1953. She was determined to graduate before entertaining any thoughts of marriage. So the last thing she wanted was a date with a senior named Bill Marriott, who she rightly suspected had come to Utah to find a Latter-day Saint wife. The first few times he asked her to school functions, she turned him down. Then Bill had a crackerjack idea.
In the first week of December, Sigma Chi put on its annual ball and banquet, at which one woman was elected the “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” Bill cleverly nominated Donna and then called her to tell her she was on the list, without telling her he had nominated her. “I’m supposed to take you to this banquet, so I’ll come pick you up,” he said. She didn’t win, but Bill was the perfect gentleman. That didn’t make securing the second date any easier. Weeks went by, and Donna finally said yes to an invitation to one of Bill’s ROTC dances. Ten-year-old Linda was very impressed with her older sister’s date. “You could hear him coming a block away. I will forever remember that wonderful white navy uniform he had on,” she remembered. But Donna’s head was not easily turned by wealth or good looks.
A buoyant Bill returned home for Christmas, where his dad spent hours counseling him, trying to smooth some rough edges. J.W. wrote in his journal: “Billy is critical of anyone who gets in his way or who seems to be superior, but will outgrow that.” On Christmas night before a crackling fire, his parents and Grandmother Alice Smoot gave Bill advice about love and marriage until 1:30 a.m. “Discussed the type of girl for Bill,” J.W. wrote. “Good family requirement.”5 When Bill flew back to college, he was more determined than ever to court Donna, who fit the requirements.
The turning point for Bill and Donna’s future occurred in April when they went to dinner with J.W. and Allie in the elegant Empire Room of the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City. To Bill’s parents, Donna was bright, beautiful, enjoyable to be with, and well rooted in the Church. Until that evening, Donna had had no idea who the Marriotts were. After the dinner, her sorority sisters educated her. “The Marriotts are really it back there in the East,” one friend said. “Don’t you know anything about the Marriotts?”
Bill in his navy dress whites.
“No,” Donna answered, “but I DO really like his parents a lot.”
Soon, they were dating once a week, and near the time of Bill’s graduation, they were seeing each other every day. On graduation day, June 7, 1954, Donna could not help but be impressed with her beau as he was commissioned as an ensign in the navy, wearing his dress whites. Bill and Donna had tickets for a graduation dance that evening, but they never made it. “Bill started talking to me about the business and what he wanted to do in the company,” Donna recalled. “He told me about his uncles—how two of them were letting down his father. He told me how hard his father was on him, and if it wasn’t for his mother he didn’t know where he would end up. We sat and talked for hours and hours. He told me everything. We never went to the dance.”
In July, Bill had to report to the navy. Before that, he accompanied J.W. on a business trip and to the opening ceremonies of the New York Thruway. J.W. had won the lease to operate nine restaurants along the 148-mile stretch between New York City and Albany. Approximately seventeen miles apart, the Hot Shoppes thruway restaurants comprised a monopoly that became a significant new revenue stream for the company.6
Bill paid little attention to the ceremonial speech that day given by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the one-time presidential candidate who was then at the end of a decade as the state’s notable governor. Instead, Bill’s eyes were riveted on a bright red Ferrari, one of the first Ferraris ever seen in America. After the ribbon cutting, an auto cavalcade of vehicles commenced down the superhighway, with Bill and J.W. traveling in J.W.’s Cadillac convertible. But Bill was absorbed with that $16,000 foreign sports car ahead. At the first opportunity, Bill boldly asked the driver if he could ride with him. The driver agreed, advising: “Don’t touch the back of the seat because it’s very thin and you’ll dent the metal.” Bill clambered into the front passenger seat and sped along more than forty miles of the new superhighway in the exotic sports car. “That was a big deal,” he remembered.
Bill and Donna wrote each other frequently that summer. Late one July evening, only a week or so after his arrival at the navy supply corps school in Georgia, Bill filled up his pockets with quarters, walked to the nearest public telephone booth, and dialed Bryce Canyon Lodge in southern Utah, where Donna was waiting tables and performing in a variety show. The lodge manager who answered the phone said Donna was busy changing into her hula costume for the evening show, but Bill insisted that she be summoned. When she picked up the phone, he got straight to the point. He loved her and wanted to marry her, so would she marry him? Donna was speechless. When she recovered sufficiently, she asked him to wait for her answer until she had talked with her parents.
The next morning, he ordered a dozen red roses to be delivered to her. The card was typical Bill—no excess verbiage: “Love you, Bill.”
Royal Garff was not happy when Donna phoned him. He liked Bill well enough, but he wanted his daughter to finish college. But after some thought and consultation with his own mother, he gave his blessing. Now that the most important part of his future was assured, Bill, along with best friend Ensign Bruce Haight, hunkered down to his studies at the school for the navy supply corps, a fitting training for Bill’s plan to work for Hot Shoppes when his navy service was complete.
Without Bill’s knowledge, J.W. had been pulling strings to secure a naval post in Washington for him. Bill was summoned to an interview in Washington to discuss possible assignments.
“Tell me, Ensign Marriott, are you disabled?” the navy captain asked.
“No, sir,” Bill replied.
“Is your father disabled in some way?”
“No, sir,” Bill said, wondering where this was going.
“Do your parents need you here in Washington?” the captain continued.
“No, sir,” Bill answered. The captain shuffled his papers for a moment and then informed Bill that pressure had come from “above” for Bill to receive a Pentagon job because of an unspecified family need for him to be close to home. Bill left, embarrassed that J.W. had been lobbying the navy to keep him in Washington.
Back home that Friday evening, J.W. was disconcerted that Bill had undone his careful campaign. The two talked late into the evening. Bill explained that he neither wanted nor deserved special treatment, but he allowed that he was worried about getting married if he was going to be away for months at sea. Again without Bill’s knowledge, J.W. worked the phones all weekend trying to ensure a D.C. job. The effort failed.
Bill was assigned to the Norfolk-based U.S.S. Randolph aircraft carrier. It was not the Pentagon, but it was docked in the closest naval base to Washington and was scheduled to be in port for much of his navy service, which meant he and Donna could live in Norfolk when they married. Bill was still in supply school when the Randolph left for a six-month Mediterranean cruise. He was assigned to fly to Europe and join the ship after Christmas. Donna flew to Washington to spend Christmas with him.
Even though both Bill and Donna had grown up in four-bedroom houses, the Marriotts’ home seemed huge to her. “Big living room, big dining room—we didn’t grow up in a big house at all. I was pretty awestruck.” That feeling was compounded by an invitation to have dinner with President Eisenhower and First Lady Mamie at the Marriotts’ Fairfield Farm. The Marriotts’ close friend Ezra Taft Benson, who was both Secretary of Agriculture and an Apostle in their Church, had been pressing the president to visit the farm and enjoy some hunting, guided by Bill Werber.
An anxious J.W. called Werber a couple of weeks before the event. “I’ve got myself into a big problem and you have to help me. I’ve told the president we have a lot of birds down there, and maybe I oversold him.” Fairfield did have a good number of birds, but they were at the edges of the heavily pastured farm. Eisenhower was used to hunting in Georgia, where his hosts “seeded” a small secured area with birds. Werber advised J.W. to do the same, so he brought in 100 adult quail from Pennsylvania and released them near the farm.
By the time the big day arrived, J.W. had a cold and a high fever, but he rallied to join his guests. Donna was swept away when Bill walked her into the manor house’s front room to meet them. Huge logs crackled in the fireplace, lighting the sparkling ornaments on the Christmas tree with flickering flames. Four hostesses from Hot Shoppes attended to the guests’ every need. The day was unusually frigid, with a wind-chill factor below zero.
“What do you want to do, Mr. President?” J.W. asked him. “Do you want to go hunting? We’ve got fine opportunities for you to kill some birds, if you’d like, but it’s awfully cold outside.”
The president paused a bit, then turned to Ensign Marriott and asked, “What do you think we should do?”
Bill was surprised. “This was the commander in chief, and I was just the lowest form of animal life in the navy—and he was asking me what I wanted to do,” he remembered.
Bill quickly replied: “I think we should stay inside by the fire.”
The famous Ike grin spread over the president’s face, and he responded, “I think your suggestion is great. Let’s do that.”
The short episode made “a tremendous impression” on Bill. “I could see almost immediately how a man of his stature could deal with egos like Montgomery, Patton, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Stalin during World War II. He gave them the respect of asking and considering what they thought.”
After that, the dinner was almost an anticlimax for Bill, but not for Donna. She soaked up every moment, including the family program that the Bensons’ four daughters had prepared for the president and first lady—a typical “family home evening” like those observed weekly in devout Latter-day Saint homes.
After Christmas, Allie took Bill and Donna to New York City for several days. The visit was filled with sightseeing and dazzling Broadway shows. On January 6, Bill flew out to join the U.S.S. Randolph anchored in Valencia, Spain. He and Donna would not see each other until three days before their wedding, almost five months later.
Bill’s last name would one day loom large on dozens of European hotels, but he took his first trip to Europe aboard a slow-moving U.S. Navy Constellation cargo plane. He arrived on January 10, 1955, and the Randolph weighed anchor, leaving Valencia five days later.7
Two weeks after Bill joined the crew, his superior, Lieutenant Mickey Finn, wrote privately to a navy captain who was a friend of J.W.’s that Bill had been given “the job of Sales Officer which entails three Ship’s Stores, one Soda Fountain, one Foreign Goods Store, the Clothing and Small Store retail and bulk, the Ship’s Laundry, Cobbler Shop, Tailor Shop, about eight storerooms including one holding 700 cases of beer!; two Barber Shops, and deal with vendors at various ports visited. So you can see where Ensign Marriott will be a very busy young man, picking up an immense knowledge of business.”8
Meanwhile, J.W. was busy pulling strings for another unwanted surprise for Ensign Marriott. He hatched a plan with the wife of the Randolph’s commanding officer to fly himself, Allie, and Donna to one of the ship’s ports of call in Italy for a shipboard wedding, complete with an arch of crossed sabers. J.W. called the father of the bride to tell him the good news. “Shouldn’t you ask Donna what she thinks?” her father gamely responded.
J.W. did, excitedly springing his surprise on Donna: “How would you like to go to Europe with us and see Bill and we’ll have the captain of the ship marry you while we’re there?”
“It was just like a bolt of lightning. I mean, it was exciting to think about, but I hadn’t heard anything about this from Bill—and I found out they hadn’t even asked him,” Donna recalled. She diplomatically reminded J.W. that she and Bill wanted to marry in a Latter-day Saint temple. But J.W. had already thought about that. “You can be married a year later in the temple,” he insisted. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in that era required couples who married in “till death do us part” civil ceremonies to wait a year before their marriage was ratified in a temple ceremony “for time and all eternity.”)
Donna said she would get back to him after she talked with Bill. Knowing the “surprise” was about to be revealed, J.W. made a shore-to-ship call to Ensign Marriott and dropped the plan on him. Bill didn’t like it, but as he had learned to do with his father, he held his tongue and called Donna.
“We can’t do it,” he told her. “What are you going to do? Follow me from port to port and just see me when I can get off the ship for a few minutes? That’s ridiculous!” Donna agreed and continued waiting in Utah. Bill sent a terse January telegram to his parents: “Prefer to wait until June for wedding.”
Not to be deprived of a visit with their son, J.W. and Allie met up with him in Cannes, France. J.W. had brought a news clipping from the Washington Evening Star, which illustrated just how ubiquitous Hot Shoppes had become. In a Protestant Sunday School class in Chevy Chase, Maryland, one youngster was showing off his Bible picture cards to a pal while his mother happened to be listening in the next room. “This one is Jesus in the manger,” the boy explained. “This is Jesus at school. This is Jesus as a young man.” Finally he came to the picture of the Last Supper. “This one”—he hesitated for a moment—“This one is Jesus at the Hot Shoppe.”9
After Cannes, it was back to the Randolph. Bill had his job well in hand, though there were occasional hiccups, like the Wormy Cigarettes Incident. The ship had a large case of cigarettes infested with worms. The accounting regulations didn’t allow Bill to just throw away merchandise, so he sent them over to a supply ship. Shortly after, the Randolph captain called him up to the bridge.
“Why did you send over those cigarettes?” he asked Ensign Marriott.
“Because they’re no damned good!”
If the captain was amused, he didn’t show it. “Well, [the other captain] is going to send them back, and we’re going to accept them.”
That was that. “I had this big space in our storage inventory that was now useless because of those dead cigarettes. I tried to get rid of them, and I couldn’t,” Bill said. “That’s the difference between the navy and a commercial business.”
During his months aboard the Randolph, Bill and a lieutenant who shared his faith met each Sunday for Church services. They were the only two practicing Latter-day Saints among the Randolph’s 3,500-man complement. Both were appreciative that every night, after the sound of taps, one of the ship’s chaplains prayed for the crew over the PA system.
Donna and Bill on their wedding day in 1955.
In Salt Lake, Donna was feted at no fewer than eight luncheons at four different country clubs, as well as a country club dinner and another dinner party at a private home, four bridal showers, and one tea, all of which threatened the thin bride’s waistline.
The Randolph arrived in Norfolk on June 18, and Bill hurried to Utah. On June 29, in the Salt Lake Temple, Bill and Donna faced each other, kneeling across an altar with mirrors behind each of them that stretched their images into eternity. In a simple ceremony, surrounded by family and friends, they were sealed “for time and all eternity.”
Afterward, Apostle and family friend J. Reuben Clark, who performed the ceremony, offered some advice: “Don’t ever go to bed angry. You won’t be able to kneel down and say your prayers together if you’re angry with each other.” The two took the advice to heart. “I only remember about five times in our six decades of married life that we’ve had a problem,” Donna said. “And that was only when one of us was overly tired—at the end of the day when the kids weren’t good, or Bill had a hard trip or something.”
Nearly a thousand friends and family members attended the reception that followed. It took indefatigable Donna more than six months to send out handwritten thank-you notes for the 436 gifts.
The next day, Bill and Donna flew to Calgary for a week in the Canadian Rockies in a room at the Banff Springs Hotel, a magnificent structure built in a combination of Scottish baronial and French chateau styles.
Their first home was an apartment in Portsmouth, Virginia, less than ten miles from the Norfolk naval base. From there they had easy access for trips to Washington once or twice a month. Bill was one of the first that summer to taste a new double-decker hamburger that Hot Shoppes was trying out. J.W. had modeled it after Robert Wian’s signature sandwich in California, called the “Big Boy,” which also became the name of his restaurant chain. But Hot Shoppes had a different “secret sauce,” with a recipe that included chili, A-1, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauces. The burger was called “Mighty Mo,” after the massive U.S.S. Missouri battleship.
At Christmas, J.W. and Allie hosted a party for the newlyweds and 250 Washington guests. Back in Norfolk, Bill was promoted from ensign to lieutenant junior grade, and shipped out on the Randolph for two months. Donna waved good-bye, closed up their first home, and flew to Salt Lake City to spend the spring with her family.
The Randolph’s first port of call during the Caribbean cruise was Mayport, Florida, where the ship anchored for almost two weeks. While there, Bill was alarmed to learn that his father had become seriously ill, with an acute pain in one of his arms. Surgeons cut a large muscle in his shoulder to clean out an excessive calcium deposit in one bone. J.W. was well enough to fly with Allie and Donna to Cuba when the Randolph docked at Guantanamo Bay. Bill met his wife and parents in Havana, but his folks found the city dirty and congested, so after a few days they moved the vacation to Miami. At the end of his leave, Bill hitched a ride on a navy transport back to Cuba.
Because of his assignment on the Caribbean cruise as wardroom mess officer, Bill was relieved of his responsibility for the Geedunk (the ship store), the barber shop, the cobbler shop, and the laundry. But the new job wasn’t any easier. “The wardroom provided three meals a day for several hundred officers, all of whom had high expectations about what they should be eating and how it should be presented,” he explained.
His greatest challenge was dealing with the stubborn World War II veteran “stewards” or cooks, who were mostly African-American or Filipino. Hence the Battle of the Meat Loaf. “I got into it with them about how they were making the meat loaf, so I gave them our Hot Shoppes recipe for it. They ignored me. They wanted to cook the way they wanted to cook, and their meat loaf was, well, terrible. They were tough as nails, and they didn’t give a crap about me, or anything else. When I tried to pull rank on them, the meat loaf only got worse. This went on for weeks until I finally folded my cards and crept away, dropping the family recipe back into my sea bag. And they continued making crappy meat loaf.”10
When the Randolph returned to its home base on May 1, that was the last of Bill’s sailing days in the navy. He owed the military just two more months of service, so he and Donna rented a small apartment in Portsmouth for that short period. “I loved being at sea,” Bill reflected, and he gained useful knowledge as one of the managers of a large floating hotel with a massive guest list. “Brief as it was, my navy experience has carried over in many large and small ways. I still shine my shoes every day.”11