Stability, Loss, and Responsibility in Salt Lake City
Vennetta Spencer was born on 16 January 1897 in Salt Lake City, on 13th East in what she called the Sugar House area. Her parents, Henry Wilson Spencer and Vennetta Naylor, kept a six-room home on several acres, with gardens, fruit trees, livestock, and a canal running along the property.
Her memories of the place were practical and vivid rather than sentimental: chickens in the yard, playing near the canal, and one incident she never forgot, when a rooster tore part of her nose while snatching bread and jam from her hand. Even in her nineties she would still mention that a small piece of her nose was missing.
Vennetta's mother died following a miscarriage while Vennetta was still young, and the household changed quickly. Henry was not prepared to raise five young children on his own. Jane "Jennie" Bird had lived with the family before, helping Vennetta's mother manage the house and children, but had since returned to New York. After his wife's death, Henry brought Jennie back to help, and the two were married in the Salt Lake Temple in November 1903.
By the time Vennetta was old enough to form lasting memories, Jennie was simply the mother figure in her life. The family records note no conflict following the second marriage. Jennie became part of the family.
Vennetta graduated from high school in Salt Lake City, most likely Salt Lake High School (East), given the family's home at 324 L Street and the school's location at 40 South 800 East. She went on to Henager's Business College at 49 South Main Street, which offered both day and night courses in bookkeeping and business skills. (An advertisement in the 1914 city directory confirms the location and the kind of instruction it offered.)
After finishing her business training, Vennetta went to work at The Paris Company Millinery in downtown Salt Lake City, a store that sold women's hats and other high-fashion goods. The city directories track her rise clearly: inspector first, then bookkeeper, and eventually cashier in the main office. She was trusted with money and records while still young. By her late teens she already held positions of real financial responsibility, the same steadiness with figures that she would later bring to the family's businesses.
She met Wesley Robbins on a blind date arranged by Pearl Snowball. In her own words, she remembered him as shy but fun. They kept seeing each other, though Wes told her he wanted to finish college before they married.
In the early 1920s, Vennetta's father went through a period of financial and emotional strain that she described as a nervous breakdown. The family moved to Blackfoot, Idaho, where he delivered milk by wagon. In 1923, during a heavy snowstorm, his milk cart was struck by a train. Vennetta wrote that he did not hear the whistle. He and the horse were both killed. By then she was newly married, and the accident came just as her own household was beginning.
She later noted a pattern of hearing loss that ran through the family, in herself, in her children, and in some of her grandchildren, and she wondered whether her father's failure to hear the whistle had been part of it. It could never be known for certain.
A note on the record. Much of what we know of Vennetta's early life survives only because she wrote it down herself, in a condensed history composed in her nineties. Without her own account, these years would be little more than city-directory entries and job titles.