A LONG TIME AGO
Bob Dempel remembers the shops and rooms in the Palace
Born in Ukiah in 1936, Bob Dempel remembers going to Ukiah regularly with his mother from their ranch north of Hopland when he was about 6 or 7.
“We went to town and she would shop for our weekly groceries. There were three fiveand- dime stores and Frega's Hardware Store. If I was good, she would give me 10 cents to buy something.”
He was allowed to walk around town and go to the Palace Hotel where she would meet him when she was done shopping.
“The Palace was a safe zone because Walter Sandelin was always right there in the lobby… impeccably dressed with a suit and a tie.”
Dempel hung out in those big overstuffed chairs in the lobby and rode the Otis elevator — probably one of the only elevators in town — up and down. If someone was checking in on the first or second floors, the bellboy/clerk would take their luggage, put it in the elevator and take them up. Dempel rode with them.
Sandelin would always say hello and call him Bobby, one of the few allowed to use that moniker.
“You could go down the hall to the west and use the men's restroom. It was the first men's room I ever saw that required you to pay to use the stalls. The urinals were free but you needed a nickel for more.”
In 1954, a group of sophomore schoolgirls organized an invitation-only night dance at the Palace Hotel. He and his girlfriend were the happy recipients of those special invitations.
“It was a swanky affair for Ukiah and the invitation list was kind of like a Who's Who at that time in high school.”
After graduating from high school, Dempel, his girlfriend and his parents attended a castoff party put on by Sandelin on the Lurline, a Matson Lines ship, setting sail from San Francisco to Hawaii with Walter and his wife, Cora, and a large group of mostly elderly women.
Sandelin would purchase birthday cards regularly and Dempel was one of the lucky people to be on his list of birthday-wish recipients. Every year for at least 40 years he received a card with a short, personalized, handwritten note.
Somewhere along Dempel's 50th, the card said `Happy Birthday and many more.'
“That was Walter's way of saying this was the last card.”
And indeed, it was; he died soon after in 1984.
Dempel's grandmother, Jessie Crawford, lived on the third f loor, on the southwest corner of State and Smith streets from 1965 up until 1970 when she passed away. It was a suite with a little dinette and a bedroom, a front room combination. The family furnished the small apartment from their home.
“When I visited her, we would go downstairs to the Palace Hotel Coffee Shop and she would treat me to lunch for 85 cents. She would always have a little nip upstairs before we came down.”
“The connection I had with Walter was through the Masonic Lodge. He was a very active member; I went in when I was 21.
“We attended their monthly dinners at the Masonic Hall on School and Standley streets on the first Friday of every month. There were about 60 of us who met regularly up on the second floor.”
Dempel remembers Sandelin's daughter Irene was quoted as saying the reason she married more than once was because she couldn't find anybody who was as good as her father.
After his grandmother died in 1970, they removed the furniture; it was the last time Dempel was in the Palace.
He remembers the shops and rooms in the hotel in the late
1950s.
Bob Sandelin's Ukiah Tour and Travel was on the southeast corner of Smith and School Streets; one store to the east on Smith Street was Mrs. Del Tully's Beauty Shop; east of that was the 1891 room where Rotary met and east of that was the Black Bart Room, where you could get a highball for 50 cents. The rest of the Smith Street side to State Street was the Palace Hotel Coffee Shop.
On the School Street side, Mr. Sandkulla's barbershop was tucked in next to Ukiah Tour and Travel and south of that was Berman's Men's Shop that later became Empire Office Supply and after that the Mendocino Book Company.
On State Street, south of the lobby, Suzie Cox had the Palace Dress Shop.
“My heart breaks when I look at the Palace Hotel and how it looks today… I think about all of the possibilities that the building and property could have become.”