And since he was his father’s son, Ford asked Ripley for one more thing: permission to start a side business, outside of the Santa Fe contract. He wanted to start bidding to run the restaurants and newsstands in the new “union stations” that were springing up across the nation. While Indianapolis and Kansas City had early union stations, most cities still had individual depots for each railroad and were in the process of making deals to begin building central terminals. The first of these was going to be in St. Louis, and Ford snared the contract to run its restaurants and newsstands.
St. Louis Union Depot turned out to be the largest and most glamorous railroad depot in the nation, and certainly the most architecturally eclectic—a mesmerizing jumble of strong colors and Romanesque style with sixty-five-foot-high barrel-vaulted ceilings in its Grand Hall and a Victorian train shed covering eleven acres, built at a cost of some $6.5 million ($172 million). For Ford and Dave, it was a daring leap forward into the company’s largest market yet, its first major city. For Fred it was deeply nostalgic; he now owned one of the top restaurants in the city where he had first started, and first failed.
Soon Harvey Girls were serving the dishes that made Fred Harvey beloved in St. Louis, which came to include the Harvey Girl Special Little Thin Orange Pancakes, based on a recipe from the head vegetable cook’s grandmother; the cream of Wisconsin cheddar cheese soup; the Plantation Beef Stew served over hot biscuits; and the chef’s special sautéed cauliflower greens. In addition to new recipes, working in a big city meant new challenges: To help the numerous immigrants passing through the station who barely spoke English, Ford set up a separate side dining room with Harvey Girls who were multilingual.
The move into St. Louis also brought Fred Harvey a much bigger national profile because not long after Ford took over, St. Louis hosted the 1896 Republican National Convention. Harvey Girls were serving at some of the power meals that led to Ohio governor William McKinley’s nomination to run against populist orator and ideologue William Jennings Bryan.
Besides all the expansion that happened almost immediately in 1896, Ripley had ambitious plans for the future. He was building new tracks between Los Angeles and San Francisco and expected that soon there would need to be Harvey Houses all over California. He also decided it was time for the Santa Fe to become much more aggressive about its passenger business, which had always taken a backseat to shipping. Just as the Santa Fe had always helped farmers, ranchers, miners, and manufacturers who would then use the railroad to ship their goods, Ripley now wanted to “seed” the passenger business. The Harvey “standard” of passenger care was a key to his strategy.
He started with grand personal gestures to demonstrate the Santa Fe’s newfound love of its riders. When the fast, new all-Pullman train was put into service between Chicago and Los Angeles—with a special dining car menu of “good things from Mr. Harvey’s plethoric larder,” including bluepoints, fillet of sole à la Normande, sweetbread cutlets with French peas in Claret sauce, and tenderloin of beef with mushrooms—a uniformed boy greeted passengers at the halfway point in Colorado, presenting every lady with a bouquet of roses, carnations, and violets, and every gentleman an alligator wallet.
But Ripley’s master plan was to build a chain of new trackside hotels along the Santa Fe route, big, beautiful destination hotels where tourists would be compelled to linger for several days. All these hotels would of course feature the fine food and impeccable service of Fred Harvey.
It sounded like quite a ride.
FORD DID HIS BEST to make sure that his father got to experience much of the excitement. When Fred was in England, he and his son exchanged letters and telegrams almost daily. They discussed everything from business strategy (Fred urged his son never to let his feelings “interfere with the strictest business principals [sic]”) to what lovely gifts of European foodstuffs, liquor, and cutlery Fred could ship back to the States, so that Ford could shower the company’s friends in high places with Harvey-style swag.
They wrote a lot about the family. Like all sick people, Fred was obsessed with everyone else’s health. He worried about his wife—who he thought should eat better and drink fewer “spirits”—and especially their daughter May, who had always been somewhat sickly and was being told by doctors that she needed the “Alexander operation,” a now-discredited surgery to “correct” the position of the uterus in women having menstrual problems.
They also corresponded about their mutual annoyance with some extended family members, whom Fred was about ready to disown. As he grew wealthier, his two sisters—Annie in London, Eliza in St. Louis—and their children had become more and more demanding. After Eliza’s son, George, solicited help yet again in a financial matter, Fred wrote to Ford, “The amount you gave him was quite enough & all I am willing to donate. That family has had enough, as well as my sister Annie’s family. She never has appreciated what I have done for her children, so I am unwilling to do any more.”
He and Ford also corresponded about the farm in Emporia, as well as the XY ranch out in Colorado, which they moved farther west yet again, closer to the La Junta depot. Fred reportedly sold his forty-five hundred acres in Granada for $200,000 ($5.3 million) to a syndicate from Bloomington, Illinois.
When Fred did return to the United States, he and Ford would often spend time together in Emporia, which was just a hundred miles from Kansas City. On a hill overlooking the 750-acre property, they had built a handsome fourteen-room home with the first indoor bathroom in the area. The property had several barns, as well as bunkhouses and carriage houses for staff and guests. Fred had bought it in 1890, as an experiment to see whether the company could grow some of its own corn and vegetables and raise some of its own beef and dairy cattle. They were now raising horses there as well.
The entire Harvey family tried to get to the Emporia farm for at least two weeks every summer, during which Fred and Ford did a lot of hunting and fishing. They were a familiar seasonal sight for Emporians. One ranch manager liked to tell the story of seeing father and son return after a particularly long day of hunting. He asked what they had gotten.
“Wet clothes and a hungry stomach” was Fred’s reply.
In Emporia, Fred and Ford had become friendly with journalist William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia Gazette, who often dined at the Harvey depot restaurant with his wife. For years the Harveys knew him as a talented but provincial small-town newspaper editor, but in the summer of 1896 he suddenly became a player in national politics. A sarcastic editorial he had dashed off before leaving on vacation was discovered by the McKinley campaign and was so quickly and widely distributed that by the time White returned from his trip, he was famous.
The editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” took potshots at the Populist Party of William Jennings Bryan, making fun of the idea that what Kansas needed was “fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are ‘just ordinary clodhoppers’ … who hate prosperity and who think because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street … Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts, on an altar, and bow down and worship him.”
The Republicans loved White’s message that Middle America still needed a social and political elite. In return, they made him their homespun literary hero and invited him to help write their campaign platforms.
William Allen White’s fame as “the sage of Emporia” grew rapidly. As he traveled more and more, Fred arranged for him to have a pass for free meals at his Santa Fe eating houses. It was a friendly gesture but also a smart one. White was already a big fan of Fred Harvey, and now he would occasionally pontificate in print, to his growing national audience, about the joys of Harvey House food—which he missed even when dining in the best restaurants in New York.
“The more one sees of the world,” White wrote, “the more he respects Fred Harvey. He is the Great American Caterer.”
IT WASN’T LONG before the Harvey Houses became a sensation in a new broad swath of America, starting in St. Louis, going across Missouri, down through Oklahoma and Arkansas, and all over Texas. (The Harvey newsstands extended even farther, into Tennessee, Mississippi, and as far southeast as Mobile, Alabama.) With all these new locations, the “civilizing” influence of Harvey Girls, fine food, and jacket-only dining rooms reached more of the country’s rough patches. In one Texas town, the newspaper heralded the coming of Harvey Girls by noting that “no smirking, tip-seeking negro stands back of one’s chair in a Harvey restaurant, figuring out just how much he will get for his minimum service. Emoluments are given in the realm of the Harvey girl as they were originally intended to be given—in appreciation of the service rendered and the attentive interest shown by the clever girls in white.”
To fill the positions for all these new restaurants, the company went on a hiring spree for new Harvey Girls, promising good jobs, good pay, and, of course, the company’s legendary marital prospects. One Harvey Girl recalled being told, “We’ll guarantee you a good railroadman for a husband.” But she was also taught how to handicap desirability: “You learned that brakemen were a dime a dozen, engineers were good, but men in the communications department, like telegraphers, were very good.”
The Fred Harvey training was brought to a new generation of young women—including all the inside jokes and hazing. When a new girl cleared the table after serving her first order of bluepoint oysters, it wasn’t uncommon for one of the others to pull her aside and convince her she was expected to wash out those shells so they could be reused. Occasionally a kindly veteran would intercede to prevent the embarrassment—one remembered telling a rookie to take the clean shells, put them in her bag, and tell the other girls she had decided to start a collection.
As usual, the sudden influx of bright, single young Harvey Girls generated more excitement among men than women. “We caused a lot of jealousy among the local girls,” recalled one Harvey Girl. “Sometimes after a dance where one or more Harvey Girls had been socializing with a lot of the local men, young women from [the town] would come into the lunchroom and find fault with everything we did—the toast was too brown, the eggs not the way they ordered them—petty things. We’d just grin and bear it.”
The competition, however, was real. “You know, nearly every single unmarried man in [town] proposed to me!” recalled one Harvey Girl. “There were an awful lot of single men … I finally got engaged to a young man who was an engineer with the Santa Fe. His father was a big lawyer in Nebraska. We were engaged a few months … when he started to grow this mustache. He kissed me one night and that mustache made me mad. I asked him to shave it off—I told him I wouldn’t marry him if he didn’t. Well, he wouldn’t shave it, so I gave him back his ring.”
The newspapers started paying more attention to the impact of all these Harvey Girl marriages. William Curtis, a well-known Chicago journalist who covered the Southwest and Latin America, wrote:
[Fred Harvey] is responsible for a great deal of the growth and a great deal of the happiness in this part of the country. He has done more than any immigration society to settle up the Southwest and still continues to provide wives for ranchmen, cowboys, railway hands and other honest pioneers … and the successful results of his matrimonial bureau are found in every community. It must not be forgotten that a precedent for Mr. Harvey’s enterprise was established by the first English settlers in America. Two cargoes of wives were sent out to the colonists of Jamestown by the Virginia Society in London and were sold to bachelor colonists for 120 pounds of tobacco per wife—while Mr. Harvey does not even charge a commission.
But to the wives of travelers who were already married, these hundreds of single Harvey waitresses represented something else entirely. New Yorker memoirist Emily Hahn, who spent one college summer working for Fred Harvey, recalled childhood scenes of her parents arguing about Harvey Girls:
When my father … traveled every year in the West, Harvey Girls stood for much the same thing as businessmen’s secretaries often do today—they were hazards for stay-at-home wives. Harvey Girls were famous for looks as well as dexterity. Mother had half believed that my father was carrying on a flirtation with one of the young ladies, though even if he was it couldn’t have amounted to much—a gallant remark or two thrown at her, as she rushed past, across the heavy railway china.
CHAPTER 19
ROUGH RIDDEN
AFTER FRED TURNED HIS PROXY OVER TO FORD, HE BEGAN TO finalize his will. And if he needed any lessons on how not to handle his estate, he had only to consider the example of George Pullman. In the years since the strike of 1894, Pullman’s company had done well for investors, and he had been personally charitable. But in the public consciousness, the growing labor movement had successfully painted him as perhaps the worst boss in American history.
Pullman was never forgiven for allowing the entire country to be closed for business, and for letting so many be killed and hurt during the protests, simply because he didn’t want to negotiate with his workers. His ideas about controlling life in his company town, long seen as “un-American,” were eventually found to be illegal. While his workers may not have fully agreed with the characterization—especially the sleeping-car porters, who still had some of the best jobs available to black men—Pullman had become the prototype of the corporate businessman more concerned about his stockholders than his employees.
In fact, Pullman’s reputation was so tainted that he decided to leave one last great invention as his legacy: a tomb impervious to desecration by his enemies. After he died in the fall of 1897, at the age of sixty-six, his body was placed in a mahogany casket lined with lead. After the funeral at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, his coffin was wrapped in tar paper and then lowered into a pit thirteen feet long, nine feet wide, and eight feet deep, with eighteen inches of steel-reinforced concrete at the bottom. Once the coffin was precisely in place—it had to be equidistant from each wall within a fraction of an inch—it was encased in a one-inch layer of quick-hardening asphalt. Then the concrete floor, which was already set and cold, was warmed up so it would mesh better with the fresh concrete poured all around the encased coffin—which created a rim a half inch above the asphalt layer. Next, eight steel rails were laid across the casket and bolted together with two long iron rods. More tar paper was used to create a small space below the rails to prevent settling that might crush the casket, and then enough concrete was poured to cover the rails. Once this set, another entire day was spent pouring layer after layer of concrete, reinforced with metal sheeting. Finally, dirt and sod were placed on top of the concrete and myrtle planted in it so the grave would better fit in with the others around it.
But none of these fortifications could protect Pullman’s family from the bombshell of his will. He disinherited his twin sons, one of them his namesake (whose fiancée immediately broke off their engagement). The bulk of his personal fortune—estimated at $7.6 million ($203 million)—went to his daughters, his wife, and a fund to build a retraining school for his employees. Leadership of his company was turned over to Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president’s son, a lawyer who had been one of Pullman’s right-hand men for years.
Pullman’s sons didn’t sue the estate, but others did, including his personal barber, who claimed unsuccessfully that he deserved one of the $500 ($13,389) bequests left to household servants because he had shaved the master every morning and acted as his “gazette,” telling him the news of the day and “sundry funny anecdotes.” Pullman’s wife eventually decided to give her sons some of her money, but the entire affair was a front-page family fiasco.
Fred Harvey would have none of that. While he had admired Pullman as a young man, he had deliberately built his business to be the opposite of the Pullman Palace Car Company. He wanted Fred Harvey to remain a closely held, privately owned company with employees who felt as if they were part of an ever-growing extended family. He would leave his wife and child
ren more than enough to live comfortably, but not in a way that might jeopardize his reputation as an exemplary boss forever devoted to maintaining the standard.
AS FORD’S NEW ROLE in the family business became clear, his sister Minnie decided she would like to be more involved. Minnie was now a cosmopolitan twenty-seven-year-old who had been living in New York on and off since attending boarding school there. Smart, direct, and sometimes stunningly opinionated—a “tsk” always at the ready—she was a no-nonsense woman except when it came to her hats and her little dogs, which she fussed over like spoiled children. She had strong, handsome features and thick brown hair, which she usually wore pulled back, and both of her parents could see themselves in her face: She had her father’s aquiline nose, her mother’s cherubic cheeks. Unlike Ford, she had managed to escape from Leavenworth and develop a more independent relationship with her parents. Her father had always managed to spend quality time with her when he was in New York, and she would return home periodically to be with her mother, with whom she also sometimes traveled. As her parents grew further apart, she was sometimes their only point of contact.
Minnie had recently married a New Yorker, John Huckel. A tall, fit man with a closely trimmed beard, an eternally arched eyebrow, and a penchant for playful confrontation, Huckel grew up in a well-known Episcopalian clergy family—his father was the longtime rector at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. But, after graduating from Williams College, he chose publishing over the pulpit. He spent several years at Harper & Brothers, the nation’s leading publisher of books and magazines (including Harper’s Weekly and what was then called Harper’s New Monthly Magazine), before becoming assistant publisher of the New York Evening Post.
When Minnie married John Huckel in the fall of 1896, it appeared they would live the charmed lives of New York socialites, “at home” on 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, with summers spent at the seaside resort of Spring Lake, New Jersey, or in Europe. But Minnie grew homesick, in part because of a health crisis that was kept hush-hush. Not long after marrying, she became pregnant with twins, but had an especially difficult miscarriage that left her unable to bear more children. Besides wanting to be closer to her family—especially Ford’s children, Kitty and Freddy, whom she adored as her own—she had also acquired the Harvey fascination with the West. With Ford taking control of their father’s company, she saw an opportunity to relocate closer to home, become involved with the business, and travel as well.
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