Landing in New York, they took the Pennsylvania Railroad to Chicago and then transferred to the Santa Fe at Dearborn Station, where there were now Harvey Girls serving meals. In Fred’s absence, his company had taken over the station’s large lunchroom—which was always packed with diners seeking Harvey comfort-food favorites and new signature dishes such as the delicately prepared Finnan Haddie, smoked haddock cooked with milk, cream, butter, and sliced potatoes.
ON MONDAY, MAY 28, 1900, Fred Harvey was brought by horse-drawn carriage to the Olive Street house he’d thought he would never see again. He spent a few peaceful weeks at home, during which he did little other than get up, dress, read, and perhaps take a short walk. In one of the last pictures ever taken of him, he looks comfortably ensconced in a plush chair with long dangling tassels at the bottom, intently reading the morning paper in his sitting room, surrounded by the tasteful paintings and sculptures and objects collected during his travels. His legs are crossed, with the top one cocked slightly; his face is much fuller and his beard almost gray, and he appears if not happy, then at least cozy.
When the weather grew too warm, Fred, Sally, Minnie, and Sybil took a vacation to Mackinac Island, a resort on Lake Huron, between Michigan and the Canadian border, which had become popular with the “railroad rich.” But by summer’s end, Fred’s health had taken yet another bad turn, so instead of returning with his family to Leavenworth, he was moved to Chicago, taking up residence at the lakefront Chicago Beach Hotel along with his doctor, a nurse, and a servant who tended to him round the clock.
He allowed few visitors, just his children and most trusted employees. But the one he most desperately wanted to see was Ford. Ultimately, Ford was the only one who understood him, and the only one he understood. While he loved his other children dearly, they were children of privilege, children of the rich man he had become. Only Ford knew him way back when, and only Ford knew him now.
After Ford’s initial visit, Fred wrote that it was “the first moment that I have felt anything like myself.” Ford then sent his father a very moving letter, to which Fred quickly replied, “Your words and actions are always so tender that I cannot express to you what pleasure they give me. It is hard for others to appreciate my feelings. When I know there is nothing but constant pain and misery before me, your own health causes me more care than anything I know of.”
While he was eager to see Ford again, Fred seemed ambivalent about a visit from his wife. “If you can impress upon her that I cannot stand the slightest worry or crossing, I would be glad to have her come up,” Fred wrote to Ford. “I appreciate at times I can be unreasonable, but the agony that I am in makes me for the time not responsible. It does seem that after forty years she ought to be able to bear with me [for] another. But I can only repeat as I have so many times that to the best of my ability I have never failed to do my duty to my wife and children to the fullest extent. I constantly pray that the Almighty will give you all health and protect you from all evil.”
JUST AFTER RETURNING HOME, Fred instructed his son to make certain discreet financial moves so the family might escape some taxes when he died. There was now a national income tax, and the federal government had recently levied a new estate tax to pay for the Spanish-American War, which took up to 15 percent of estates valued at over $1 million.
Fred decided he and his wife would make spontaneous, tax-evading “gifts” to the children, giving each of them $50,000 ($1.32 million). Since he didn’t have easy access to $250,000 in currency, he gifted family members with stocks, bonds, even personal promissory notes, including several from loans he had made to some of Kansas City’s wealthiest men when they were short on cash. Minnie was given two $25,000 notes from Charles W. Armour, a partner in one of the country’s largest meatpacking plants and a contemporary of Ford and Dave’s. Armour had borrowed the money from Fred over a four-week period.
Yet such moments of levelheadedness and estate planning on Fred’s part would often be interrupted by well-meaning friends and relatives convinced they had found some miracle remedy. One day Ford received an urgent telegram, which his father had sent just before midnight, saying people were telling him to see a Chinese doctor they had heard about as a last-ditch attempt to cure his cancer. Fred wanted to do it, “unless mamma and you object,” he explained.
Ford wired back that he did object, and followed the wire with a long letter explaining why. “The Chinese doctor is not a regular qualified physician,” he wrote, and “it is a very grave question [whether] we can afford to cast aside the best educated brains and the most skilled hands of our own world in return for the advice of one man and that man of an entirely different race with entirely different methods than those in which we have been taught to believe.” Ford also worried that the English physician who had been by Fred’s side for six months might be outraged and quit. He urged his father to wait until he could come up to Chicago so they could discuss this further.
The next day, Ford was golfing at the Kansas City Country Club, when he received another urgent telegram from his father. “Have seen Chinese, am exceedingly anxious that you should come this evening … I feel very much encouraged. Come if possible.”
But the Chinese treatment failed, so they consulted another Chicago doctor, Henry Favill, the family physician of hotelier Potter Palmer, whom Fred had known for years. Fred was heartened when Dr. Favill called him “the most sprightly invalid I have ever seen.”
He felt well enough for a visit from his friend William Strong, who had taken several railroad posts after leaving the Santa Fe and then retired to his family farm in Wisconsin. The two men had carried on an active correspondence, and Fred had sent Ford and Dave to Strong for advice on many occasions. But the old chums hadn’t seen each other much over the past few years, and Strong didn’t know what to expect.
“It was a delightful surprise to see him appear and talk so naturally—so like himself,” Strong wrote to Ford after the meeting. “It was hard, very hard to realize his real condition. It was a most painful thought that I might never again see him. It came to me as I left him … what a friend he had been and what his vacant chair would mean to me. In a business lifetime we meet but few such men, men capable of such loyalty and unselfish friendship. I pray he may live just as long as the pleasures of life exceed the pains of living.”
Strong also wanted Ford to know how much he admired the way he was handling the pressures and emotions involved in caring for an ailing parent: “Your father spoke to me in such a tender manner of his children that it touched me deeply—your faithfulness will have its rewards. It comes daily, I know, in the fact that you are doing your duty with every true purpose of heart as a loyal son. God bless you.”
FACED WITH THE prospect of losing his father, Ford relied on Dave Benjamin’s counsel and support more than ever. They had grown closer over the years, especially after Dave’s wife, Julia, died in her midthirties, not long after giving birth to their third child. He had since married again, but the loss, as well as Fred’s worsening condition, had caused the two men to bond even more, the lines between work and life becoming even blurrier. Now in his early forties, Dave was arguably the most indispensable person in the sprawling Fred Harvey organization.
Which is why Ford was frantic when he disappeared suddenly on a routine business trip to Texas.
On the rainy morning of September 8, 1900, Dave was riding from Houston to the Gulf of Mexico when the train suddenly slowed to a crawl on the bridge over Galveston Bay. The water was frightfully high, with waves lapping just below the tracks, and it took the engine forever to inch across the trembling three-mile span. Once on Galveston Island, the train went only another two miles before it was forced to stop because the tracks were washed away. Eventually, another train came along to fetch them, bringing Dave and his fellow passengers fairly close to the Santa Fe depot, but that train’s engine was also flooded by the rising tide. So they walked through rushing, waist-deep water the rest of the way, the men carry
ing the women and children, until everyone was safe at the station—a four-story Romanesque building with a tall observation tower.
As the water kept rising and the winds gusted up to thirty-five miles an hour, Dave, ever the determined Fred Harvey man, insisted on going back out to keep a business appointment nearby. The client wasn’t there, so Dave optimistically rescheduled for an hour later and went back to the depot to call the Kansas City office. He sat in one of the second-floor offices overlooking the station’s large rectangular main room, waiting for the rain to stop pelting the domed glass ceiling.
But before long, the water rose so high that the bay met the ocean, flooding the Fred Harvey lunchroom and forcing everyone upstairs. It crept higher for several hours, and then, at around 7:00 p.m., the wind began to wail, and the water suddenly rose four feet all at once. They were horrified to see the body of a drowned child among the debris floating through the station.
All communications to Galveston Island were down, so it was nearly twenty-four hours before Ford could get any news at all—and when he did, it didn’t bode well. A train out of Houston, stuck six miles short of Galveston Bay, had reported that the prairie was strewn with hundreds of dead bodies. There was no word from Dave for two days, during which the death toll in Galveston rose to an estimated five thousand.
There was great relief at Fred Harvey headquarters when he finally checked in and let them know he was safe and unhurt. The way he did it was typically Dave. Calm, fearless, and matter-of-fact, he insisted to Ford, and later to reporters who wanted to know about his experience, that he had never been worried or felt he was in any real danger.
WHEN THE WEATHER in Chicago began turning its typical shade of raw, Fred came to Leavenworth to celebrate one last Christmas at home with his family and then headed to Southern California in pursuit of warmth and a new set of doctors. Santa Fe president Ed Ripley arranged for one of his private Pullman cars to pick up Fred, his personal physician, and his son Byron in Kansas City. Their destination was the Castle Green in Pasadena, a trackside resort that had become the winter home for the first generation of American snowbirds. They arrived just after the New Year, and rose petals were still blowing in the streets from the Tournament of Roses Parade.
By this time, California had become a major Fred Harvey state. The company was now managing dining rooms and lunch counters in ten different locations from San Diego and Los Angeles all the way up to San Francisco—which actually had two floating Harvey Houses. Since the Santa Fe didn’t run directly into town—its tracks ended on the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay and passengers ferried over to the city—Ford and Dave opened eateries and newsstands on two ships, the Ocean Wave and the San Pablo, and were about to open a lunch counter and a newsstand in the gorgeous new Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.
Several weeks after Fred’s arrival in Pasadena, the doctors acknowledged there was nothing more to be done. He wanted to die at home, so the railroad arranged for a private Pullman to take him back to Leavenworth. He was now so weak he had to be carried onto the train, and by the time the California Limited began its three-day journey back across Fred Harvey’s America, the staff of every Santa Fe eating house and dining car knew that their leader was barely tethered to life.
The Limited did not make meal stops; it had a Harvey dining car, from which waiters brought chipped ice to moisten Fred’s dry, cracking lips. But at each station where the train stopped to take on passengers, Harvey Girls, chefs, and busboys stood in silence, paying their last respects.
FRED HARVEY’S TRAIN pulled in to Leavenworth, which had just dug out after a huge, drifting snowstorm, on Sunday, February 3, 1901. He and Byron were brought by carriage to the house, where they were joined by the Kansas City Harveys—Ford and Judy and the grandchildren, eight-year-old Kitty and five-year-old Freddy, along with Minnie and John Huckel. Their youngest sister, twenty-one-year-old Sybil, who still lived at home, greeted them at the door. Sally Harvey and their other daughter, May, were on their way home from the hot springs in Arkansas.
Doctors told the family to expect the end at any moment, but Fred periodically regained consciousness. Initially, this was a pleasant surprise. But the longer he was awake, the more he felt the monstrous ache in his gut, and needed more morphine, which made him drift away again.
A few close friends were allowed to see him. Pistol-packing editor Dan Anthony was so moved by his visit that he rushed an emotional article into the Leavenworth Times: “Fred Harvey lies at the point of death at his home … surrounded by family, friends and everything wealth could procure, yet with all this, during the last three years there has never been a moment when Mr. Harvey has been in a condition to look at even the humblest little newsboy or bootblack without a feeling of envy … Since 1898, the man has been doomed … All over the world Mr. Harvey has fled in a vain and fruitless endeavor to escape the clutches of the grim monster, who is no respecter of persons, and whose visit is inevitable.”
In the early afternoon of Saturday, February 9, 1901, Fred died with his family gathered around him. Ford, ever the dutiful son, did what his father would have expected of him. He took a few moments to shed a tear, hug his family, collect his thoughts—and then he called Western Union and started dictating telegrams to everyone who needed to know.
“Father passed away peacefully this afternoon,” he said. “Stop.”
All the pallbearers were longtime employees, led by Dave Benjamin. Fred was buried at Mount Muncie Cemetery, just outside of Leavenworth, in a grave that had to be dug through a five-foot snowdrift. The funeral was the largest in Leavenworth history, and the newspaper tributes across the country were elaborate and moving.
“Fred Harvey … has done more to promulgate good cooking—healthful, substantial, wholesome, digestible cooking … than all the cook books ever published,” wrote William Allen White in his nationally read column in the Emporia Gazette. “Men who have eaten at Fred Harvey’s eating houses have come home and insisted on having their meats broiled, not fried; their roasts roasted, not boiled; their potatoes decently cooked and their biscuits light.
“Fred Harvey was a greater man than if he had been elected to something. The Gazette will hereafter pay more attention to great men out of politics, and less to giving politicians free advertising.”
Fred’s will was made public several days later. It was, as Dan Anthony wrote in the Leavenworth Times, “in many ways … out of the ordinary.” In fact, it was downright peculiar, but in a very modern, managerially brilliant way.
Fred decreed that for the next ten years his heirs should carry on as if he were still alive. During that decade, nothing was to be done to change the operation of his company in any way, and none of his possessions could be sold, split up, or even inventoried. There were no bequests of any kind to his wife or children, no money donated to charity, nothing set aside for his sisters, nieces, or nephews. His wife and family were to stay in their house and keep all the servants on. Ford and Dave were to continue operating the Fred Harvey eating houses and hotels, along with the two Fred Harvey ranches in La Junta, Colorado, and Emporia, Kansas, as if nothing had happened. After ten years, his wife and children would inherit everything, with half going to Sally and the other half divided among Ford and his siblings.
The amount they would eventually be sharing, according to a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times about Fred’s estate, was estimated at $1.2 million ($31.3 million) but was believed “to be greatly in excess of that amount.” There was also a life insurance policy paying his wife and daughters $35,000 ($914,515). But Fred’s main objective was clearly to preserve the status quo. If his children wanted to make more money anytime soon, they were welcome to make it the way he and Ford always had—by working long hours in the family business. The same was true for his employees.
When confronted by Dan Anthony about what the unusual will meant, Ford said its message was clear: “[The business] will be conducted just as it was by my father. The name of Fred Harv
ey will be preserved and the present standard of the business maintained.”
While the family was prohibited from making any changes in their father’s business or home, there was one issue they felt needed to be addressed immediately. In the weeks after the funeral, they decided Fred’s grave site simply would not do. The plot in Mount Muncie Cemetery—section 15, lot 68—was small and too far from the main road. Father would have expected something more prominent and more practical, easier to get to in bad weather.
So, several months after the funeral, Fred Harvey was disinterred. His coffin and headstone were moved to a tree-shaded plot on a hill just inside the main entrance. At the same time, the remains of his two sons Charley and Eddie were dug up from the Greenwood Cemetery across town, where they had lain since 1865. The boys were reburied next to their father.
Only then could Fred Harvey finally rest in peace.
HARVEY GIRL MAKING PERFECT COFFEE AT THE EMPORIA, KANSAS, EATING HOUSE; INSET, FORD HARVEY, AROUND 1910
CHAPTER 21
A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WILDERNESS
NINE MONTHS AFTER HIS FATHER’S DEATH, THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Ford Harvey stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, gazing out over the most stunning vision of America’s past and contemplating the future.
It was the last day of an enlightening and challenging expedition—by train, by stagecoach, on horseback, and on foot—that would mark the turning point in the development of the West and the way Americans view America. Everyone on this trip had been through the Southwest many times on business, but they all had always regarded the long, hot train ride as a journey across the turn-of-the-century equivalent of “the flyover states.” Now, for the first time, they were feeling the soul of the Southwest.
Santa Fe president Ed Ripley and his wife, Frances, had invited his inner circle—Ford Harvey, first vice president Paul Morton, and several other top Santa Fe executives—to join them on a rugged adventure through some of the most beautiful, sacred, and controversial sites in Indian Territory. Their guide was Charles Fletcher Lummis, the self-appointed “Apostle of the Southwest,” a Harvard-educated writer who had been publishing magazines and books about the West for years. A small, weathered man who had lost the use of his left arm after a stroke, Lummis was a brilliant and tireless promoter of Indian causes, of western environmental causes—and of himself.
Appetite for America Page 20