Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  NO MATTER HOW FAR and wide the Harvey System spread, its heart and soul were still in Kansas City. Ford had managers in each Fred Harvey location, regional offices in New Mexico, California, and Texas, and a band of roving inspectors and auditors, but the entire business was still run by his Tenth Legion from their growing suite of low-profile offices on the second floor of the Kansas City Union Depot annex building. While the Harvey family saw the Southwest more and more as their home away from home, Kansas City was where they, and the company, lived.

  In fact, Ford and Judy Harvey had become major players in the growth of the former “City of Kansas,” which was starting to fulfill its dreams of being the next Chicago—the second city’s second city. When they moved there as newlyweds back in the late 1880s, it had about sixty thousand residents and was just beginning to develop a distinctive brand of Midwestern urban life. But Kansas City was now one of the twenty-five largest cities in America. It had a population of over 165,000, and it was growing rapidly under the tough-love political leadership of city councilman James Pendergast, whose family concrete company went on to control new construction for decades.

  Ford and Judy Harvey had been part of Kansas City’s young social set in the Quality Hill neighborhood and were founding members of the Kansas City Country Club. Now that their children were older—Kitty was eleven, Freddy, eight—and business was flourishing, they moved to the wealthy neighborhood near Hyde Park. They bought the spacious house at 3617 Robert Gillham Road that the late architect Henry Van Brunt, a protégé of Frank Furness’s, had designed for his own family. Ford became increasingly active in the civic life of Kansas City, and his wife was a rising star of the social scene, known for her good works, great parties, and ambitious family travels.

  The Harveys were especially involved with Catholic charity work. While Ford was still technically Episcopalian—although, lately, most of his religious experiences involved his awe at God’s handiwork in the Southwest—Judy remained a devout Catholic. She had followed through on her promise to raise the children in her faith, and was deeply involved in Catholic social causes. Ford was fully supportive of the charity work she did, and gave generously, though always with characteristic discretion.

  In a very cozy arrangement, Minnie and John Huckel would soon buy a house down the street from Ford and Judy’s new home, so the Kansas City Harveys were together often—and had frequent visits from their mother and sisters, who took the train down from nearby Leavenworth. Dave Benjamin and his wife, Linnie, also bought nearby on Gillham Road.

  So, Ford and the leaders of his Tenth Legion grew closer personally as well as professionally. And those who succeeded in the Fred Harvey Service understood the need to accept a similarly blurred line between work and private life. As one national magazine writer said of Ford, “His employees who do their work well are his friends.”

  The way they lived mirrored the way their employees lived, in more than seventy different outposts connecting more than half of America: from Chicago west into Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona to California, and from Chicago south to St. Louis and into Arkansas and Oklahoma, all the way down through Texas. In each city and town, whether there was just a lunchroom and newsstand or a new hotel with a staff of fifty or sixty, being in the Harvey Service meant living and working in close quarters with intense commitment. Fred Harvey people lived as if they were on small military bases where the strategies and tactics of hospitality were taken every bit as seriously as those of combat. As in all military operations, there were a large number of young, ambitious people looking to improve themselves during a short term of duty, a handful of lifers who had stayed on to be promoted up the ranks, and a townful of people who had gotten their discharge from the Harvey Service (honorably or not) and decided to make their homes where they were last posted. So they still came to eat in their old restaurants and participated in the social lives of the Harvey Houses like veterans: There were regular dances, plays, baseball games, sing-alongs, weddings, baby showers. The culture of Harvey people was so intense that they were given their own section in the Santa Fe railroad employee magazine, because they communicated in a language all their own.

  TO KEEP IN TOUCH with his nearly seven thousand employees, and remind them—and himself—of the importance of their work, their loyalty, their integrity, and their ingenuity, Ford would sometimes dictate long conversational memos to be copied and circulated throughout the system. He also sent around copies of speeches he gave to trade groups about the company’s successes and challenges, as well as typewritten versions of any newspaper articles mentioning Fred Harvey service.

  While his father had primarily communicated through actions, Ford was learning the power of words. And he was using them to explain a business ethos that was adapted from his father’s ideas and informed his own contemporary experience.

  Ford could make an entire sermon out of an order of pompano.

  [We] instruct our people always to give the customer the benefit of the doubt—which goes a step further, I think, than simply assuming that the customer is always right. It is not always so simple to satisfy a customer, even by giving the customer the benefit of the doubt. He may be wrong—and while we must satisfy him, if we leave him under the impression that he is right he may carry away a harmful impression.

  We serve a good deal of pompano, for example, a highly flavored fish. Those who like it cherish this flavor. But, unfortunately for us, the customer who orders it may not know it. And then the chances are excellent that he calls the dining-car steward or the restaurant manager and complains that his fish is spoiled. Our man knows exactly what is up, of course. He knows further that his first job is to suggest some other dish which will suit the customer. But next comes the dilemma. Shall he, by keeping still, admit that his place is serving bad fish, and thus shake the customer’s confidence in us? Or shall he offend the customer mortally by pointing out that the customer knows nothing about fish, else he would recognize the pompano as excellent?

  It is a situation which calls for big-caliber diplomacy. About the only way out is for our men to pay extra attention to the customer throughout the rest of the meal, get the conversation around to fish and their peculiarities of flavor, and then—without letting the customer suspect he is doing so by intention—plant the idea that by reason of its unusual high flavor pompano is often unjustly suspected of taint. Such a job requires consummate tact. If we were able to score a bull’s eye 50% of the time, the State Department would recruit ambassadors exclusively from our employ!

  Through his talks and writing, Ford was developing a running list of rules for businessmen—an unconscious update of those that Fred used to carry around glued to the front of his wallet when Ford was a baby, which was equally illuminating:

  Never buy a cheap thing: Everything you buy, you in turn sell. If you buy the best, your customer gets the best.

  The best price is always the fair price: You may be the first on the market in the morning, but the buyer who is always seeking his supplies at a price under the market will fail to secure preferential consideration.

  Concentrate your business in as few hands as possible: When you have formed the right associations, “stick” unless convinced your confidence is misplaced, and in that case be careful to see that you hitch up right the next time.

  Loyalty is double barreled—if you want it, you must be loyal.

  Plow your profits under: At every point, our growth has been clearly in proportion to our willingness to be moderate in our immediate profit-taking for the sake of the fullest possible satisfaction of the customer. We have not always been so moderate as we might, but always we have paid more for the fun than it was worth. Now, anything above the normal in profits in any section of the business is taken at once as a danger signal and calls for investigation. Generally, we have found, it means that somebody has been cutting costs for a profit showing—without enough regard for profits in the long run.

  Be committed
to complete customer satisfaction: In every venture from the Topeka lunchroom on down, we have been assailed and assailed again with the most plausible reasons for doing things less well. Sticking to our commitment in spite of all sorts of inducements to depart from it has really counted for us.

  Hold constantly to a level of theoretical perfection: Of course we are not unfailingly successful in having our policies carried out. Of course some of our people fail to hold to our standards, some more often than others. But trying to attain perfection creates a process of natural selection that helps management with its purpose. If, unthinkably I should direct our meat buyer to purchase second grade beef hereafter, I honestly believe that he would disregard the order. It is the same with all of our department heads and our buyers. Any one of our responsible executives under such circumstances would simply conclude that I had said something that I really did not mean, or that I had suffered a temporary aberration from which I would soon recover.

  Catch employees young, or at least fairly inexperienced in your kind of business. We find we have a better chance with them that way than if we get them already trained by someone else.

  Always promote from within your own ranks: We are firm about this. And it is not without a good deal of regret that we sometimes pass up the opportunity to add to our staff a particularly competent individual who has proved himself elsewhere. Our people recognize the opportunities that come to them because we will not hire a man for a responsible job if we can possibly fill it from within.

  Gradually and steadily expand, so that we may make opportunities for the competent youngster who comes up from the ranks. If we did not expand, they might leave us.

  Always please the cranks: Anything which suits a finicky customer is bound to be more than satisfactory to the great run of folks who take what is handed them without complaint. The unreasonable customer, by setting the standards to which we hold, has insured our pleasing the reasonable customers who would be satisfied with less. And the finicky customer is by disposition a talker. Take away any grounds for complaint, deprive him of his grievances, and he goes about the world praising you just as ardently as he would otherwise decry you.

  Never take yourself too damn seriously.

  CHAPTER 24

  ON THE VERY BRINK OF THE DIZZY GULF

  BUILDING A NEW LUXURY HOTEL AT THE GRAND CANYON, SOME sixty miles from a dependable source of fresh water, was, predictably, a nightmare. The new hotel finally had a name: El Tovar, after Don Pedro de Tovar, the Spanish conquistador who first told his boss, explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, about this natural wonder, leading to its “discovery” by white men in 1540. (They considered a Coronado-related name, but all the good ones were already taken—the most prominent being the popular Hotel del Coronado beachfront resort in San Diego.)

  Construction on the building immediately fell way behind schedule, and Ford was getting nervous. He was accustomed to delays—after all, he worked with the trains, so his life was all about delays and feeding people who were famished and cranky because of them. But the El Tovar delays were different. This was not another trackside hostelry in the middle of the desert or the prairie. This was the Ritz of the Divine Abyss, a monument to the new American pastime of “sightseeing” and a project whose progress the president of the United States, and the entire nation, were watching.

  There was also competition. The Northern Pacific had decided to build a similarly grand hotel in Yellowstone. Conceding canyon bragging rights, they were naming it after their geyser, the Old Faithful Inn.

  But for Ford, El Tovar had greater personal significance: It was the Montezuma all over again. He never forgot what that hotel had done to his father, to their family. He was fifteen years old when Fred had basically left them for months at a time. Looking back, Ford could now see that the Montezuma made Fred Harvey professionally but injured him physically and psychologically. He was never the same after that—never truly well, only “better” or “worse.”

  And while nobody liked to say it out loud, the Montezuma had been Fred Harvey’s most colossal failure. In its third incarnation, the resort hotel had lost so much money that the railroad was probably wishing it would burn down again, since nobody would buy it. Most recently, the Santa Fe had attempted to capitalize on its friendship with the president to help convince the U.S. Army to accept the Montezuma as a gift, a fine mountainside convalescent home for soldiers. But the government wouldn’t even take it for free.

  Fred Harvey’s business had recovered from the Montezuma because the disappointment had occurred early in his relationship with the Santa Fe, when they were still getting to know each other. But Ford was not so sure his partnership with the nation’s largest railroad system could survive anything less than resounding success with El Tovar.

  IN THE MIDST of these pressures, Herman Schweizer and the Huckels got some thrilling news. Because of the success of the Indian Building in Albuquerque, the territory of New Mexico was asking the Fred Harvey Indian Department to create its exhibit for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis. In less than two years, their little trackside museum had gained so much credibility that it was worthy enough to compete with the Smithsonian Institution and the other major museums of the world.

  While their original big-name anthropologist had returned to the Field Museum in Chicago, he was replaced by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hopi Indians, Henry Voth, who had spent ten years on the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona. As a Mennonite missionary, Voth had converted only six Indians to Christianity over an entire decade, but in the process he had been able to painstakingly document Hopi life and culture. While his methods were controversial—he photographed Hopi rites against the tribe’s wishes—Voth was clearly the tribe’s premier ethnographer. He had also amassed perhaps the world’s greatest collection of Hopi art and artifacts, which had never been publicly displayed. They became the cornerstone of the Fred Harvey–New Mexico exhibit at the exposition.

  There were dozens of elaborate Indian displays at the St. Louis world’s fair, ranging from complete recreations of Pueblo cliff dwellings to the tragic image of the infamous Apache chief Geronimo, a federal prisoner for eighteen years, sitting in a booth “whittling bows and arrows and selling his autographs for 10 cents each.” Almost anywhere visitors walked, but especially down the fair’s midway, “The Pike” (which is where the phrase “coming down the pike” originated), they would encounter native peoples in full regalia. There were daily snake dances and other slices of “living history,” interspersed with more modern displays such as Marconi’s new wireless telegraph technology, an early motion picture theater, the latest in automobiles, and the debuts of a “health drink” called Dr Pepper, as well as baked cones for eating ice cream.

  While the Fred Harvey exhibit in room 111 of the Anthropology Building didn’t attract quite as much attention as snake dances and ice-cream cones, it did win a number of prestigious jury awards: a grand prize for “best ethnological exhibit,” another grand prize for “best aboriginal blanketry and basketry,” and two gold medals. For a little museum run by a private company, it was a tremendous honor—not to mention great publicity.

  In ethnology-crazed America, Fred Harvey was becoming the first name in the buying of Indian art and crafts. Word spread that any serious collector needed to make the pilgrimage to Albuquerque and talk to Herman Schweizer.

  One of his most insatiable customers was William Randolph Hearst, who was hooked after seeing a Fred Harvey promotional display of Navajo blankets at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago. Hearst, who was by then a congressman from New York as well as the owner of several powerful newspapers, insisted on buying several choice items right off the display—at a healthy discount. He became a regular at the Indian Building, since he often traveled on the Santa Fe express to and from California, but then he began writing or wiring Schweizer whenever the collecting spirit moved him, demanding that a selection of the finest items either be sh
ipped to him immediately in California or be made available for perusal in his Pullman compartment so he didn’t have to leave the train.

  Hearst and “My Dear Mr. Schweizer,” as he called him, developed a curious relationship. Not exactly friends, or even fellow collectors sharing the excitement of rare finds, they were more like a drug dealer and his richest addict, both respecting and detesting their mutual dependency. Schweizer understood Hearst in a way few did, in part because he often had to interact with Hearst’s mother, who traveled with the publisher and shared his fascination with Indian art.

  Before Christmas one year, Hearst and “the bald-headed man” had a big argument over some items that Mrs. Hearst had tried to buy during a visit to Albuquerque. When offered her son’s usual 10 percent discount, she decided she could do better, and instead made Schweizer an absurdly low “offer for the lot”—$2,500 ($62,400) for seven fine blankets, a piece of Spanish tapestry, and a rare Acoma wedding dress.

  Schweizer stunned her with a word she was unaccustomed to hearing: “No.”

  Hearst fired off an angry letter. In his three-page response, Schweizer did his best to pacify him, even enclosing an unusual silver Navajo ring as a peace offering. Hearst liked the ring, but still insisted Schweizer ship him all the items his mother coveted—at a big discount—and audaciously asked him to include a sampler of new blankets as well. In exchange, he claimed he would buy enough pieces to make it worth Schweizer’s while, but also offered to sweeten the deal:

  “If a little article in the newspapers any time would be of value,” he wrote, “let me know on what lines you would like it prepared and I will see that it is inserted.”

  The stubborn pair continued negotiating through several more impassioned letters, before Schweizer made one final offer—which also provided an interesting insight into his way of doing business. He stuck to his guns and refused to give Hearst the discount his mother wanted—yet at the same time he sent an extra blanket as a personal gift, assuring them it was worth more than what they had hoped to save. The deal was made.