Ford was looking forward to sharing some of those expansive afternoon chats. He had recently bought a splendid family vacation home in Montecito, several miles from the Ripley estate. It was called Arequipa, a ten-acre property with elaborate gardens that had been built in 1899 as a wedding gift for a prominent local couple. Its name—invoking a city in Peru—meant “yes, here” or “here, rest” in the South American native language Quechua.
Unfortunately, Ripley did not live to see the government return his beloved railroad to the company he had led for over twenty years, or to have those expansive chats with Ford. On a Wednesday afternoon in early February 1920, he rose after a light lunch and told his wife and daughter he was retiring to his bedroom for “a short siesta.” Only minutes later, his daughter checked in on him and discovered that he was not breathing.
One of the biggest hearts in American industry had finally given out. And Ford Harvey had lost his closest friend and mentor in the railroad business.
CHAPTER 29
SOROPTIMISTAS
KANSAS CITY WASN’T EXACTLY AS FREDDY HAD LEFT IT. For one thing, his high-society mother and sister now had … jobs. Actually, they had started their own little restaurant, the Tip Top Cafeteria. While doing volunteer work for the Red Cross during the war, Judy Harvey and her daughter, Kitty, had marveled at the growing number of working women in Kansas City and were upset that there was no place for them to get an inexpensive lunch. They decided it was time for the Harvey women to open their own eatery. To get it started, they asked each of their society friends to donate $60 ($747) and agree to prepare some of the food themselves in their own home kitchens—perhaps with a little help from their full-time cooks.
The ladies commandeered a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Altman Building (named for the grandfather of director Robert Altman, who was a successful Kansas City entrepreneur). The building was well-known in the financial district because businessmen frequented the Turkish baths in its basement and ladies loved its five stories of retail stores. On the sixth floor, the society women set up a lunchroom and a separate reading area, with books brought over from the Catholic Free Library, their partner in the project.
Society columnist Betty Ann covered the opening of Judy and Kitty Harvey’s Tip Top Cafeteria as though it were bigger news than the peace talks in Versailles:
Never in their wildest expectations did the women engineering the Tip Top Cafeteria expect to serve the crowd, the mob, the riot which swamped them when they opened the door … It is odd the magic there is in a society woman’s name. Had Mrs. Ford Harvey been some struggling, dependent soul trying to earn a living by serving meals to the hungry at moderate price, I’d wager a chicken ranch she would have gone broke. What was the actual result? Mrs. Harvey had so many pie-eaters and sandwich fiends pushing, crowding, scrambling to get inside this little food shop … that it looked like bargain day at the handkerchief counter.
Mrs. Robert Keith, with her cheeks as pink as roses, was behind the counter handing out ham sandwiches which were made, in plain sight, by Mrs. Harry Seavy. Mrs. Leo Stewart waited on the trade, as if she had never done anything else …
When the crowd became so great that clean dishes were at a premium … Mrs. J. C. Firth and Mrs. Francis Drage—honestly, they are the best-looking women—turned their hands into the dish pan and washed while [Kitty] Harvey and Mrs. Herman Brumback wiped. Mrs. Ford Harvey was on the floor most of the time and over it all presided.
The opening of the Tip Top also made the front page of the Kansas City Star, which was stunned by the image of society women “emptying garbage at a public cafeteria” and being ordered about by commoners, who got their attention by calling out, “Say girlie, bring me a fork, will you?”
While the Tip Top was an immediate hit, serving over two hundred working women a day, the ladies didn’t have the slightest idea how to run a restaurant, and neither did the Catholic Library Association. After a week or so, Judy reluctantly asked Ford—who was one of the only men in town who patronized the Tip Top—to have Harvey chefs help her with the project. For this, he was lavished with praise by Betty Ann, who noted “the newspapers never get hold of the thousand and one contributions [Ford] makes to countless charities and indigent people, helpless mothers of little children, stranded men, erring girls, wayward youths and all the rest of the unfortunate; his heart never turns against them.”
While the Harvey chefs made most of the food, the society women all continued working one lunch a week, bringing in homemade desserts and waiting on tables for “the girls employed.”
The ladies of Kansas City loved being Harvey Girls for a day.
AS FOR THE CAREER Harvey Girls, they were flourishing in postwar America. Train service was getting back to normal, as was life in the Harvey restaurants and hotels. But the ranks of the Harvey Girls had been dangerously depleted by marriages to returning soldiers: Of the two thousand Harvey Girls employed in 1918, twelve hundred had reportedly quit since the war ended to become brides. So the company had to hire and train an army of new waitresses. And “Miss Steele,” the woman who interviewed and chose new girls for the company, became something of a celebrity.
Alice Steele was a Kansas farm girl who had come to Fred Harvey as a file clerk in 1910 and worked her way up in the employment department until she became known as “the woman who hires the Harvey Girls.” Unmarried, in her early thirties, and living with her niece—still “a girl herself,” noted one story about her—she was a serious-minded woman with kind eyes, short black hair, and a photographic memory of everyone she met.
Being head of personnel for the entire Fred Harvey company was a remarkably important executive position for a woman. In fact, “Miss Steele” and “Miss Mary Colter” were among the highest-ranking women in corporate America. Steele’s position made her a queen bee and role model for working women from all around the country who flocked to the office at Union Station in Kansas City—or to Chicago, when she held interviews there at the satellite Fred Harvey office—to get a chance at a good-paying job, travel, and chaperoned adventure. She was a combination of model agent, women’s college recruiter, and pop sociologist, and nobody in the country better understood the experience of America’s new working women.
Alice Steele embodied the cresting idea of “soroptimism”—knowing what was “best for women”—as Soroptimist Clubs began springing up all over the United States and Europe in the 1920s to support working women. It was no surprise when Steele became a charter member and a national leader in the Soroptimist movement, helping to recast the image of Harvey Girls for modern times. For thirty years they had been viewed as the most fetching, efficient, and available of young women. “The girls at a Fred Harvey Place never look dowdy, frowsy, tired, slipshod or overworked,” raved one nationally known writer. “They are expecting you—clean collars, clean aprons, hands and faces washed, nails manicured. There they are! Bright, fresh, healthy and expectant—Extra Choice!”
But now the newspapers were calling them “the smartest girls in the world.”
Some of their stories were still laden with backhanded compliments, but they did show the changing appreciation for the role of working women nonetheless. “Today’s girl is ‘glorifying’ her job,” the Kansas City Journal rhapsodized in a profile of Steele. “The modern girl is less superficial and frivolous, has a deeper sense of responsibility, has more self-reliance and is surer and clearer in her thinking than the first women to invade the field long monopolized by men.”
Steele explained that “when a woman comes to me applying for work, I never talk to her from [an] executive pedestal, but as one woman to another. I try to get an understanding of the outside conditions surrounding the applicant’s life, so that if she enters our employ I can be more help to her in the future.”
This allowed Steele to choose a perfect rookie assignment after a Harvey Girl finished her one-month unpaid training—or quickly make a change if she had guessed wrong. “A girl who is lonely in Ch
icago, for instance, and not at her best, may give ideal service in a little town where she soon makes friends with everybody,” she noted. But others couldn’t wait to get out of those little desert towns and work in larger cities—or at the Grand Canyon, which for many was the dream posting.
“We have many girls who are actuated by wanderlust,” Steele said. “Sometimes girls realize that life in a stuffy office is not living at all.”
It was, of course, hard to make more modern Harvey Girls follow the old company rules, such as the 11:00 p.m. curfew and the prohibition against dating fellow employees—especially in those cities where the women no longer lived exclusively in dormitories, but were also put up in rooms the company rented from private home owners. In time, Miss Steele started hearing more and more stories about Harvey Girls hiding relationships, and realized she would have to overlook such indiscretions by otherwise dependable, loyal employees—such as Joanne Stinelichner.
At the age of twenty-two, Joanne had emigrated from Germany during the war; she was living in Milwaukee taking classes to learn English when she and two friends, a beautician and a schoolteacher, went to Chicago for Harvey Girl interviews. “I was dressed real nice,” she recalled, “with rosy cheeks and nice hair.” They were all hired, but Joanne was the only one who stayed with the company, finishing her English education in the immersion course of working as a Harvey Girl in Hutchinson, Kansas.
She was later transferred to the Fred Harvey hotel in Syracuse, Kansas, where she fell for the chef, John Thompson. Luckily, both were friends of the night watchman at the Harvey Girl dorm, who never reported their late-night meetings to the manager. And when they decided to marry, Fred Harvey didn’t want to lose them, so the ceremony was held in the manager’s apartment, and they were allowed to live together. They were then transferred to the Harvey House in Waynoka, Oklahoma, where they soon had something else to keep secret from management: Joanne was pregnant. She kept it quiet in Waynoka and at their next posting in Galveston, but by the time they were transferred to Emporia, Kansas, some of her fellow Harvey Girls had figured it out.
“I worked up to the end of the ninth month,” she recalled. “I was on the floor in Emporia, Kansas, when my water broke!” After giving birth, she continued working for Fred Harvey for years, her daughter, Helen, growing up among dozens of Harvey Girl surrogate mothers.
Joanne’s career was one of many that showed Alice Steele the value of bending the rules. But occasionally, Miss Steele guessed wrong and made disastrous mistakes. The most infamous was Millie Clark, a Harvey Girl who became one of the best-known prostitutes in the Southwest, “Silver City Millie.”
Millie grew up a headstrong orphan in Kansas City, bouncing around in foster homes until she found herself in front of a young local judge by the name of Harry S. Truman, who had just gotten into politics. (Like many local politicos, he was a regular at the Fred Harvey lunchroom in Union Station.) Judge Truman sent her to live with a Greek family who knew Alice Steele. Worldly beyond her years, fourteen-year-old Millie fooled Miss Steele into believing she was sixteen, the minimum age for Harvey Girls. She was desperate for the job, which would allow her to go west with her sister, Florence, who had tuberculosis.
Millie and Florence ended up in Deming, New Mexico, among the most dreaded first postings for Harvey Girls. It was one of the few original Fred Harvey locations that had never really flourished, remaining a desolate desert outpost. But there was still a small Harvey hotel there, primarily for railroaders, cowboys, and rookie Harvey Girls, who never forgot the large sign hanging over the door from the kitchen to the dining room. “Water, Butter, Ice,” it read, reminding them to make sure that every customer had a full glass of ice water and three pats of butter at all times. And each pat of butter had to have a fork mark visible on the top, so no patron would fear it had been put on the plate with someone’s dirty fingers.
Millie initially did well there. Since most of her salary went to pay for the nearby sanitarium that was caring for her sister, she quickly figured out how to use her charms, and her rapidly developing body, to get bigger tips. Flashing her toothsome smile, batting her wide blue eyes, she made a big production out of buttering a gentleman’s toast, or putting cream or sugar in his coffee, asking him suggestively: “Is that enough?”
After six months at Deming, Millie received the standard Harvey Girl one-week leave and a train pass to the destination of her choice. She took her sister to El Paso, to another sanitarium, and soon decided to quit being a Harvey Girl. Her recommendation from the Harvey House helped her find work in El Paso, but as her sister’s health-care costs skyrocketed, Millie couldn’t make ends meet working two full-time jobs. So she started turning a few tricks on the side, eventually deciding to make it a career, first in El Paso and then in Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she worked in the well-known whorehouse of Madam Jenny. Eventually, she set up her own place in a nearby mining town, where she became known as “Silver City Millie,” the infamous Harvey Girl turned madam.
THE MOST THOROUGHLY modern woman in the Harvey family was Kitty, Ford and Judy’s daughter, who at the age of thirty was still fiercely single. In fact, the gossip columns had long since stopped speculating about her marital prospects, even though she had once been considered the most eligible young woman in Kansas City.
Almost everything else about the handsome, athletic socialite, arts enthusiast, nationally ranked golfer, and world traveler made the papers. There were her social engagements and good works in Kansas City, where she still lived with her parents and got good reviews for her appearances in local theater productions. There were her many sojourns to Chicago and New York, where she visited family and society friends, who would then join her on adventures of all kinds: anything from weekend excursions to the Kentucky Derby or the Hamptons to grand expeditions all through Europe. There were her frequent train trips to California, where she spent months at a time entertaining at Arequipa, the family’s getaway home in Montecito.
And then there were Kitty’s glorious journeys through the Southwest, where she was high society’s most fearless, engaging, and witty tour guide, organizing groups to visit Santa Fe, Taos, and the nearby pueblos, or take rugged trips down into the Grand Canyon. She and her younger brother had been traveling in the Southwest since childhood—sometimes with their parents, sometimes by themselves, watched over by Harvey House managers and Santa Fe train conductors. They became extraordinarily close—in almost every photo of them, they seem to be sharing a private joke—and the Southwest was like their private paradise.
It was out west that Kitty Harvey seemed to feel most free, most like herself. In the city, she was always impeccably garbed in the latest silk dresses, elaborate hats, and darling shoes—much like her mother and Aunt Minnie, for whom she had great affection. But when hiking and camping in the Southwest, she wore a man’s hat, jodhpurs, and boots, and a man’s white shirt and tie. And she invariably traveled with an unmarried female companion.
There were plenty of single women in the Fred Harvey service who appeared to be of ambiguous sexuality—never married, rarely associated with men socially, just focused on working hard and taking care of their parents or siblings. Mary Colter was the best known of these women, and though she eventually became a feminist icon and, many presumed, a gay heroine, none of her biographers—including one who is gay himself—felt there was enough evidence to support such speculation.
Kitty Harvey, on the other hand, had such a clarity about her sexuality that most people had stopped pretending. The guessing ceased not long after her Kansas City debutante class decided to put on an evening of “Living Reproductions of Famous Paintings” as a fund-raiser for the Women’s Guild of St. Paul’s Church. One after another, her very eligible peers appeared dressed in Victorian fineries, recreating portraits of lovely ladies ranging from “Miss Innocence” (posed holding a lamb) and “the Countess of Oxford” to Marie Antoinette.
Then the curtain opened, and there was Kitty Harvey, dressed as J
oan of Arc, in full armor, brandishing a sword.
“Whether it was acting or that the character simply suited her,” the Kansas City Star reported, “everyone agreed” it was an “inspired” choice. “Miss Harvey has a slight yet determined kind of figure and her face took just the expression one imagines on the Maid of Orleans as she listened to the message of St. Michael.”
Kitty had two close female friends, both from prominent families, who were also resolutely unmarried. One was Harriet McLaughlin, the Chicago coffee heiress. Her grandfather was a coffee and tea importer whose company became known nationwide for McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee. Harriet’s father, George, was president of Manor House—which was renowned in Chicago not only for its coffee but its advertising (the company sponsored local radio and, later, TV shows). And her uncle Frederic was a World War I hero who led the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion of the 86th “Blackhawk” Infantry Division. An avid sportsman and polo player, he went on to spend much of his inheritance buying the hockey team in Portland, Oregon, and moving it to Chicago. He renamed the team the Blackhawks and went down in hockey history.
Kitty’s other close friend was Mary Russell Perkins, whose father was one of the nation’s great early railroad executives. In fact, Charles Perkins was vice president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad during the 1870s, when Fred Harvey himself worked for the road. It was one of Perkins’s managers who had turned down the young Englishman’s idea for revolutionizing railroad eating houses, sending him off to make a deal with the Santa Fe. Mary’s older brother was a Harvard-educated polo star who also became a major railroad executive.
Appetite for America Page 31