Fred Harvey had no appreciable debt. Ford had favorable long-term contracts with the nation’s largest railroad, major union stations, and the U.S. government, and owned arguably the most recognizable, beloved, and marketable name in the hospitality industry.
“How large can such a business grow?” Ford asked, in a mission statement he sent out to every one of his seven thousand employees. “Is it possible to keep on expanding indefinitely a business where everything centers around goodwill, and where the goodwill itself is dependent upon doing each component part of the job in a way which is considerably above the average of generally accepted standards? … Frankly, we do not know.”
But he was anxious to find out.
CHAPTER 34
FORD HARVEY HAS A COLD
ON A CHILLY FRIDAY IN EARLY DECEMBER, THE WORD PASSED from desk to desk through the bustling offices on the second floor of Kansas City Union Station:
“Ford Harvey has a cold.”
His nose was stuffy, and he felt a bit feverish as he sat at his desk in the elaborately wood-paneled corner office. As he kept feeling worse, he walked over to the large brass National Regulator Company thermometer mounted on the wall to see if the heat had been turned up too high. But the temperature in the room was fine. He stayed at the office for a meeting about the endlessly delayed construction at La Fonda—for which Indian Detours chief Hunter Clarkson had come all the way from Santa Fe. Then he headed home and went to bed.
An influenza epidemic had been sweeping the West for weeks. While the flu of 1928 didn’t appear to be deadly, like the 1918 pandemic, it spread almost as quickly and in an unusual way. It was one of the first flus to ever begin in California and move west to east across the entire country.
The first outbreaks were reported in November in San Francisco, where Ford’s colleague William McAdoo, the former Treasury secretary who had run the railroads during the war, was an early victim. Senator Hiram Johnson of California was also stricken, unable to even get out of bed to vote in the presidential election. Students at several Bay Area schools and colleges became ill, and many classes were canceled—but sporting events were still played shorthanded, spreading the illness.
The flu traveled to Los Angeles, appearing not long after Stanford played USC. It descended on Hollywood and closed down many movie productions. Buster Keaton, Hoot Gibson, Clara Bow, and Loretta Young were among the first actors reported ill. Almost everyone recovered within a week or two, although there were a handful of deaths when the flu developed into pneumonia. Veteran stage and film character actor Edward Connelly, at sixty-eight the longest-running studio player in Hollywood, who had made over sixty pictures for MGM, died after a brief bout. So did a forty-two-year-old Santa Ana grammar school teacher named Fannie Hasty, who got it from her students before officials closed her school.
The city health officer in Los Angeles announced that he would arrest anyone with the flu who didn’t stay home.
Since Fred Harvey had large operations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, the flu affected the Harvey System rapidly. An early outbreak was reported in Prescott, Arizona, which was on the Santa Fe branch line to Phoenix. The virus also traveled by train along the railroad’s High Iron, as well as the lines of its western competitors, with outbreaks in Idaho and Utah.
By the Friday afternoon that Ford Harvey went home sick—insisting on taking the streetcar, as he always did, instead of a taxi, even though it was freezing outside—the hot zone of the epidemic had reached the dead center of the United States. The army announced a quarantine of Fort Riley in Kansas, not far from the original Fred Harvey eating house in Topeka.
The surgeon general was reporting that while 200,000 Americans had influenza, Kansas and Missouri were currently the hardest hit. He also stressed that this flu was a much “milder variety” than the one that had decimated the country a decade before. It was not a “killer flu,” he insisted. Patients just needed to “go to bed and stay there.”
This was exactly what Ford Harvey did. He hired nurses to take care of him around the clock so he could remain in bed—Inez Meek and Minnie KreienKamp were on duty during the day, with Sylvia Terrell covering the nights—and his physician, Dr. Comingo Griffith, stopped by regularly to see him. And he still felt well enough to make phone calls. He stayed in touch with Dave and John Huckel at the office, spoke to Freddy and Kitty, who were both out at the family home in California, and took calls from Hunter Clarkson as soon as he got back to Santa Fe. When he wasn’t on the phone, Ford listened to the radio: He had just leased a high-tech system, the Majestic “all-electric” radio with the “Dynamic speaker.”
Ford was a sixty-two-year-old man in robust health. He had walked nearly two miles to work every day for years. The local papers, which always covered the health of Harvey family members, reported that he was “progressing satisfactorily.” There was no reason for concern.
But after three days in bed, Ford suddenly became gravely ill, with chest pains and labored breathing. Fearing pneumonia, the doctor sent a sputum sample to Duncan Laboratories in town, so it could be injected into specially bred mice that were being used to test for and “stage” pneumonia. The early stages, Types I and II, were believed to respond to an antigen made of horse blood serum, although the foreign proteins in the treatment were known to make many patients sicker.
Ford was given the horse blood antigen, and an oxygen tent was delivered to the house so he could breathe easier. The Fred Harvey drugstore at Union Station sent over an analgesic balm to spread on his chest, along with eucalyptus oil, to clear his congestion.
On Tuesday, as his condition worsened, several top physicians were summoned—including renowned clinical cardiologist James B. Herrick, arguably the world’s leading expert on coronary artery disease, who was rushed down from Chicago. Ford had apparently consulted with Herrick previously—most likely because the cardiologist was one of the earliest proponents of walking as a way of preventing heart disease. (Herrick was the first to ever diagnose a myocardial infarction in a living patient, and he later went on to co-found the American Heart Association and discover sickle-cell anemia.)
Word of Ford’s deteriorating condition leaked to the press. “Ford Harvey Nears Pneumonia Crisis,” read the headline in the Kansas City Journal. Doctors told the family that his condition was deteriorating. Yet it was still hard for anyone to believe that he might actually be on his deathbed. After all, he had been sick for only six days.
But on the seventh day, Ford’s temperature surged past 103 degrees, and kept rising, no matter how much they tried to cool him with ice. He was delirious, his brain stewing in its own juices.
On the eighth day, at 9:30 in the evening, Ford Harvey died. Dr. Griffith recorded his last body temperature at 108 degrees.
FORD’S DEATH CAME as such a shock, its ramifications for the family and the company so unimaginable, that nobody knew quite what to do. When his funeral began at 2:00 p.m. on Monday, December 17, Fred Harvey employees in over fifty cities and towns across the United States stopped working and remained silent for five minutes to remember their beloved boss. There was no eulogy at the service, and no press release from the company. It was left to a wordsmith who had watched Ford Harvey grow up to say the most poignant goodbye.
Only hours after his death, a telegram arrived from William Allen White.
“I have lost an old friend,” wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, “and the West has lost a commercial leader who is typical of all that the West holds fine: enterprise, imagination, courage, honesty, social vision and an understanding heart. His loss will be felt for years.”
The chairman of Harris Trust, one of Chicago’s largest banks, where Ford had been a board member, called him “the leading citizen of Kansas City … he won his place by a devotion to the finest principles of life in business and in his personal affairs.”
The president of the Santa Fe, William Storey, who had known Ford for twenty-five years, described him as “
a considerate friend, a lovable companion, a gentleman in every sense of the word. I feel a distinct personal loss that cannot be filled.”
In tribute, the Santa Fe employee magazine reprinted one of Ford’s favorite quotations, from Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister of England:
All my life I have believed from my heart in the words of Browning: “All service ranks the same with God.” It makes very little difference whether a man is driving a tramcar, or sweeping streets, or being Prime Minister, if he only brings to that service everything that is in him, and performs it for the sake of mankind …
Four words of one syllable each are words which contain Salvation for this country and for the whole world, and they are: Faith, Hope, Love, Work. Faith in the people; Hope in the Future; Love for our fellowmen; and Work, and Work, and Work.
The magazine also published a painfully somber photo taken the day of the funeral in front of Kansas City Union Station, of Ford’s friends and colleagues from Fred Harvey—members of the Tenth Legion, managers from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, even his old assistant from when he joined the company in the 1880s. Sixty-four men in trench coats, holding their hats and staring stunned at the camera, as if the photographer, instead of asking them to say “cheese,” had just given them the worst news imaginable.
While Ford’s death was a shock and a mystery, when the epidemic finally ended several months later, it was easy to see what had happened. The very week Ford got sick was when the influenza went from being relatively benign—mucusy, achy, and annoying, but survivable—to being lethal. When the Public Health Service later analyzed all the reports from its regional offices, it was clear that the flu had become deadlier and deadlier as the Christmas shopping season progressed. By year’s end, health officials finally declared an all-out war, but without medicinal weapons they could only resort to increased fines for spitting and, in some cities, a ban on kissing and “all forms of petting.”
Many people, including many celebrated patients, survived the illness: among them Charlie Chaplin, Ethel Barrymore, Jackie Coogan, Lon Chaney, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., journalist Ida Tarbell, opera prima donna Ganna Walska, and, at the beginning of baseball season, Babe Ruth.
But more than a hundred thousand Americans did not survive. And unlike previous epidemics, which mostly struck in cities, this one killed in even the most remote territories: More than 10 percent of the entire Indian population of the Northwest was wiped out. The flu of 1928–1929 turned out to be one of the worst influenza outbreaks of the twentieth century, second only to the pandemic of 1918.
THE READING OF FORD’S will was anxiously anticipated, but it was over before it really got started.
“In as few words as ever disposed of an estate of more than a million dollars, the will of Ford F. Harvey … was filed with the probate court today,” said the Kansas City Star. The will, “one of the shortest ever filed,” was only fifteen typewritten lines.
In the months before his illness, Ford had spoken to Dave and others about rewriting his will, because he knew it was woefully inadequate. He had drafted a temporary will after his wife’s death, simply to remove her name from the list of his beneficiaries, but he forgot to update it. So, unlike his father’s will, which laid out an elaborate ten-year plan to preserve the future of the company, the document Ford left consisted of only three short paragraphs, which said little more than that he left his entire estate to his two children, “share and share alike.”
The estate included a large and diverse portfolio of municipal bonds—representing virtually every city on the Santa Fe, as well as others across the country—each worth between $5,000 and $25,000, and all 136 of them valued together at over $1 million ($12.6 million). There was another $75,000 ($943,000) in private mortgages he had given and cash deposits in banks. And then there were Ford’s stocks: some $600,000 ($7.5 million) in blue-chip companies—as well as his large holdings in Fred Harvey. One useful aspect of owning a private firm was the ability to manipulate the price of its private shares. So for estate reasons, Ford’s controlling share of Fred Harvey was computed to be worth an absurdly low $400,000 ($5 million)—even though he had paid $600,000 ($14 million) for it in 1911, and it was now worth at least twice that much. Ford also left two lavish homes—the mansion in Kansas City and the vacation house in Montecito, each filled with art and antiques—and two cars: a 1924 Lincoln and a 1925 Buick.
Kitty and Freddy Harvey had now lost both of their parents in two-and-a-half years. Their first Christmas without them was agonizing. To try to keep Father alive for one more holiday, Freddy arranged for the estate to go ahead and buy the Christmas present Ford had chosen for Kitty the last time he was in New York. It was a bronze statuette group by John Angel, a British sculptor gaining renown in America for his work creating the main figures for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, under construction in upper Manhattan. The piece was called “The Treasure.”
While Kitty and Freddy were close enough to negotiate their way through “sharing” the estate, the future of the company was more complex. From the time his father yanked him out of college at the age of nineteen because of a medical “emergency” that went on for nearly twenty years, Ford Harvey had spent his entire professional life planning for every imaginable possibility. For decades, Ford, Dave, John Huckel, and the executives they trained had maintained an almost maniacal level of preparedness. Even at the local manager level, while employees were never treated as if they were replaceable, they quit often enough that everyone on the staff was constantly being assessed for his or her ability to move up. So it was astonishing that Ford Harvey had not left exacting instructions for his own successor and the company’s future.
Yet his general wishes were clearly known to Dave Benjamin and the Tenth Legion. They knew full well that Ford wanted his son to take over the business. Under no circumstances did he want his brother, Byron, to be put in charge.
Dave was initially offered the presidency of the company, but refused it. “A Harvey should always be the head man of the firm,” he said, according to what he told his daughter, Gertrude, about the offer. But he did make a move to assure that the Harvey-in-charge would not be Byron: Dave sold his own Fred Harvey stock, the only major block not already in family hands, to Freddy.
Since Freddy and Kitty inherited their father’s controlling shares of the eating house and hotel business, and Freddy also inherited Ford’s 99 percent ownership stake in the profitable Harvey subsidiary that ran all the union stations, there was no question that Ford’s children had control of the family business. But Byron wanted Ford’s title and was the oldest male Harvey in the company, so a compromise was worked out.
Byron Harvey was named the new “president” of Fred Harvey, and an official announcement was made of his elevation. However, anyone who did business with the firm could see that this promotion was merely titular. Byron continued to live in Chicago, while the company’s main offices remained in Kansas City Union Station. Ford’s Tenth Legion continued to run the company day to day. While both Byron and Freddy were briefed on various decisions and situations, neither one was ready to lead the way Ford had.
So Byron could be the figurehead president until Freddy was ready to assume his birthright as the next Fred Harvey. After all, the company was in great shape—its next five years of moves already well choreographed by Ford—and the U.S. economy was at its absolute peak. If the Harvey System needed to remain at this cruising altitude for a while, what could possibly go wrong?
CHAPTER 35
FREDDY SPREADS HIS WINGS
AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-THREE, FREDDY HARVEY APPEARED prematurely mature but acted preternaturally young. With his thinning slicked-back hair, pencil mustache, and droopy eyes, he looked like an aging British movie star. Yet he maintained the stamina, taut athleticism, and occasional capriciousness of a man in his twenties, and his very American sense of adventure was growing.
Freddy’s moment had arrived much soone
r than expected. This was supposed to be the year he made his first real impression on the family business by finishing his two pet projects—the new hotel in Santa Fe, the largest in the company’s history, and the nation’s first transcontinental airline. Instead, he and Kitty now basically owned one of America’s largest privately held companies. It would have been daunting had Freddy not been so constitutionally undauntable.
In the months leading up to the summer debuts of La Fonda and Transcontinental Air Transport, Freddy faced two more personal dramas. In mid-March, Mary Colter was nearly killed when the taxi she was riding in crashed headfirst into an oncoming streetcar in downtown Kansas City. She suffered serious back and hip injuries, and her face was badly cut by flying glass. While Colter was in Saint Luke’s Hospital for weeks, it was only a matter of days before she was ordering her secretary, Sadie Rubins, to bring her all the updated plans for La Fonda so she could bark orders—by phone and by wire—to the architects, construction crews, and artisans in New Mexico.
While Colter recuperated, one of Freddy’s closest friends committed suicide at the age of thirty-two. Rogers Crittenden, the never-married son of the former mayor of Kansas City, had been a country-club polo buddy of Freddy’s, a groomsman at his wedding, and a fellow flyer who helped build the first local airfield. But just after turning thirty, Rogers fell into a deep depression, started seeing a psychiatrist, stopped flying, quit his job, and moved back home. When his parents went off to Europe for the winter, two male friends stayed at the Crittenden mansion to keep an eye on him. But on April 12, 1929, just before supper, Rogers was found in his childhood bedroom with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. He left a sealed suicide letter, addressed only to his mother, which said he felt his life had been a failure. Freddy and several of their closest friends served as pallbearers.
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