Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Mary Colter finally recovered to the point where she could take the train to Santa Fe and personally shepherd the finishing touches on the new La Fonda—albeit from her wheelchair. The hotel reopened on June 15, 1929, just in time for Indian Detours season.

  Colter designed the exteriors of La Fonda with a rising young local architect, John Gaw Meem, and together they created a combination of Pueblo and Spanish simplicity that brought new clarity to what became the Santa Fe Style. While Meem had designed a few homes using some of these ideas, La Fonda was the new architectural masterpiece of the City Different, a breakthrough in adobe architecture with soft, casually elegant lines interrupted only by windows and the exposed ends of the logs that vaulted all the ceilings. But while the outside was brilliantly simple, making a new building five stories high and a square block wide seem somehow intimate and approachable, the interiors were complex, color saturated, whimsical. Among the more surreal images were the ashtray holders, made of aged-looking iron bent into elongated jackrabbits. In fact, there were many other extraordinary, unexpected touches throughout: eight hundred pieces of handmade furniture; surfaces covered with paintings, murals, mosaics; a huge bouquet of copper pots dangling from a cantina wall. And there were fireplaces everywhere.

  “You may not be able to get all these fireplaces in,” Colter wrote to one of the managers of the La Fonda project, “but Mr. Frederick Harvey and I are crazy about fireplaces and want to have as many as we can!”

  The food in the new La Fonda dining room was also spectacular, with chef Konrad Allgaier—who had cooked for Kaiser Wilhelm and in major European hotels—bringing his classical training to traditional New Mexican cuisine. His specialties included Chicken Lucrecio, a chili-roasted chicken with a garlic and almond gravy, beef empanadas with vanilla sauce, Chiles Rellenos à la Konrad, huevos rancheros, and heavenly fresh sopapillas.

  La Fonda became an instant classic in American architecture and a monument to the kind of aesthetic coziness for which Fred Harvey was famous. Besides being packed with “detourists,” it quickly became the center of life in Santa Fe.

  “You never met anybody anywhere except at the La Fonda,” wrote Ernie Pyle, the popular syndicated newspaper columnist, who lived in New Mexico, “you never took anybody to lunch anywhere else.” French author Simone de Beauvoir would later call La Fonda “the most beautiful hotel in America, perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  WHILE OVERSEEING THE OPENING of La Fonda, Freddy was also in the middle of the national public relations blitz for the upcoming maiden flight of the Lindy Line. The newspapers, radio, and movie-theater newsreels were in a frenzy over the first transcontinental air-rail service, which would speed up life in the United States by shortening the time it took to cross the nation by an entire day.

  Freddy’s role in the publicity assault was to explain the challenging job of choosing food for air travelers with Fred Harvey “dietitians” in the Kansas City test kitchens.

  “Airsickness is mental, to some degree,” he told the Kansas City Star. “But with the plane riding nicely, the whole journey could be spoiled for the passengers by an inappropriate diet on board. The rich heavy foods in which one ordinarily indulges would be disastrous if eaten on an air journey.”

  He took great pains not to say what everyone was thinking—that he was trying to find foods that passengers were less likely to throw up. Given the small planes, unpressurized cabins, and sharp changes in altitude, most passengers were bound to experience some degree of airsickness—the treatment for which, at the time, was sucking on a slice of lemon.

  Part of the reason for the public relations whirl was that TAT was running so far behind schedule that it now had competitors: Several other regional airmail carriers had cobbled together lesser and slower versions of what TAT was promising by partnering with different railroad lines. But none of the competitors had the star power of TAT, which was augmented on May 27, 1929, when Lindbergh wed Anne Morrow—whose father, Dwight, a partner at J. P. Morgan and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, was a major player in aviation, having chaired the presidential commission that initiated the U.S. Army Air Corps. The marriage generated front-page stories around the globe, and was soon followed by the news that TAT had hired Lindbergh’s friend Amelia Earhart, the thirty-one-year-old Kansan who was on her way to becoming the world’s best-known female flyer. Earhart actually had another tie to the company: She had known Freddy Harvey, casually, for years, because she and Frank Baker, his Kansas City polo and partying buddy, had been childhood friends in Atchison.

  Transcontinental Air Transport finally opened for business, simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles, during the July 4th weekend. Freddy flew out to L.A. by himself to attend the festivities at the new TAT air terminal in Glendale, stopping along the way to visit the Grand Canyon.

  He continued on to Los Angeles, and was joined there the next day by Charles and Anne Lindbergh—who had spent the past few days flying into the western cities with TAT airports and enjoying Harvey hospitality at each stop. The Lindberghs were greeted by a crowd of thousands and then whisked away to a private reception held by Freddy and several other TAT officials. Among them was Eugene Vidal, a storied flyer and athlete who had been in the air corps with Freddy but went on to be an all-American quarterback at West Point, an Olympic decathlete, and then West Point’s first aeronautics trainer before joining the nascent aviation industry as TAT’s assistant general manager. The entire group was then driven to the Los Angeles office of California governor C. C. Young, where Lindbergh officially inaugurated the airline on both coasts simultaneously—in a sequence of events that brought to mind the popular syndicated cartoonist Rube Goldberg and the contraptions invented by his mad scientist character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts.

  With a sheepish grin, Lindbergh pushed a button on the desk of the governor’s office, which caused an electrical circuit to close at the local Western Union office, which sent a signal across the country to Pennsylvania Station in New York, where a light then flashed, signaling Amelia Earhart to break a bottle of champagne over the front of a TAT plane on display in the station and then lead her nine fellow passengers onto their special Pullman on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s new “Airway Limited,” which quickly pulled out of the station for its overnight train ride through the Alleghenies and on to Ohio.

  When the train arrived in Columbus the next morning, it was greeted by Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone and a large crowd waiting to see these intrepid first-time cross-country flyers—who were not so much the astronauts of their era as they were the equivalent of the first civilians on the space shuttle. After the requisite hand shaking, speeches, and photographs, the group was escorted by male flight attendants—referred to as “couriers,” like the Fred Harvey guides in the Southwest—to “Aerocars” that whisked them, and their luggage, to the runway.

  The official TAT plane was a Ford Tri-Motor, which had three propellers and was affectionately nicknamed “the Tin Goose” because of its unusually long fuselage and rounded, birdlike tummy. The company had purchased a flock of ten; it also bought or leased airports in ten cities, and hired pilots and crews, along with seventy-two weather forecasters all along the route. Each plane could accommodate ten passengers, five on either side of a narrow aisle, in adjustable cane-backed seats with all the essentials: an individual reading lamp, electric cigar lighter, and ashtray. The windows, draped with brown velvet curtains, could be opened. There were heaters on the floor, but since they were not really powerful enough to combat the drastic changes in temperature, passengers were encouraged to hold on to their overcoats.

  The plane made frequent stops—ostensibly to refuel, but mostly to make passengers feel there were regular safety checks. (Also, anyone too nervous to continue flying could get off and switch to a train.) From Columbus they flew to Indianapolis, landed, and then took off again for St. Louis, where the Fred Harvey lunch was brought on board so it could be served while airborne across Mi
ssouri, on individual aluminum tables with lavender linen tablecloths. The menu was freshly made sandwiches—chicken salad, egg salad, and cheese—along with a pickle, a piece of cake, an apple, a banana, and a choice of coffee or milk.

  The Tin Goose landed in Kansas City and once more in Wichita before the flight ended in tiny Waynoka, Oklahoma. The previously obscure hamlet was now crawling with reporters, who wanted to see Earhart and her fellow passengers dine at the Fred Harvey eating house before boarding their Santa Fe Pullmans for the overnight train ride across Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. In the middle of the night, they passed another Santa Fe train coming in the opposite direction: It was carrying the first group of TAT passengers heading east from California. Since the tracks were so close together, the engineers and crew could actually wave to each other.

  As the sun came up, Earhart’s train pulled in to Clovis, New Mexico, just across the Texas border, midway between Amarillo and Roswell. They had a big breakfast at the Fred Harvey hotel there, the Gran Quivira, before heading for the Clovis airfield, five miles west of town, where two TAT planes awaited them: They had picked up several more passengers along the way.

  The first plane took off without incident. But as the second taxied down the runway, a gust of wind caught one of its wings and threw the plane into a scary spin—which ended only when it skidded across a freshly plowed field and smashed into one of the airport hangars. The hangar windows shattered, sending glass flying. Nobody was hurt, and journalists were later told that the passengers “showed no concern” during the “slight” crash. One can only imagine how they felt as they were marched across the runway to a replacement plane, being assured that this time the takeoff would go smoothly.

  From Clovis they flew across New Mexico to Albuquerque, and then on to Winslow, the most dangerous part of the flight because of the altitude needed to cross the mountains. Couriers handed out chewing gum, as well as cotton balls for passengers to stuff in their ears, but nothing could really prevent the ear popping. TAT executive Eugene Vidal’s son—who grew up to be the controversial author Gore Vidal—was a passenger on one of the company’s flights at the age of four, and would never forget his eardrums bursting and “blood trickling from my tiny lobes.”

  At Winslow, they were greeted by Lindbergh, who was there to personally pilot one of the two planes to California. They made one more stop in Kingman, Arizona, and then flew directly to the Grand Central Air Terminal outside of Los Angeles, where several thousand fans were waiting to be part of the historic moment—along with actress Gloria Swanson, who was just there for the photo op.

  Earhart and her fellow passengers had traversed the United States in a scant forty-eight hours. But unlike previous cross-country speed marks, this one wasn’t an experiment or a one-shot deal: It was to be a regularly scheduled miracle.

  It was a glorious moment, bursting with the promise that, in the words of the TAT commemorative book, “American Aviation Shall Be Surpassingly Useful to Mankind.” The American economy was at its screaming all-time high, and the nation had never before been so prominent economically or socially. While it would be some years before Life magazine publisher, Henry Luce, would proclaim the 1900s as “the American Century,” by 1929 it already felt true—with many of the trends, dynamics, and frictions of that century already in place and in play.

  Nowhere was this more clear than out west, where visitors jammed the Grand Canyon and other Fred Harvey tourist attractions as never before, yearning to “find America” and be part of that grand American experience.

  It was the greatest summer ever in the history of Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe.

  If only Ford had lived to see it.

  CHAPTER 36

  PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT CRASHING SOUND

  AT THE END OF EVERY SUMMER, AMASA MCGAFFEY LEFT HIS home in northern New Mexico to meet a group of friends for an elaborate big-game-hunting expedition. He had traveled by train and more recently by car, but now his kids were urging the rugged fifty-nine-year-old to try the plane, since the two-month-old TAT service was so easily accessible from Albuquerque.

  On the Tuesday after the long Labor Day weekend of 1929, McGaffey boarded the TAT plane City of San Francisco heading west, and met his fellow air passengers—who barely outnumbered the crew. This was not surprising. Much to the disappointment of Freddy and the other owners of TAT, people were more afraid to fly than they had anticipated. So many passengers were asking to get off at the next airport and switch to rails that critics joked that TAT really stood for “Take a Train.”

  Other nervous passengers did what they could to tough it out. The couriers loved to tell the story of the little old lady who got on the TAT plane in Los Angeles and immediately opened a dainty parasol over her head. When asked why, she said, “Young man, I’m shielding myself from God’s wrath for defying the law of gravity.”

  McGaffey’s fellow passengers that day included a shipping company executive from Boston, a paper salesman from Cincinnati, a woman whose husband and father both worked for the airline, and William Henry Beers, the editor-in-chief of Golf Illustrated magazine. Their plane took off from Albuquerque at 10:20 a.m., flying into the kind of passing storm that often makes its way across northern New Mexico, and it was sighted by any number of people cruising over Gallup at around 11:30 a.m.

  But the flight never arrived at Winslow.

  Within a few hours, nearly every plane in the West—private, commercial, army, and navy—was buzzing over the area in search of the missing Ford Tri-Motor with “9649” on its wing. Search parties set out from towns all over New Mexico and Arizona. News of the missing TAT plane spread quickly across the country by radio and newspapers, especially after the airline offered a $5,000 ($63,000) reward for information leading to the discovery of the lost plane, and the parents of the young steward on board immediately offered to double it. By the next morning, more planes had joined the search, and more than five hundred New Mexicans were out scouring the countryside—Anglos, Hispanics, Indians from the nearby Navajo and Zuni reservations.

  Freddy was probably one of the pilots searching from the air. But since TAT board members had been asked to keep a low profile until there was news—Lindbergh was in New York and was told to stay there and avoid the press—there was no mention of it in the papers.

  After three days of fruitless searching, news came Friday morning that a plane had spotted four people on a high mesa, waving white shirts in what looked like a distress signal. Charles Lindbergh and his wife immediately took off for New Mexico to be there for the rescue. While they were en route, however, the airline determined that the “survivors” were just rural New Mexicans who were waving their shirts with excitement because they had never seen planes before.

  The next morning, however, an airmail pilot did spot some wreckage near the southern peak of Mount Taylor, a volcanic mountain, sacred to the Navajos, about fifteen miles above the town of Grants. He took aerial photos of the site, which was about eleven thousand feet high, and brought them to Albuquerque, where the identity of the plane had been confirmed by late afternoon.

  Since there were no trails to the crash site, the company search team—pilot Paul Collins, together with an intrepid vice president and an engineer—had to navigate through the woods in pitch darkness on packhorses, led by an Indian guide. A group of local police officers and national newspaper reporters trailed them through the dense forest, the temperature dropping as they climbed. At daybreak, the company search plane returned. Reporters were told that the pilot had orders to dive over the spot of the site—but this was a ruse. In fact, he had been told to dive at a sham location to lure the reporters away, then fly along the ledge and quickly pull up when he reached the actual site. So as the reporters and local police ran through the woods toward the decoy spot, Paul Collins led the airline’s team to the actual site. Only one news photographer thought to follow them.

  The scene was a horror show—all eight passengers had burned to death on impact.
When the photographer started snapping pictures, Collins grabbed his camera and yanked out the film. He didn’t want anyone ever to see what he was seeing. The pilots’ charred bodies were found with their left hands fixed in front of their faces, shielding themselves from the impending impact.

  It was an eerie image, but an apt harbinger for the airline—and, in fact, for the entire nation.

  WHEN THE STOCK market reopened on September 9, 1929, the Monday after the bodies were discovered, there was a predictable sell-off in aviation stocks, depressing their prices. But the surprise was that railroad stocks, especially the Santa Fe, fell with them, leading the Wall Street Journal to speculate about “a Railroad Problem.” Markets appeared to stabilize over the next few days, but three weeks later the stock market collapsed in its worst sell-off of the year. Some stocks then rebounded, but not TAT and the other aviation companies. Word was out that the government was investigating the crash and would call for the industry to be regulated by the dreaded Interstate Commerce Commission.

  The airline tried slashing prices and added America’s first regular in-flight movies, but nothing helped. Freddy’s new business was floundering.

  Luckily, the eating houses were having their best year ever, with the exception of San Marcial, New Mexico—and that was only because in late September the entire city was literally washed away in a flood. The Santa Fe station and Harvey House, deliberately built on the highest ground in the area, were the only structures not wiped out by the raging Rio Grande. Fifty-four people were trapped on the second floor of the Harvey hotel, where they huddled for hours until boats could rescue them. When the waters finally receded, the state declared martial law: Besides the town itself, fifty miles of Santa Fe track was unusable. The railroad rebuilt the tracks, but decided to write off San Marcial as a total loss.