Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  The city of fourteen hundred simply ceased to be.

  Within three weeks, the same could be said for much of the New York Stock Exchange. On October 24, 1929—“Black Thursday”—the market lost over $9 billion ($113 billion) in the first two hours of trading, and the gallery at the exchange had to be closed to prevent a riot. The market caught its breath on Friday, but opened Monday morning even lower and kept falling, losing over 22 percent of its value—the worst one-day loss in American financial history. And on the next day, there was no rebound at all—not even what analysts call a “dead-cat bounce.” Stocks fell another 12 percent, and the market lost another $14 billion ($176 billion) in value.

  AT FRED HARVEY, the reaction to the stock market crash was the same as it was to everything else: business as usual. If the trains were running, there would be people to feed. Being a privately owned company, it had no stock that could plummet. While some family members might have lost money in the market, the only positive thing about Ford Harvey’s death was that the lion’s share of the family fortune—his estate—had been liquidated during the process of probating his will, so it was sitting in very safe U.S. government Treasury bills.

  Many Americans still believed the country was, at worst, in a recession, a downturn, a correction. This was especially true in the Midwest and the West, where the regional economies were based more on livestock than stock, on wheat harvests rather than auto production.

  Still, the staffs at Harvey Houses certainly noticed that some of their better-tipping local patrons had suddenly disappeared. “We had one customer from the Ford Motor Company,” recalled a former Emporia busboy. “He had a special table where he sat with his paper every evening for several years … He knew all the Harvey Girls and he treated them very well. After the crash of ’29 … he didn’t come into the Harvey House anymore. I later saw him traipsing around Emporia in ragged clothes. For a long while, I didn’t realize he was the same man.”

  Yet most Americans did not own stocks. There were few bank failures in the first year after the crash, and while unemployment did begin to rise, it was still under 9 percent through the end of 1930. So the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey saw no reason to deviate from what had carried them through decades of bumper crops punctuated by occasional bad harvests. They decided to continue with the ambitious plans they made before the market collapsed—in fact, the plans that Ford Harvey had made before he died.

  Their biggest project together was a new train depot and hotel complex for Winslow, Arizona. They hoped to take advantage of the city’s new TAT airport, where Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, and other well-known aviators were often seen. But Winslow was also prized for its location between the two cornerstones of the growing Harvey tourism empire: the Grand Canyon and the city of Santa Fe. Ford had been certain that a new luxury hotel in Winslow was the key to luring tourists to the Southwest for much longer stays, so they could enjoy extended adventures like the one that had first so inspired him in 1901.

  Ford had also arranged for the company’s biggest project ever without the Santa Fe. Fred Harvey had a deal to take over operations in the huge new union station in Cleveland, if it ever got finished.

  So, in the months after the stock market crash, the company showed no fear or caution whatsoever. Work continued through early 1930 on the new hotel in Winslow and the new Cleveland Union Terminal as if nothing had changed.

  And Freddy kept flying his planes.

  One day he decided he absolutely had to try out a new single-engine plane that had just set the world speed record—especially since the vaunted Inland Sport was built by a company in Kansas, just a few miles from his office. He had his chauffeur, Franz Jawurek, drive him to the small Fairfax Airport, just across the river from Union Station, where the Inland planes were built and tested.

  Freddy also insisted that his chauffeur fly with him in the two-seat plane. As they took off, however, Franz noticed a problem.

  “You’ve lost a wheel, sir,” he shouted into his boss’s ear.

  “Don’t be silly,” Freddy replied.

  But Franz insisted. Aside from the fact that he could see that the wheel on his side was missing, there was someone down on the runway waving the wheel at them.

  Freddy loosened his seat belt and had Franz reach over and hold the steering wheel, so he could look over the side. Not so silly after all. In fact, pretty scary, since the experimental plane had no radio.

  The director of the small airfield alerted the Kansas City Municipal Airport to prepare for an emergency landing. Police and fire departments were summoned, and since there was no way to contact Freddy, somebody at Kansas City Municipal found a spare wheel that they could wave at him from their runway, too.

  Instead, Freddy decided to turn around and attempt an acrobatic landing at the little airfield. He came in low, on an angle, urging the single-engine plane to land teetering only on its one good wheel. Then, keeping the plane precariously balanced, he stalled the engine at precisely the right moment, so that it slowed, rolled a few feet, looped a little loop, and then came to rest with its nose tilted neatly to the sky. Neither the passengers nor the plane was damaged.

  “F. H. Harvey in a Thriller,” read the headline in the next day’s Kansas City Star. While some senior executives surely wrung their hands that their young boss still took such risks, they had to admit he had a gift for heroic antics.

  IN THE THIRTY YEARS Mary Colter had been working for Fred Harvey, she had convinced Ford and his brother-in-law John Huckel, her day-to-day boss, to let her build some pretty outrageous things—by talking about them in a way that made them seem not outrageous at all, but inspired and essential. She helped design an absurdly tiny boutique hotel in Lamy, New Mexico—just ten rooms, a little dining room, and a patio—that she knew would delight Minnie and John, and others for whom nearby Santa Fe was too crowded. She designed a hardscrabble lodge and cabin hotel for the bottom of the Grand Canyon: Phantom Ranch, which was the harshest assignment in the Fred Harvey system—the small staff had to remain at the very bottom of the canyon for one or two weeks at a time—but offered one of the most unique perspectives in American tourism. These special projects were also the company’s way of compensating Colter for the less glamorous responsibilities of her job: making interior decorating decisions for every shelf and surface in the Harvey universe, the endless memos about whether to paint or paper certain walls in the guest rooms in Wellington, Kansas, and then the additional memos about precisely which color would make them more “homelike and livable.”

  But Colter had never been granted the kind of freedom she was given for La Posada, the new hotel in Winslow. The building became Ford’s going-away present to her, and hers to him: It was a project he adored, because it embodied all the disparate passions he, his sister Minnie, and his children had shared with Colter during her unique career with them.

  When La Posada opened in May 1930, it was clear that Colter had conjured her most eccentric structure ever. It was a faux-Spanish hacienda purposely designed to have a kind of architectural multiple personality disorder—it wasn’t supposed to match itself. She invented an elaborate backstory to explain why the eclectic building appeared to have been designed by unrelated architects over many decades—and not by a petite Midwesterner in her sixties, entertaining herself in a Kansas City office. According to Colter’s made-up legend, La Posada was first built in 1869 as a Spanish immigrant’s ranch home, and was added to over the years—until his heirs decided to sell the estate to the railroad. That was why some parts of the sprawling La Posada compound were authentic Spanish design, while others seemed miscellaneous—one hallway and courtyard, which supposedly connected two “older” buildings, actually had exposed cinder-block walls.

  Seen from Route 66, the hotel looked traditionally Spanish, with stucco walls and orange clay roof tiles. The entrance from the train tracks, however, was entirely different. With its picket fence (featuring subtly wavy posts), its improbable lawn of thick green grass, and
its modest doorway into the lobby, La Posada appeared to be not a depot hotel but a very inviting private residence. It was the clearest architectural depiction ever of Fred Harvey’s original concept of a trackside home away from home. The home just happened to have six dining rooms, seventy-five guest bedrooms, tennis courts, stables, and gardens that bloomed in the middle of the desert.

  The original mid-six-figure budget for the hotel was considered extravagant by the railroad even before the stock market crash. When the costs actually topped $1 million ($12.9 million) in the months just after the financial meltdown, Santa Fe executives did their best to grin and bear it.

  “Congratulations on the new building, La Posada,” read the telegram they sent to Fred Harvey on its opening. “Hope income exceeds estimates as much as building costs did.”

  THREE MONTHS AFTER La Posada opened, Fred Harvey made what many considered its boldest move yet—into Cleveland, Ohio, its first major location east of Chicago and its first city with absolutely no ties to the Santa Fe. The new Cleveland Union Terminal was the brainstorm of the railroad-rich Van Sweringen brothers, who were responsible for creating Shaker Heights, one of the country’s prototypical upscale suburban communities. The terminal (now called Tower City Center) was ten years in the making and required the destruction of a thousand city buildings, followed by an excavation so preposterously ambitious that it was said to be second only to the digging of the Panama Canal. Rising above the sprawling new station, which covered seventeen acres, was the dramatic fifty-two-story Terminal Tower, which Clevelanders could boast was the tallest building in America outside of Manhattan.

  By the time the Union Terminal was finally completed in August 1930, the Van Sweringen brothers’ personal fortune—estimated at over $3 billion ($38.7 billion)—had been decimated by the crash, and they didn’t even attend the grand opening. But their station attracted nationwide attention. It also provided a stunning introduction to the world of eastern railroads for Fred Harvey.

  Ford had arranged for the company to run all the new terminal’s restaurants: the English Oak Room for fine dining, a huge lunchroom with Belgian marble floors and walls of inlaid oak and ebony that could seat seven thousand, a tearoom, and a soda fountain. John Huckel’s division also controlled more than 175,000 feet of retail space, including a large drugstore operation, a barbershop, a toy shop, a men’s haberdashery and a women’s clothing store, a bookstore, and all the newsstands.

  The New York–based book publishing world was especially intrigued—and a little frightened—by this new Fred Harvey operation in Cleveland. The trade magazine Publishers Weekly sent a correspondent to do a big article about how the company’s book business, run by longtime Tenth Legionnaire Frank Clough for three decades, had become an innovative powerhouse. Now that Clough’s operation was moving eastward, PW wanted to know how the Fred Harvey stores did what many other booksellers could not: successfully service consumers of best-selling novels while also capturing the market for more serious readers of nonfiction and classics.

  Besides offering the kind of obsessive customer service usually found only in high-end restaurants—and centralized buying in Kansas City, with volumes shipped by airmail—the Harvey bookstores were full of marketing ingenuities. PW marveled at the way Clough displayed books on slanted bookshelves that were “really the fronts of drawers holding duplicate stock, and each one pulls out without effort, so no storage space is lost.” It was also impressed by the way Fred Harvey turned so many corners of the train station into bookselling spaces, with more popular titles also available at every newsstand and a complete selection of children’s books at the toy store.

  “If America is to have chain bookshops,” Publishers Weekly proclaimed, the model that “chain builders must study is the Harvey chain.”

  While Cleveland was a great new opportunity for Fred Harvey, it was more important as a possible gateway to the East—which had many large new union stations that could benefit from Harvey management. The mighty Pennsylvania Railroad had withdrawn from the Cleveland project and was still using its old station, but its archrival in the East, the New York Central, was a major owner of the new Union Terminal. If the Cleveland experiment proved successful, it was not hard to imagine Fred Harvey one day running the restaurants and stores in the New York Central’s historic home: Grand Central Station on 42nd Street in New York City.

  THROUGHOUT THE ECONOMIC crisis of the Depression, the Grand Canyon remained crowded. In the entire Harvey System, it was the only destination where the number of visitors actually rose during those years. And no Grand Canyon outing received more attention than the day Albert Einstein arrived.

  In December 1930, Einstein left Germany to spend the winter at the California Institute of Technology. It was a prescient time to flee—Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party had just enjoyed its first significant showing in a national election. Einstein and his wife, Elsa, first sailed to New York, where he celebrated Hanukkah with a huge throng at Madison Square Garden and later gave a speech calling for brave men to resist war and refuse military service. Even if only 2 percent did so, he said, it would make a huge difference; pacifists nationwide began wearing buttons that said “2%.”

  When Einstein lectured at Caltech, he exhorted young scientists not to let their work be used to wage war:

  Why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it … Instead of freeing us in great measure from labor that exhausts spirituality, it has made men into slaves of machinery …

  Just consider a quite uncivilized Indian, whether his experience is less rich and happy than that of the average civilized man—I hardly think so. There lies deep meaning in the fact that children of all civilized countries are so fond of playing Indians.

  Within days, Einstein was at the Grand Canyon “playing Indian” himself. He was met there by a contingent of Hopi Indians—who Einstein assumed were local natives, not realizing that most of them worked for Fred Harvey. Herman Schweizer was also there, both to meet the renowned scientist and to act as a translator, since Einstein was still more comfortable speaking German. So Schweizer became part of the most famous photo opportunity in canyon history. The Hopi presented Einstein with a headdress, which he wore as he posed in front of Hopi House in a suit and tie but with a goofy kid grin—brandishing a peace pipe in one hand and holding the tiny hand of a little Indian girl with the other.

  During the visit, Einstein was made an honorary chief of the tribe. But the Hopi weren’t sure what to name him.

  “What’s his business?” one of the Harvey Indians asked.

  “He invented the theory of relativity,” Schweizer replied.

  “All right, we’ll call him ‘Great Relative.’”

  CHAPTER 37

  LOAVES AND FISHES

  AS THE DEPRESSION DEEPENED, THE HARVEY HOUSES TOOK on a new role in economically ravaged America—they became known as the softest touches in the West, the places where impoverished locals and drifters went in search of a free meal. It was company policy never to let anyone who couldn’t afford to pay leave hungry. Many begged for food at the back door and were pleasantly surprised to get sandwiches, fruit, bread, and coffee. Others came in through the front door.

  Bob O’Sullivan, who later became a well-known travel writer, never forgot the hot, dusty fall afternoon in Albuquerque when he was a second grader and his family had to rely on the kindness of strangers in Harvey Girl uniforms. His mother was driving him and his eleven-year-old sister—with all their belongings stacked high against the backseat windows—to California, where they hoped to meet their father and make a new start. The O’Sullivans had arrived in Albuquerque expecting that $25—several weeks’ pay—had been wired to them at the Railway Express office. But when his mother walked out of the office in tears, Bob knew the money hadn’t arrived. As she pulled on her driving gloves, the children asked if they could still get something to ea
t.

  She hesitated.

  “Of course we can,” she said finally. “We have to, don’t we?”

  She drove along the railroad tracks to the Alvarado and led her children into the dining room. There were few customers there, but lots of delicious aromas, and every surface was gleaming. When a smiling Harvey Girl approached them, her puffed sleeves and starched apron rustling, Bob’s mother pulled her aside and whispered something. The waitress walked to the kitchen and returned with a man wearing a suit, to whom his mother also whispered. Then they were led to a table, where Mrs. O’Sullivan began to order sandwiches for the kids and just a cup of coffee for herself—until the man in the suit interrupted her.

  “Why don’t you let me order for you?” he said, and proceeded to tell the Harvey Girl to bring hot soup, then the beef stew, mashed potatoes, bread and butter, and coffee for the lady. He asked the children if they wanted milk or hot chocolate.

  “Yes, sir,” they both said.

  “Milk and hot chocolate for the children,” he continued, “and some of the cobbler all around. Does that sound all right?”

  “Will that be all?” the waitress asked.

  “Oh,” the man said, “and these people are the guests of Mr. Fred Harvey.”

  Bob saw his mother mouth the words “Thank you.”

  The taste of that stew would stay with him his entire life. As would the memory of what happened when they finished eating. His mother pushed what few coins she had left toward the waitress, who pushed them back with a smile.

  “Oh, no, ma’am. You’re Mr. Harvey’s guests,” she said, placing two bags in front of them. “And the manager said I was to wrap up what you didn’t eat, so you could take it along.”