Appetite for America

by Stephen Fried

  Minnie insisted that the right to pass on the founder’s name belonged solely to Freddy, the Kansas City heir apparent. After ten years of trying, he and Betty were still hoping to have a baby. It simply would not do for the Chicago Harveys to try to steal the birthright of Ford Harvey’s only son.

  Of course, Minnie had her own issues with Freddy—as did Kitty, who looked forward to a day when she could advise her brother as he ran the company. Both were bothered by Freddy’s presumption that whatever he needed to know would simply rub off from working around the older executives, and that he didn’t really need to learn everything about the business because there would always be plenty of smart people around to advise him. They were annoyed that he was pushing forty and still didn’t seem to grasp the concept of working all day, every day. But despite all this, Freddy was the only candidate to be the family’s Kansas City savior. His legacy had to be protected.

  So Minnie and Freddy both told Stewart—who was working at the Kansas City office at the time—that he needed to find another name for his baby. Since he felt a certain allegiance to the Kansas City Harveys, he quickly acquiesced and named his son Stewart Jr.

  But three months later, when Byron Jr.’s son was born in Chicago, he openly defied Minnie by naming his baby Frederick Henry Harvey III. A birth certificate with the name was issued at Passavant Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University.

  At that point, Minnie had a long talk with Byron Sr., who even at age fifty-five was still her kid brother. While nobody ever found out what they “discussed,” a new birth certificate was issued several days later, and the baby was renamed Byron Harvey III. To avoid Byron gridlock at family events, he was called Ronny.

  And just to make certain there was no question in the family that the Kansas City Harveys would produce a namesake heir, Freddy’s wife, Betty, arrived in Chicago several weeks after the birth certificate was changed—and announced to the society columns that she was in town to find a male baby.

  “Mrs. Frederick Harvey Here ‘Shopping’ for Baby Boy to Adopt,” read the headline in the Chicago American. The gushy article, which described Betty as “breathtakingly lovely” and “almost unbelievably beautiful”—in the same sentence—explained that since “no ordinary baby would do … the process of finding just the right one has been quite difficult.” Apparently, adoption had already become quite competitive by the early 1930s. Betty “found a cunning pair of twin boys at one clinic, but before she could quite adjust her plans for twin beds in the nursery, some other couple who had an option on them snapped the twins up and carried them off.”

  After sizing up the “Chicago baby market,” Betty returned to Kansas City and gave Freddy a full report on her “shopping tour.” And then they flew to Santa Barbara in his new plane, which the paper said was “his pride and joy.”

  As for the baby—well, they would just have to keep shopping.

  IN THIS GAME of family chess, the Chicago Harveys soon made a surprising countermove. Byron Sr. announced he was doing something unprecedented in the company’s fifty-seven-year history: He was moving the company into a new business that had nothing to do with the trains, and would be opening sophisticated urban restaurants with no Harvey Girls. He and his oldest son had agreed to run five new Fred Harvey restaurants, all located in the Straus Building (now called the Metropolitan Tower), a glamorous skyscraper at the corner of South Michigan Avenue and Jackson Boulevard that overlooked Grant Park and Lake Michigan. The new restaurants were only a few blocks from where Chicago’s long-awaited Century of Progress International Exposition—the 1934 world’s fair—was slated to open in a few months.

  Little is known about Byron’s decision, but there are certainly hints in the newspaper coverage that the family was far from united concerning the new restaurants. The announcement in the Chicago Tribune barely mentioned the Kansas City home base of the company or its executives. The Kansas City Star story, on the other hand, barely mentioned Byron, instead explaining rather awkwardly that Freddy and John Huckel were in Chicago “to cooperate with other officers of the company.” Between the lines, it was clear that Byron’s decision was causing a good deal of family friction.

  If Byron was making a mistake, there was nobody left to talk him out of it. Dave Benjamin was the last voice of reason who had known Fred and Ford well and could remain above the fray of family fighting—and he was no longer actively involved in day-to-day business. He had cashed out his shares, and while he was still technically a vice president, he spent most of his time raising money for charity. He focused on poverty and Jewish causes. “I try to follow the teachings of Judaism,” he said, “by helping my brother, and I don’t think that help should be limited to my Jewish brother.” He was also active in the nascent YM-YWHA movement, which would eventually create Jewish Community Centers all over America. He saw them as havens for “those who can’t afford the more expensive form of Jewish clubs.” On his recent seventy-fifth birthday, he had been presented with an oil portrait of himself by the board of United Jewish Charities.

  Just two weeks after the announcement of the new, non–Harvey Girl restaurants in Chicago, Dave Benjamin was in the news. The Kansas City Journal-Post reported that the serially providential business leader—“who has had his share of harrowing experiences” and had just recently “enjoyed a talk with his colleagues” about them—had survived yet another natural disaster. He and his wife were visiting Los Angeles when the city was rocked by an earthquake on March 10, 1933, registering 6.3 on the Richter scale. More than a hundred people were killed, thousands were injured and homeless, and there was over $40 million ($643 million) in property damage. But, as the Journal-Post headline read, “David Benjamin Telephones Calmly as Earthquake Showers Plaster.”

  Ironically, only weeks later, Dave took ill in the safety of his own home, after playing cards on a Sunday night with his wife, his spinster sister, Fanny, and one of his sons. The game broke up just before 11:00 p.m., and ten minutes after his guests left, Dave said he didn’t feel well and excused himself. When his wife went to check on him a few minutes later, she found him in the bathroom clutching his chest, dying from a massive heart attack.

  Dave Benjamin was buried that Wednesday morning, and his pallbearers were all close colleagues from the Kansas City office, led by Freddy. Later that day, in Chicago, there was an event he would have been sorry to miss. Some twenty-five thousand Jews marched on Grant Park, just across Michigan Avenue from the new Fred Harvey restaurants. They were there to protest the Nazi persecution of Jews and to demand that the Century of Progress exposition ban Germany’s chosen envoy to the world’s fair. Adolf Hitler, who had recently seized control of the German government and was now chancellor, apparently planned to send Dr. Joseph Goebbels as his nation’s goodwill representative to the exposition.

  The next day, as the Benjamin family mourned, Century of Progress officials announced the Germans would not be coming to the Chicago world’s fair after all.

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to the fair, Byron unveiled his new restaurants in the Straus Building. But the media and the public were considerably more interested in an utterly delightful side venture that Fred Harvey had undertaken on the fairgrounds: the first restaurant just for kids, the Toy Town Tavern.

  The Century of Progress exhibition had an entire separate fair for children: the “Enchanted Island,” featuring amazing amusement rides, engaging street performers, and a special library where many of the world’s top children’s authors served as resident storytellers. There was also a kid-friendly, theater, with productions running nonstop from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. every single day.

  And in the middle of this colorful chaos was the Harvey Toy Town Tavern, a sleek, curved one-story building with twenty-foot-high windows, revealing an interior decorated with a smorgasbord of colorful storybook images. The chandeliers were dangling dollhouse villages and castles, the walls were painted floor to ceiling with circus images, witches on broomsticks, and life-size cows jumping
over the moon. The Toy Town Tavern even had its own kid-friendly limited-edition china pattern, with hand-painted images of Mother Goose rhymes, professorial elephants teaching French grammar, and bon vivant rabbit couples out for a stroll. The decor was designed with the help of renowned puppeteer Tony Sarg, the Jim Henson of his day, who was also a prolific and beloved illustrator and had invented the first whimsical balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1928. (Sarg also designed and built the first mechanical animations for Macy’s Christmas windows.)

  When the Chicago world’s fair opened in May 1933, there was cautious optimism about its chances for success in the harsh economy. The most recent Summer Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles because no other city in the world would bid on them during the economic crisis, had been something of a disaster; nearly half the countries that normally competed could not afford to send their athletes to the games, and the president did not even attend.

  Yet the Century of Progress exposition was surprisingly successful. Over a hundred thousand people arrived each day. While many traveled by car, the train stations were packed with tourists—and since Fred Harvey ran all the restaurants and shops in Chicago Union Station, and the restaurant in Dearborn Station, where the Santa Fe trains came in from the West, its capacity was pushed to the limit. For the first time in years, redcaps were working up a sweat juggling luggage, and Harvey Girls were busy juggling customers.

  The mood in the restaurants was especially festive, because after thirteen “dry” years patrons could legally order a beer or a glass of wine. One of President Roosevelt’s first acts when he took office in March had been to sign a bill legalizing the manufacture and sale of light wines and low-alcohol beer, and the ratification process for a full-scale constitutional amendment legalizing all liquor was under way.

  Because all the Fred Harvey union stations feeding into Chicago were surging with world’s fair business, Kansas City Union Station was more crowded than usual on the morning of Saturday, June 17, as seven federal agents tried to hustle murderer and train robber Frank Nash through the terminal without attracting attention. He had recently been recaptured after escaping from prison; a car was waiting outside to take him back to jail in Leavenworth—where a new federal penitentiary had been built near the fort.

  When the men reached the black sedan in the crowded parking lot, the agents shoved Nash into the backseat, where he raised his cuffed hands and then ducked—a signal to three gangsters lying in wait with machine guns. One of them yelled, “Let ’em have it,” and they opened fire, a dense spray of bullets pelting the car and everyone near it. The gunmen—led by the infamous Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd—rushed to the car to get their friend, but when they opened the door, they saw that Nash, and everyone else, was dead. As they raced out of the parking lot in a dark Chevrolet sedan, a Kansas City cop fired at them, but they got away—leaving four federal agents dead and two more critically wounded.

  The “Kansas City Massacre” immediately became priority number one for the fledgling federal Bureau of Investigation and its ambitious young leader, J. Edgar Hoover. The massacre investigation would become the turning point for federal law enforcement, bringing Hoover’s agency a much wider national mandate than ever before—for the first time, his agents were allowed to carry firearms and countermand local police—and leading directly to the creation of the modern FBI.

  At the Fred Harvey lunchroom in Union Station, however, the massacre was just one more Depression-era drama for the Harvey Girls to gab about with their regular customers. They all howled when retelling the story of what happened in the restaurant right after the shooting. Their manager, Walter Rouzer, had missed the entire incident, but when he heard about it ten minutes later, he came running excitedly into the lunchroom, slipped at the entrance, and slid across the floor on his belly. It looked like a movie slapstick routine, and from then on they called him “Wild Dash Rouzer.”

  AS PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S first year in office came to an end, hopeful Americans looked for any sign that the nation was headed into recovery. Instead, in the spring of 1934, it started raining dirt.

  At Harvey Houses all over Kansas, the exhaustively manicured front lawns were disappearing under dust that had fallen from the sky. On St. Patrick’s Day, the dirtstorm reached Kansas City, causing the temperature to plummet from a balmy sixty-eight degrees to well below freezing in six hours. Soon it was sleeting dirt and then snowing dirt. Freddy watched in disbelief from the corner office he had inherited from his father.

  Weathermen called it a “freak storm,” but then it happened again. In some Midwestern towns, the dust drifted so deep that it covered the snow fences; in rural areas, snowplows were used to remove sand and dirt from roads.

  In early May, Chicago was shrouded by a cloud of dirt so large that airplanes had to be rerouted, because even at ten thousand feet they couldn’t get above it. Some twelve million pounds of dust were swept into Greater Chicago by the windstorm in just over twenty-four hours—four pounds for every man, woman, and child. And then the black cloud moved east across America, in a five-hundred-mile band hugging the Great Lakes, at a rate of sixty to a hundred miles an hour. The next morning, it descended on New York City during rush hour. The sun’s rays were so distorted that Manhattan was cast in an obscure half-light, which observers likened to a partial solar eclipse.

  When it was over, the topsoil that made America’s Midwest the most abundant source of grain in the world was gone—dried out and loosened by summers of drought and improper crop rotation—and the “Dust Bowl” era had begun. It decimated American agriculture and triggered one of the largest migrations in the nation’s history—nearly half a million people driving, riding, hitching, walking, hopping freight trains west. They came from Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, Missouri, Kansas, and New Mexico, mostly by Santa Fe trains or on Route 66.

  Their migration put the remaining Fred Harvey hotels and eating houses under even more pressure to feed the hungry. For several years, Harvey Girls, chefs, and busboys had seen firsthand the more urban devastation of the Depression. But now the Dust Bowl was destroying the rural economy as well, and an entirely new group of Americans were begging at the Fred Harvey eating houses along their route to the “promised land” of California.

  One Santa Fe conductor never forgot a scene he witnessed at the Purcell, Oklahoma, station, when railroad police, “bulls,” were trying to chase hobos away from the trains. “The thirty-six freight train was pulling out of Purcell and the hobo caught the boxcar and was trying to climb across the rods,” the conductor recalled. “He slipped and fell. The wheels cut off both of his legs at the knees. They called in a doctor and gave him some shots and … put him on a stretcher in the baggage room where he waited for the southern freight train from Oklahoma City to take him to a hospital.”

  He recalled the hobo said only one thing:

  “Did they get them both?”

  Someone told him, “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER 39

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  IF THE DEPRESSION MADE LIFE MORE DIFFICULT FOR ANY OF THE Harveys personally, it certainly didn’t show. As a private company, their business dealings did not get much coverage unless they sought it—so nobody reported when the new restaurants in the Straus Building lost money or mentioned how many Harvey locations had closed since the crash. As public people, they were still society-page stars.

  The Byron Harveys entertained grandly, and each year Helen Harvey’s name appeared on Chicago’s best-dressed list. The family’s place in society was elevated, and assured for years to come, when Daggett—now a practicing attorney and the only young Harvey not in the family business—became engaged to one of Chicago’s most illustrious and desirable debutantes: Jean Cudahy Wilhelm, the granddaughter of meatpacking magnate Edward Cudahy.

  In Kansas City, the exploits of Freddy and Betty Harvey always made news. They threw lavish parties and fund-raisers for major arts charities—especially the new William Rockhill N
elson Gallery of Art (now the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), created by the trust of the late Kansas City Star publisher. The Harveys and the Huckels also helped the museum create its Indian art collection by selling items from the company vault in Albuquerque (which made Herman Schweizer extremely nervous).

  Freddy and Betty were among the world’s first “jet-setters”—even before there were actually jets. “One day while zooming above the Missouri clouds, Betty suggested dinner at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec,” Mademoiselle magazine reported. “Fred likes Creole cooking, so he held out for Antoine’s in New Orleans. After going round and round on the subject, they put it up to the wind. A sudden gust blew them South, and New Orleans won.”

  The couple was also known for their obsessions with their pets. They had a pair of purebred black dachshunds, Samson and Susanna, that Betty had carried back with her on the ship from Europe as puppies, registering them in the U.S. branch of the “Tail Waggers Club”—which raised money for “less fortunate dogs”—immediately upon arriving in New York. All member dogs got a special round medal for their collars, which read, “Be a Tail Wagger and help your pals,” and Betty also bought the puppies Tail Waggers monogrammed coats. She often took Samson and Susanna with her when traveling: In London, she got to know the king and queen of Norway because the royal couple spotted the dachshunds at Claridge’s hotel and insisted on meeting their owner.

  Once, when Susanna was pregnant, Freddy had her flown home from New York by his airline so the puppies could claim Kansas City as their birthplace. It is unclear whether Susanna came in a carrier, got her own seat, or sat on the lap of pilot D. L. Mesker, who was photographed holding her for the Kansas City Journal-Post. Local papers also ran editorial cartoons about the dog’s flight and her pregnancy, and covered the birth. She produced only one pup—even their dog had fertility issues.