Being centers of good cooking, the Harvey restaurants … became centers of good fellowship. When a man wanted to give a stranger or a fellow citizen a good meal, he took him to the Harvey house. When a lady wanted to throw a luncheon party, the swellest thing she could do was to go to the Harvey house. And this custom prevailed through two generations.
The revolution in railroading which has taken off the local trains that stopped for meals, the revolution that has made the railroad the long distance carrier and turned the local traffic over to the bus, made the Harvey house a symbol of the ancient days and olden times. If any Harvey House survives this decade it will be a collector’s item, strange, weird, inexplicable in the commerce of tomorrow.
Evidence that we are passing through a great social, economic and political revolution is none the less convincing because the revolution is bloodless. The Harvey house in Topeka was bombed in the mop-up of that revolution. It might well be marked by a tablet. The tablet should display these lines: “Here, for sixty years, women who put water in the skillet to fry beefsteak rolled in flour learned of their sins, repented and were saved unto full culinary salvation!”
WORLD WAR II began in Europe in September 1939, and even though the United States was still watching and waiting, preparation for war was like an antidepressant for the U.S. economy. This was especially true for the railroads, which were rediscovered as the only dependable way to transport large numbers of troops and heavy munitions long distances. After years of moribund business, the empty seats in the Fred Harvey dining cars and restaurants were starting to be filled again by men in uniform, and while the economy was hardly robust, the worst appeared to be over.
In Hollywood, there suddenly was renewed interest in the Harvey Girls movie. It had fallen through the cracks at Paramount, but the project was then sold to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, who envisioned it as a straight-up Western with Clark Gable and Lana Turner. The film headed into preproduction in the fall of 1941, and MGM was so high on its prospects that Mayer reached out to his friend Bennett Cerf, the forty-three-year-old editor and co-owner of Random House publishers, to have a novelization done of the new screenplay so it could be released with the film.
Cerf called a writer he had always admired but never managed to work with: Samuel Hopkins Adams. The prolific Adams had first made a name for himself at the turn of the century with a shocking series of investigative articles about the pharmaceutical and patent medicine business in Collier’s, “The Great American Fraud.” From then on, he published a book a year, as well as hundreds of magazine articles and short stories, everything from hard-core investigative reporting to biography, mainstream fiction, erotic fiction (under a pen name), and literary criticism. His work had spawned eighteen feature films, including Frank Capra’s immortal It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, based on a short story Adams published in Cosmopolitan.
Now seventy, Samuel Hopkins Adams looked like W. C. Fields on a late-in-life fitness kick, and showed no signs of slowing down, which is why Cerf was so excited when he agreed to do the novelization. “I have a hunch that Adams is going to do a story that will be really important both for us and for you,” Cerf assured Louis B. Mayer.
Before Adams could get started, however, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and America finally joined the war. The author assumed this would derail the project; instead, several weeks after the attack, he was told to get writing, the book was due in five months. He was brought to Hollywood to take a few meetings with executives brimming with plot points and ideas, all of which he found worthless. The highlight of his trip was a conversation he had with a waitress who served him lunch at the MGM studio commissary. She had been a Harvey Girl for seventeen years, and had lots of wonderful stories he could use.
Adams was then sent to Chicago to meet Byron, whose ego he was instructed to massage as heavily as possible. MGM had signed a deal giving Fred Harvey approval rights on the book and the movie. The studio didn’t want any legal hassles over the use of actual company names, and Bennett Cerf at Random House was respectful of the powerful Harvey bookstores and newsstands. To woo support, Adams told Byron Sr. and Jr. that he was writing an epilogue to the book—and it would feature them. The novel was set in the late 1890s, when Fred was still living, but the epilogue would be set decades later, at a reunion of Harvey Girls, and they would be characters. They loved the idea.
Retreating to his winter home in Beaufort, South Carolina, Adams banged out the first two chapters, over six thousand words, in just two days. He went on to briskly weave everything he had heard from the Harveys, and from that waitress at the MGM commissary, into a story so convincing—if not always consistently compelling—that it would later be quoted as if it were historical nonfiction. He told the tale of three women coming to the imaginary New Mexico town of Sandrock to become Harvey Girls, where they are viewed as fresh meat by the local cowboys, and prissy little busybodies by the only other single women in town, the morally casual waitresses at the Alhambra saloon. Much drama and hilarity ensue as the cowboys and showgirls resist the civilizing impact of the Harvey House, stealing its revered steaks and even trying to burn the place down. One Harvey Girl falls in love with a local rancher with a checkered past, but he turns out to have a heart of gold and they live, of course, happily ever after.
Adams finished the first draft of The Harvey Girls well ahead of schedule. He got the revisions done in a month and then held on to the manuscript until the day before his June 1, 1942, deadline, so Bennett Cerf would think he had been working hard on it up until the last minute.
In the meantime, MGM decided to put the movie on hold yet again, and was reportedly trying to dump it off on 20th Century Fox. But Cerf decided Random House should publish The Harvey Girls book anyway—and much to everyone’s surprise, it was a big seller, immediately going into a second and then a third printing, no doubt helped along by the marketing might of the Fred Harvey bookstores. It sold 8,354 copies in standard hardcover and another 50,589 copies in the less expensive Forum Books hardcover with no movie to support it at all—just the nation’s continued nostalgic attachment to Fred Harvey.
AS THE WAR ESCALATED, not only was the entire Fred Harvey system mobilized to feed the troops, but its long-shuttered restaurants were recalled to active duty. Dining rooms were converted into mess halls, the handsome carved-wood tables lined up end to end and supplemented by long banquet tables, so each Harvey House could serve as many as three thousand soldiers a day. The company set up eight large sandwich-making operations in Chicago, Kansas City, Newton, Clovis, Albuquerque, Gallup, Williams, and Los Angeles, which produced tens of thousands of sandwiches a day. Some of them were served in the eating houses, but many others were passed up to soldiers through train windows and doors, since the dining cars could not possibly keep up with demand.
It was a herculean undertaking—much larger than anything the company had experienced during World War I—and the Harvey System was initially unprepared: After so many years of downsizing, the firm hadn’t needed to train many new Harvey Girls. So when the government leaned on the Santa Fe to increase the number of servicemen it could transport, and urged Fred Harvey to dramatically increase its capacity to feed them, the company had to go on a major hiring spree, quickly adding two thousand workers. Luckily, Dave Benjamin’s old system of maintaining records on all employees, current and former, was still in place. Every old Harvey Girl who could still stand up and carry a tray was called back into service.
Still, that didn’t produce nearly enough servers for all those soldiers. So, in 1943, the sixtieth anniversary of the hiring of the first Harvey Girls in Raton, the vaunted Harvey System of carefully training young women and dispatching them to live in chaperoned dormitories finally gave way to expedience. Harvey Girls hired in Chicago and Kansas City were sent out into the field before they were ready, some Harvey Houses hired local women—which they had never done before—as waitresses or “troop-train girls
,” and many other regulations were relaxed.
“It really changed the Harvey standard … They were really desperate. They took anybody,” recalled Margaret Reichenborn, a Kansan who became a Harvey Girl in Las Vegas, New Mexico, just before the hiring spree:
When I first got to the Castañeda, there were about eight to ten Harvey Girls. When the troop trains started coming through, there were about twenty-five Harvey Girls. They were mostly local girls. They didn’t have to meet the old contracts—no promise not to marry, and they weren’t strict about the rules … During the war, we couldn’t even wear the same uniforms. We couldn’t get white hose, then we couldn’t get any hose at all. We had long-sleeved white shirts, and we had to keep those clean. But it got so difficult we finally cut off the sleeves to make it easier … We often had a lot of very inexperienced waitresses working under very difficult circumstances … We all did the best we could.
Yet for many women in the Southwest, who previously would not have considered applying to work for Fred Harvey because they were Hispanic or Indian, this change in Harvey hiring was a civil rights breakthrough. They burst with pride to be the first Harvey Girls of color. There was something deeply powerful about walking into El Navajo in Gallup and seeing that all the Harvey Girls were Navajo. (Troops of color were always fed the same way as white troops. Still, while Fred Harvey was never known to refuse black patrons, it was sometimes guilty of seating them together in less desirable tables—and blueprints for some Harvey Houses in New Mexico and Texas did specify “colored” seating areas. But any such vestiges of what race reformers called “Jim Crow seating” disappeared during the war.)
These newer, more multicultural Harvey Girls rejected the notion that they were somehow lesser. “Although they hired a lot of local girls, there were still many they turned away,” recalled another wartime waitress. “Working as a Harvey Girl, even during the war, was a privilege. I felt lucky to have the job.”
The troops on their way to war were just happy for the female attention. “The men were always real friendly,” this Harvey Girl continued:
They were often very lonely and they asked for our names and addresses. Each of us received hundreds—literally hundreds—of letters. We couldn’t even remember who the boy was who had written it. I had a milk carton full. One train came through with French troops on board. We couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand us. Still, they wrote us lots of letters.
But, proud though he was of his company’s war effort, Byron was clearly mortified that Fred Harvey could no longer “maintain the standard.” Not only was service slipping, but the food itself suffered because so many ingredients were rationed. So he did what many executives of service-related companies were doing. He ordered a series of ads in national magazines to apologize—and also to explain why civilian patrons were being asked to get up and leave Fred Harvey restaurants whenever a troop train approached. The campaign began with a generic ad showing a Harvey Girl holding a chair for a serviceman, with the headline “Sit Down Sergeant, Mr. Harvey’s Saving This Place for You,” followed by copy about the company pitching in for the war effort (and a small plug for El Tovar).
As tourism ground to a halt and even El Tovar became primarily a rest stop for furloughed soldiers, Fred Harvey unveiled its “Private Pringle” campaign. It revolved around—but never actually showed—a ubiquitous private who became the company’s symbol for the American fighting man.
One Private Pringle ad showed a large potato being peeled, with the line “K.P.? Not for Private Pringle!” while another showed a “Do Not Disturb” sign and a shushing bellhop, with the line “Shhhh! Private Pringle’s Asleep!” The ads ran in Life magazine and other major publications, and as the war worsened, they included patriotic asides about how many Fred Harvey employees had “joined Private Pringle” in the armed forces, and admonitions such as “Victory will come SOONER if we: Conserve food in our households, Refuse to buy from black markets, Pay necessary taxes uncomplainingly, Buy War Bonds instead of luxuries, Kill rumors that aid our enemy.”
The ad campaign took on a life of its own—especially when it turned out there was a Private Pringle, who wrote from Africa to inform the company that he was now Corporal Murray Pringle, and hoped that upon his return they might help him arrange to have dinner with Lana Turner. But while the Pringle ads helped a little, they could not assuage the feeling within the company that although they were doing their duty, they were also allowing Fred Harvey’s sacred standards to slip away.
A HANDFUL OF DEATHS severed even more links to the company’s founder. Minnie Harvey Huckel died in July 1943 at the age of seventy-two. She left a large estate to Kitty and to Byron’s sons—even to her housekeeper of twenty-three years—because she had no children of her own. Three weeks later, her sister, Sybil, died. Married late in life and widowed, Sybil was still living in the original Harvey family home on Olive Street in Leavenworth, which was donated to a local hospital to be used as a dormitory for nurses.
Later that same year, Herman Schweizer died in Albuquerque at the age of seventy-two. In his later years he had become active at his local synagogue, Temple Albert, and with the B’nai B’rith, and spent more time with his sister and her daughter in Chicago. But he never married, and his legacy was the Fred Harvey art collection—which he had spent his entire career amassing, and the last five years of his life successfully protecting from philistine bean counters at the Chicago office. The company collection would remain intact, under Harvey family ownership, for decades after his death, and was eventually donated to the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
Schweizer’s own personal collection of blankets, however, was consigned to one of the local traders in Gallup with whom he spent so many of his fondest hours haggling. Nelson Rockefeller bought one of the fine Saltillo blankets, while several of the institutions Schweizer helped get off the ground—such as the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff—also acquired pieces.
William Randolph Hearst did not buy anything, because he had long ago lost interest in Indian art. While he had originally planned that his castle in San Simeon would primarily be a showplace for his Navajo textiles, the project and his collecting of other styles of art had spiraled out of control. The blankets he had begged Schweizer to sell to him years ago were sitting in warehouses with the Fred Harvey tags still on them—an image conjured perfectly by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.
CHAPTER 43
THE SPIES AT LA FONDA
WHILE FRED HARVEY MADE MUCH OF HOW MANY TROOPS IT was feeding, the company’s most notable contribution to the war effort was top secret. In the spring of 1943, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer came to New Mexico—where he had once visited as a sickly teen—to establish a hidden laboratory on a secluded mesa above Jemez Springs canyon, thirty miles northwest of Santa Fe, at the site of the old Los Alamos Ranch School for boys. It would be the new home of the “Manhattan Project”—so named because it had briefly been located in New York City before scientists realized they needed a more secure location to develop the first atomic bomb. But while some of the world’s greatest physicists would work on “the Hill”—as they referred to the mesa lab—their social lives and family time were spent in Santa Fe, more often than not at Fred Harvey’s La Fonda hotel.
The Manhattan Project had an office in Santa Fe just a block from the hotel, in an adobe storefront at 109 East Palace Avenue. When Oppenheimer and his family first came to town, they stayed at La Fonda and ate all of their meals there, starting a pattern that continued through the project. For this reason, the government immediately infiltrated the hotel staff, and many of the bartenders and cocktail waitresses in La Cantina—the hotel’s main watering hole—were undercover agents. So were several of the front desk clerks and various other staff members. At the Alvarado in nearby Albuquerque, the staff also had its share of G-men.
Oppenheimer hired a local woman named Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin, a fortyish widow from Kansas City,
to run the office in town. She and her family had been social friends of the Harveys. McKibbin handled all the logistics for the Manhattan Project scientists and their families, who primarily traveled on Santa Fe trains, many of them from Chicago (where work was being done at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago) and California (where radiation research was being done at Berkeley). Since there was still no direct train service into Santa Fe, McKibbin would arrange to have the scientists picked up in Lamy and brought to town, where they would eat at La Fonda before heading up to the Hill, and sometimes spend a night or two there, if there was room, as a reprieve from the spartan accommodations at Los Alamos. La Fonda was usually very crowded, since servicemen stayed there on furlough, sometimes creating a rowdy atmosphere that seemed out of place in laid-back Old Santa Fe.
As the main nexus between the Manhattan Project and the real world, La Fonda served many roles—everything from a lunch spot for shopping Hill wives to a secret rendezvous point. In July 1943, the first physics experiment was completed at Los Alamos—counting the number of secondary electrons emitted by a speck of plutonium-239. Afterward, the speck, which was virtually all the plutonium that existed in the world then, needed to be returned to the University of Chicago. So physicist Robert Wilson drove it down from the Hill before dawn in a pickup truck, armed with his deer-hunting rifle.
He brought it to La Fonda, where Chicago physicist Glenn Seaborg, whose team had discovered the rare element (and would later win the Nobel Prize), was staying with his family. Seaborg was handed the plutonium while a Harvey Girl served him breakfast.
“I just put it in my pocket,” he later recalled. (It’s unclear what kind of container it was in, but it may not have been anything elaborate—he had originally kept it in a wooden cigar box.) After finishing his meal, he transferred the plutonium to his suitcase for the ride back to Chicago on the Santa Fe.
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