Also thanks to Ted Steele, the president of the St. Louis Genealogical Society; MaryAnne Widel of the North West Missouri Genealogical Society; Judy Garland historian John Fricke; Kim Walters, associate director, Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center, and her research associate Manola Madrid for finding and translating Charles Lummis’s letters (and later finding his photos of his trip with Ford). Also thanks to those lured in at the end for photo research and last-minute fact-checking: Coi Drummond-Gehrig at the Denver Public Library; Jackie S. Robinson from the Florence, Kansas, Harvey House Museum; Wanda Fixsen and Thelma Jennings at the Fort Wallace Museum; Stephen Priest; Mary Colton (who not only helped me track down the amazing Harvey Girl pictures of her grandmother Margaret Becker, but also shared two of her handwritten diaries); Glenn Fye at the Albuquerque Museum; Katherine Degn at the Kraushaar Galleries; Keith Sheridan; and Wallace Dailey at the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard College Library.
Special thanks for logistical and other support for our cross-country train trip to Bruce Brossman and Bill Johnston of Xanterra’s Grand Canyon operation; Allan Affeldt, who with his wife, Tina Mion, saved La Posada; George Shaw, the Canyon Diablo bridge enthusiast who works away in the basement archive of La Posada, pausing only to give desperate strangers rides to Flagstaff; Dick Babcock at Chicago magazine; and Marc Magliari at Amtrak.
Like many long-form nonfiction writers, I rely on the kindness of researchers. First and foremost, thanks to Jason Schwartz, a fine journalist and history buffer, who as an undergraduate at Penn was my primary researcher for this project and without whose engagement, hard work, and “where’s Fred” newspaper reading this book might never have taken shape. Thanks to Heather Paxton, who after we met over the phone through Kansas City’s society magazine, The Independent, volunteered to be my one-woman Midwestern research staff and made inestimable contributions to this book. And thanks to Andy Hines, who did an amazing job overseeing the fact-checking and keeping track of the blue files.
Thanks also to two of my former Columbia J-School students, Amanda Zafian in New York and Maria Ahmed in London, who made many research breakthroughs (and to John Tofanelli, of Columbia’s Butler Library research staff, who helped with database searches). Thanks to Lauren Gilger for last-minute photo and menu research in Arizona, and to Jason Wesco, who assisted me in Topeka. My other research assistants on this project (in the order of their servitude in the Fred-mines): Dan Kaplan, Jennifer Machiaverna, Maria Popova, Nick Barr, Jess Feurst, Elizabeth Slavitt, Matt Rosenbaum, Anthony Campisi, Jessica Haralson, Tali Yahalom, Maggie McGrath, Khanh-Anh Le, and Jonathan Wroble.
I am honored but also saddened that Appetite for America turns out to be the last book edited by Ann Harris in her amazing sixty-year publishing career. We did four completely diverse and wonderful book projects together over fourteen years, and also energized each other’s lives and work in many different ways. I will miss working with Ann, but am glad to still have her as a friend. (The same is true for several others from the Bantam family who nurtured me and my books, but have since moved on.)
Thanks to my bright, intuitive new editor, John Flicker—who has quickly embraced Fred (and me)—for his brainstormery and good humor, and his assistant Jessie Waters for all her hard work. I’m especially grateful for the ongoing support of Nita Taublib, the executive vice president, publisher, and editor-in-chief at Bantam Dell, and I’m pleased to be working again with Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group, who published my first book in paperback.
Loretta Fidel, my smart, empathic, supremely patient agent, has been an especially wonderful proponent of this book, through a writing and editing process that had more than its share of challenges. She has also been a fount of Harvey puns, and I truly appreciate all her Fredilections.
Thanks to my family, especially my mother-in-law, Joan (who not only read the manuscript but tried some of the recipes for the holidays); my brother, Dan, who actually shlepped to California to film a Harvey Girl reunion (how did we get home that night?) and always gives good website; and my beloved kiddos: Jake, Emma, Anna, Eli, and Miranda. Thanks to my hoop buddies for keeping me grounded, elbowed, and amused.
I always thank my wife, Diane, last, because nothing I do could be accomplished without her. This book took more out of her—out of both of us—than the others, so I owe her even more gratitude than usual for her endless hours as my editor, and her endless love and support as my wife of twenty-two years. There are times when those two roles get too intertwined, but she is always there for me in all ways. In life, love, work, and play, she doesn’t just maintain the standard—she exceeds it every day. Thank God for her.
FREDITOR’S NOTES & SOURCES
IN RECREATING THE STORY OF FRED HARVEY AND THE AMERICA his family business helped build, I relied first on the surprisingly large cache of Fred’s own datebooks, business correspondence, personnel letters, and artifacts—as well as those of Ford, Freddy, Byron, Minnie, and Kitty Harvey and Dave Benjamin—which have been held privately for decades by disparate branches of the families, some of whom never realized their true significance. In many cases, I was allowed to borrow the original materials and bring them back to my office in Philadelphia, so I could really spend time with them—which made a huge difference (and made me, temporarily, the curator of the world’s best Fred Harvey museum). I had access to the fruits of two private family history projects undertaken by Fred’s grandsons: a dogged fact-finding mission by Daggett Harvey Sr. in the 1960s, when he was still an executive with the company; and a voluminous, rambling oral history by the retired Stewart Harvey Sr. in the 1980s, which fills over thirty ninety-minute cassette tapes. And I was the first writer ever allowed to use the remarkable private Fred Harvey archive of Dr. Jere Krakow, a treasure trove of corporate documents, ledgers, and microfilmed records.
In addition, I interviewed at length six Harvey family members with direct personal knowledge of the main characters and events in this book: Stewart Harvey Jr., Byron “Ronny” Harvey III, and Daggett Harvey Jr., who all worked for the company with their fathers; Joy Harvey, Ronny’s wife and a historian in her own right, who provided special insight into the Harvey women; Helen Harvey Mills, the keeper of the family photo archive; and Kay Harvey, the widow of Frederick Huckel Harvey and the only Harvey left in Santa Fe—as well as David Benjamin’s living relatives in Kansas City, Ann Kander and Judge Howard Sachs, and even Freddy and Betty Harvey’s niece in England, Elizabeth Drage Pettifer.
All this allowed me even greater insight into the large repositories of original Fred Harvey and Santa Fe railroad corporate material spread across the breadth of the Harvey System. In every place they operated, the Harveys were considered local celebrities. So there are literally dozens of archives around the country where the Harvey saga is viewed through a unique local prism, which made my job both easier and harder.
As a key to these chapter notes, here’s a simple view (which took me five years to see simply) of the world of what’s left of Fred, and the abbreviations used to reference it. There are seven major private collections. Stewart Harvey Jr. maintains one in Boston, but many of Stewart’s holdings were donated to the Leavenworth County Historical Society collection to assist in the Sisyphean effort to turn Fred’s original house into a museum. The Daggett Harvey Collection is held privately in Chicago—and includes Fred’s original datebooks, scratchpads, and ledgers, as well as a scrapbook put together in the 1940s with many of his original papers, and most of Ford and Byron’s correspondence—as is the Helen Harvey Mills Collection. Some of the Byron Harvey III Collection is held privately in Boston by his widow and children. The Kay Harvey Collection is held privately in the old family compound in Santa Fe. David Benjamin’s papers are in the Ann Kander Collection, held privately in Kansas City. And Dr. Jere Krakow’s collection is held privately in Albuquerque.
Most of the existing files from Fred Harvey’s corporate offices are sp
read across Arizona. Material from the main Chicago office is now in Phoenix at the Heard Museum, which is also the final resting place of the company’s Indian art. (This collection includes the Harvey clipping file, an excellent resource with only one problem—it includes the dates of stories and where they were printed, but generally no page numbers.) Other Fred Harvey corporate files—largely those originally held at the Grand Canyon offices, including materials concerning the Harvey Girls movie—ended up at the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University and the National Park Service archive at the Grand Canyon. The Kansas State Historical Society Collection includes the Santa Fe railroad’s corporate files, which document the railroad’s side of its dealings with Fred Harvey and its own, sometimes revisionist version of Harvey history. The Missouri Valley Special Collections department of the Kansas City Public Library is one-stop shopping on local history, and since many K.C. papers aren’t yet fully digitized, I sometimes relied on their bound in-house clipping collection (which, unfortunately, has no original page numbers or story titles). Many of the other newspapers from Kansas and New Mexico—especially Leavenworth and Las Vegas—had to be read on microfilm, but I was always extremely grateful to have access to the historical New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and others through Pro-Quest; to census and immigration information through ancestry.com; to academic articles through JSTOR; and to some papers through Newsbank’s “America’s Historical Newspaper” database, as far as it goes (which is, unfortunately, only up to 1922).
I went through nearly a thousand books and academic papers on the way to telling this story—just ask my researchers, whose library management abilities and sheer strength were constantly tested—but a handful of them were particularly helpful, and are often cited below.
The canon of underappreciated scholarship on all things Fred begins with a quirky 1942 master’s thesis by Harold L. Henderson, an ambitious graduate student of history from the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri–Kansas City), who was the first to spend significant time with family members (he interviewed Fred’s daughters Minnie and Sybil), employees, and some corporate files. Oddly enough, the next major academic study of Fred was done by an unrelated young scholar with the same last name: “Meals by Fred Harvey: A Phenomenon of the American West,” by James David Henderson at the University of Arizona in 1965. This second thesis was later published as the slim book Meals by Fred Harvey, which is still in print. (Another thesis I found very helpful was “Harvey Girls Then, Now, and Forever,” by Judith Ann Stoll, for her 1995 degree from Emporia State University.)
For the most part, Fred’s story has been relegated to chapters in books about other subjects, starting with Food and Flavor in 1913 by prominent New York critic Henry Finck, who viewed Fred as a “food missionary” out to save “ungastronomic America,” and, in 1940, Our Southwest by Erna Fergusson (who worked for the Harveys in Santa Fe during the Indian Detours, interviewed many key employees, and reportedly had her manuscript fact-checked by the company). The Harvey legend is also featured, in compact form, in the major books about the Santa Fe railroad on which I relied: James Marshall’s Santa Fe: The Railroad That Built an Empire, which was written in the 1940s (and, judging from what I saw in the company’s files, heavily informed by, and edited by, officials from the railroad and Fred Harvey); Steel Trails to Santa Fe by L. L. Waters, in the 1950s; and Keith L. Bryant Jr.’s very solid History of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in the 1970s.
Several contemporary books deserve special note. The two books produced by the Heard Museum for the 1996 show of art from the Fred Harvey collection are in many ways the culmination of a century of academic research and writing about Harvey and the railroad: the more user-friendly Inventing the Southwest by Kathleen Howard and Diana Pardue; and the dense and rewarding The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, edited by Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock. Arnold Berke’s biography, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest, is splendid visually and narratively. And I should make special note of The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the Westby Lesley Poling-Kempes, a smart feminist academic book published in 1989, which grew out of an oral history project Lesley did with Harvey Girls and their relatives in the early 1980s. I will always regret my failure to convince Lesley to let me listen to the original tapes of her Harvey Girl interviews. But because she decided not to share them (which is, of course, an interviewer’s prerogative), I relied on the myriad, and often quite wonderful, quotes in her book, all of which are cited below.
I also found inspiration and factoids in the train writings of Lucius Beebe—whose books are wonderful, exuberant, manic, and, in places, almost delightfully unintelligible. Now, that guy must have been amazing company on a long train ride.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR FREQUENTLY QUOTED SOURCES
AKC: Ann Kander Collection
BHC: Byron Harvey III Collection
CLC: Cline Library Collection, Northern Arizona University Library
CT: Chicago Tribune
DHC: Daggett Harvey Jr. Collection
HHMC: Helen Harvey Mills Collection
HMC: Heard Museum Collection
Htapes: Stewart Harvey Sr. tapes
IND: The Independent (Kansas City)
JKC: Jere Krakow Collection
KCJP: Kansas City Journal-Post
KSHSC: Kansas State Historical Society Collection
KCStar: Kansas City Star
KCT: Kansas City Times
KHC: Kay Harvey Collection
LAT: Los Angeles Times
LC: Leavenworth Conservative
LCHSC: Leavenworth County Historical Society Collection (donated by Stewart Harvey Jr.)
LT: Leavenworth Times (also Daily Times)
LVO: Las Vegas Optic
MVSC: Missouri Valley Special Collections (Kansas City Public Library)
NPSGC: National Park Service archive, Grand Canyon
NYT: New York Times
SFMag: SantaFe Magazine (also Santa Fe employee magazine)
SHC: Stewart Harvey Jr. Collection
NOTES
PROLOGUE
So when “Red John”: The earliest and best iteration of this often-told Fred story appears in “The Rise of the Harveys” by William Curtis, Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1911, page V19, which features an interview with Charles Brant, the original maître d’ at the Montezuma.
“a food missionary”: This term for Harvey was coined by the New York critic Henry T. Finck in “Ungastronomic America,” Century Magazine, Nov. 1911, and was later expanded into his 1913 book Food and Flavor, pp. 5–7.
years before Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola was invented in 1886, almost a decade after Fred’s chain started, and wasn’t sold outside of Atlanta or bottled on a wide scale until the mid to late 1890s.
Most of the Indian: I have chosen to use the word “Indian” throughout the book—instead of “Native American”—even though there continues to be debate about its political correctness. It is the term that was used during the time I am writing about, and it has certainly come back in style, which is why the new Smithsonian museum is called National Museum of the American Indian.
“More than any single”: Frank Waters, Masked Gods, p. 109.
CHAPTER 1: POT WALLOPER
legal notice appeared: “Law Notices,” Times (London), July 12, 1843, p. 7.
where Fred was baptized: Records at All Souls Church, St. Marylebone, London, show the baptism—number 272 for the year—took place on July 12, 1835. The family’s address was listed as 15 Great Marylebone Street (which is now called New Cavendish Street and the numbers are different).
“with a coachman”: Htapes, no. 5, side B, SHC.
living with his widowed Aunt Mary: 1851 U.K. census, London, Tottenham Parish, p. 15; they lived at 63 High Street.
in the late spring of 1853: All biographies of Fred claim he arrived in 1850, but I have come to the conclusion they’re incorrect. The 1851 U.K. cens
us says he was still in England then, and his entry in the 1900 U.S. census—the only one that asks what year he arrived—clearly says that he first came to America in 1853. Also, Fred became a U.S. citizen in 1858, under a rule that allowed expedited naturalization, after only five years, for people who entered the country before the age of eighteen. Since Fred was always in a hurry, it is more logical that he applied for expedited citizenship as soon as he could, which would have been five years after an arrival in 1853.
avoid being drafted: Author interview with Stewart Harvey Jr., who said he was told this by Fred’s longtime employee Herman Schweizer.
Washington Street Market reeked: Information on the market comes from The Stranger’s Guide Around New York and Its Vicinity, pp. 21 and 53; and from “How New York Is Fed,” Scribner’s Monthly, Oct. 1877, pp. 729–31.
Smith & McNell’s: Information on Smith & McNell’s is from NYT stories: “Old Hotel to Change Hands,” Sept. 27, 1899; “Market Men’s Inn Has to Raise Prices,” Oct. 4, 1907; “High Prices Down Smith & M’Nell’s,” Dec. 4, 1914; and Topics of the Times, Aug. 11, 1948, p. 22.
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