Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER 23

TENTH LEGION

ON A TYPICAL MORNING AT THE FRED HARVEY OFFICES IN KANSAS City, Ford met with his top executives—“the Tenth Legion,” as he jokingly called them, after Caesar’s elite fighting force. Clad in nearly identical gray suits, they sat discussing problems large and small throughout the sprawling Harvey System: anything from the specter of federal regulation of train depots, to the problem of pregnant Harvey Girls, to how it was that tiny toads found their way into all the coffee cups in Guthrie just before a seating—discovered only when scalding beverages were poured on them. Or sometimes the subject was a tiny price change in an indispensable provision—which, multiplied by several million meals a year, meant a considerable amount of money.

“Coffee has riz, two cents higher this morning—how much have we left?” Dave asked, his British accent and word placement still strong, as a rare visitor, a local reporter, listened in.

“Two cents a pound? That’s going to set us back five thousand dollars, just about,” said one of the legionnaires. “We’re using twenty-five thousand pounds a month or more.” Every year, Fred Harvey was now buying and serving some 6,480,000 eggs; 300,000 pounds of butter; 1,000,000 pounds of sugar; 2,000,000 pounds of beef; 600,000 pounds of chicken; 500,000 pounds of ham; 100,000 pounds of bacon; 150,000 pounds of lard; 100,000 pounds of turkey; and 60,000 pounds of duck. It also used seventy-five train-car loads of flour (about 3,000,000 pounds) and eighty-eight train-car loads of potatoes (about 2,800,000 pounds). All chased down with over 300,000 pounds of Chase & Sanborn coffee.

Another gentleman strode into the office, holding a package of dinner rolls. It was Victor Vizzetti, the company’s culinary czar. “A fellow sent these from Hutchinson,” he explained. “Says they’re better than ours.”

Ford and Dave stuck out their hands for samples while checking other reports piled in front of them.

“Here’s a letter from a man in Washington who says they serve better olives in a hotel there than we do,” Ford said. “How about it?”

“Look over there on that desk, Mr. Harvey,” Vizzetti shot back. “I wrote immediately to that hotel and procured the brand when I heard about it. It’s exactly the same olive we’ve been serving. I have one man on the West Coast who puts in all his time looking up the best olives and olive oil for us.”

Ford picked up the jar of olives and examined it. “I guess that chap was carried away by the flowers and shaded lights and the music,” he said with a shrug. “He just thought those olives tasted better.” Olives were no small matter at Fred Harvey; Ford had recently sparked a huge controversy by admitting to Pacific Fruit World that he believed Italian olive oil was still better than anything made in California, which was why his chefs used it exclusively.

No matter how large the company got, every day at Fred Harvey headquarters started the same way—with a meeting of Ford’s Tenth Legion. The group included Dave, John Huckel, Victor Vizzetti, Dave’s brother Harry, A. T. Hilyard, the head of procurement, and Frank Clough, the book buyer for the newsstands. All of these men had known Fred Harvey personally, and had been promoted through the ranks by Ford and Dave. All of them understood the company’s obsession with the needs of customers as well as employees, since any personal problem could quickly become a professional one.

And all of them, in the words of the reporter, knew “the multiplication table backward down to the division of a mutton chop. They juggle daily with reports and train routes and figures and maps and crop failures and markets until they can tell you the exact reason why there was a pint of sweet cream left over on a trip through the American Sahara until it soured enough to use for the salad dressing they served that terrible hot day the passengers didn’t seem to care for hot meats.”

Fred Harvey had been gone for three years, and the plan for how the company would run after his death had succeeded brilliantly. By not allowing any estate issues to slow or divert the family business, the Harvey System was riding a wave of renewed American prosperity and the rising fortunes of the Santa Fe Railway. In addition to the depot eating houses and lunchrooms in over sixty cities and towns, Ford and Dave were now running eight large, handsome trackside hotels the Santa Fe had built over the past few years—in Newton and Dodge City, Kansas; La Junta and Trinidad, Colorado; Clovis, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Temple, Texas—and there were plans for many more. They also created large “commissaries” in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and several other cities that did food prep for all the dining cars and tested out recipes and new ingredients.

To fill the seemingly endless needs for fresh ingredients, Ford had established his own dairy farms and poultry facilities at Newton, Temple, and Del Rio, Arizona, which not only produced milk and dressed chicken parts but also made fresh ice cream. These also allowed the company to set new standards for safeguarding the nation’s milk safety, following up on the suggestion of a well-known customer: “Frontier Doctor” Samuel Crumbine, a nationally known public health reformer who lived in Dodge City and had breakfast every day at the new Harvey hotel there, the El Vaquero. One morning, when Dave Benjamin was in the hotel, Crumbine pulled him aside and complained about how dangerous it was that milk was being stored in open jugs and pitchers, inviting bacteria. So Fred Harvey became one of the first companies in the nation to use only smaller milk bottles that could be sealed.

While the restaurants and hotels were his main focus, Ford was also taking care of the expanding Santa Fe dining car business, where he made a major personnel change that also helped solve the problem of where to put his twenty-six-year-old baby brother, Byron—whom he loved dearly, but generally considered to be spoiled and somewhat lazy. He sent Byron, who had been soaking up the culture in the Kansas City office, to Chicago as the family’s representative in the Santa Fe dining car business. The dining car operation was completely separate from the eating houses, and was run very differently. The chefs and supervisors, as well as the servers (who, like the train stewards, were black men—there were no Harvey Girls on wheels), were managed by the Fred Harvey dining car office in Chicago. But they were paid by the railroad. The menus, ingredients, and service were absolutely Fred Harvey quality, but the operation was more of an interactive partnership with the Santa Fe than the eating houses and hotels were. And running the dining car business was more about schmoozing railroad executives and crunching the numbers than the kind of creative, bottom-up management Ford’s people did from Kansas City. Byron, who had excellent people skills but limited executive moxie, was brought in as the “titular head of the dining car operation,” according to one of his grandsons, “but in essence he was ‘minded’ by the senior supervisors who had actually been running that division. They were instructed by Ford to ‘train’ Byron, so he could become more than a figurehead leader.”

My father didn’t know how to do anything when he went to Chicago,” one of Byron’s sons would later recall. “Some cheese company sent him a Roquefort cheese to try it out. He had somebody open it; he smelled it and told the guy to go out and bury it, it was rotten!”

Besides hospitality, Ford was moving the company more strongly into a new business—publishing. Taking the advice of his brother-in-law John Huckel—who always offered his own opinion as well as Minnie’s—Ford increased the amount of space and attention allotted to books in their newsstand business. This turned the company’s longtime book buyer, Frank Clough, a former Leavenworth neighbor of the Harveys who had started out as an eating house cashier, into something of a phenomenon in the publishing industry. Because of the company’s expanding reach and his own proven instincts, he was now one of the few book buyers in America who could predict, or create, a best-seller.

But there was more to publishing than books. Ford was also investing in the country’s hottest new communications medium: the picture postcard. He teamed with the new American powerhouse in the postcard business, the Detroit Publishing Company, which had cornered the market by securing the U.S. patent on the best new process for colorizing black-and-white photos and then partnering with America’s preeminent outdoor photographer, William Henry Jackson, so they could make all his pictures into color postcards. Then Detroit benefited from a stroke of luck: In 1898 the U.S. government lowered the postage required on a card from two cents to one, and also began loosening restrictions on what could appear on the picture side as well as what could be written on the blank side. A partnership with Ford took Detroit Publishing to the next level. Not only did the Harvey System have a powerful distribution network, but the company owned a huge stockpile of photographs and was constantly taking more—all of which could be made into postcards. The two companies made an exclusive wide-ranging contract in 1904, and pictures of “Fred Harvey Indians,” archaeological wonders, and southwestern life started appearing on postcard racks around the country. The two companies also explored other ways to profitably publish the images, everything from handsome books to sets of highly collectible gold-leaf Fred Harvey “Souvenir Playing Cards of the Great Southwest” with a different tinted photo on the face of each card.

Each time the company expanded, more businessmen around the country came to appreciate what a unique talent Ford was—how creatively he had taken what his father built and molded it into something so much larger and more complex while still maintaining the standard and, if anything, increasing the loyalty of employees and patrons. Yet there was something curious about the way Ford still refused to put his name on anything, and labored to maintain the illusion that his father was still alive. Every menu, every piece of promotional material, still ended with “Your host is Fred Harvey.”

One Kansas City society columnist suggested Ford was “peculiarly lacking in personal ambition … Even his identity is obscure to the general public.” But actually, he was every bit as ambitious as his father, which made his willingness to remain behind the curtain, and lead by powerful presence, that much more intriguing.

A handful of eastern entrepreneurs had seen Ford’s vast operation and were trying to copy aspects of it. William and Samuel Childs had returned from a train trip west and started a small chain of “dairy lunch” cafeterias in their hometown of New York City. Two Philadelphia luncheonette owners, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, had taken the self-serve idea one step further and opened the first American coin-operated automat. At Horn & Hardarts, individual servings of cold foods were displayed behind rows of small chrome-plated doors, each with its own coin slot that only accepted nickels; hot foods were served at steam tables, except for wondrous hot chocolate, which flowed from a chrome-plated spout after your nickels dropped clink into the slot.

The cafeterias and automats represented the first steps toward a new kind of fast-food eating—prompted, in part, by the rising price of oysters from the polluted, overharvested waters around New York, which had finally eroded the mollusk’s status as a staple for quick, easy meals. But the food at these new cafeterias and automats was generally much simpler than Fred Harvey’s, and there was, by definition, no service. The Harvey System was the nation’s gold standard for fine, fast, dependable, comforting food in cities large and small.

NO MATTER HOW FAR and wide the Harvey System spread, its heart and soul were still in Kansas City. Ford had managers in each Fred Harvey location, regional offices in New Mexico, California, and Texas, and a band of roving inspectors and auditors, but the entire business was still run by his Tenth Legion from their growing suite of low-profile offices on the second floor of the Kansas City Union Depot annex building. While the Harvey family saw the Southwest more and more as their home away from home, Kansas City was where they, and the company, lived.

In fact, Ford and Judy Harvey had become major players in the growth of the former “City of Kansas,” which was starting to fulfill its dreams of being the next Chicago—the second city’s second city. When they moved there as newlyweds back in the late 1880s, it had about sixty thousand residents and was just beginning to develop a distinctive brand of Midwestern urban life. But Kansas City was now one of the twenty-five largest cities in America. It had a population of over 165,000, and it was growing rapidly under the tough-love political leadership of city councilman James Pendergast, whose family concrete company went on to control new construction for decades.

Ford and Judy Harvey had been part of Kansas City’s young social set in the Quality Hill neighborhood and were founding members of the Kansas City Country Club. Now that their children were older—Kitty was eleven, Freddy, eight—and business was flourishing, they moved to the wealthy neighborhood near Hyde Park. They bought the spacious house at 3617 Robert Gillham Road that the late architect Henry Van Brunt, a protégé of Frank Furness’s, had designed for his own family. Ford became increasingly active in the civic life of Kansas City, and his wife was a rising star of the social scene, known for her good works, great parties, and ambitious family travels.

The Harveys were especially involved with Catholic charity work. While Ford was still technically Episcopalian—although, lately, most of his religious experiences involved his awe at God’s handiwork in the Southwest—Judy remained a devout Catholic. She had followed through on her promise to raise the children in her faith, and was deeply involved in Catholic social causes. Ford was fully supportive of the charity work she did, and gave generously, though always with characteristic discretion.

In a very cozy arrangement, Minnie and John Huckel would soon buy a house down the street from Ford and Judy’s new home, so the Kansas City Harveys were together often—and had frequent visits from their mother and sisters, who took the train down from nearby Leavenworth. Dave Benjamin and his wife, Linnie, also bought nearby on Gillham Road.

So, Ford and the leaders of his Tenth Legion grew closer personally as well as professionally. And those who succeeded in the Fred Harvey Service understood the need to accept a similarly blurred line between work and private life. As one national magazine writer said of Ford, “His employees who do their work well are his friends.”

The way they lived mirrored the way their employees lived, in more than seventy different outposts connecting more than half of America: from Chicago west into Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona to California, and from Chicago south to St. Louis and into Arkansas and Oklahoma, all the way down through Texas. In each city and town, whether there was just a lunchroom and newsstand or a new hotel with a staff of fifty or sixty, being in the Harvey Service meant living and working in close quarters with intense commitment. Fred Harvey people lived as if they were on small military bases where the strategies and tactics of hospitality were taken every bit as seriously as those of combat. As in all military operations, there were a large number of young, ambitious people looking to improve themselves during a short term of duty, a handful of lifers who had stayed on to be promoted up the ranks, and a townful of people who had gotten their discharge from the Harvey Service (honorably or not) and decided to make their homes where they were last posted. So they still came to eat in their old restaurants and participated in the social lives of the Harvey Houses like veterans: There were regular dances, plays, baseball games, sing-alongs, weddings, baby showers. The culture of Harvey people was so intense that they were given their own section in the Santa Fe railroad employee magazine, because they communicated in a language all their own.

TO KEEP IN TOUCH with his nearly seven thousand employees, and remind them—and himself—of the importance of their work, their loyalty, their integrity, and their ingenuity, Ford would sometimes dictate long conversational memos to be copied and circulated throughout the system. He also sent around copies of speeches he gave to trade groups about the company’s successes and challenges, as well as typewritten versions of any newspaper articles mentioning Fred Harvey service.

While his father had primarily communicated through actions, Ford was learning the power of words. And he was using them to explain a business ethos that was adapted from his father’s ideas and informed his own contemporary experience.

Ford could make an entire sermon out of an order of pompano.

[We] instruct our people always to give the customer the benefit of the doubt—which goes a step further, I think, than simply assuming that the customer is always right. It is not always so simple to satisfy a customer, even by giving the customer the benefit of the doubt. He may be wrong—and while we must satisfy him, if we leave him under the impression that he is right he may carry away a harmful impression.

We serve a good deal of pompano, for example, a highly flavored fish. Those who like it cherish this flavor. But, unfortunately for us, the customer who orders it may not know it. And then the chances are excellent that he calls the dining-car steward or the restaurant manager and complains that his fish is spoiled. Our man knows exactly what is up, of course. He knows further that his first job is to suggest some other dish which will suit the customer. But next comes the dilemma. Shall he, by keeping still, admit that his place is serving bad fish, and thus shake the customer’s confidence in us? Or shall he offend the customer mortally by pointing out that the customer knows nothing about fish, else he would recognize the pompano as excellent?

It is a situation which calls for big-caliber diplomacy. About the only way out is for our men to pay extra attention to the customer throughout the rest of the meal, get the conversation around to fish and their peculiarities of flavor, and then—without letting the customer suspect he is doing so by intention—plant the idea that by reason of its unusual high flavor pompano is often unjustly suspected of taint. Such a job requires consummate tact. If we were able to score a bull’s eye 50% of the time, the State Department would recruit ambassadors exclusively from our employ!

Through his talks and writing, Ford was developing a running list of rules for businessmen—an unconscious update of those that Fred used to carry around glued to the front of his wallet when Ford was a baby, which was equally illuminating:

1.     Never buy a cheap thing: Everything you buy, you in turn sell. If you buy the best, your customer gets the best.

2.     The best price is always the fair price: You may be the first on the market in the morning, but the buyer who is always seeking his supplies at a price under the market will fail to secure preferential consideration.

3.     Concentrate your business in as few hands as possible: When you have formed the right associations, “stick” unless convinced your confidence is misplaced, and in that case be careful to see that you hitch up right the next time.

4.     Loyalty is double barreled—if you want it, you must be loyal.

5.     Plow your profits under: At every point, our growth has been clearly in proportion to our willingness to be moderate in our immediate profit-taking for the sake of the fullest possible satisfaction of the customer. We have not always been so moderate as we might, but always we have paid more for the fun than it was worth. Now, anything above the normal in profits in any section of the business is taken at once as a danger signal and calls for investigation. Generally, we have found, it means that somebody has been cutting costs for a profit showing—without enough regard for profits in the long run.

6.     Be committed to complete customer satisfaction: In every venture from the Topeka lunchroom on down, we have been assailed and assailed again with the most plausible reasons for doing things less well. Sticking to our commitment in spite of all sorts of inducements to depart from it has really counted for us.

7.     Hold constantly to a level of theoretical perfection: Of course we are not unfailingly successful in having our policies carried out. Of course some of our people fail to hold to our standards, some more often than others. But trying to attain perfection creates a process of natural selection that helps management with its purpose. If, unthinkably I should direct our meat buyer to purchase second grade beef hereafter, I honestly believe that he would disregard the order. It is the same with all of our department heads and our buyers. Any one of our responsible executives under such circumstances would simply conclude that I had said something that I really did not mean, or that I had suffered a temporary aberration from which I would soon recover.

8.     Catch employees young, or at least fairly inexperienced in your kind of business. We find we have a better chance with them that way than if we get them already trained by someone else.

9.     Always promote from within your own ranks: We are firm about this. And it is not without a good deal of regret that we sometimes pass up the opportunity to add to our staff a particularly competent individual who has proved himself elsewhere. Our people recognize the opportunities that come to them because we will not hire a man for a responsible job if we can possibly fill it from within.

10. Gradually and steadily expand, so that we may make opportunities for the competent youngster who comes up from the ranks. If we did not expand, they might leave us.

11. Always please the cranks: Anything which suits a finicky customer is bound to be more than satisfactory to the great run of folks who take what is handed them without complaint. The unreasonable customer, by setting the standards to which we hold, has insured our pleasing the reasonable customers who would be satisfied with less. And the finicky customer is by disposition a talker. Take away any grounds for complaint, deprive him of his grievances, and he goes about the world praising you just as ardently as he would otherwise decry you.

12. Never take yourself too damn seriously.

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