CHAPTER 30
AMERICA’S CITIES EXPLODED AFTER WORLD WAR I, BUSTLING and churning to the sound of ragtime becoming jazz and the spiritual becoming the blues, as two of the nation’s busiest train junctions, Chicago and Kansas City, became centers of cultural cross-pollination. While Chicago was larger, Kansas City was freer, because the leaders of the Democratic political machine—still dominated by the Pendergast family, cement magnates in their second generation of controlling the local economy—made it clear they had no intention of enforcing the rules of Prohibition (which went into effect on January 16, 1920) or any other rules they didn’t like.
Fearless Freddy Harvey and his teenage bride, Betty, with her trendy flapper haircut and pouty lips, were stars in the new, youth-driven, all-hours social life of Kansas City. They cut a fine figure on any dance floor and held lavish parties. Freddy continued his daredevil exploits in the air and on the polo field—where his achievements, and occasional injuries, always made the papers. And, like everyone else in Kansas City, they might be found, at any time of the day or night, eating breakfast at the Fred Harvey restaurant in Union Station. Since it was open round the clock and was known for the most indulgent comfort food, the restaurant became a center for a diverse group of Kansas Citians whose days and nights ended at different times. Besides regular mealtimes, there were those who came after the theater to end their evenings, and then a younger crowd who came near midnight, their evenings just beginning. While Kansas City’s burgeoning jazz and blues clubs—which were spawning the likes of Count Basie—were concentrated farther east and north, they were just a streetcar ride away from the place that most people had taken to calling “Harvey’s.”
If you were a close friend of Freddy and Betty’s, you might even qualify to have Harvey’s brought to you. Fellow polo player Frank Baker, whose family was powerful in the grain industry, had a bachelor pad downtown where he threw many elaborate dinner parties—all discreetly catered by the Fred Harvey chefs at Union Station. Sometimes the chefs sent live lobsters or fresh mountain trout, prairie chicken or venison, to be prepared in Frank’s small kitchen, but often they just cooked all the food at the restaurant and it was delivered to the apartment by car.
SOME OF THE GLAMOUR of the Fred Harvey restaurants—not just in Kansas City, but all along the line—was generated by the more than occasional presence of movie stars dining among the locals. The Santa Fe was the preferred railroad to Hollywood, and had been since the first films were made there in 1910, by New York directors and actors seeking a place to shoot outdoors in the winter. The relationship between Fred Harvey and Hollywood was cemented in 1912, when directors D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett stopped in Albuquerque on their way home from California, set up shop at the Alvarado, and made two silent pictures there in ten days. Griffith shot an Indian melodrama called A Pueblo Legend. Sennett directed his girlfriend, the budding young film comedienne Mabel Normand, in The Tourists, a slapstick comedy about sightseeing in which a tourist named Trixie becomes so engrossed with buying pottery at the Indian Building that she misses her train. To kill time, she and some friends visit a pueblo, where the “Big Chief” shows them around until “Mrs. Big Chief” gets jealous, and soon the “Indian Suffragettes” are on the “war-path,” brandishing clubs. Trixie hides in an Indian blanket, but eventually she and her friends are chased back to the train, which the Indian “squaws” beat on with their clubs until it pulls away—with Trixie waving her handkerchief, smiling.
Neither picture went on to be taught in film schools. But movie people did get to know Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe, and they all realized the opportunity for cross-promotion. Some actors, directors, and executives preferred to keep a low profile while traveling, but others took full advantage of the exposure. In many ways, the railroad publicity machines were bigger and better established than those of the growing silent-film studios. The Santa Fe wanted to be seen as the railroad to the stars, who were only too happy to benefit from their relentless public relations efforts. So, it was no coincidence that when a well-known actor was riding toward any major Santa Fe city, a remarkably well-informed story about the trip would appear in the local newspaper.
“The biggest thrill I ever had was when William S. Hart, the famous western silent-movie star, came into the dining room,” recalled a Harvey Girl from the El Garces in Needles, California. “He sat at one of my tables and when I served him he said, ‘I’d like to stick you in my pocket and take you home and let you play with my ponies.’ He patted me and left. I looked under the plate after the train had gone and found a silver dollar … Sometimes you’d get someone who was needy—Groucho Marx was like that. The coffee wasn’t hot enough, the service not enough, nothing pleased him. We’d give those people special attention, but otherwise, everybody was treated the same.”
Humorist Will Rogers was a frequent train traveler and a regular at many Harvey restaurants. “All the girls knew who he was and used to go and stand on the porch of the Harvey House to watch him perform in the street,” recalls one Harvey Girl posted in Amarillo, Texas. “I became the Harvey Girl he always requested serve him. We became great friends. He’d call me by name when he came into the Amarillo dining room and then he’d say, ‘Bring me some of that corn bread and red beans and some of those delicious ham and eggs!’ Everybody knew what he wanted; and he’d get it, even at dinner time. He was a great favorite.”
In fact, Hollywood columnists would learn to pump Harvey Girls for information about traveling stars. After hearing that Carole Lombard had just said goodbye to Clark Gable at the Santa Fe station in Los Angeles, a reporter asked a busy Harvey Girl to help him out with some fashion details.
“What’s that Carole Lombard is wearing so I can tell my wife?” he asked.
“It’s a beige dress,” she said, hustling to clean away dishes.
“What kind of hat is that?” the reporter wanted to know.
“Listen, big boy,” the Harvey Girl shot back. “I’ve got five hungry men here screaming for food. I’m busy. Get yourself another stylist.”
While the motion picture business had been growing for some time, vying with theater and concerts to become the entertainment mainstay in cities large and small, the biggest postwar media explosion was on the airwaves. Commercial radio began to be viable in the early 1920s, which meant that companies were investing in broadcasting and families were buying huge living-room radios.
There was, of course, a Fred Harvey connection to this new business. Byron Harvey’s brother-in-law John Daggett became one of the first major stars in radio broadcasting. He was known to listeners as far as KHJ radio’s signal would carry—which, on most nights, was all the way to Chicago—as “Uncle John,” whose “Children’s Hour” was the last thing most kids remembered hearing before falling asleep. He came on at 6:30 p.m. and offered a gentle combination of musicians, actors, and comedy, before reading America’s youngsters a bedtime story. Uncle John was also the station manager at KHJ—which was owned by the Los Angeles Times, where he was a reporter. The Times got into radio to extend the brand into a new electronic medium and reap whatever profits this new technology might be stealing from print.
At the height of his fame, Uncle John, then in his early forties, was married on the radio to a seventeen-year-old whose high school glee club had appeared on his show. His young wife, Marguerite Daggett, became a character on the show, “Pal O’Mine,” but their marriage later imploded as famously as it began. During their front-page divorce, Uncle John accused his wife of having an affair with Michael Cudahy—the meatpacking magnate whose family had been friendly with the Harveys for decades—and she claimed he drank, cheated on her, and encouraged her to have sex with other men while he watched because he was too old to satisfy her.
It was the kind of scandal that the Harvey family had always successfully avoided. But for all their serious-mindedness in business, it was impossible to completely dodge the giddy media frivolity of the 1920s. One morning Ford Harvey was appalled to find in his morning mail a clipping from a front-page story in the Los Angeles Examiner with the headline “Diamond-Studded Toothbrush Stolen From Harvey’s Daughter.” The story claimed that “Fred Harvey’s daughter” had been robbed while staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with bandits making off with $50,000 ($629,000) in jewelry and precious stones—including the bejeweled toothbrush. In fact, the robbed woman wasn’t a Harvey at all; she was Kansas City socialite Dorothy Clendening, whom Ford and Judy knew from the country club, along with her husband, a prominent physician and medical writer. According to Ford, her closest connection to the Harveys was that he had called his friend Fred Sterry, who ran the Plaza, to make sure she got a nice room.
“Mrs. Clendening is a very dignified, attractive young matron who has no more idea of ‘a diamond-studded toothbrush’ than you or I,” Ford wrote angrily to his brother, Byron, after seeing the clipping. “Many will form an erroneous and unfavorable opinion of the Fred Harvey family from this … [which] demonstrates how helpless we are against the misrepresentations of a newspaper reporter.”
FORD WAS NO HAPPIER with the ongoing national coverage of the company’s bizarre battle with an Oklahoma state official who decided that the long-standing policy of requiring men to wear jackets in Fred Harvey dining rooms was actually un-American—and had to be stopped. Campbell Russell, the excitable chairman of the state’s corporation commission, went to the Harvey eating house in Purcell for dinner one hot August night, removed his jacket, and was stunned when the maître d’ told him he needed to put it back on—or take his meal in the lunchroom, where the same food could be had à la carte in more casual surroundings. Russell refused to put on his jacket, so he was refused service.
Several days later, he called a public hearing of his commission—which controlled business practices in the state—to take sworn testimony on the coat rule, which had been in place, in states with climates as warm as Oklahoma, as far back as the 1880s, long before Fred Harvey eating houses even had electric fans. Besides calling in various Oklahomans for their opinions, the commission compelled representatives of the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey to come to Oklahoma City and testify. Ford sent Freddy to explain why the company had the rule, and how they provided loaner jackets free of charge to any man who didn’t have one. The Santa Fe sent a vice president who challenged the commission’s jurisdiction in the matter.
A week after the hearing, Campbell’s commission declared that men absolutely could dine in Harvey eating houses in Oklahoma without jackets. Ford’s lawyers immediately challenged the ruling in court. Naturally, newspapers and radio commentators across the country had a field day.
Among the critics of the Fred Harvey jacket rule, the Washington Post called it “discrimination,” and the Chicago Tribune said it exemplified the double standard of fashion between the sexes: “Women do as they please … [while] American men are the most conventionalized and most timid wearers of clothes in the world … [but] a man has not lost any of his citizenship rights if he has removed his coat.” One Oklahoma paper went so far as to call the rule a conspiracy of “snobbery from England [against] the low brows of Oklahoma” and a “‘Jim Crow law’… aimed at whites only.”
But many papers lambasted Campbell Russell for his “ruthless warfare” against the very “conventions of society.” As one small-town editor said, it was only a matter of time before men would demand to dine without shoes and want to “take all the dogs and oxen in, too.”
More amazing than the national outcry was just how long Ford Harvey had to fight in court over the jacket rule. The case dragged on for three years in the Oklahoma legal system, eventually ending up on the docket of the exasperated state supreme court. During the same week that a judge in Chicago was making legal history by deciding the sentences for Leopold and Loeb—whose lawyer, Clarence Darrow, had turned their sensationalized murder trial into a popular referendum on capital punishment—Oklahoma’s chief justice, Neil McNeill, and his colleagues were stuck wrestling with the issue of whether men should wear coats in the dining room.
In a unanimous decision, the supreme court supported the Fred Harvey jacket rule:
Unlike the lower animals, we all demand the maintenance of some style and fashion in the dining-room. Civilized society has developed the masculine attire from the breech-clout to the coat and trousers. Always a part of the masculine garb … [the jacket] is worn as an adornment to satisfy the conventions of society rather than for bodily comfort and protection … these conventions of society cannot be entirely ignored, without disastrous results … Man’s coat is usually the cleanest of his garments, and the fact that he is required to wear a coat serves notice that decorum is expected and creates a wholesome psychological effect.
ACTUALLY, THE OKLAHOMA jacket battle was the least of Ford Harvey’s problems with government regulation. Like everyone else in the restaurant and hotel business, he was searching for a way to replace the profits lost to Prohibition. Fred Harvey was not quite as dependent on liquor sales as other establishments. The company had started in Kansas—which had long been one of the drier states in the country, an epicenter in the national temperance movement, and the home of anti-liquor crusader Carry Nation—and had operated under earlier statewide Prohibition laws in Kansas and Oklahoma for years. In fact, Fred Harvey had always been positioned as a more family-friendly alternative to saloons.
Nonetheless, most of the Fred Harvey hotels and eating houses had featured extensive wine selections, as well as private-label Scotch imported from Ainslie & Heilbron and a private-label whiskey made by Old Forester in Louisville—all high-profit items. And nobody had expected Prohibition to remain in place for so long, or to be prosecuted so vigorously all across the country. Regular raids in major cities had led to the closing of some of the nation’s most famous restaurants and hotels, especially when enforcement picked up on New Year’s Eve 1923. Within the next six months, New Yorkers watched in shock as dozens of popular eateries were forced out of business, including Shanley’s, Murray’s Roman Gardens, and the Knickerbocker Grill. Eventually, even historic Delmonico’s closed, after nearly a century as New York’s best-known restaurant.
Many restaurants and hotels around the country tried to remain quietly “wet,” by sneaking wine or spirits to customers. The most famous—and successful—was probably “21” in New York, which maintained not only a hidden wine cellar but an entire underground lounge for drinking. But Fred Harvey could not afford to take such risks.
Even before Prohibition, Fred Harvey was the only food-service company in the country being regulated by the federal government. It was under the constant scrutiny of federal regulators at the Interstate Commerce Commission, and Fred Harvey contracts at the Grand Canyon were entirely dependent on the good graces of the Department of the Interior. The company’s considerable stock of wine and spirits had to be locked away or sold off. While hotel patrons surely overtipped bellmen to have them find liquor they might enjoy in the privacy of their rooms, Fred Harvey establishments could never have secret basement lounges. There was too much at stake.
So Ford tried to grow his business in different, nonalcoholic ways. He made a deal to run all the restaurants and retail spaces in the new Chicago Union Station—a handsome classical building with a stunning twenty-thousand-foot, five-story-high Beaux Arts Great Hall. When the new Chicago station opened in 1925, it featured a Fred Harvey drugstore and soda fountain, a perfumery, a toy store, a barbershop, a beauty salon, a twenty-four-hour bookstore, and no fewer than eight Fred Harvey eateries, from a huge formal dining room to a small sandwich-making operation next to the taxi stand for cabbies.
With its successes in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago, Fred Harvey was sought out by other cities planning to build union stations. And not just traditional Santa Fe railroad cities. Ford was bidding on contracts for the new station in Dallas and the one being planned in Los Angeles, and was also considering the first major Fred Harvey operation east of Chicago, in Cleveland.
PROHIBITION ALSO FOSTERED the growth of other restaurants, which now had to innovate with food because they couldn’t make money on liquor. Much of the growth was in chains, every one of which based its business on the models created by Fred Harvey. The first generation of largely self-service eateries, which began opening in major cities at the turn of the century—especially the Childs cafeterias and the Horn & Hardart automats—were now substantial chains in many eastern cities and widely copied. Major cities also had take-out bakeries for breads and dessert items once made mostly at home—which the Fred Harvey restaurants had always done for their local customers—and even catering shops that offered prepared entrées for takeout or delivery. As early as 1902, Levy’s restaurant in Los Angeles was running this ad in the L.A. Times: “They’re coming tonightand I haven’t ordered a blessed thing for dinner. Why, of course, how absurd. I’ll just order from LEVY’S what I want. What a relief. Telephone us when your friends drop in unexpectedly. We deliver direct from kitchen to table. Try our lucky number Main 2184.”
By the 1920s, however, Americans were seeing the first wave of sitdown fast-food shops featuring signature hamburgers and frankfurters, sodas and ice cream. The first major hamburger chain was White Castle, which began in 1921 with four locations in Wichita, Kansas—where it competed with the Harvey House—and then spread into other Fred Harvey strongholds, Kansas City and St. Louis, before expanding into Minneapolis and many other Midwestern cities. The small, extremely shiny White Castles served small tasty burgers, and were able to overcome a long-held public fear of beef—left over from the Chicago meatpacking scandals—by stressing cleanliness (the interiors looked like gleaming white tile bathrooms) and even hiring young men to dress up as doctors and sit at the counters eating enthusiastically.
White Castle and the A&W Root Beer drive-ins (which started in Sacramento at around the same time) were among the first of the classic American fast-food franchise operations. It was a new and exciting business model that Fred Harvey had eschewed—although Ford was constantly getting offers to try it. The franchise chains expanded by selling local entrepreneurs the plans to open a look-alike facility of their own, and making them sign contracts to purchase signature foods. Some people bought multiple franchises; others used one to learn the business and then went out on their own. (The Marriott hotel chain, for example, had its origins in an A&W Root Beer stand that J. Willard Marriott and his wife started in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, leading them to create their own drive-in company, The Hot Shoppes, and then hotels.)
Most of these new chains did not have the same level of service or food quality as the Harvey Houses—and their owners appreciated perhaps more than anyone the ability of Ford’s restaurants to prepare and serve entire full-course meals in twenty minutes. But the burger joints and soda shops were spreading everywhere as America became a faster-food nation.
AS THE COMPANY GREW—it now had seven thousand employees in more than eighty cities—Ford was anxious to find a project to get Freddy more involved in the family business. Ford and his brother-in-law John Huckel were now well into their fifties, and Dave Benjamin was in his sixties and starting to spend more time on family and community matters.
In 1923, Dave’s two brothers died within six months of each other. Harry, with whom he had been working at Fred Harvey every day for over thirty years, suffered a sudden fatal heart attack. Then Dave lost his brother Alfred, who had become one of the most widely admired men in Kansas City, the selfless leader of the city’s first major Jewish philanthropic organization, United Jewish Charities, and a bridge between the fund-raising efforts of other religions. (Judy Harvey was often on the Catholic side of that bridge.) A rabbi and a Catholic priest presided at Alfred’s funeral, and outside Temple B’nai Jehudah a mourner was overheard saying, “I would rather be Alfred Benjamin than anyone I know.” Dave felt it was his responsibility to try to take Alfred’s place in the philanthropic community, so he was devoting more time to good works.
Now approaching thirty, Freddy remained a young, restless soul, still too distractible and reckless for his father’s comfort. When Ford got off the train in a Harvey town, he always went to the eating house first, just as his father had before him. But not Freddy: When his train pulled in, he was more likely to head off to the local airfield, hoping there might be a plane available for him to fly. He claimed he could get a better feel for a city by seeing it from the air. But his father knew there was only one way to get a feel for a city: You inspected the Fred Harvey kitchen, the dining room, the hotel lobby, you talked to the managers, the Harvey Girls, the maids. Flying, polo, fishing, hiking, all of Freddy’s passions—these were the things you did to relax only after business had been conducted.
It was time for Freddy to grow up already. Ford loved his younger brother, Byron, who had matured into a charming and temperate husband, father, and socialite and was doing perfectly well in Chicago overseeing the dining car business. He even appreciated his brother’s somewhat quixotic desire to design his own dining cars: Byron had received a patent for a diner car with the kitchen all the way at one end, instead of in the middle, which improved efficiency, but allowed passengers to enter only from one end. When the car debuted, it was heralded as the first new patent in dining car design since George Pullman’s in 1865. Byron had a scale model of it made for his desk.
But, patent or no patent, Ford had no intention of ever letting his brother, Byron, run or own a controlling interest in the company. He was determined that his son, Freddy, would be the next Fred Harvey.