APPENDIX I
AT 3:15 EVERY AFTERNOON, THE TRAIN FRED HARVEY TOOK ACROSS America still departs from Union Station in Chicago. While run by Amtrak, the train retains its old Santa Fe designation as the number 3 to Los Angeles, and it is still called the Southwest Chief.
Today, my wife, Diane, and I begin our journey: “chiefing” across the country in search of what is left of Fred and Ford’s inspiring enterprise. While the company did, in its later years, extend east to Cleveland, Fred Harvey’s roots were always in the America that began in Chicago and headed west by southwest by rail. We are here to do the same.
Like many big-city union stations, Chicago’s is a massive structure with great architectural bones, but its most dramatic spaces have largely been wasted for years. There are plans to restore the station to its former grandeur—a process that is happening to depots all over the country, thanks to federal funds earmarked for preserving transportation buildings. But until these ambitious plans become reality, most of Chicago Union Station’s busiest areas—the underground concourse and food court—pass for what was considered eye-catching in the 1970s, when Amtrak took them over. (The Santa Fe did continue as a freight line until 1995, when it merged with the Burlington Northern, creating BNSF.) The station’s lower-level waiting area is so disheartening that our highlight is chatting with a guy in the food court who works as a traveling casualty-notification officer, a specialist in giving military wives the bad news.
When we board the Chief, however, we immediately feel much happier. Even though the days of Pullman luxury are gone, Amtrak does offer first-class sleeper compartments on its long-distance trains, and they are well worth the extra money. They’re a bit shabby, but in a cozy, comfortable way, with couch-like seating and a big picture window all to ourselves.
The cabin was advertised as having a private bathroom with a shower, which is technically true. Actually what it has is what Diane refers to as a “shoilet”—a cramped metal closet about the size of an upended coffin that serves both purposes. George Pullman would have appreciated the ingenuity of the shoilet—which has a showerhead suspended over the toilet seat, and almost enough room to wash half-crouched—although he would probably have insisted on marble walls and a porcelain, self-heating seat.
As the Chief picks up speed beyond the city and suburbs, we sit and stare as northern Illinois passes by. Not everything we see is beautiful, yet somehow it is mesmerizing—fields of corn that appear to be blowing over as we pass, the backs of ramshackle houses with burnt-out cars on blocks, the shadows of planes flying toward O’Hare, depots that were once centers of town and now don’t even merit a stop of the train. As journalist William Allen White lamented when the first fast Santa Fe train sped past his hometown of Emporia, “This new blue streak gives us the royal run around, the grand bounce, the dirty look—and brushes by like a movie queen! The whistle gives a toot … a dark smudge crosses the dawn and it’s over.”
We are reminded just how much more pleasant the train is than driving. That’s especially true for me, since I’m always the one behind the wheel, so I see everything and nothing at the same time. Diane also likes the train for another reason. Whenever she opens the door and sticks her head out of the cabin into the corridor, everything resembles an unfolding scene from a Hitchcock movie.
As we cross through Fort Madison, Iowa, and into northern Missouri, there is still nothing of Fred Harvey for us to see. While some of these small stations once had Harvey newsstands, this section of the Santa Fe was the speedy “airway” to Kansas City. It was where Fred Harvey had its original dining cars, so it seems appropriate that we go visit the rolling Amtrak diner to see what kind of standard is being maintained.
There aren’t enough tables for couples to dine by themselves, so we are forced to buddy up with another couple—initially somewhat irksome, but they turn out to be terrific conversationalists, reminding us that before cars and planes travel was once a much more pleasantly social proposition. I recall the words of a Fred Harvey busboy from Emporia, Kansas, lamenting the rise of the automobile: “When the railroad connected towns and was the only reliable way to travel, I think people were friendlier. The country lost something when the railroad went; it seems a lot of history was left behind—the pioneer history and feeling … There was a lot of connection between people on the trains.”
But connecting with charming people doesn’t make unexceptional food delicious. The meal is a little better than the Amtrak snack-bar fare on the eastern-corridor trains, but far from noteworthy. I keep expecting the ghost of Fred to appear and yank the tablecloth—except there are no tablecloths.
Kansas City is the first major Fred outpost on the Chief. Union Station itself is majestic, its restoration in the late 1990s remarkably successful. The main Fred Harvey dining room in Kansas City, which was renamed the Westport Room in the 1940s and remained extremely popular well into the 1960s, is gone but the old ladies’ lounge has been transformed into a fine private restaurant called Pierpont’s, with good steaks and seafood. Next to it is the old Harvey lunchroom space, which has been well preserved—the ceilings and walls pretty much intact—and currently houses the “Harvey House Diner.” The old Fred Harvey offices on the second floor are now used by a law firm that has kept much of the original wood paneling. Ford Harvey’s old corner office is still there, its Indian-head mantel intact and the old National Regulator thermometer on the wall.
Fred’s hometown of Leavenworth isn’t far from Kansas City—unless you use the MapQuest directions as we did, which take you along the same old, crooked country road Fred’s horse-drawn carriage probably used in the 1860s. By highway it’s just half an hour or so away, and worth visiting because so much of Fred’s stuff is there. The Harvey mansion itself is being lovingly and meticulously restored by local folks who have been slaving away at the job for years. In the restored stables, they have started a modest museum, which includes a real Harvey Girl uniform and a small collection of artifacts. As I’ve learned over years of research (and eBay surfing), there are an enormous number of collectible items with Fred Harvey’s name on them: multiple patterns of signature dishes, silverware and stemware, books, postcards, photographs, playing cards, Indian curios, bottles, coffee cans, candy tins, liquor bottles, Harvey Girl statuettes. But so far, many private collectors have more and better stuff than this museum in progress.
Down the street, however, is the best collection in the country of Fred and Sally’s actual housewares—kept at the Leavenworth County Historical Society in the old Carroll Mansion for safekeeping until the Harvey House has been fully restored. Fred’s rolltop desk is on display, along with his shotgun and a lot of the dishes and silver from the house. Tucked away in file cabinets is an extensive collection of family photographs and many of the moving letters that Ford received from Fred during his declining years.
For Fredophiles, this is a thrilling collection—although its highlight is also its biggest tease. They have three of the Edison Cylinders Fred used to communicate with his family from England, hand labeled “Father’s Voice.” Unfortunately, two of the cylinders are cracked like Turkish Taffy, and the third one plays with so much surface noise that you can’t hear his voice. I know this because I once carried the cylinder, by hand, from Leavenworth to a highfalutin lab in New York City specializing in incredibly old-tech transfers. They couldn’t get a sound off it except crackling.
Back on the train, our Amtrak first-class porters have literally turned down our beds while we were eating, transforming our cabin into a bunk-bed cocoon for two. My wife insists she will never be able to get to sleep with all the train’s rocking and rolling, but within minutes those very movements have lulled us both into deep, rewarding slumber. We pass towns in the night that could make the unabridged, director’s-cut Fred Harvey–tour itinerary. In Topeka, there’s not much left to see of the depot, but the state historical society holds all that is left of the corporate files of the Santa Fe railroad. In Florence, part of the old Clifton Hotel building still stands, and the local historical society puts on periodic Harvey Girl reenactment dinners that are reportedly quite tasty. For this trip, however, we decide to stay on the train until morning and get out at Dodge City.
You can’t rent a car at the Dodge City station (which is true at too many western train stations, unfortunately, and makes train travel more challenging than it ought to be). So we remain in our compartment until the next stop, Garden City, where you can arrange to have a rental car waiting: It’s the same little depot where Truman Capote and Harper Lee disembarked when they visited Holcomb while researching In Cold Blood. We get a car, take the long, flat drive back to Dodge, and realize we made a mistake. Everything in the charming little town is so close to the depot we probably could have done the visit on foot.
Dodge City’s main street has been nicely preserved—a little touristy, but it has its charms. The Boot Hill Museum is a hoot. I’m not sure how authentic the cemetery is, with the toes of plaster boots sticking out of the ground, but it does cause all those old cowboy movie images to stir in our minds. Inside the museum there is some amusing vintage furniture for which a great many cows and buffalo gave their lives, and a small collection of Fred Harvey memorabilia.
But the cornerstone of the Boot Hill Museum complex is the Hardesty House, which was the actual home of Fred’s in-laws: rancher Jack Hardesty, his wife, Maggie (Sally Harvey’s sister), and their daughter. It appears as if nothing has been moved since they died in the early 1900s: It is a little eerie, actually, with the rooms sealed off behind plexiglass walls. But these are probably the last rooms left that look exactly as they did when Fred and Sally Harvey and their kids last visited.
The highlight of Dodge City, however, is the old Fred Harvey hotel, the El Vaquero, which has been brilliantly restored, albeit in a rather surprising way. It is now a dinner theater; probably America’s most historically significant dinner theater. For a town with such an outlaw reputation, Dodge City is actually quite friendly and progressive, with a robust arts community. A local theater maven was able to get $5 million from the federal government to turn most of the El Vaquero into a state-of-the-art theatrical facility, with a full digital recording studio. The Depot Theater Company also restored the original hotel lobby space to its absolute Mary Colter–ish perfection: Every piece of her original handmade furniture has been rebuilt from scratch. The juxtaposition of the old hotel lobby and depot with the new dinner theater is a little odd, but it beats the alternative: In many Fred Harvey cities, the old hotel buildings have been torn down.
We board the train the next morning for the long ride into New Mexico, but separate at the La Junta, Colorado, station because I have an opportunity I can’t pass up—an invitation to ride with the engineer. One thing about writing a book about Fred Harvey is that you meet a lot of “trainiacs”—an affectionate term for the locomotively obsessed, whether they are historians, modelers, or actual railroad employees. One of the most helpful and generous trainiacs is Brenda Thowe, a longtime personnel executive with the Santa Fe (and now BNSF) and a Harvey Girl enthusiast. Because Brenda has pulled some strings, I climb up into the engine car in La Junta and ride with the engineer, his assistant, and a BNSF supervisor (who is there to make sure I don’t hijack the train) all the way through Colorado, up through the Raton Pass, and into New Mexico. It is a thrilling ride, with fascinating running commentary about railroad accidents and all the celebrity ranches we’re traversing: “Oh, this is Ted Turner’s land, and then down past here is Don Imus …”
There’s nothing much to see at the old Raton depot, where the Harvey Girls made their debut, but at the next stop in New Mexico, Las Vegas, there are major blasts from Fred Harvey’s past. The first is bittersweet: The Castañeda, the Santa Fe’s original Mission Revival Fred Harvey hotel and the site of the Rough Riders’ reunion, is still there, but just barely. The building and its surrounding structures have been featured in many Hollywood films, going back to old Tom Mix Westerns and, in the color-film era, everything from the parade scene in Easy Rider to exteriors for the Oscar-winning 2007 Coen Brothers movie, No Country for Old Men. But no matter how sturdy the construction of the graceful Castañeda, its shell—one of the nation’s top endangered landmarks—can’t survive forever.
Just six miles outside of town, however, is one of America’s most astonishing preservation miracles. The shell of the Montezuma—which was used as a seminary from 1937 to 1972, and then sat vacant for nearly a decade—was purchased by billionaire Armand Hammer’s foundation in 1981. It became a hulking Victorian backdrop for the new buildings of the American campus of Hammer’s pet project, United World Colleges (UWC), an ambitious international program for high school students, now prominently supported by Queen Noor of Jordan, Prince Charles of England, Nelson Mandela, and other world leaders. Then in 2001, the UWC spent $10.5 million to dramatically restore the old building and make it the cornerstone of the educational retreat. You can arrange to tour the hotel’s luxurious public spaces, although the creaky third-floor turret, which offers a breathtaking view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is off-limits to anyone but the staff and the occasional student who sneaks up there. After the tour, we wander to the outskirts of the campus to dip our feet in the hot springs, which bubble up in small outdoor pools (and the occasional hot puddle) in several places near the hotel building. It’s a popular place for students from the nearby New Mexico Highlands University to come on dates.
Back on the train, we continue on to Lamy station, where we disembark for our short trip to Santa Fe. While there is a daily train, we take the shuttle bus service to the city—or, in our case, to a rental car center.
Our first stop is La Fonda hotel, which has been in continuous use since the company first opened it in 1926. La Fonda is still very much part of the center of town, although it looks a little different than in its heyday. It was run by Fred Harvey until the 1960s, when it became so unprofitable that the company sold it to a colorful, wealthy, menschy New Yorker named Sam Ballen. He rescued La Fonda financially—and helped Santa Fe through its growing pains in the 1960s and 1970s, just as Fred Harvey did in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. But in the process, Ballen allowed parts of the hotel’s elegant first floor to be hacked up to create retail spaces. Some of Mary Colter’s finest public rooms didn’t survive—the famous bar, La Cantina, is now a crepe shop—but the skylighted main dining room is still there, and many of the guest rooms still have the furniture and wall hangings Colter put there. Ballen and his wife, Ethel, both died in 2007, but their daughter now runs La Fonda. I’m pleased to report that the hotel’s main dining room, La Plazuela, is still one of the best in Santa Fe—which, considering how many amazing eateries the city has, is quite a testimony to maintaining the standard. Chef Lane Warner’s soups are particularly scrumptious (especially the classic sopa de tortilla and the white bean soup with roasted garlic), and the menu still includes New Mexican favorites originally adapted by chef Konrad Allgaier starting in the 1940s.
For years, the only other major repository of Fred Harvey–ana in Santa Fe itself has been the Museum of International Folk Art, which holds all the Spanish colonial art collected by Herman Schweizer and John Huckel. The Harvey collection there includes over four hundred paintings, sculptures, silver pieces, textiles, bells, and furniture, some dating back to the early 1500s. But the long-awaited New Mexico History Museum, which opened in the spring of 2009 right in the middle of downtown Santa Fe, has a small but growing Fred Harvey display and collection, to which several prominent family members have already pledged their substantial holdings.
Visitors to Santa Fe still take pretty much the same day trips as they did when Fred Harvey began the Indian Detours in the 1920s. You go to see Taos—driving along the “High Road,” a scenic, curvy highway that was once the only road to the pueblo. (For some, the drive is more fascinating than the destination—especially if you stop for lunch, as we do, at Rancho de Chimayo, which has life-altering fresh sopapillas and New Mexican favorites.) And you go to see the Anasazi cliff dwellings at nearby Bandelier National Monument, which is just below Los Alamos (which you can’t really “visit,” except for its small, intriguing Bradbury Science Museum). The forests around Bandelier are growing back after the wildfires in 2000—triggered when government workers lost control of a planned burn—but the dwellings were spared; the more rugged ruins nearby at Puye, where Ford’s wife, Judy, had her stroke, are still closed.
Visitors also continue to go to the active Indian pueblos nearby to watch the dances, shop for arts and crafts, and indulge in the sweet Indian fry bread. Some also drive to Abiquiu, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived and fans still make pilgrimages to her studio and Ghost Ranch—a sprawling retreat and conference center where O’Keeffe had a small home. But the true highlight, honestly, is just motoring along the highway and being constantly blown away by the geologic formations that clearly inspired O’Keeffe’s paintings. It’s like driving through God’s early sketches for the Grand Canyon.
After a few days in Santa Fe, we drive an hour and a half southwest to see one of the last intact Fred Harvey depots in New Mexico, in tiny Belen (although you can now actually get there on the convenient new Rail Runner regional train). Local residents have done a terrific job restoring their tiny Fred Harvey eating house and turning it into a charming Harvey and Santa Fe museum. It’s a little trainiac treasure, leaving us with almost enough warm feeling to counteract the existential nausea of then driving to one of the more depressing sites in Fred Harvey’s America—the Albuquerque parking lot where the Alvarado Hotel and Indian Museum used to be.
Preservationists fought like hell to keep the Alvarado from the wrecking ball in the late 1960s—in fact, it was one of the first highly publicized historical preservation fights in the country—but they failed, and on February 13, 1970, it was demolished. Amtrak built a modest wooden train station that burned down and was replaced in 2002 by a new transportation center, which, ironically, mimics the Alvarado’s facade. The new building is mostly for buses and regional rail lines. The only Amtrak train that stops here is the Chief, which arrives once a day in each direction and, even today, is still greeted by Indians trying to sell their crafts.
The sunset view from the Chief as it heads west from Albuquerque is amazing—especially if you take it in from Amtrak’s special observation car, which features extra-high arching windows, a glass ceiling, and comfy swivel seats. (For kids immune to nature’s charms, the observation car also has TV screens playing children’s movies nonstop.) As the solar light show ends and the stars begin to shimmer, the Chief pulls in to Winslow, Arizona, just in time for a late supper—and we get our first glimpse of Mary Colter’s masterpiece, La Posada, the way it was meant to be seen: from trackside. It is one of the most welcoming experiences available in American travel. While Colter may have been right about people living too long—she died in 1958 at the age of eighty-nine—she would be thrilled to know that her artfully miscellaneous hacienda, shuttered for nearly forty years, is enjoying a marvelous second life.
In 1997, a thirtysomething couple from L.A.—entrepreneur Allan Affeldt and his wife, artist Tina Mion—bought the crumbling La Posada complex, which the railroad had been using as a block-long storage closet. Affeldt’s thoughtful restoration has been remarkable considering that he did not have Armand Hammer’s dollars. He brought La Posada back to life one room at a time—and when it was partially done, he reopened, allowing the first customers to enjoy (and fund) the work in progress. All the guest rooms have now been restored, and named after the most famous guests who stayed in them—although it is unlikely that Truman’s or Einstein’s quarters originally had Jacuzzis.
La Posada’s Turquoise Room restaurant comes as close to capturing a modern vision of Fred Harvey’s gourmet comfort food as any place in the country. If I could eat chef John Sharpe’s Arizona Green Chile Eggs (with creamy polenta, tomatillo sauce, roasted corn salsa, and warm corn tortillas) every day for breakfast, or start every dinner with his signature paired potage (cream of corn and black bean soup side by side in the same bowl), I’d be a very happy man. (He recently published a Turquoise Room cookbook.)
From Winslow you can take the train to Williams—where some restoration work has begun at the old Fred Harvey Fray Marcos hotel—and then catch the train to the Grand Canyon, which runs once a day. We want the freedom of driving, because this part of Arizona has several treasure troves of Fred Harvey–ana not so easily accessible by rail. So we rent a car in the hip little college town of Flagstaff. Two hours to the north is the Grand Canyon, the nation’s best-known Harvey location. But two hours in the opposite direction is Phoenix, which not many people realize is now home to the priceless Fred Harvey company Indian art collection.
Over four thousand pieces originally collected by Herman Schweizer and others—the very best of the Indian Museum textiles, pottery, and silver—were donated by the family trust to the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix, which features Native American art in an educational setting. While the Heard, a small gem of a museum, has the entire collection, at any given time you can see only those pieces culled from the private storerooms for the themed shows and placed in the ten handsome exhibition spaces. (Kitty’s art, including what she inherited from Ford and Freddy, is not part of the family collection: She donated most of it, along with some personal photos, to the small Museum of Northern Arizona, and a few other pieces to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) The Heard also has a Harvey-esque little restaurant, the Arcadia Farms café, which has outdoor tables in a restful courtyard.
It’s a four-hour drive from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon, and we’re tempted to stop over in Sedona at our favorite hotel, Enchantment—the same kind of luxe oasis that the Harvey hotels were in their heyday. But we continue on. It’s highway driving up to Flagstaff, and then we get on Route 180, the main thoroughfare through the Coconino Forest to the canyon—and a road that may very well have inspired more utterances of “Are we there yet?” than any other in American tourism.
While plenty of people do the canyon as a day trip, they are missing what Fred Harvey employees have always known is the best part—which is being at the canyon after all the day-trippers leave. This means staying over at least one night in one of the Fred Harvey hotels on the South Rim, which can generally be accomplished only with a good bit of advance planning—especially if you want a room at El Tovar (which, trust me, you do). At any time, El Tovar is taking reservations up to thirteen months in advance—so there are people who know to call precisely at 11:00 a.m. mountain time on the first day of the month, exactly thirteen months from when they want to go, because that’s when all the rooms for that month are released (including the three corner suites with canyon-view balconies, and all the other most desirable rooms). Many people plan entire southwestern or cross-country trips around room availability at El Tovar because space is so limited, the rooms are so surprisingly reasonable (the rates are controlled by the National Park Service, not the marketplace), and the experience is so worth the wait. You can also make dinner reservations at El Tovar up to six months in advance, and should. While the food can occasionally be a little too inventive for its own good, what they do well at El Tovar (steaks, fish, southwestern dishes) they do really well, and the room is redolent with history. In keeping with the Fred Harvey tradition, the best meal there is breakfast, for which they don’t take reservations: It’s first come, first served starting at 6:30 a.m., after the early birds like me have been out watching the sun rise over the canyon.
Fred Harvey’s operation at the Grand Canyon is now run by a company with a name like an eco-friendly planet on Star Trek—Xanterra, which manages food and lodging for many western national parks. The company was created in the 1990s when Amfac, which bought out Fred Harvey, merged its South Rim holdings with a firm that controlled concessions at Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Mount Rushmore, and others. For years, Xanterra didn’t do much with its Fred Harvey heritage, much to the chagrin of Grand Canyon employees who still remembered the Harvey glory days. But Xanterra has recently started exploring its roots. The corporate Web site now boasts about the company’s “Fred Harvey Legacy.” And the signage around the South Rim now pays more homage to the founders of the feast—primarily to Fred Harvey himself (who didn’t live to see the hotel, but I have to believe visited the canyon in the 1890s) and to Mary Colter.
At the canyon, we explore all the extraordinary Colter buildings. From El Tovar, it’s a short walk to Hopi House, Lookout Studio, and Bright Angel Lodge, where they have a fine little Fred Harvey museum in the lounge with Mary Colter’s famous geological fireplace. It’s an excellent collection of Harvey memorabilia, including obscure silver, plates, and stemware, menus, Harvey Girls outfits, and gold service pins. (See it while you can; I’ve heard from company officials that the room will become a coffee shop.)
Hermit’s Rest and the Watchtower are both miles away, in opposite directions. We take the free bus the park service runs to Hermit’s Rest, where Colter’s marvelous live-in fireplace still elicits gasps (as do the squirrels around the building, which are so tame and accustomed to entertaining tourists that I was surprised they didn’t offer to take our picture). But we drive to Desert View to see the Watchtower, allowing us to stop at all the vistas along the way that, over the years, were named and made accessible by Fred Harvey and the park service. The main attraction is still the view from the Watchtower. We are lucky enough to arrive just as the weather is getting “bad”—Colter’s faux lookout point being one of the few tourist attractions on earth where you hope for thunderstorms, which swirl dramatically down the canyon, leaving in their wake miraculous rainbows.
My wife is not what you’d call a “camper,” so I’m surprised one night when she announces that we should “sleep out”—until I realize that by “out” she means out on our spacious and very private canyon-view balcony. At bedtime, she pulls a couple of blankets and pillows off the cushy bed, wraps herself in the thirsty hotel robe, opens a bottle of room-service wine, and goes out on the balcony to nest on one of the chaise longues. We lie out there looking up at what appears to be every star in the universe—you can see the whole northern celestial hemisphere in panorama, like a planetarium, with no impediments or light pollution.
Taking a sip of wine, Diane turns to me and says, “Now, this is my idea of camping!”
After four days of such “camping,” we reluctantly leave the South Rim and drive back to Flagstaff to catch the Chief. When it arrives, many hours late, it’s nearly midnight, and the beds in our cabin have already been turned down. The train goes through the hottest part of California at night, so we miss the handful of cities where the old Fred Harvey/Santa Fe buildings are still in use. The one all the trainiacs are watching with great interest is El Garces in Needles, which Allan Affeldt, who did over La Posada, is helping restore. In Barstow, Casa del Desierto is now a museum and transportation station, and in San Bernardino, the restored Santa Fe depot also houses a police substation.*
As the sun comes up, we are deep in Southern California, approaching Los Angeles Union Station, the last of the great American train depots. The interior of the station still looks like a 1940s movie set, but the only vestige of Fred Harvey’s large operation here is the empty side building Mary Colter designed. All her handmade wood restaurant furniture is gone, but Colter’s curved ceilings, her light fixtures, and that amazing faux-Navajo-rug tile floor are in immaculate condition, as are the circular red leather booths and the curved copper bar in the upstairs cocktail lounge. The space is no longer open to the public, but justifies its existence by being rented out for bar mitzvahs, weddings, and film shoots. (It was used as the police station set in Blade Runner.)
Because the train arrives many hours late in Los Angeles, we are forced to dash through Union Station because we have a plane to catch. We get a cab to LAX and begin the cycle of rushed indignities that are modern air travel: the lines to get boarding passes, then the lines to get into the queue for security check, all so we can finally board the plane, take a crammed seat less comfortable than the one in the train “shoilet,” breathe pre-used air, and eat stale mini-pretzels from tiny, shiny bags.
As we ascend, I attempt to recline my seat but am stopped by two large knees digging into my back. And I think to myself: It really is sad that Freddy wrecked his fancy new plane before he and his company had a chance to teach the fledgling airline industry how to set a Harvey standard for passenger care.
How is it that we can travel faster than ever before, but when it comes to comfort, we are back to a time before Pullman, before Fred Harvey, when people were treated only slightly better than freight?
I turn to my wife, who is only 5 ’1” but is still smushed into her allotted seating space—a carry-on bag jammed where her feet would like to be. She looks up at me, with the plaintive eyes of a traveler who has just spent two weeks traversing half the country at a leisurely, life-affirming pace, only to be made weary by a flight that has barely reached cruising altitude.
“I miss Fred,” she says.
Me too.
* There are several restored Santa Fe depots on the route from St. Louis south into Texas. Besides the gorgeous Art Nouveau St. Louis Union Station itself—now a hotel and shopping mall—there’s Waynoka, Oklahoma, and, in Texas, Gainesville, Brownwood, Temple, Slaton, and Galveston. See Appendix III for a complete list of the Harvey locations.