I just got off the phone with a wonderful book group in St. Louis, run by the Kitchen Conservancy there, where members read foodie books, cook from them, and have delicious book club meetings. I took questions from them for 45 minutes, by phone, as they ate the Cream of Cheddar Cheese Soup and the Crabmeat and Shrimp in Ramekins they had just cooked from the recipes in the back of the book. It was great fun (and I believe they still had two courses to go…maybe I’ll call back for dessert!)

If there are any book groups that would like me to participate in a discussion of Appetite for America, I’m more than happy to do so. We can do it by phone or, if you prefer, by Skype or Google chat.

Just email me at sf@stephenfried.com, write to me on the wall of my Facebook author’s page, or leave a comment here on the blog, and we’ll get it set up.

After the book club meeting, if you’re interested, I can sign personalized bookplates for each group member, and have them mailed to the book group leader.

May Fred be with your book group!

If you’re a Fred Harvey fan, click on this link.

It takes a LONG time to load, because it’s a 191-page masters thesis, fully illustrated, from the historical preservation program at Penn. But it is well worth your while.

It suggests a way to save the at-risk Harvey House properties, and to link all the locations with Harvey heritage, using a novel interpretation of the “National Heritage Area” program of the National Park Service.

I feel bad for the author, Patrick Kidd, who points out in his footnotes that my book came out just as he was finishing this–so he was unable to fix all the mistakes he made (or repeated) by relying on the other sources available to him during much of his thesis preparation. But I urge you to overlook any historical errors and focus on his contagious passion for Fred Harvey and the Harvey House heritage–and his very intriguing idea of creating a preservation plan for all the Southwest Harvey locations. He says it is possible to use the “National Heritage Area” program of the National Park Service to make sure the buildings are registered not only individually as historically significant, but together as historically significant.

He believes this might be a new way to get funding to save the buildings that still exist but are in danger, but also to help the buildings that are doing just fine–La Fonda, La Posada–cooperate more with each other to share the Harvey heritage.

It’s food for thought, and I hope his ideas get some traction. Certainly, we here at One Nation Under Fred are all for anything that helps preserve the Harvey heritage.

The book tour for Appetite for America returns to the West, starting 8/27 in Williams, AZ at the Grand Canyon Railway Depot and later that day at the Grand Canyon–where author Stephen Fried will be signing books in the lobby of history El Tovar hotel from 1-4 pm. The next day, he’ll be signing in El Tovar again and that evening, 8/28 at 7 pm, he will give a free lecture at the Thunderbird Room.

The tour continues through Northern Arizona and New Mexico, and then ends in Sacramento for two days of Harvey-themed events at the California State Railroad Museum over Labor Day weekend.

Here’s a complete schedule of the tour:
8/27
Williams AZ depot gift shop, signing, 8-9:15 am
Grand Canyon South Rim, El Tovar hotel, signing in lobby, 1-4 pm
8/28
Grand Canyon South Rim, El Tovar hotel, signing in lobby, 1-4 pm
Thunderbird Lodge, Thunderbird Room, free author lecture and slide presentation, 7-8 pm, followed by signing
8/29
Flagstaff, AZ, Museum of Northern Arizona, 2:30 pm, free lecture and book signing
Winslow, AZ, La Posada hotel, 6:30 pm, free lectureand book signing, optional Fred Harvey dinner at Turquoise Room restaurant
8/30
Belen, NM, Belen Harvey House museum, reception 4-6; Belen Library, Harvey-recipe refreshments 6-7, free lecture and book signing, 7-8:30
9/2
Santa Fe, NM, La Fonda hotel, 7 pm, free lecture, book-signing and wine reception, La Terazza, co-sponsored by Collected Works Bookstore
9/3
Las Vegas, NM, Montezuma Castle, 7 pm, free lecture and book signing, co-sponsored by Tome on the Range Books; optional free afternoon tour of Montezuma
9/4
Sacramento, CA, California State Railroad Museum, 4:00 pm special screening of “The Harvey Girls” (1946) with comments from author about the making of the film and book signing (free with museum admission)
9/5
Sacramento, CA, California State Railroad Museum, noon showing of “The Harvey Girls” and then at 3:00 pm, author lecture and slide presentation, followed by book signing (all free with museum admission)

To arrange for an appearance in your town, university or bookstore, email: SFlectures@comcast.net

Photos: Appetite for America tour at La Posada, author and wife, Diane “Black Bart” Ayres, in El Tovar lobby doing Fred Harvey “fist clench” from famed portrait

Came across a website claiming there was a Harvey House in Cascade, CO in the 1890s–which I had never heard of, and doesn’t show up in any company documents. With the help of Peter Hansen, editor of Railroad History, and Colorado Midland trainiac Tom VanWormer, we’ve discovered either three or four “new” Harvey locations in Colorado–which the company ran from 1890-1895, the years the then-troubled Santa Fe owned the Colorado Midland. So we can now report there were Harvey Houses and Harvey Girls in: Cascade, Idyllwild and Leadville, and the Cascade house at some point in the early 1890s moved to the Woodland Park depot. This brings the number of Harvey locations in Colorado to 10. Fred had one of his pre-Santa Fe eating houses in Hugo and then beginning in 1879, was in La Junta, Pueblo, Trinidad, Palmer Lake (briefly, a lunchroom from 1899-1902) and then in Colorado Springs. The last Colorado Harvey House, El Otero Hotel in La Junta, closed in 1948.

If anyone has any more information about these Colorado houses, or photos, please get in touch. Here’s a shot of the original La Junta eating house, opened in 1879. and the original website where I heard about this is http://sgcalligraphy.com/PikesPeakCountry052010.pdf

A TV piece from KPLR in St. Louis about Fred’s long relationship with that city–where he opened his very first restaurant in the 1850s, then his company’s first Union Station operation in the 1890s!

Here’s the main dining room in the union station, which is still there—just now part of Marriott the hotel at one end of the station complex.

Just to prove that I do occasionally write about things other than Fred—and to acknowledge that I’m at the Jersey Shore, decompressing before going back out on Appetite for America tour starting at the Grand Canyon 8/27—here’s a link to a little piece I did on my family obsession, sea glass-hunting, in Parade magazine. they also posted a nice sea glass-porn photo gallery here. and I posted a photo gallery on my FB page of my own day of glass-hunting with “Godfather of Sea Glass” Richard LaMotte at one of his secret places

and, among the many blog responses to the piece all over the country, I especially liked this one from The Pitch: Baseball & Life by Warren Hynes.

How I loved loved loved Appetite for America.  I heard the interview on NPR and immediately downloaded the book on Kindle.  When I was a girl I spent a great amount of time in the backseat of a Buick driving across America three and four times a year.  My parents raced greyhounds and in those years, the racing was seasonal so we were always on the go from track to track hauling our dogs behind us in a homemade trailer. Though we were itinerant, my mother’s home town was a small town in Southeastern Kansas, Parsons, a one time junction for the MKT railroad.   Harvey Houses were well known to us. As were the railroads. Almost all of the highways paralleled the railroad tracks and I counted cars and read the logos out loud urging Dad to beat the train, mother white knuckling and tsking beside him.

When I was ten or eleven, my parents would sometimes let me stay on in Kansas while they drove north to Denver or Portland. After a few days my uncles and aunties would take me to the station, pin a note on my dress and put five dollars in my pocket sending me on my solo way to my folks. I cannot describe the heady feeling of navigating the cars, carefully watched, BTW, by the porters who called me Miss Sutherland.  I ate in the dining car with a single rose on the white tablecloth, usually with a couple or some other traveler, I felt competent and elegant all on my own.  But the best part was when I headed back through the cars, supporting myself on the window side to my sleeper.  I yearned to have the top one. I climbed up the little wooden ladder and the porter pulled the heavy curtain closed behind me. And then, and then there was only the little blue light and me. I could see my reflection in the pane of glass. It lay over the rushing fields and the cross roads, the flashing warning lights on the barriers. Then sometimes I would wake up, the train shuddering under me, steam pumping up from outside and I could see the name of a station on the side of a small depot and even saw people getting off. I wanted it to go on forever.

So reading your book was a trip completely waiting for me. I have been in all those towns. I knew America like crazy. I just came back from a trip to Parsons. Oh Kansas, oh, Missouri, the Rockies. Oh boy, America.

Thanks a whole lot. Dee-lish!  Your love of what you write about shines through. You have a terrific voice.

Claudette Sutherland

www.gotoclaudette.com

Brownwood Texas is one of many Santa Fe cities that has not only saved its old depot and Harvey House, but turned it into something wonderful for the future–in this case, the Chamber of Commerce building. Here’s a story about the city’s of the 100th anniversary of their Harvey House.

Just published a piece in Text/Context, the magazine of Jewish Week in NY, exploring the roles of the two top Jewish execs at Fred Harvey—David Benjamin and Herman Schweizer—and frontier Jewish immigrants in general. Check it out here.

Here’s a picture from 1915, the United Jewish Charities banquet in Kansas City. Dave Benjamin is front right, with his wife Linnie right behind him; to his left is his brother Alfred Benjamin, who was the city’s most important Jewish philanthropist (and whose counterpart in Catholic charities was Ford Harvey’s wife, Judy)

Nice review of the book on Texasmonthly.com reminds me that many people don’t know the Texas version of the Fred Harvey and Harvey Girl saga. Fred came to Texas later than the rest of the Southwest, beginning in the 1890s when the company took over the eating houses and dining cars on the Frisco and the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe, which meant there were Harvey locations in (in alphabetical order) Amarillo, Brownwood, Canadian, Cleburne, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Gainesville, Galveston, Houston. Kingsville, Panhandle, Paris, Rosenberg, Silsbee, Slaton, Somerville, Sweetwater and Temple (where the company not only had restaurants and a hotel, but a huge dairy farm that served Texas and Oklahoma locations.)

Here’s a rare photo of Texas Harvey Girls in Somerville, where Fred Harvey had a depot hotel, dining room, lunchroom and newsstand from 1901 to 1940.

from the collection of Gordon Chappell

One of the highlights of the Appetite for America train tour was a lecture I gave at the private Chicago Club at the invitation of Fred’s great-grandson Daggett Harvey, Jr.

When I finished, he presented me with this gift–an original FH etched wine glass, from Fred and Sally Harvey’s actual dining room on Olive Street in Leavenworth.

I treasure it, as any Fredhead would. What is the most cherished Harvey piece in your collection?

One of my favorite John Prine lyrics is “we’ll whistle and go fishing in heaven.” This is me, fishing in heaven–in North East, PA, my wife’s hometown, to be exact, with the grape vineyards you might recognize from the Welch’s ads behind me. Summer days don’t get much more perfect.

Sorry to pass on news of the passing of Skip Gentry, one of the all-time great Fred Harvey-ana collectors. Here’s a link to a tribute page set up by his friends.

Wonderful review in new issue of The Keystone–the handsome glossy magazine of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society–by editor Chuck Blardone, who writes:

“Appetite is a page-turner. Written of an era of optimism and ‘can-do’ attitude, it’s inspiring and entertaining with the passion of its subject … a book with clean, crisp sentences and vivid descriptions that bring history to life and guarantees to hold the interest of history buffs, railroaders, Wild West adventurers, foodies, and even fashionistas.”

“In this superbly written and rigorously researched saga of American business, family, and food, Fried takes hold of history and, as Hampton Sides did in his Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the American West, makes it live and breathe.”

just one highlight of a wonderful review in New Mexico magazine by Tom Clagett

Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the Wild West
By Stephen Fried
Bantam Books
544 pages, hardcover, $27

Stories of the taming of the West usually involve tough sheriffs, six-guns, and the U.S. Cavalry, not cozy restaurants offering fresh bread, friendly service, and waitresses in white aprons. However, those latter elements played an important role in building the West: British-born immigrant Fred Harvey, a railroad ticket agent, brought culinary hospitality west of the Mississippi River, helped establish New Mexico as a tourism haven, and made Arizona’s Grand Canyon one of the most visited national parks in the country—all because, in 1876, he opened the first restaurant chain. Before McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, there was the Harvey House.

In this superbly written and rigorously researched saga of American business, family, and food, Fried takes hold of history and, as Hampton Sides did in his Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the American West (Doubleday, 2006), makes it live and breathe.Appetite for America

Disgusted by the ghastly meals and horrid service at the eating houses along the U.S. railroad lines of the 1870s, Harvey was certain he could provide “the finest cuisine along the tracks in the middle of nowhere.” The upstart Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway welcomed Harvey’s venture, and soon Harvey Houses stretched from Topeka, Kansas, to Bakersfield, California.

Author Stephen Fried states that the New Mexico Territory proved difficult for Harvey; residents in such towns as Deming, Las Vegas, and Ratón resented the railroad, as well as Harvey’s dress code, which required male diners to wear jackets. They didn’t care for the European chefs Harvey imported, either. When one cowboy saw the pink interior of his first rare steak, he “didn’t know whether to eat it or brand it.” Then a friend of Harvey’s suggested the idea of waitresses, to make “those cowboys more gentlemanly.” The Harvey Girls quickly became “the predominant daydream of men in the West.”

In a story filled with surprises, one of the most significant is that Fred Harvey dies halfway through. But as first Harvey’s son, and then his grandson, take charge of the company (which by then included chain hotels and chain bookstores), and as America evolves, the Harvey legacy of customer service remains firm through two world wars, the Roaring Twenties, and particularly the Depression, during which Harvey Houses serve free meals to anyone who asks. By the 1960s, though, blunted prospects and business fears have soured the Harvey recipe for success.

The author peppers the book with fascinating tidbits: Each Harvey House baked and hand-sliced its own bread to the thickness mandated by Harvey: precisely three-eighths of an inch. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, who’d flown the Spirit of St. Louis solo across the Atlantic Ocean, joined Harvey’s grandson Freddy, a flying enthusiast, in establishing the first cross-country air and rail service. And in 1926, Harvey’s company inaugurated auto tours to New Mexico’s pueblos, called Indian Detours, operating them out of its latest acquisition, La Fonda in Santa Fe, and benefiting from the newly opened Route 66, which passed within a block of La Fonda’s doors.

Richly illustrated with photographs, Appetite for America also includes recipes from the Harvey House cookbooks, including their signature Little Orange Pancakes.

Tom Clagett, a member of the Western Writers of America, lives in Santa Fe.