Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West
Where to buy Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West books online?
- ISBN13: 9780553804379
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The legendary life and capitalist vision of Fred Harvey helped shape American culture and history for three generations—from the 1880s all the way through World War II—and still influence our lives today in surprising and fascinating ways. Now award-winning journalist Stephen Fried re-makes the life of this unlikely American hero, the founding father of the nation’s service industry, whose remarkable family tree business civilized the West and introduced America to Americans.
Appetite for America is the incredible real-life tale of Fred Harvey—told in depth for the first time ever—as well as the tale of this country’s expansion into the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, of the fantastic days of the railroad, of a time when a deal could still be made with a handshake and the United States was still uniting. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name: He was Ray Kroc before McDonald’s, J. Willard Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Schultz before Starbucks. His eating houses and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (including historic lodges still in use at the Grand Gap) were patronized by princes, presidents, and countless ordinary travelers looking for the best cup of coffee in the country. Harvey’s staff of carefully screened single young women—the celebrated Harvey Girls—were the country’s first female workforce and became genuine Americana, even inspiring an MGM musical starring Judy Garland.
With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the tale of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family tree empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in heap ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is past biography that is as richly rewarding as a slice of fresh apple pie—and every bit as satisfying.
*With two photo inserts featuring over 75 images, and an appendix with over fifty Fred Harvey recipes, most of them never-before-published.Amazon.com Review
A Note from Stephen Fried on Appetite for America
I first encountered Fred Harvey seventeen years ago in the lobby of El Tovar, the historic hotel just a few steps from the edge of the Grand Gap. His temperamental portrait was hanging there, his nervous eyes seemingly scrutinizing everything, and I wondered who the hell he was.
A pamphlet in our room offered some insight, explaining that his company had been running the hotels, the restaurants, the gift shops at the gap–even training the mules–since 1905. It also mentioned the incredible impact of his capitalist vision. From the 1870s through the 1940s, Fred’s revolutionary family tree business–which included restaurants, hotels, dining cars and stores from Chicago to Los Angeles along the Santa Fe railroad, and later along Rt. 66–had forever changed the way Americans ate, drank, cooked, traveled, and spent their leisure time.
Hotel pamphlets don’t regularly change my life, but I was immediately struck by what sounded like a fantastic American saga that needed to be told in more depth, perhaps in a magazine article. So I ongoing searching for information about Fred, alternative up the few literary books that mentioned him, his company, and his legendary waitresses, the Harvey Girls.
I learned that the Fred Harvey name had once been ubiquitous in America, as the company built the nation’s first chain of restaurants, lunchrooms, hotels, bookstores–in fact, the first national chain of anything–and was heralded for its unusually high standards of customer service and employee loyalty. By the 1940s, Fred and the Harvey Girls were such a well-customary part of Americana that they inspired both a best-selling novel and an Oscar-winning movie musical with Judy Garland. And they went on to inspire everything from the Howard Johnson’s chain to McDonald’s and Starbucks, and all the major national hotels (along with a robust community of Harvey memorabilia collectors.)
As I nonstop my research, I establish myself caught up in the small-known Harvey family tree drama. I realized that much of what was attributed to Fred himself had really been done by his equally brilliant but unsung son, Ford–who memorialized his father by turning him into a brand-name. I am a sucker for tales about father-son family tree businesses, having grown up in one myself (furniture).
Somehow I never got around to writing that article. But ten years later, I was having lunch with my editor at Bantam, and we ongoing talking about the new breed of history books–like Seabiscuit and Devil in the White City–being written by contemporary journalists. I suddenly establish myself regaling her with my fascination with Fred Harvey, insisting that the saga of his multigenerational family tree business had all the excitement, intrigue and narrative fruitfulness of this new genre of “history buffed” books. Writing it would also give me a window into an entire 75-year stretch of American history.
By the end of the lunch, we agreed I write a book on Fred. It was the best choice I ever made in my career; this has been the most challenging and rewarding book I’ve ever written.
The more I’ve learned about Fred, his family tree, his Harvey Girls, his business and his world, the more I know about America. And, by reliving through them two Depressions and several major recessions, two world wars, two flu pandemics, the rise of trains, autos and planes, electric lights, telephones, radio and television, I am constantly reminded of this nation’s courage and resiliency.
The very first person (besides my editors) to read the manuscript of this book told me Fred’s tale made him feel better about America. And I know exactly what he means.
May Fred be with you.
Buy Cheap Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West Online
Related posts:
I did delight in reading this book, but I can truly say that I didn’t find it memorable. Harvey’s accomplishments are … well, he invented a form of tourism, or at least a way of *marketing* tourism. In a way, he’s reliable for some of the vapid tourist traps that blight the American landscape!
The book is not poorly written, nor dull, nor incomprehensible. I just establish the theme matter to some extent uncompelling.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The tale of Fred Harvey is vital to the shaping of America. Harvey pioneered the chain restaurant, chain hotel, was the first significant employer for both African Americans and women, and he also made the first shopping mall. A mall in Kansas City is generally credited as the first, but it was built to compete with the local train station in which every store and diner was owned by Harvey and was open 24hrs. Even the popularity of Southwestern jewelry, Indian jewelry, may be attirbuted to Fred Harvey, who first ongoing selling it at his trackside newsstands and sparked a craze. From the 1880s through the 1930s the Harvey system was the head of state food chain in America, in many ways inventing the thought of eating out, and the Harvey Girls were a kind of forerunner to the Hooters girls of today. In its decline the company followed the usual blind alleys of airline food and diners, but a system built around passenger rail travel was inevitably doomed by the automobile and the highway. In the Appendix is a clean collection of Fred Harvey recipes you could try out for yourself, and an pointer of locations stretching from the 1870s through to the early 1960s. Stephen Fried’s book is well researched and clearly written and has some handy tips about booking one of the legendary rooms overlooking the Grand Gap, another pioneering Harvey thought.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is a terrific haunting read that takes the readers to the the mesmerzing past and introduces them to the rising history of the best country in the world. After reading the book, one wonders why a name with Fred Harvey’s stature and accomplishments did not rise to the fame and recognition that he truly deserved ?
Highly recommended for the history/non-fiction lover.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Like most “trainiacs” I had heard of Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls; you cannot read a history of the western railroads lacking seeing them at least mentioned. But I had no thought just how significant and influential Fred Harvey was: the first national restaurant chain; the first national hotel chain; the first national bookstore chain; the largest employer of women at the time; one of the driving forces behind the development of all aspects of tourism in the Fantastic Southwest; and a man and a company whose tale and methods are still studied today in graduate schools of hotel, restaurant, and personnel management, publicity, and marketing. But, thanks to this enthusiastic, slightly hagiographic labor of like, I have a much better thought of what Fred Harvey was…
and what I missed out on by being born too late.
I also know better why Fred Harvey finally failed. To my surprise, it was neither the Fantastic Depression nor the postwar decline in railroad passenger traffic that did Fred Harvey in, rather it was the all too common decline in capitalist drive and vision in subsequent generations of this family tree owned business.
Jennifer Bouani, the Horatio Alger of the 21st Century, believes that entrepreneurship can be taught to children and has written the Future Business Leaders’ Series of books in order to do just that: Tyler & His Solve-a-Matic Machine and Tyler Passes the Golden Key. Let us hope that she’s right because as Mr. Fried’s book and additional books chronicling the history of American business like Burton W. Fulsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Huge Business in America convincingly prove, we damn sure cannot breed it!
It is nearly proverbial; a man builds a fantastic business, and his son or his son’s son pisses it all away. Exactly why this is so prevalent is unknown, but a excellent guess is the difference between growing up wealthy and growing up not wealthy. Growing up rich cannot help but have an impact on the drive and ambition of all but the strongest of wills and the most sterling of characters. It is no manufacturing accident IMHO that the only Harvey with the drive and ambition and vision to exceed the original Fred Harvey just happened to be the only extant son who grew up BEFORE they got rich, Ford Harvey, and even Ford Harvey got one huge thing incorrect, and I don’t mean his to us moderns downright silly (though all too common for his time) notion that women should not run a business.
Ford Harvey insisted on keeping the company in the family tree, which ensured its demise after his untimely death. A publicly-owned Fred Harvey might have resulted in no more Harveys at Fred Harvey sooner than turned out to be the case in real life, but it might also have resulted in a company leadership energetic enough to envision and manage the transition from railroad to highway and airline travel service, which the lesser ambitioned Harveys who followed him barely attempted. (Of course if reckless Freddy had lived or energetic Fund as a replacement for of feckless Byron had replaced him, the end might have been postponed for awhile but probably for no more than a generation.)
Defects? A few. I wish Mr. Fried had somebody helping him who had a better grasp of what’s acceptable to tell about people. Maybe it’s just because I’m ancient-fashioned (or maybe it’s just because I’m ancient), but there are some things I don’t need to know, some things I don’t even WANT to know! Frankly, I establish Mr. Fried’s seeming obsession with the sex lives of the Harveys more tiresome than titillating, especially regarding rumors even the leader pronounced untrue or the lives of people only abstractedly related to them. Nor was it just the sex. I also didn’t see the need for details about Fred Harvey Senior’s postsurgical struggles with his bodily functions nor the need for graphic descriptions of the condition of the bodies after a couple of plane crashes. (After one of them a man reacts to a journalist taking photos by yanking the film out of his camera. Would that he had been available to yank pages out of Mr. Fried’s typewriter.)
Mr. Fried also made a couple of past mistakes that I caught. First, it was unrestricted submarine warfare, not revolution in Russia, that in addition to the Zimmermann Telegram brought the US into WWI (though Russia’s revolution certainly increased Allied desires for us to join them), and any and all post-Nagasaki threats to nuke Japan were bluffs. We had shot our wad, using up all available (for more than a year) fissionable material in our Trinity test and Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. The next step if Imperial Japan had called our bluff was conventional invasion…
and what surely would have been the bloodiest battles in all of human history.
Finally, I judge Mr. Fried was out of line when he made this crack in the Prologue:
“But unlike the chains of today, the Fred Harvey system was known for dramatically RAISING standards wherever it arrived, rather than eroding them.”
Planet to Stephen Fried, the only chains that loved any long term success were persons that set and maintained their own high standards because that’s how the chain business works. You don’t attract loyal customers over a country as vast and mobile as ours lacking building (and keeping!) the promise of a high standard of service in every location. Now because of something Fred Harvey didn’t have to worry about…
competition…
most modern chains have all ears on much smaller slivers of the market, but that doesn’t mean that they have lower standards,…
just narrower ones.
Still, these are minor complaints about a right masterpiece of business history, and I’m even feeling inclined to track down the legendary musical The Harvey Girls and its novelization The Harvey Girls, if I can ever find it.
Finally, I come away from this book with a better understanding of something that has permanently puzzled me: why did American railroads so keenly abandon the business of passenger travel and prompt no interest in ever resuming it?
Because attitudinally they were never in it.
No industry that made George Pullman and Fred Harvey rich doing and managing what they could have done and managed themselves can aver to have been truly interested in passenger travel. The proverbial axiom, “Goods doesn’t complain,” says it all. Since the beginning, the profit in railroading has mostly been in carrying goods; carrying passengers was merely a necessary evil until technological advance produced a better way for people to travel. It is just too terrible because there is no excellent reason why rail passenger travel could not be made profitable today at least under certain circumstances, but I don’t reflect it will be a major, goods-first American railroad that facts out how.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Stephen Fried’s Fred Harvey “biography”, Appetite For America, reads like a 100-year history lesson of the 1860’s through the 1960’s. Not only does it clarify, in at times excruciating detail, the life and times of the man Fred Harvey, but it also describes, again in regularly excruciating detail, the hospitality company of the same name and how they both rode tumultuous times while thriving financially and publically – regularly time in less than hospitable country – to bring the towns served by Santa Fe rails the particular Fred Harvey brand of Americana.
Either by chance or due to human/corporate scope, it appeared that the man and/or the food-service company was constantly intertwined in the major events and the event makers of the day – from the Oklahoma land rush, the financial panics of 1895, 1907, and etc, to the equal rights questions (Fred Harvey was one of the first major employers of African Americans and women – bringing out scores of single, and thus available women “Out West”), not to mention the ebb and flow of the railroad industry and culinary, to such past giants as the men of the Manhattan Project, Gen George Custer, Jay Gould, teddy bear Roosevelt, and scores of others. Thus you are constantly surrounded by the major events of American history as you read through this encyclopedic book.
Everything about Fred Harvey is here. Not only do we have a thorough history, but the three appendices include notes from the leader’s recent 3 wk Amtrak trip from Chicago to LA along much of the original AT&SF lines, an wide recipe book with many of the more notable fare that was served at Harvey houses throughout the years, and a perfect list of all the restaurants, stations, and additional facilities that were at one time or another owned or run by the Fred Harvey organization. Mr. Fried also includes a detailed chapter-by-chapter notes section and extremely useful bibliography.
My only negative comment is that the leader gets to some extent verbose in his description of every esoteric happening. One example. Fred Harvey was regularly stricken with one ailment or another. This obviously bears at least passing reference from time to time throughout the book to underline his overall health. But, the leader has paragraph after painful paragraph detailing ailments, time lost, remedies, etc, throughout Mr. Harvey’s lifetime – over and over ad nauseum. The first time is fantastic as an vital backstory. The second time he devotes half a page to the current sickness is ok. But the 15th time it’s mentioned and again we read about his ailments in exacting detail seems a small much. And this is basically the theme for every theme throughout the book. Even peripheral events that have only minimal importance to the central characters/tales are regularly agreed half to full page (or more) expositions. Although Harvey-philes will like all the small esoteric references and factoids, unless you are a fanatic devotee or interested in reviewing a doctoral thesis, after awhile it gets to be a small much. It appeared to me that the leader had gathered so much really fantastic research material and was so invested in the information and his topic, that he was unwilling to cut anything out to help the readability of the book. 400 pages is long and when you re-read the same themes over and over again, it seems even longer.
HOWEVER, you can’t really fault a name for loving the theme that he’s obviously devoted many years to and wanting to include everything he can. It’s just… a lot. As evidenced by my review, it’s tough for me to be brief either – so what do I know…? Minor comment, but it keeps me from giving it 5 stars.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5