Eat My Globe

Interview with Award Winning Author,

Stephen Fried

on the Impact of Fred Harvey on American Food

Simon Majumdar (“SM”):

Hi everybody and welcome to Eat My Globe, a podcast about things you didn't know you didn't know about food. And today's interview is with Stephen Fried, the author of a wonderful book called, “Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West – One Meal at a Time.” Now, you may not have heard about Fred Harvey. Neither had I, to be honest. But a very good friend, Kevin Ryan, who's the chairman of the ICCA, shared Harvey's story, his amazing life, and this, his fantastic biography, with me. I was enthralled. Now we have the opportunity for Stephen Fried to talk about this extraordinary man and his impact on American food.

Stephen is an investigative journalist, an award-winning writer, and the author of numerous best-selling books. He also teaches at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania. And a fun fact about Stephen. I don't believe this. It says he invented the word, “fashionista.” We'll have to talk about this later.

Stephen's book about Fred Harvey is a New York Times bestseller. It was declared the 10 best books of the year by Wall Street, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Amazon. And Kirkus Review said it was one of the best books of the year, which makes me very ashamed that I didn't know about it.

So, I'm very, very excited to chat with Stephen today about Fred Harvey. And I hope this episode will make you learn more about Fred Harvey and go out and get Stephen's book.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Stephen Fried.

Stephen Fried (“SF”):

Great to meet you Simon, thanks so much for having me on.

SM:

It's a real pleasure. Now before we go any further, perhaps you can tell us about what you're doing right now and what kind of projects you're working on and then we can move on to talk about Fred Harvey.

SF:

Sure. Actually, I just published a book in May called “Profiles in Mental Health Courage” . . .

SM:

Okay.

SF:

. . . which I wrote with former Congressman Patrick Kennedy. So, when I'm not writing about American history, I write about mental health. We are preparing for the 15th annual Fred Harvey History Weekend in New Mexico, which takes place later in October. And I'm working on another historical biography as well. So, but thanks for asking.

SM:

Oh no, that's fantastic. And I'm, I'm afraid that way we're going to New Mexico and Santa Fe and unfortunately, we're going. . . we're staying at La Fonda and we go the day before or no, I think we leave a week or so before you get there. So, we're not gonna see you there but anyway.

SF:

I'm sorry you'll be missing our annual Fred Harvey foodie dinner.

SM:

I know.

SF:

And all the lectures about Fred Harvey, not just about food, but about all the other things that the Fred Harvey story gets you to.

SM:

Oh. I’m, I'm actually feeling really ashamed about that because I, one, I so want to hear.

SF:

People can watch it all. You can, you can watch all the lectures online. It's, it’s available internationally. So, people who. . .

SM:

Oh fantastic.

SF:

. . . can't be in Santa Fe, the lectures are always available online for a very low price and you can watch them whenever you want.

SM:

Oh, that, and that's something people at home should listen to as well. So, if you want to go and listen to these fabulous interviews and essays, and all kinds of things, you must go and listen. And what will that be on?

SF:                                                 

We do them by Zoom. People who want to subscribe to the Zoom, just go up to Fred Harvey dot info, fredharvey.info, and you can sign up.

SM:

Fantastic. Absolutely.

SF:

And then, no, weeks later we post them for free, but if you want to get them right away, that's the way to do it. All the old ones are up on that site.

SM:

Okay, well let's talk about who Fred Harvey is because there's a lot of people who, like me, who don't really know who he is. So perhaps it might be just useful to tell them as much as you can about his kind of start in England and then we can take it from there.

SF:

Sure. Fred Harvey was a guy who grew up in London when he was a teenager. He came to America to get a job during the World's Fair in 1853 in New York. He got a job at a restaurant not far from where the boats came in. He worked at this restaurant called Smith & McNell’s, which was a very well-known restaurant at the time, a market restaurant that made whatever was coming in available in the market that day. He learned the business. He was what they called in England a pot walloper, which was a dishwasher. And, you know, he was a teenager. So, he worked his way up there and then he left New York and ended up in St. Louis. He started a restaurant in St. Louis. Unfortunately, his partner in the restaurant was a Southern sympathizer in the Civil War. And when the war broke out, they broke up and the guys took all his money.

SM:

Perhaps you could tell us about that as we move into the interview. But first I wanted, because he's an Englishman like me. . .

SF:

Yes.

SM:

. . . I’m here in LA. But first I wanted to hear about his start in London and his parentage as it were and his wife.

SF:

Well, you we don't know a ton about his early life. We know that his father had financial difficulties because we can see the paperwork in London for him, you know, declaring bankruptcy. We know his father and mother's names. We know he had two sisters and that they grew up in, you know, we have the address where they grew up in London, but honestly, we don't know a lot about their lives. What we know is that he came here when he was a teenager and later brought his family over. So, they got to experience America. Later in life, he would go back. But his family was a working-class family and did not have a lot of money. A lot of British teenagers came to America as this new phenomenon of World’s Fair started. And he came to get a job during that World's Fair. We don't know a ton about him. We kind of know where his parents died and a little bit about their work, but not a whole lot else.

SM:

I know I just wanted to point this out because I'm one of the English people who's been here for more than 17 years now nearly and I haven't lost my accent so I feel like because he never lost his accent either, did he?

SF:

No, he didn't. And I think people often forget when they look at the history of America during the 1800s, how many people were first generation people who were British and had British accents. So, Fred Harvey came over, you know, in 1853, he maintained his British accent and his son Ford also had a slight British accent. So, I think that when people do historical TV shows and stuff, they don't have anybody talking in British accents after 1776. But I think that there was a lot of people crossing over. Fred, but Fred Harvey, people always noted that he maintained his British accent. And, and I, and I think in a lot of ways, the reason that Fred Harvey was successful was, he appreciated how different America was, more than some Americans did. So, I think that, you know, because his company ended up basically, exploring the bounty of American food and how it could be delivered to people in all kinds of locations where there was no good food on trains and train stations in the middle of nowhere. I think that he had a particular fascination with America that I'm not sure in post-Civil War America so many Americans had. I part of the reason I got interested in this was, you know, the post-Civil War in the reconstruction area, which is when Fred Harvey grew up here, is a time when the original America had gone to war. They all hated each other. They were all mad at each other. So very hard to romanticize the original America, the original American Revolution America. So, it's not surprising that people started romanticizing the West, which no one could fight about. And so, I do think that part of my attraction to this and the reason that Easterners love the West is because it's a chance to sort of reinvent America through a different lens. And as the railroads went further and further West, more and more people did that. First for work, and later for pleasure.

SM:

I think the way you talk about that, I actually just think about myself as well, because I came over as I said, 17 years ago, and I wrote a post the other day on Instagram or wherever. And I said that when I first came over, and I still am, I look at America as the land of opportunity. I, you know, I came over and I started working on the Food Network and then I started writing books then I started doing all of this and I think that's something that again the reason I find Fred Harvey so in, in interesting is that not the way he's done it, but he's done something that I find really fascinating because of that, that area.

So, tell us about his early days then because you said he came over here with I think when I was reading it and said he had like two quid or two dollars in his pocket. . .

SF:

Yes.

SM:

. . . and you do mention this, this pot walloper. So, tell me about that. So, he got a job in a restaurant and that take it from there.

SF:

So, he got a job in a restaurant in New York. He worked there for a year and a half. This is at the early days of restaurants. Keep in mind, the people in America didn't eat in restaurants. They ate at home. And if actually they had money, they hired a chef to cook for them at home. So, in general, the people who ate at restaurants were travelers who didn't have a home. And they were very democratized. So, anybody could eat in a restaurant if they had enough money. So, Smith & McNell’s was not a very expensive restaurant, but it had good food.

SM:

Where was it?

SF:

There's clips about it. It was down near the boat docks on the lower west side of the city. What we would think of as like Greenwich Village and below, that's where the docks are. That's down where the World Trade Center was. That's where the boats first came in. Then there were markets near there that people shopped in and there were restaurants there. So, the big talk that time was Delmonico's.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

Delmonico's was the first famous restaurant. And there weren't that many other well-known restaurants except in hotels because again, travelers needed to eat when they were traveling. So, Fred Harvey learned the business there. He saw Delmonico's, which was a very high-end restaurant. He worked in a more middle range restaurant. But he saw the power of fresh food and the power of fresh food meant you had to get access to fresh food coming in right away from boats and, at that point, not even from trains. I mean, trains were just starting in the East at that time, so was building up. So, he worked there, and then he left because he wanted to make it in the West. So, he got on a boat and took a boat around, down to New Orleans, and then across, he went across to St. Louis, which was, you know, St. Louis was like the end of the East at that time.

SM:

Oh wow, yes.

SF:

Because the border of Missouri is where the trains, the first train stopped. That's why the Pony Express started at the border between Missouri and Kansas.

SM:

Oh wow, I did-

SF:

So, he was at, you know, we think of that as the heart of the Midwest right now.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

But that was the gateway to the West at that time. So, he opened a restaurant with another guy and, you know, we know where it was. It was called Merchants Dining Room. We know where it was.

SM:

Yep.

SF:

It's actually right under where the Arch is now in St. Louis. And this was pre-Civil War, but his partner ended up being a Southern sympathizer. Fred was. . . Fred tried to stay out of politics because he was trying to run a restaurant and he needed to serve everybody.

SM:

Yep.

SF:

But he was against slavery. So, when the war came, his partner took all their money and bankrupted Fred.

SM:

Oh wow.

SF:

And at that time, Fred had a wife and a kid and another kid on the way. So, he was trying to figure out what to do. He got some work on the boats that ran on the rivers. And then his wife died in childbirth, giving birth to their second child. So, he was a single guy in his late 20s with two young kids trying to figure out what to do. He ended up moving to St. Joseph, Missouri, which is where the Pony Express was. And he worked on the mail sorting car that went across northern Missouri. And then he remarried a woman from St. Louis and they moved to Leavenworth. At that time, Leavenworth, Kansas was thought to be the next great American city after St. Louis and Chicago, because they thought that the major railroads would go through there. And so, it was quite a cosmopolitan city. Like the New York of the West.

SM:

Oh wow.

SF:

It also had Fort Leavenworth, so it had a big army presence. But it was really interesting place. It had, you know, some of the first synagogues in the Midwest. It had ethnically diverse... It's not your idea of what the Midwest of America was.

SM:

Sure.

SF:

There were Native Americans, you know, there are tribes were nearby. So, Fred set up there, assuming that Leavenworth would become the next big city and the major railroad would come through. And the major railroad ended up coming first above through Omaha, that was the first, you know, and then the second one went through Kansas City, which is below Leavenworth.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

So, Fred kept his family there. He remarried. His first two kids died of scarlet fever, but he and his wife had five children. They raised their children there in Leavenworth and his company. And he worked on the railroads first selling tickets and also selling, allowing people who were shipping cattle and ore and other things at the trains. He was an agent for the railroads. So, he sold things for the railroad. He also sold advertising for the local newspapers for people who wanted to reach the newspaper towns of the railroad Midwest. And he did this for a number of years and didn't do restaurants at all for almost more than 10 years. And then he got in his head that he wanted to open a restaurant in part because these railroads were expanding to the west and the restaurants at the stops were horrible. The food was like the old Woody Allen joke, the food's terrible in such tiny portions. But they would serve terrible food. You have, you know. . . . As soon as you started eating it, the whistle would blow for you to get back on the train. So, they would take the dishes, cut off the part you ate, and then re-serve it to the next person. There was just... travelers knew that the food in these restaurants that were all local restaurants wherever the train stopped were terrible. And Fred Harvey had a bad stomach on top of that. So, he was very sensitive to the fact that the food along the railroad lines was awful. And he had it in his head that if anybody actually improved that, they would become rich. So, he started a side business running a handful of restaurants along a railroad in Kansas. He ended up not liking the partner he was with, so he went in with another railroad, a brand-new railroad called the Atchison-Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. And you can tell by the railroad names what the deal was. So, Atchison and Topeka are like in Kansas, not very far from each other, and Santa Fe, of course, is hundreds of miles away.

SM:

Yes.

SF:

So, railroad names were always aspirational to where they hoped the railroad would one day get, but when he started working with them, it was basically Atchison and Topeka. And he opened a dining room in the second floor of the Topeka train station. And his idea was, instead of it being just bare bones, that it would be like a restaurant in Chicago, that it would have wonderful imported silver and imported glassware and beautiful plates. And it would have market food because it would be brought in fresh on the trains. And people would see like, you can have fresh food in the middle of nowhere. Because they already knew, you know, like all the oysters from New York could already come on the trains.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

Oysters can be refrigerated and they can travel pretty far. So, it's like a miracle to be in Topeka and be eating fresh oysters. But he could see from the beginning that this was possible. He opened this restaurant in Topeka. It was not huge. People paid attention to it. They were interested in it. And then the railroad had another place nearby in Florence, Kansas, where they owned a small hotel and where people ate. And he was offered to take over that restaurant. And for that restaurant, he hired the chef and manager of the Palmer House restaurant in Chicago, really big deal restaurant, and said to him, why don't you come here to Florence and create this amazing place? You can do whatever you want. The food can be incredible, do whatever you want.

SM:

Wow.

SF:

And so as long as you feed the people coming in on the train, we will be happy. So, Florence was a place where people would come to hunt and fish, and people would bring in what they got and he would cook that. And people immediately just saw that this was some kind of food that they could not get anywhere else and that anybody could go there and eat. It wasn't cheap, but it was affordable and they had the good luck of it. There was a guy from London who had a column in a newspaper in London and his job was to come to America and basically travel around and tell people what was cool and interesting in America, especially things having to do with hunting and fishing. He's actually a well-known writer. He went under the name St. Kames, K-A-M-E-S. He came to Florence and he had this like amazing meal in the middle of nowhere served to him by a chef who was from England, by a restaurant owner who was from England. And he thought, what a great story. So, he wrote to some of the first people who really heard about what the amazing food in Fred Harvey restaurants were. We get this from London papers, not from Kansas papers.

SM:

Wow! Do we know which paper it was or has it closed now?

SF:

It's closed now.

SM:

Okay.

SF:

But it's all in the book. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the newspaper.

SM:

No, no, no, I really want you to-

SF:

But we have the articles. It's not like a big secret. They're in archives and we have the articles. And he just went on and on about how amazing the food was, how Fred Harvey was there. And Fred talked to him about all the people who would get involved in hunting and then never come back to work. And people obsessed with fishing, that would be me, who never could. . . . He kind of had this idea of what this restaurant was, but this was really the beginning of this. So, as the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad expanded across Kansas, they opened a station in Lakin, Kansas, closer to the cattle areas in Western Kansas. Fred had a restaurant there. And basically, as the railroads expanded west, each place there was a Fred Harvey restaurant because nobody else had this quality of food. People would go now, you know, keep in mind it's hard for us to understand this now, but you know, railroads competed at each other in a huge way. There were no union stations.

SM:

No, no, I know.

SF:

And you basically put down your own tracks and you try to get people to come to wherever you're going by your train, not by somebody else's train. So, the Atchison Topeka immediately started advertising that they had better food than everybody else. And they did because one guy was controlling it all. And he was also using, they would send fresh beef out from the slaughterhouses in Chicago and Kansas City to make sure they had fresh beef. There was very little fresh beef in the West at that time. Everything was cured. All vegetables were processed. So, to have fresh vegetables, to have fresh meat, to have fresh fish from both the Great Lakes and from the Pacific Ocean, they immediately figured out that this was something that they could do. So, each place they added, so they had several locations in Kansas, Colorado, and then they crossed over into New Mexico. And New Mexico is really where the company broadly expanded. They opened up in 12 cities. The railroad really circled the whole state. And not only did they have these trackside restaurants, but they opened a resort hotel outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which is sort of the New York of New Mexico at that time. And a lot of people were starting to come west for their health. So, it was a health resort as well as a hotel, a beautiful big Victorian hotel. Everybody from the press all over the country were brought in for the opening. It had bowling alleys and a beautiful wine cellar. It had a casino. It had like a zoo outside, so that in the outside there were actually, there were deer and antelope actually played because they were brought them in to show people the bounty of New Mexico. It was this amazing place. Unfortunately, people who are sick don't attract people who are not sick.

So, people who were coming West did not want to be at a place where there were so many people who had tuberculosis. And there's a story in the paper about people being scared because there's a guy there with no nose, because sometimes those were the kinds of operations that people had at the time. So, the restaurant, while it was a beautiful success, the food was amazing. Everybody loved it. It was not successful. And Fred Harvey turned it back over to the railroad and kept building smaller restaurants along the trackside, eventually expanding all the way to California across Northern New Mexico and then from California, from San Diego all the way up to San Francisco. And so, for the first couple, first decades, their business was trackside restaurants. And they had a few rooms in them, but they were not basically hotels. They were basically restaurants that were really only there for people on the trains. But of course, it turned out the people in the towns loved them too because they had no kind of food service that was like that. The only thing they had to deal with was that when the train came, all the local people had to stop being served because the trains came in and they had to be turned around as quickly as possible so that the people get back on the train so the train wouldn't be late. So, if you were sitting there eating and waiting for your chicken and then the train came, you'd have to wait for the 30 minutes for the service for the restaurant and then from the train and then your food would come. And that actually continued, that started in the 1880s. And M.F.K. Fisher actually wrote about it the night happening to her in the 1920s. So, it was still happening because it was a, you know, this was the nature of the business. So, it was originally. . . .

SM:

Funnily enough, funnily enough, I've just been writing one of my essays for the podcast about Fisher because a lot of people in England and a lot of people now have forgotten about her, which is I find really odd. When I was, you know, I'm 60 now, but when I was 21, no one in Britain, no one anywhere really knew about her. And I find that really odd.

SF:

Right.

SM:

And even now, I talk to people and I go, do you know who she was? And they all go, no. So, I find that, so I said, we have to write, even if it's just a short kind of essay thing on her, I'll read that out. And it’s, that's going to be something. So the fact that you mentioned that.

SF:

She described in one of her earliest pieces, sort of losing her high culinary virginity on the Santa Fe train. Her uncle took her and she just never eaten food like this before. So, the Harveys, keep in mind, initially did not serve on the train. There were no dining cars west of Chicago. They were too heavy. The railroads didn't use them. That's why people stopped the trackside restaurants. But after there was a depression in the 19. . . in the early 1890s, all the, every company went out of business. And then when they came back, the railroads changed. They added dining cars and Fred Harvey ran all the dining cars from Chicago West. And they started getting interested in the hotel business because, initially people took trains across to California. The, you know, New Mexico and Arizona were like the flyover States for trains. But eventually people realized they were incredibly beautiful. There were things to visit. And so, the railroad started creating places for people to stay, including a hotel at the Grand Canyon, which previously, you know, only a few hundred people a year could go to, had to schlep up on a, you know, covered wagon or on a horse, but they built a train line to the Grand Canyon, which opened in 1901. And then they built a hotel.

SM:

And is that why the Grand Canyon really opened up as a. . .

SF:

Yes. Yes, was also, know, the Union Pacific, which was the railroad that was further north of the Fred Harvey, was along, you could get to Yellowstone from there. So, they advertise that they had their own national park, which you could only get to if you took their train. So, the Santa Fe thought, we have the Grand Canyon. So, you'd say if you take our train, you can get to the Grand Canyon on your way to California. And that was part of the sales technique.

So, in 1901, they opened a train line. I don't know if you've ever been to the Grand Canyon, but train line is still there. And the train goes right up to lip of the canyon. I mean, like, literally like only hundreds of yards from the opening of the canyon.

SM:

I didn't know that.

SF:

But the canyon is so big, you don't like see it or anything. And so that's how people started going there. And that's how it became sort of the top tourist attraction in the West because there were Fred Harvey restaurants there and a Fred Harvey hotel and you could take the train right up to it. Some people would take the train to it. When people started having cars, they would bring their cars on the train and then drive, because there's like a paved path along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, they would drive on it. The Vanderbilts and the Melons would bring their cars and have a nice little leisurely drive, then put the car back on the train and go back. So, the Harvey business changed and Fred was. . .  Fred didn't, you his nervous stomach and his bad, you know, that led him to want to have restaurants later turned into cancer. So, he turned over his company to his son, Ford, in the 1890s because he was sick. He actually was brought to England. He was operated on by the same doctor who operated on the Elephant Man.

SM:

Oh wow.

SF:

And then he came back to America and he lived, you know, for a couple more years. By this time his son, and his right-hand man, David Benjamin, who was also British via Canada, they were running the company. And in the 1890s, that's when the railroads, first of all, started building Union stations, which all the trains came to the same station. One, they also had retail in them, and the Harvey Company ran the retail, and they had restaurants. They were like the first enclosed shopping areas, the first malls.

So, starting in St. Louis in 1896, the Harvey Company got involved with these. And at the same time, they started building hotels because there was starting to be tourism both in Kansas, but a lot in Arizona and New Mexico. People wanted to experience all the things that we go to for tourists in New Mexico to see Native American pueblos, to see the Big Sky, to experience all that America. And the Harvey Company grew. Fred died in 1901, but by that time his son was running the business. And they'd also figured out that they could brand the business without Fred actually being involved anymore by using his name. So, they started signing his name to every letter as if Fred Harvey had sent it out. And each. . . . The idea was that Fred Harvey could be at every one of these restaurants at the same time, because people thought that anybody they saw from the company was probably Fred Harvey.

So, but the idea of branding, which we now take so seriously, you know, McDonald's and Hilton and all these kinds of things. The first national brand in America that had locations all over the place was Fred Harvey. The Fred Harvey restaurants along the Santa Fe railroad. And they later even took Fred's signature and made it into a logo. And so, but this company was known for creating the idea of having a chain where the quality was the same in every place. It wasn't run by local people. In fact, they invented this idea of the Harvey Girls of having female waitresses at all these places that were trained in Kansas and in Missouri and then sent out to all the different places so they did not have to rely on just the people who lived in these towns.

SM:

I love it.

SF:

Because some of them were major cities and some of them were towns that had been created because the railroad just built a station there. So it was. . .

SM:

I wanted to ask a question if I may.

SF:

Sure.

SM:

There were a couple of questions about that because all of this, the branding, the everything is kind of modern in the way he's looking at it.

SF:

Yep.

SM:

But before we do that, and I want you to carry on telling this story because it's just so amazing. But the first thing I did want to ask you, this was from me, he had all the people from the Wild West. They were coming into his restaurants. They were coming in and I find this fascinating because you have the rich going into his restaurants and then you have these people going in who are these, I call them roughnecks or whatever. But I think what he did was he got them to... they tidy themselves up and then go into these restaurants, is that right?

SF:

Well, I think there were two things going on at the same time. One, the opening scene of the book is people coming to the Montezuma Hotel early on in Fred Harvey's time and making a ruckus and Fred Harvey getting into a fistfight with one of them. So, I think Fred himself was a tough guy, but he also, as his company got bigger, had to hire other tough guys because people would rob these restaurants. . .

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

. . . at gunpoint. I mean, everything that you see in a... in a Western movie. Some of those Western movies were actually shot at Fred Harvey hotels early on. But yeah, everything that you would expect did happen and they would have to have muscle, especially in New Mexico. I mean Kansas, Eastern Kansas wasn't so bad. Western Kansas was cattle country. And there were people, I mean, obviously Bat Masterson was there. I mean Fred Harvey knew all these, all these people.

So, there was some in need to do that in Dodge City and in Lakin, but New Mexico was really rough. And it was also after the Civil War, really racially rough, you know, because there were African-Americans who had come after slavery was over and the white people, they were unbelievably racist towards them. And part of the reason they created the Harvey Girls was because the African-American male waiters in New Mexico found themselves in danger, you know, all the time because they, because they would, you know, there was a lot of racism. So, Fred Harvey's innovation was to move the employees of color into the kitchen and to hire white single women to do all the waiting and to lower the testosterone level in the restaurants. And they did it first in Raton, New Mexico. And when it worked, they decided to do it and keep doing it as the company expanded and at a certain point people recognized, one, they were bringing a lot of single women to the West. After they did their stint for Harvey, many of them married and stayed there and they were kind of building up the towns and that Fred Harvey Company had become like a matrimonial agency because they were constantly bringing new single women, you know, mostly in their late teens and early 20s out to these towns. So, it just became this ongoing phenomenon. And, but yeah, but no, Fred Harvey had like his bouncer, you he had like his big guys. . .

SM:

I love this.

SF:

. . . who he would sometimes have to stand. Yeah. Because people can't, you know, people would ride their horses into the restaurant, you know, so somebody had to get. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

SF:

. . . them out of there and punch them and call the police or be the police. And, so it was very rough, especially in New Mexico during the 1880s. And, you keep in mind, we, we tend to think of the history of the West as linear, meaning that everything advances in civilization at the same time, but it's not true. The biggest places that were older get more civilized faster.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

And then for every one of them, there's a town that just got started, which is still rough where people are still, you know, fighting and, you know, a lot of people had guns. I mean, the newspaper editors at that time had guns. So, the editor of Las Vegas Optic, a newspaper we love because it was really funny, was. . . . He had a gun. People would come up to him and argue about his op-eds and they could have a gunfight. You know, he claimed to have been involved in helping with the shooting of Billy the Kid and he claimed to have Billy the Kid's thumb on his desk in a jar. In the 1880s, there's a lot of this going on. It's very much Wild West. And a lot of the genre writing from this time is being proliferated through that. It's part of making people romanticize the West. And the one thing that people had in common is they all knew Fred Harvey. Fred Harvey was a company they could see in Chicago. They could see in St. Louis. They could see in Kansas City. They could also see in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and in really tiny towns in New Mexico. . .

SM:

Wow.

SF:

. . . and then across Arizona into California. So, it was, it was a thing that sort of connected America before this before phones. You know, they were still in the early years, they were still using telegraph. I mean eventually they got phones. Again, we think of brands because we know them from the 20th century, the 21st century. This was the only place that you would go and go like, oh I just traveled 300 miles and here's a Fred Harvey restaurant in this train station.

SM:

And it looks...

SF:

Yeah, the way we would expect to go to a train station and see like a Starbucks and a McDonald's and all this kind of stuff.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

There was nothing like that then, especially in the West. And the difference of course, is that of course these places had the best food possible. So, we sometimes think of chains as having mediocre food. . .

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

. . . just being everywhere. But the Harvey company was, think of the way Starbucks was when it first started.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

Everybody thought, wow, the best coffee you could ever possibly get is in this place that just opened that's called Starbucks. Okay. That's how people thought of the Fred Harvey company. Not only because they had amazing coffee. First of all, it was brewed the same day, which didn't happen in the West. But they also had fresh fruit and fresh vegetables and fresh meat and fresh fish that was brought in refrigerator cars on the trains. And that phenomenon was something that was considered miraculous and continued to be miraculous until it was common. But that kind of transporting of food, that's a phenomena in America of the 20s, 30s and 40s and beyond.

The Fred Harvey Company had existed for like 25, 30 years before anybody else did this. And it was written about in hospitality magazines because it was like this kind of like this miraculous thing. I mean, look, you're interested in food service. You're interested in that whole world. The world of hospitality has always been about having a place and making sure it runs really well. Having good employees, having good service, having good food, having good hotel. So, but it's based in a place. You know, it's not based in 30 places that are really far from each other that there's no phone service between. But that's how they did it. They did it through telegraph. The telegraph books are hilarious because the telegraph books have to predict. They have to have a code for everything that can go wrong. You know, in a very specific way, everything from a code for Fred Harvey's wife is sick, come back to Leavenworth to, you know, the hotel in, you know, wherever in southern, you know, New Mexico has been robbed, you know, bring the police, you know. So, they had sort of every possible thing.

SM:

Wow.

SF:

You know, manager absconded with funds, you know, because they had to predict every possible thing. Because not only was Fred on the road, but Fred's health wasn't that great, as I think I mentioned. He was in England being treated during much of the time when his company was getting big because he was diagnosed with the disease of the rich of the day called Americanitis. And this was like a real diagnosis then. And it was basically that people who become wealthy in America could get sick because of the pressures of being wealthy in America. And the treatment was to go somewhere else. So, Fred would go to England for half the year and have to communicate with his company by telegraph in order to maintain his health. Yet today we would say he has depression, he has IBS. You know, we would treat him with something, but back then he had Americanitis.

So, it allowed, one thing it did allow was that part of the reason Fred Harvey was successful, he was not like a maniacal egotistical guy who needed everybody to listen to him and for him to tell everybody what to do. He was great at picking good people, delegating responsibility, enabling people to delegate other responsibility. Everybody was trained by the company and promoted from within. They tried as much as possible not to bring in outsiders, except for chefs who they brought from Europe and from England and from major New York cities. And so, they built a huge workforce. They got, you know, they had thousands and thousands of employees that were deployed all over the country.

SM:

You do say about that because, you know, first of all, I love the fact that Judy Garland played a Harvey Girl.

SF:

Yes.

SM:

And that made me very happy because I love Judy Garland, but that's a separate matter. And I have to find out which film it is then.

SF:

It's called the Harvey Girls.

SM:

Oh okay. So, there you go.

SF:

It won an Oscar.

SM:

I haven't seen that so I'm going to go and find that.

SF:

See, you know, the word doesn't get to England that much. You know, you missed that part of it. But, you know, in 1946, there was a big MGM musical called “The Harvey Girls.” It won an Oscar because the song “On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe” written by Johnny Mercer was a huge hit song. And it was considered the follow-up to “The Wizard of Oz” because it was one of Judy Garland's first movies after “The Wizard of Oz.” And Ray Bolger, who played the scarecrow, was also in it. And Judy Garland played this girl who came from the Midwest and went on a train and became a Harvey girl in a town in New Mexico. And it is not a great movie. And Judy Garland always made fun of it as not being a great movie. But it has, parts of it are wonderful. It's one of Angela Lansbury's first movies. So, Angela Lansbury plays the woman who runs the brothel at the bar across the street from the Harvey restaurant. And the Harvey Girls are all dressed like, kind of like nuns. I they wore these long black wool dresses with little bow ties. They were there to be the counterpoint to the only single women who were in many of these towns who were prostitutes. So yeah, young Judy Garland and young Angela Lansbury in the Harvey Girls movie. It's a...

SM:

That is. And the other thing though, because when we're talking about the Harvey Girls, you said that they were almost, they had a strict discipline. In the dormitory, a lot of them would sleep rather than be in rooms around. . . .

SF:

Yeah, no, they were not local girls. They were brought in and they slept in the, for the first 25, 30 years of the company, they did not hire local people for anything. So, the Harvey girls were brought in and in order to protect them from all the single guy, I mean, in the Harvey Girls movie, you see this, but it's really true. The train would come in. It's like the first single girls who have been here, you know, since the last time a Harvey Girl came here. So, every guy is like, could I marry her? You know. And so, there's a big dance number at the beginning, of course, of all this, because they're so excited because single girls are coming. But that really is what happened. So, the women would come in. Their deal was they had to sign a contract to stay with Fred Harvey for six months wherever they were sent and not get married and not get pregnant. So, some of them didn't get married. Some of them did get pregnant. And if they made it through six months, they continue to want to work for the company, they would get a free vacation anywhere the Santa Fe Railroad went. And then they could come back and sign another contract. So, some women did this repeatedly through their childhood. Some people did it for their whole lives and moved up in the organization. But, you know, 100,000 women were Harvey Girls between the 1880s and the 1940s. And so many of them came and did it for one summer or for one year and then went back to their lives. But it was an incredible opportunity. I mean, women did not travel at this time. They certainly didn't travel by themselves at this time. And for a single woman, to be able to have the opportunity to go west. They worked incredibly hard. I mean, it was not a fun job. It was really hard. If the train came in nine hours late, they had to wake up at three o'clock in the morning, all get dressed and serve the train. It was not easy work, but it was very exotic to be able to be in these locations and to see the American West. And many of them fell in love with ranchers or cowboys and then build up these communities. And the company only started hiring local people during the Second World War. Because up until that point, they always were committed to training their own forces and bringing them out to the different places so that they would have the highest quality. But during the Depression and then the Second World War, that broke down in part because during the Depression, a lot of Harvey locations first closed. And then when the war started, they all had to be reopened because the Santa Fe Railroad was one of the main train lines the troops went on.

So, you had some of these places that had gotten smaller and some of them had even closed and they had to all be reopened. Every Harvey Girl who they had, who could come back and still carry a tray was brought back and they took these restaurants that had originally been these beautiful little restaurants with nice little tables for four or six and beautiful chairs and you know, and they made them into cafeterias for the troops. And they put all the tables together. They made these long tables. The Harvey Girls would serve all these guys who would be giving them letters. Sometimes they were the last girls they saw before they went off to war. They also served meals through the windows of the trains because there were just so many people when America finally committed to being in the war who were traveling across the country. And so, it's not surprising that the Harvey Girls movie got made in 1946 because after a period of sort of getting smaller during the depression, the Harvey brand was everywhere during the war because they had these huge contracts with the federal government to serve all the troops. They were taking out full-page ads in Life Magazine explaining why the service wouldn't be perfect in the restaurants because they had to take care of all the soldiers.

They invented this whole character, Private Pringle, who was one of the soldiers who would eat at a Harvey restaurant. I mean it was a whole big thing that was very much part of many people's experience of the Second World War. And then this Harvey Girls movie came out, which is basically set in the 1880s in New Mexico. And it's got Judy Garland, who was at the peak of her career. And it was a big thing right when the war ended.

The biggest song on the hit parade when the war ended was not a patriotic song. It was a version of “On the Atchison Topeka in Santa Fe” from the Harvey Girls movie. It was incredibly popular. There was like a Judy Garland version of it, a Bing Crosby version of it. Three orchestras versions of it. It was unbelievably popular. But in part because I think people were, again, they wanted to be able to have the nostalgia and the romanticism of the American West. You know, now that the war was over, people went to the West like crazy after the war. And, you know, America changed. I mean, the railroads, let's face it, America had railroads in the East always. When the railroads came West, that's what connected the country to itself. Right? There was a life in California. There was a life in the East. And there was a big schmush in the middle. Each time the railroads expanded, more of the middle got connected and more of the middle got, you know, developed. And the romanticism of that time was the West. It was cowboys, it was mountains, it was the Grand Canyon, it was that history and not the previous history, which had, again, by this time was fraught with racial and other danger. So we are, I think now we are actually reconnecting to that period of history, the reconstruction period. But at this point, what people loved about American history was post reconstruction, Billy the Kid, you know, up through the Rough Riders and all this stuff. And that stuff was all tied up with the Southwest and all tied up with the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. I mean, you know, when, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to have his Rough Riders reunion, they had it at a Fred Harvey Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And all the Rough Riders came to the hotel, the New York Times came there to take pictures and all the journalists came. And Teddy Roosevelt's. . . many of the things that happened in Teddy Roosevelt's presidency were tied to things that happened at Fred Harvey locations. I mean, the famous speech that he gave at the lip of the Grand Canyon, which is the beginning of American environmentalism, he gave. . . you know, he was brought there by the Fred Harvey Company, by the Santa Fe Railroad. So, you know, remember, Arizona and New Mexico didn't become states until 1912. So, the railroad was bigger than the state governments to some degree. So, the railroad really was a huge player and the Harvey restaurants had many more employees on the ground than the railroad stations did. Because the people had to live there and take care of people. It was just this fascinating cultural phenomenon.

As a guy from the East, I've got to tell you, I had no idea about any of this. You know I grew up in the East, we would say, in Howard Johnson's territory.  And Howard Johnson Company was a company that copied Fred Harvey starting in the 1930s when the Fred Harvey Company unwisely decided that it did not want to be roadside on turnpikes in the East. And they basically ceded that to Howard Johnson. But the Howard Johnson company was based on the Fred Harvey Company. But the Harvey Company expanded as far as Cleveland eventually, but for most of its existence was Chicago to California and Chicago south to the Gulf of Mexico. So, there were Fred Harvey restaurants in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and then all the way West, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California.

SM:

Wow, so, I mean the obvious question is, why did they kind of fizzle out? Because these were, like you said, they were like the Howard Johnson, which has gone now as well, but why did they, you know, particularly disappear?

SF:

Well, keep in mind, the Harvey Company started in the 1870s. So, you know, it was already, when people were starting to talk about it getting smaller, it had already existed for 50 years. And it had already existed through two generations. Most family businesses don't make it past the first generation. Fred's son, Ford, ran the company better than Fred did and expanded the company in ways that his father would have loved. But he was sort of the real genius of a lot of it. What happened really simply is that the Harvey Company, its model was that it worked in buildings that the railroad provided for it. So, they spent all the money on food and service because they didn't pay rent. And so, as the railroads became. . . . The railroads did something very dumb themselves, which was instead of thinking of themselves as being a transportation business, they thought themselves being in the railroad business. So, they didn't invest in cars, which they just saw as a competition. And then they didn't invest in planes, which they also saw as competition. So, the Harvey Company did better than them because the Harvey Company actually was involved in the first transcontinental airlines. And they were partners with, in transcontinental air transport, which was the first airline that flew all the way across the country.

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

But their grandson, Freddie, who was a World War I flyer who insisted they get into it, died in a plane crash in 1936. After that, the company didn't want to be involved in the airline business anymore for a while, and they sold out to somebody else. And Howard Johnson's came and took the first big contract in America on a turnpike was in Pennsylvania. But by this time, the Harvey Company in its third generation pulled in and just stuck with train stations and the trains, which ultimately limited them. But what they also did was they bought from the railroad, they bought La Fonda in Santa Fe, which is still there, still a Fred Harvey restaurant. And they bought all the Grand Canyon hotels. So, the Grand Canyon by this time had three, two hotels and a lot of other things the Harvey company owned. And so, they bought that from the trains, from the railroads in the fifties. And that became the center of their business. I mean the Grand Canyon was for many decades, the biggest place that people visited in the whole country. And they had a contract to basically take care of everybody who came there, both the people who stayed over, the people who just came to eat, the people, you know, so they were involved, you know, with the park service and taking care of that.

So, the company. . . . It actually continued to expand some in the 50s and 60s. You know, they ran the restaurants in Illinois on the toll roads. There were these very futuristic restaurants that were over the toll roads. They were Fred Harvey restaurants. So, it's not that the company didn't exist. One, it wasn't... the biggest company of its sort anymore, other people learned its business, one. And two, they couldn't grow as much as they wanted to because they didn't believe in franchising and they didn't want to take on a lot of debt. And that's how you make a bigger company.

So eventually the fourth generation, those kids sold the company to a big hospitality company, which was called originally called Amfac based in Hawaii is now called Xanterra, which runs many national park places. And they bought out Fred Harvey. And by the 70s, they kind of didn't get why Fred Harvey was cool. So, Americana wasn't so cool in the 1970s. They wanted to de-Americana it. And then, you know, in the 80s and 90s, people started realizing, wow, this is like a really cool thing. It barely exists anymore. Why don't we start saving the existing buildings and getting more in touch with our Harvey history?

And that was happening long before my book came out in 2010. But what my book did is that it brought together the people in all these different towns who were trying to save their buildings, trying to recapture their Harvey history. And we met them all. You know, we took a train tour for the book tour to every Fred Harvey location. And people started connecting to each other. And the people in Winslow, Arizona, who love Fred Harvey, would meet the people who... from Las Vegas, New Mexico who love Fred Harvey and the people from Florence, Kansas who love Fred Harvey. So, the Fred Harvey, the Fred Harvey nation, the Fred Head Nation started meeting each other more and comparing what they loved about Fred Harvey. And so, luckily, I mean, the book helped do that, but believe me what the book did was it connected a lot of dots that already existed of people who had been trying to save their buildings for a long time.

SM:

This is the book, “Appetite for America.” If you are going to remember Fred Harvey, how would you do it? Would you have one hotel that became the Harvey House? How would you remember him?

SF:

Well, I mean, look, you can still experience Fred Harvey in a handful of places in America, and you can sleep in them and eat in them. I mean, La Fonda Hotel is run by people who love Fred Harvey history, and they have maintained the Fred Harvey history. Fred Harvey had a very famous architect and interior designer named Mary Colter. They have restored the hotel to the things that Mary Colter wanted when she started working on it in the 1920s. And they have, they have a great interest in their history there.

Winslow, Arizona, La Posada is another Fred Harvey hotel that was, it opened in the early 1930s, but it, and it was, and it was shuttered in the 1950s and a couple from California bought it in the 1990s and it's completely restored. It has the same beautiful gardens that Mary Colter put there. And again, it's the, it's the only one of the hotels where you can actually take the train. You know, the Southwest chief still goes along those tracks, and walk off the train and walk into the hotel. . .

SM:

Wow.

SF:

. . . and have dinner and have a hotel room. It's a wonderful place.

And then the hotels at the Grand Canyon, the original hotels, El Tovar and Bright Angel Lodge, those places were created by the Fred Harvey Company 1905 and then the 1920s. And they are still there. You can have that same experience. So, there's an aspect of the experience.

And the Hopi House, which they built next door, Delto bar, which Native Americans lived in. We haven't really talked about this, but at the turn of the century, the Fred Harvey Company became basically the major purveyor of getting people interested in Native American art. And they would sell Native American jewelry, Native American art in their hotels, especially at the hotel in Albuquerque and at the Hopi House at Grand Canyon. Hopi House is still there. Native American artists originally lived there, and would make stuff and would come down and do dances for people. They were like living World's Fair exhibits that no one left.

SM:

Wow.

SF:

So, you can still have that experience in Santa Fe, in Winslow, Arizona, in, at the Grand Canyon, which that's actually not a terrible drive.

SM:

No, it's a great drive!

SF:

It's one of the most beautiful drives in America. So, we often encourage people just to do that because those are the places where there are active hotels, Fred Harvey hotels, that have, still have wonderful cuisine and all the views. There's also a restored hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, the Castaneda, which is the most recently restored one. But so those four are the restored Harvey hotels and places where people are really interested in all this. And there are, of course, other buildings. The Harvey Company had buildings all over California, all over the Southwest and through Texas. Many of them still exist, but they're not. You can go to them, but you can't eat in them. There's one other one, Slayton, Texas, little Slayton, Texas. They have saved their Harvey building and they have a B & B there and you can stay there. And in Belen, New Mexico, which is not far from Albuquerque, they have restored their Harvey house and they have lunch four days a week, wonderful lunch, and they have a little museum.

SM:

Oh fantastic. Now, before we move on to our fun questions. . .

SF:

Sure.

SM:

. . . I'm going to just read out the title again. “Appetite for America” by Stephen Fried. “Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West – One Meal at a Time.” Hold it up again. And I have to tell you, this is one of the great books I've read. And it really is. And I knew nothing about Fred Harvey.

SF:

Me neither.

SM:

So, I just want to say thank you for that and thank you for all your stories about him. I know I had a lot of questions here and you've covered everything. So, that's been great. So, but now, why don't we get some fun questions at the end, okay?

If Stephen was a meal, you know, if I was a meal, I'd be fish and chips from England, you know, they're fantastic. But if Stephen was a meal, what would it be?

[Laughter]

SF:

Well, you know, before I discovered Fred Harvey, the meal probably would have been pizza because, you know, I'm a big pizza eater. But I have to say that in the last 15 years since this book came out, I've become quite obsessed with the places that recreate Fred Harvey food. And I mean, there's a Fred Harvey recipe for almost everything. But I have to say that the most wonderful Fred Harvey meals are generally chicken meals. And two of my favorites are there's Chicken Castaneda, which is a fried chicken with tomato sauce and English peas, which I've had probably 10 different chefs make me in different, their own interpretations. And we really have encouraged chefs to look at these old recipes and riff on them because they're really fun. But many of them have way more lard than you would actually want to use in a recipe today. But they are, you know, the Harvey Cookbook was the Harvey Company basically wanted to have American food, English food, Italian food, French food, and regional American food, all in the same place. So, these restaurants served, you know, the chefs were unbelievably nimble. They served a lot of different stuff. So, Chicken Castaneda is one of my favorites in terms of very hearty meal. And then there was another one called Chicken Lucrecio, which the biggest chef in the Harvey system was the chef at La Fonda, Konrad Allgaeir, who came over, he had cooked for the Kaiser during the First World War, that was bad. So, he came over here to do something else. But he was like the first fusion foodie. So, while up to this point, the restaurants for the first 20 years made traditional dishes that people could have in different places, La Fonda, it's not uncommon that Santa Fe itself became a place of fusion cuisine because Konrad Allgaeir would do sort of a German, New Mexican riff on things. And so, the recipes even from that, so Chicken Vesuvio is a wonderful chicken breast dish that has a very spicy almond paste sauce. . .

SM:

Ooh.

SF:

. . . and really interesting, you know, the exact opposite of going to a banquet and getting, you know, banquet chicken. But we've had dinners there where like a hundred or two hundred people got to have this wonderful Fred Harvey dish. I will say also that Konrad Allgaeir was obsessed with ice sculpture. So, the ice sculpture pictures from La Fonda during that time period are utterly hilarious because they just did everything. There's one of a bat.

SM:

[Laughter]

SF:

They just did all the normal things you would expect and all kinds of crazy other things. So. We're doing the menus right now for the 15th annual Fred Harvey dinner, which is going to be on October 26th at La Fonda. So, we're all looking at old Fred Harvey recipes and thinking about what we're going to make. It's fun.

SM:

I feel so bad that I can't be there and I would love to be there because I read all the menus from, you know, right back to the 1700s when they started having them in Paris. . . .

SF:

We included, as you probably know this, the appendix of the book has 50 original Fred Harvey recipes. . .

SM:

Yeah.

SF:

. . . right out of the old chef's cookbooks.

SM:

Which is, know, I might even, I always have this podcast, event where I try and create one of the meals from somewhere that I'm gonna be doing. And so, I'm trying to think, maybe I'll do the, one of the chicken recipes that you talk about.

If you had to go back to any period of history and have a meal, what would it be?

SF:

Well, I recreate in the book the meal that they served in the middle of nowhere when they finished the Golden Spike meal, when they were building the Union Pacific Railroad and they invited all these people out to see that the railroad was going to go all the way across the country and people came from far and wide. And we have the menus from the meal in the book. It's insane. You know, like hundreds of entrees all being served outside in tents. And on top of these excessive meals, with just like, you know, so many entrees, so many appetizers, so many desserts. They put on things that they thought people would be excited about that would make them like the West, like they had a fake Indian attack. So, at the end of the meal to let people know what it was like to be attacked by Indians, of course they weren't being attacked by Indians, but they thought there were, they set a fire on the prairie to see a prairie fire. So, the meals that surrounded the Union Pacific railroad crossing into America, I have to say when I looked at these and just thought about what it must be like to go to them, it just kind of blew me away. And I think in many ways, what the Harvey Company did was a smaller version of that where you didn't have to eat outside and no one attacked you. But again, the idea that you'd be eating food in a beautiful middle of nowhere in America that was as good as anything you could get in the controlled environment of a restaurant in Chicago or New York or Philadelphia, that's what these places were about. And I would love to experience that the way that people did that.

SM:

Fantastic. That's a great answer.

If Stephen had to go back in time to see the invention of anything where would you, what would you?

SF:

Well, I would say, you know, every book I do that's a history book, at some point there is a technological innovation that changes everything. Every part of, in America, we always think that whatever our technological innovation is, is the thing that changed the whole world and never happened before. So, for us, like the internet and all this kind of stuff, when we talk about how nothing's never changed the world, like the internet. And of course, before that, everybody said that about TV. And before that, everybody said that about radio. Before that, everybody said that about the telephone. Before that, they said it about the telegraph.

And going back into the revolutionary times, because I wrote a book about Benjamin Rush, who was a founding father who signed the Declaration, the innovation at that time was simply the expansion of newspapers in major towns so there was more media and more coverage. So, every generation of Americans thinks that their technological innovation is the coolest thing and the thing that ruined the world. So, we keep being convinced that those are the things that happen. I would say that of all the things that I've written about and been fascinated by, the coming of telephones is to me the most fascinating single innovation of all these times, just because the haves and the have nots were so deliberate over such a long period of time. And of course, today it's something that we can never imagine. Some people can imagine not having a car. Some people can imagine never flying. Nobody can imagine not being able to call somebody. And the period when that was becoming possible and then that everybody had it is, it really makes you understand America because again, so much of the history of the world is written through the eyes of England, through the eyes of France, through the eyes of countries that frankly are little. Okay? They are little. All of them could fit like in a very small part of America. You know, America, especially when you go to the West and see the Fred Harvey, it's all about being in the part of America where you constantly can't believe how goddamn big America is. You know?

SM:

Yes, I know.

SF:

The hours and hour-long train rides and you're still not where you are. And when you look at the Grand Canyon, you think like this is the biggest thing that any person could see. So, the bigness of America, the trains actually of course helped, but ultimately it was telephones that allowed people to talk to each other, you know, all over the country. So, I gotta go with telephones and that's my pick.

SM:

Okay, that is, that is a fantastic thing.

And finally, before we finish this, I wanted to see, you know, you're wherever anyone can find out about you.

SF:

I have a have a static website called Stephen Fried dot com. S T E P H E N F R I E D dot com. We have a Fred Harvey history site, which is Fred Harvey dot info. I N F O. I’m active on Facebook. I’m active on LinkedIn. I’m active on Instagram. I don’t understand TikTok.

SM:

[Laughter]

SF:

So, but, but I am, know, and I’m still occasionally looking at what used to be Twitter. But anybody can find me on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. I'm not hiding.

SM:

So again, one more time, “Appetite for America” by Stephen Fried. “Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West – One Meal at a Time.” Fantastic book.

OUTRO MUSIC

SM:

Make sure to check out the website associated with this podcast at www.EatMyGlobe.com where we will be posting the transcripts from each episode, along with all the references and resources we used putting the episodes together, in case you want to delve deeper into each subject. There is also a contact button, so please do let us know if there are any subjects that you would like us to cover.

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Thank you and goodbye from me, Simon Majumdar, we’ll speak to you soon on the next episode of EAT MY GLOBE: Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Food.

CREDITS

The EAT MY GLOBE Podcast is a production of “It’s Not Much But It’s Ours” and “Producer Girl Productions.”

[Ring sound]

We would also like to thank Sybil Villanueva for all of her help both with the editing of the transcripts and her essential help with the research.