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3838 MAY MAY | |JUNE JUNE 2010 2010 THE THE PENNSYLVANIA PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE GAZETTEPHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS CRISMAN C’03 Historythe j BuΩer Stephen Fried says we have Fred Harvey to thank for retail chains, Western tourism, and our model of exemplary customer service. He also suggests that his just-published book about the man and the “railroad hospitality empire” he embodied represents a new nonfiction genre: history buffed. BY JOHN PRENDERGAST THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MAY | JUNE 2010 39 “Absurdly diΩerent,” ting myself through, like, nine college [book], because, even though the Fred suggests Stephen Fried C’79, when my courses. And now that I’ve done that, I Harvey story begins way before the Grand choice of adjective—“wildly”—does not feel, ‘Oh, what’s the next book that I Canyon and continues way after, it still is seem sufficiently extreme to encompass could write that’s like this, that would the best example of the audaciousness— the narrative territory covered in the five take me through another period of his- to build a train to the Grand Canyon so nonfiction books he’s published since tory and make it come alive the way that people can see this thing?—and at cutting his journalistic teeth at 34th this period in history did for me.’” some level it’s so commercial.” Street as a student. Like his award-win- As the length of Fried’s subtitle sug- Lunching with his longtime editor at ning articles for magazines including gests, the Fred Harvey story is not widely Bantam Books to discuss possible follow- Philadelphia (where he was on staff for remembered. Old-movie fans may recall ups to The New Rabbi, which had come many years and served a stint as editor), The Harvey Girls, the 1946 musical that out in 2002, Fried waxed enthusiastic Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone, and many starred Judy Garland and featured the about all things Fred Harvey—so much so others, Fried’s long-form works feature Oscar-winning song, “On the Atchison, that she instructed him to drop the other exhaustive research, meticulous report- Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” but the Harvey projects he was considering and put ing, and a vivid sense of detail—but that’s legacy lives on most vividly these days at together a book proposal, promising “to about all they have in common. the Grand Canyon, where the company make it worth my while,” he says. Thing of Beauty, which came out in managed the El Tovar Hotel and associ- “And so we very quickly tried to access 1993, told the tale—pieced together from ated attractions when the South Rim of everything that was out there, did a pro- hundreds of interviews—of the rapid rise the Canyon was first developed. That’s posal,” he says. “And then I dove in and and swift descent into drug addiction and where Fried and his wife Diane Ayres, really started exploring the story, which death from AIDS of late-1970s “super- visiting the Southwest back in the 1990s, was much bigger and more complicated model” Gia. It was followed by Bitter Pills, first encountered his future subject. and more of a family saga and more a dense, somewhat sprawling investiga- “Fred Harvey’s portrait hangs in the multi-generational than I realized.” tion of the pharmaceutical industry and main lobby” of El Tovar—which remains, Over the next five years, Fried inter- in particular the little-discussed dangers Fried says, “the classic, the one you want viewed surviving family members; exam- of prescription drugs. The New Rabbi to stay at” among the lodgings around ined diaries, correspondence, notebooks, explored the various dramas surrounding the Canyon. “And in the room you get a and other documents; made excursions to a suburban Philadelphia synagogue’s little pamphlet that tells you about Fred former Harvey House locations; collected choice of a successor to a longtime, much- Harvey,” he adds. “I’m not used to basing various items of Fred Harvey ephemera; beloved spiritual and community leader, a lot of my career decisions on pamphlets squinted over decades’ worth of local while Husbandry was a collection of per- in hotel rooms, but it was intriguing.” newspapers from Harvey-served towns sonal essays, mostly in the ruefully humor- After learning more at nearby Painted on microfilm; and combed through ous vein, about marriage, originally writ- Desert National Park, where he found shelvesfull of old books for passing ref- ten for Ladies’ Home Journal. Fred Harvey written in giant letters on erences to the family and firm, assisted Fried’s latest book—Appetite for America: the gift-shop building, Fried decided by a team of student interns. How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Harvey’s story would make for a good “I employ 10 students as interns. They Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire magazine article, but found no takers. get credit through [Kelly] Writers House,” That Civilized the Wild West, published in Americana wasn’t selling in the 1990s, he explains. “There were times when we March—blazes two new trails, taking him he says, and travel magazines—the logi- had 300, 400 books from Van Pelt and out West and into the past. It has been well cal market for such a piece—were focused other books that we had brought in from received, with a prepublication notice in on the international scene. But Harvey libraries all over the country because we Publishers Weekly that praised its epic stuck in his head, and so did the surreal saw somewhere that there was, like, one sweep, “[f]rom the battle of the Little image of the great hotel perched at the line in them that seemed to suggest a Bighorn to the Manhattan Project,” and edge of the immense canyon. “When you story either about Fred Harvey or related positive reviews in The New York Times go to the Southwest, you start realizing to the story.” and Wall Street Journal, among others. that a lot of what’s there was created by When one set of interns graduated, they Fried himself calls Appetite for America the Santa Fe Railroad and run day-to-day would cart the books back to Van Pelt, his most ambitious piece of work yet, by Fred Harvey,” he says. “Fred Harvey check them out to the next group, and cart and even suggests he may emulate its took care of everybody there.” them back to Fried’s home offi ce. “You method in the future. “The other books Something about the intersection of have to be able to deal with primary sourc- were hard, each in their own way. But romance and moneymaking struck him es. And the Penn students who were in- they grew out of some natural skills as essentially American. A person’s fi rst volved in this—there were four shifts in that I already had from writing for mag- view of the Grand Canyon is famously all—got a really interesting education.” azines,” he says. “To do a book this big, awe-inspiring, Fried says. “They look at One of the interns, Jason Schwartz C’07, this broad, to be able to learn enough to the canyon, and it’s amazing. And I had wrote an award-winning thesis based write knowledgeably about each part of that same experience. But I also said, on research conducted while working history, but still not become a nerd and ‘How the hell did this hotel get here?’ on the book, Fried recalls. “He was the make it really boring, I felt I was put- “That very much sort of drove this one who got stuck reading all the news- 40 MAY | JUNE 2010 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE papers from the early years of Fred emerges as a compelling mixture of obses- Harvey that were not digitized,” he says. sive attention to detail and openness to “And he ended up writing a great history innovation and continuous improvement, thesis on frontier journalism, based on an attitude encapsulated in one of the the most amazing editor in Leavenworth, many maxims he jotted down in the [Kansas, where Fred Harvey was head- notebooks he carried on his travels: quartered] who was this guy who carried “Be cautious and bold.” guns and shot a number of people.” It was Fred’s son Ford, his successor Fried sees his book as within a bud- as head of the company, who was ding genre of nonfiction, in which writ- responsible for creating Fred Harvey ers trained in magazine journalism are the brand when he made the fateful taking on historical subjects previous- decision, after the older man’s death in ly handled, if at all, by academics. He 1901, of continuing to operate the com- offers as further examples Erik Larsen’s pany as if he remained at its helm. The The Devil in the White City: Murder, firm name stayed the same—just plain Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Fred Harvey—and for many years there- Changed America, set at Chicago’s 1893 after routine correspondence continued World’s Fair, and Laura Hillenbrand’s to go out under the founder’s signature. Seabiscuit: An American Legend, about (Fried tells a story about visiting a local the iconic 1930s racehorse. museum, and having someone excitedly “I think that what’s been happening produce a letter “signed” by Harvey—in in these more narratively written, more 1924; he himself purchased one of the journalistically written, I think more rubber stamps used for signatures on dramatically written, history books is eBay while working on the book.) very much a product of what [the writ- But if Ford was personally self-eff acing, ers] were doing before these books,” he he was not at all shy about expanding says.