Terrific review in the Plain Dealer in Cleveland–the easternmost Fred Harvey City–in a paperback round-up:

<< Here are five more noteworthy new paperbacks: Appetite for America
Stephen Fried (Bantam, 398 pp.)
$18

The subtitle of Fried’s wonderfully entertaining history is “Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West — One Meal at a Time.” Which raises the question — also the title of his prologue — “Who the Hell Is Fred Harvey?”

Fried answers: “Fred Harvey was Ray Kroc before McDonald’s, J.W. Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Johnson before Hojo’s, Joe Horn and Frank Hardart before Horn & Hardart’s, Howard Schultz before Starbucks.”

Fred Harvey, an English immigrant born in 1835, was the founder of America’s service industry, beginning with a single lunch counter in 1876. Realizing the potential of the railroad’s Western expansion, he followed the rails, opening restaurants and hotels all along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. After his death in 1901, his son Ford took over the company named simply Fred Harvey.

At its peak, Fred Harvey owned more than 65 restaurants and lunch counters, 60 dining cars, a dozen hotels, all the restaurants and retail shops in five of the nation’s largest railroad stations, and countless newsstands and bookshops. The restaurants were known for their fine food and the people who served it: The Harvey Girls, a pioneering American women’s work force, romanticized by Judy Garland in the 1946 film “The Harvey Girls.”

In what many considered a bold move, the company branched out from the Santa Fe and opened its first major location east of Chicago, in 1930 in Cleveland’s Union Terminal, now Tower City Center. Fred Harvey ran all the terminal’s restaurants and much of its retail space. His book-selling was so innovative that the trade magazine Publishers Weekly sent a reporter to Cleveland to figure out exactly what the company was doing.

Not only is Harvey’s Horatio Alger life story fascinating in itself, Fried’s telling of it is lively and chock full of the excitement of a young capitalist expanding and innovating with can-do spirit.
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