Apr
28
28
Here’s a link to an interesting piece in the St. Louis Dispatch by Joe Holleman, who we met at the book festival event there. He was already reading the book for his own pleasure, and just came to be part of the conversation–and then did a terrific story for the Sunday travel section.
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2 Responses to “St. Louis Dispatch piece on Fred”
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> By the late 1850s, Harvey and a partner owned a restaurant at 8 Chestnut Street, near what is now the north leg of the Arch, Fried said.
Cool! How symbolic — he was a foundation of the westward expansion.
> As to the famous Harvey Girls, Fried said their creation stemmed from a racial incident in New Mexico, where former Confederate soldiers bristled at being served food by black waiters.
What about the oft-heard story that a fight between drunken male employees in Raton, NM was the last straw of unreliability that sparked the Harvey Girl idea? I recall even reading the name of the manager who suggested it.
–Michael
well, if you look in Appetite for America at both the way I explained it, and the chapter notes, I think you’ll see how I arrived at my version (which the Post-Dispatch used a reductionist snippet of.) But if you look at even the language used to describe that fight among drunken male employees in the original reporting in Erna Fergusson’s book from the 1940s, and cross-reference the racial overtones with the reports in the Las Vegas, NM papers at the time in the early 1880s when the decision to hire Harvey Girls chain-wide was made, you’ll see how I made my decisions. Keep in mind, of course, that many of the “oft-heard stories” about Fred have been called into question by my book. And I ignored several of them completely, because there was no evidence of their factuality–the whole debate about whether he said, on his deathbed, “don’t slice the ham thin, boys” or “slice the ham thin,” I just left out, because it’s clear he was unconscious on his deathbed, and there were no reports about such “last words” until many years after his death. All apocryphal, I believe.