Well, according to the food section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, that would be Appetite for America!

For the occasion, here’s an unpublished Harvey family picture from the Jersey Shore—that’s Fred’s daughter Minnie and her husband John Huckel in the middle, Ford’s wife Judy and little Kitty to the left, and Fred’s two other daughters, Sybil and Marie top and bottom.

From my last book “Husbandry” (Bantam 2007)

I am haunted by fathers.

Most men are. Some are haunted while their fathers are still alive. But almost all of us become haunted after our fathers die.

I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit. Holidays, birthdays, every time I take a walk on the beach. Every great sunrise and sunset (he always made you stop whatever you were doing to watch). Often during movies, TV dramas, even those cloying commercials that made Robert De Niro bawl in Analyze This.

But, I must say, Father’s Day is the worst, and not only for the obvious reasons. It was just after Father’s Day ten years ago that I found out my dad, then only sixty-one, was not going to live much longer. The next time we were all together, a few weeks later at the family shore house, where we pretended everything was going to be okay and went through our rituals of sea-glass hunting, horseshoe pitching, and seafood gluttony, he already knew he was facing the death penalty for not having gotten a colonoscopy.

The last seven months of his life were extraordinarily powerful for me. I will never let go of them, and they will never let go of me. So I think a lot about how the death of a parent affects a guy, both as a man and as a husband.

Men are often very different — to themselves, and to their spouses — after losing their fathers. In some marriages, it might be the first time a wife has ever seen her husband express (or openly struggle with not expressing) strong emotion. That’s because it’s almost impossible to remain stoic once you’ve been inducted into the Dead Fathers Society.

And it is a society. Anyone whose father is still alive really can’t understand. You can sympathize, I hope, but not really understand. And, in some marriages, I’m guessing that’s a big problem. Here your husband is finally expressing emotion, and it’s not one you recognize or know how to deal with.

My wife, Diane, has weathered my membership in the Dead Fathers Society pretty well. She has never given me the “snap out of it” speech that many spouses deliver — out loud or through their actions — once they realize that grieving lasts so much longer than sympathy. And she has always responded to my need to be comforted, which is one of the most crucial things in any relationship.

Still, I think she is mystified by my need to remind myself of my loss, to purposely make myself upset by it. I’ll watch the male version of a chick flick, A River Runs Through It, every time it’s on — and it’s on a lot — because all the fishing and the intergenerational intensity reminds me of my father and brothers. Dad always took us fishing when we were kids, so for his sixtieth birthday we took him to Canada for an amazing fishing trip, which a friend dubbed A River Runs Jewish.

Diane doesn’t know why I would subject myself to such deliberate heart wrenching. But I know why. If I don’t purposely make myself upset about losing my father, the emotion will sneak up on me when I least expect it. This way I can sort of control my out-of-control reactions.

If this makes no sense to you, don’t be in a hurry to understand it. Once you’re in the society, it’ll make way too much sense.

There has been some intriguing research on how losing a parent affects adult children, as individuals and in their marriages. Sociologists at the University of Texas even studied the differences between losing your father or your mother. While both devastate in their own way, the death of a mother was shown to cause more psychological distress, while fathers’ deaths drive more people to drink–especially if your father drank. (Married men who lost hard-drinking dads increased their own alcohol consumption by about one hundred drinks a month.) When married people lose their mothers, they report a decline in support from their spouses and an increase in their spouses’ negative behaviors (arguing, drinking, having affairs). The death of a father is more associated with a decline in overall “relationship harmony.”

So, basically, when we join the Dead Fathers Society — and, statistically, fathers die first — we become more difficult to live with, to ourselves as well as to our spouses. In the Dead Mothers Society, we look to our spouses more for support — maybe to replace what our mothers were giving us — and often don’t get what we need.

Either loss can create an incredibly risky marital moment. If you don’t figure out how to be there for your spouse during this time of need (based on their assessment of need, not yours), you may never be forgiven. But if you do learn how to share “good grief”—which isn’t easy because resources are few and expert opinions hard to come by–it can save your life together. I’ve now watched way too many of our friends go through what Diane and I did ten years ago. Fortunately, the experience has made more couples than it has broken.

As for me, I do my best to survive each Father’s Day. And then, the weekend after, Diane and I and our families make our annual pilgrimage to the family beach house. It’s a tradition we began as a way of coping with my father’s death, because nowhere is the spirit of Jerry Fried more present than at the shore. If I’m going to be haunted, I’d rather be haunted in the sun, with sand between my toes and the sound of squealing children and seagulls in my ears, searching the shallow surf for those exquisitely misshapen pieces of sea glass, the junk turned to jewels that link me to him.

Since we’re on the subject of paintings of Winslow Harvey Girls, I wanted to show you this print by Fred Calleri, a signed copy of which Diane and I were given as a gift by the Winslow HG group during our April visit there. (We will, by the way, soon be announcing a return engagement for the end of August, stay tuned….)

The passing of one of the Winslow Harvey Girls reminded me that most people haven’t seen Tina Mion’s wonderful painting of two other members of that group. Tina and her husband Allan Affeldt are the couple who saved La Posada–and her incredible work hangs all over the hotel.

Thank goodness for YouTube, allowing us to get our “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” fix whenever we need one. All the way from Phila-del-phi-ayy…

Harvey Girl fans everywhere mourn the loss of Millie McEvoy, the 86-year-old charter member of the delightful Winslow Harvey Girls group in Winslow, Arizona. Her memorial service will be at La Posada.

Here’s a picture of Millie (l) with one of her fellow HGs in 2002, from the National Rail Historical Society site.

Watch “The Tourists”—the 1912 silent movie filmed at Fred Harvey Alvarado hotel in Albuquerque when Mack Sennett and his crew (including comedienne Mabel Normand) were returning from Hollywood on the Santa Fe. (read about it, and the Harvey link to early Hollywood, on pages 272-273 of Appetite for America.)

Esquire food dude John Mariani has selected Appetite for America as one of the top eight food and travel books of the summer in his monthly Virtual Gourmet newsletter.

I only wish that every Fred Harvey fan in the country could have had a chance to taste what we got to eat in Harrisburg, PA the other day. And maybe, if word gets out about this inventive Harvey event, you might get that chance.

Ten students of the Olewine Center for Culinary Arts a Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC)—led by chef/instructor/caterer Autumn Patti—put on an unprecedented (and amazingly delicious) Harvey banquet for 90 people before I lectured about Fred and the book. It was followed by a dessert reception for 200. Between the butlered hors d’ouevre, the sit-down dinner and the lavish dessert buffet, they used seventeen different archival Harvey recipes from the book—in some cases, even combining two to make one dish. (One canape featured a dollop of Harvey Cole Slaw on one of El Tovar’s classic Rice Griddle Cakes”; one dessert used the rum-soaked strawberries from the legendary “Hot Strawberry Sundae” from KC Union Station, serving them over a corner of the Harvey dining car favorite “French Toast a la Santa Fe”.)

What was particularly brilliant about the whole event was the creative partnership. The place where I was speaking reached out to the local culinary school asking if it was interested in a unique opportunity, and the school’s leaders volunteered to do all the prep, cooking and serving as a class project—for just the cost of the ingredients, and the chance to cater a banquet.

The genius of this is that it could be done in any community with a local culinary program: the folks from HACC are open to trying it again, at places close enough to Harrisburg, but would also be willing to share their recipes with other culinary programs. I bet Fred would have loved this—his dishes used to train a new generation of chefs, restaurant managers and staff.

Adding to the students’ challenge, the event was held at the house of worship where my family has belonged for generations in Harrisburg, Temple Beth El—so the dinner also had to be completely kosher!

Let me tell you about some of the other delicious stuff we ate. The other hors d’oeuvre: the famous “Harvey Girl Special Little Thin Orange Pancakes” from St. Louis Union Station were served with an herb citrus creme, “Guacamole Monterey” served in cherry tomatoes, and “Mrs. Ford Harvey’s Baked Eggplant” served on crostini with roasted tomato coulis. Dinner started with the classic Harvey “Cream of Wisconsin Cheddar Cheese Soup”, with “Old Virginia Sour Milk Biscuits”, then “Fillet of Flounder Gloria” with a stuffed “Bell Pepper, Ford Harvey Style” and duchess potatoes. For dessert they created the following bite-sized delights: “French Apple Pie with Nutmeg Sauce” tartlets, phyllo cups filled with “New England Pumpkin Pudding” and “Butterscotch Pie Chantilly,” “French Pancakes filled with Apricot Cottage Cheese” and the “Chocolate Puffs” filled with peanut butter creme.

Thanks to everyone involved in this amazing Fred Harvey event: Autumn Patti (who actually came back early from her honeymoon for this) and her enthusiastic and talented students from HACC; Marcia Cohen, the mastermind of the entire event and chair of the hard-working committee that organized and aggressively marketed it; the supportive professional staff at the synagogue especially executive director Mike Schatz and Rabbi Eric Cytryn; and all our friends and family in Harrisburg.

May Fred be with you all.

I did a somewhat drunken reading and lecture for the Dead Guys Wine Society in Pennsauken, NJ, the other night—a wonderful private group of winos organized by Cellar Guru Zippy Ziskind (zipwine@aol.com) and his wife Marcie (my old Camp Pinemere pal).

The society meets at My Cellar, a climate-controlled warehouse where the well-bottled store their cases and where they hold semi-regular themed tastings (with comfort-foodie munchies.) Here’s a cell-phone shot snapped by Jim Graham (who also, with a camera, took my author’s photo) before he tasted his fourth ten-year-old Cabernet.

Thanks again for what I seem to recall was a really great night.

If you read my Boston Globe article on doing the “Tour de Fred” between Santa Fe and Grand Canyon–or you just always wanted to visit the Divine Abyss and have started planning, you’ve probably figured out how hard it is to get a hotel room right at the South Rim in one of the historic Harvey Hotels. So, here’s an excerpt from the travel appendix to Appetite for America—which lays out the entire train tour you can take of Fred Harvey’s America between Chicago and LA—explaining how, and why, it’s done.

“While plenty of people do the canyon as a day trip, they are missing what Fred Harvey employees have always known is the best part—which is being at the canyon after all the day-trippers leave. This means staying over at least one night in one of the Fred Harvey hotels on the South Rim, which can generally be accomplished only with a good bit of advance planning—especially if you want a room at El Tovar (which, trust me, you do). At any time, El Tovar is taking reservations up to thirteen months in advance—so there are people who know to call the main reservations number (888.297.2757) precisely at 11:00 a.m. mountain time on the first day of the month, exactly thirteen months from when they want to go, because that’s when all the rooms for that month are released (including the three corner suites with canyon-view balconies, and all the other most desirable rooms). Many people plan entire southwestern or cross- country trips around room availability at El Tovar because space is so limited, the rooms are so surprisingly reasonable (the rates are controlled by the National Park Service, not the marketplace), and the experience is so worth the wait. (There are last-minute cancellations: to check for them same-day, call 928.638.2631.)”

Here’s a shot of Albert Einstein during his visit to the Grand Canyon. I’m guessing he and his wife had no trouble getting a reservation.

For Father’s Day how about a personalized, signed copy of Appetite For America? I’ve arranged with my favorite local indie bookstore to take orders–which I will sign and personalize and they will ship to you in time for Father’s Day. Order now at www.foxbookshop.com and, when you get to “checkout,” request a “signature and personalization” in the comments field–or just call at 215.563.4184.

Someone called Michael Stillwell just posted a strangely compelling original song about Fred’s lonely rail journeys on YouTube. Check it out!

The Boston Globe travel section asked me to write a piece on the “Tour de Fred”—the wonderful trip you can still take to the remaining Fred Harvey hotels in Santa Fe (see La Fonda rooftop below), Winslow and Grand Canyon. Check it out!

Philadelphia Gay News summer reading section calls Appetite for America “riveting … a feast for anyone with even the slightest fascination with American history and how we became the mechanized consumer culture we are today.” This is also the first review to focus on the gay issues in the book (mostly involving Fred’s granddaughter Kitty Harvey, below).