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Show HARVEY GIRLS Harvey Opened First Restaurant At Topeka, Kan.. 75 Years Ago In 1876 a young man named Fred Harvey opened a restaurant in a little red depot at Topeka, Kansas. In seventy-five years the business Fred Harvey started in this modest mod-est way has become a great system sys-tem of resort hotels, restaurants, shops, and newsstands extending from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Pa-cific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. The story of Fred Harvey is a Horatio Alger chronicle spiced with the romance of pioneer days in the West. Harvey was a lad of fifteen when he left London for America. His earliest interests were in the restaurant business. Later the railroads pioneering into the West captured his imagination. As a traveling freight agent, he was annoyed an-noyed by the bad food, the dirty, bug-ridden quarters, and the racketeering, rack-eteering, "customer - be - darned" business methods he encountered at railroad eating houses and hotels. Determined to better the lot of the traveler, Harvey intrigued the Santa Fe Railway into letting him open a restaurant in their Topeka station. Thus began the business destined to enrich the West with many colorful traditions. The appeal ap-peal of the Harvey Girls, comely waitresses recruited from the East, and the good food, service, and honest business methods earned for Fred Harvey the title "Civil-izer "Civil-izer of the West." Harvey Houses were established in the 1880's and 90's every 100 miles along the tracks of the Santa Fe Railway. At meal stops passengers passen-gers were welcomed to Harvey hospitality with "thirty minutes for dinner" by a bong of a big brass gong. The seventy-five cent dinner din-ner included as many as seven entrees. en-trees. Meal prices were apologetically apologeti-cally raised to a dollar in 1920, and remained about a dollar until 1927. THIS YEAR the Fred Harvey system is celebrating its diamond jubilee, three quarters of a century cen-tury of continuous Harvey family management. The founder's son, B. S. Harvey, is chairman of the board. His three grandsons are president, Byron Harvey, Jr., and vice presidents, Stewart and Daggett Dag-gett Harvey. Today the business employs 6000, hands out around 31 million meal checks a year, and grosses about $30 million. The company operates oper-ates fifty-five restaurants and twelve resort hotels, the best known of which are El Tovar and Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon and La Fonda at Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fred Harvey operates 100 dining cars on the Santa Fe, runs the concessions at the big union rail terminals in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas Kan-sas City, Los Angeles, and other cities, and at the Albuquerque, New Mexico Municipal Airport. Important events in the company's com-pany's rehabilitation and expansion expan-sion program this 75th Anniversary Anniver-sary year are the opening of new Fred Harvey restaurants at either end of Chicago's swank Michigan Avenue. The Bowl and Bottle is located at Jackson Boulevard on South Michigan Avenue. On North Michigan, in the world famous Palmolive Building in the center of Chicago's fashionable Near North Side, are the Harlequin Room and the Harvey House Grill. |