The Route 66 Chick

On Sunday my daughter, Erica Jett, and I went to the opening festivities of the New Mexico History Museum's new permanent exhibit, Setting the Standard:  The Fred Harvey Company and Its Legacy . There was a huge crowd, including former Harvey Girls and members of the Harvey family. New Mexicans and others have been getting hungry for the Fred Harvey story, fanned by the flames of Stephen Fried's excellent book, Appetite for America:  Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West - One Meal at a Time. The New Mexico History Museum staff must have felt very gratified by the immense interest and excellent attendance yesterday. Four showings during the day of Katrina Parks' documentary The Harvey Girls:  Opportunity Bound  appeared to all have been packed in the auditorium with overflow space in the lobby also being utilized. The 57-minute film was wonderfully done and included numerous delightful interviews with former Harvey Girls.  The 2:00 pm ...

I might have accidentally been almost a Fredhead long before the term was coined. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I made my first trip “out west” with my parents. That trip kicked off a life-long love affair with the mountains, the high desert, native arts, sunsets, buildings (I didn't know enough to call it “architecture”), and pretty much all things western. One of my mother's sisters worked at a Fred Harvey restaurant in the 1960s, one of the five Tollway Oases constructed up over the pavement of the Illinois Tollway in the Chicago area. My mother and I went to eat there a few times, sitting up over the toll road, having a nice meal and seeing my aunt at work. Existing at least in my memory, there was a Fred Harvey over-the-highway restaurant in Oklahoma, too, but I might have dreamed up that one. My parents had put in a decade of traveling together before I was born, and Fred Harvey must have come up in their recollections that they told me. I seemed to grow up hear...