There was a legend, back in the eighties when the Santa Fe Railroad was forging westward through Kansas and Colorado, a legend quite naturally not discouraged by the railroad itself, to the effect that the great Fred Harvey, legendary restaurateur of the Southwest, once discharged an eating-house manager for not showing a sufficient monthly operating deficit in his accounts. Nothing was then too good for the patrons, as yet uneducated in the refinements of eating, of the restaurants which Harvey, with pioneer determination, was setting up along the Santa Fe's main line, and if new premises didn't show a loss to begin with, he felt he wasn't getting full promotional value out of the fine food, English cutlery, an polite dining-room manners which he was bringing, for the first time, into a new country.
Whatever the internal financial economy of the dining cars and restaurants along the way as of the present generation may be, it is a matter between the railroad and Mr. Byron Harvey.
Certainly it is difficult to imagine how such superbly provisioned and adroitly administered de luxe commissaries on wheels can show much profit, but the promotional value to the Harvey System and the Santa Fe Railroad is just as great in 1948 as it was when Fre Harvey brought the first table linen to Dodge City and started making the cow hands put on jackets before they could sit down in his dining rooms.
This department had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, of making the initial run of the now daily “Super Chief” on the thirty-nine-and-a-half-hour super luxury haul between Chicago and Los Angeles, and the chances are that even the original Fred Harvey would be amazed, even gratified, at the way his legend is maintained after more than half a century as part of the saga of Western Americana.
It used to be remarked in worldly circles that, in the spacious days of trans Atlantic travel on the superb liners whose names are now history—the “Olympic,” “Berengaria,” “Rotterdam,” and “Empress of Britain”—a week spent crossing the ocean in that generation of wealth and manners was more of an education than a year at the best university. For the perceptive intelligence there was available between the North River and Southampton or Cherbourg more instruction in the way of the world, in eating, wines, clothes, languages, goo manners, and generally cultivated deportment than could be absorbed through any other medium in a far greater term of time.
That, of course, was in a time when Europe existed and there was an England.Perhaps today the closest equivalent to this liberal instruction is available in railroad travel on the transcontinental main lines of the United States an Canada, with possible extension courses in Mexico, and of the available sources of worldly savoir-faire none is more urbane than the Santa Fe. A train trip from coast to coast aboard, say, the “Twentieth Century Limited” and the “Super Chief” is a liberal education, not only in history and geography, but in the uses of sophisticated maturity. The only defect lies in its brevity.
There is an article in the American credo which nominates as an article of faith that “real railroading” begins only west of Chicago, and, while there are some notable exceptions to this spacious generality, there is enough truth in it to make it valid and worth consideration. The aforementioned “Century” on the New York-Chicago run is certainly an exception. So is the conduct of many of the diners of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and so are some of the fine new trains to Florida and the Deep South of the Seaboard Railway. But, by and large, railroading in the grand manner and spacious tradition begins on the far side of the Mississippi, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe is, to the minds of thousands and thousands of experienced travelers, just about its foremost practitioner.
Not that the Santa Fe is anything so simple, if the word may be used to describe the incredible complexity of modern railroad operations, as a mere steel via structure between Chicago and the Far West, maintaining over its economy a system of freight and passenger conveyances. It is an empire in some places, as in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, hundreds of miles wide, whose main line alone is 2,250 miles long and whose branches, contributaries, and contingent resources constitute many other thousands of miles of rails. The empire within these limits lives or dies by the rail-road; its wheat, cattle, petroleum, an manufactories exist or don't exist by virtue of the Santa Fe, but that is not the concern of this dispatch.
Readers of GOURMET are primarily interested in the Santa Fe as a super de luxe agency for achieving the great American Southwest with a maximum of assurance and comfort and a minimum of delay,and in this capacity it functions as no other railroad has ever functioned in all the record of the flanged wheel upon the steel rail. And if the Santa Fe is the greatest purveyor of retail luxury, circumstance, and dispatch of overland travel in the region it serves, then the “Super Chief” and, only to a slightly lesser degree, the “Chief” are the most glittering and world-famous showcases for its costly merchandise. Neither Van Cleef and Arpels nor Cartier is more knowing in the display of its stock in trade.
The “Super Chief” is, and always has been in the decade of its widely heralded existence, a sort of combination Plaza, Ritz-Carlton, and San Francisco Palace of railroad trains, at once expensive, conservative, opulent, and dashing. Its overtones are those of morning-coated maîtres d'hôtel, sports clothes from Bullock's-Wilshire, French governesses with well-mannered, nonscreaming issue in their charge, and mounds of luggage from hardly anybody but Mark Cross and Louis Vuitton. Orchids are a requirement when boarding the “Super Chief” in Chicago, and station wagons with liveried attendants are essential to descending from its drawing rooms at Pasadena, and the travelers who appear in its lounges and restaurant cars are the ones you came out with on the “Century,” who lunched at the door tables at the Pump Room on the way through Chicago, and who will go directly to the Town House on their arrival in Los Angeles.
Contrary to a widely accepted legend, not every passenger on either the “Chief” or “Super Chief” is Jack Warner or Joan Crawford, and if there are film folk aboard, they are on their best behavior and no Hollywood manners. The Santa Fe has some regard for the appearance and conduct of its trains. There are, however, very apt to be fashion designers and style scouts in numbers, awash with everything which was at the Colony last week and will be on view at Mike Romanoff's tomorrow noon.
The Harvey service in the diners, which are part of the all-new equipment of the daily “Super Chief,” comprises the pick of available stewards an waiters and a cuisine which is, quite rightly, the wonder and glory of all American railroading. Possibly, back in the seventies and eighties when diner menus were positively upholstered with antelope steak, canvasback, and prairie hen, bills of fare were more comprehensive, but as it is they are enough to bug the eyes of travelers accustomed to the indifferent selections available aboar anything but the most exceptional extrafare runs in the East. The Santa Fe maintains its own trout farms in Colorado, the Harvey System buys the pick of the heavy beef for its cars and hotels in the markets at Denver and Kansas City, and such California matters as fresh figs in season, strawberries out of season, grapefruit at all seasons, artichokes, asparagus, and avocados are simply taken for granted and tossed in along with more substantial affairs as a matter of course. The wine list on all Santa Fe trains makes a feature, quite understandably, of California wines, an on both the eastbound “Chief” an “Super Chief” there are available limite quantities of Sierra cheese, another California product famous with cheese fanciers the world over, but only infrequently obtainable elsewhere.
Probably there is no circumstance in which breakfast, that all too much neglected American meal, is more agreeable than aboard a train, and on any train, such as the Santa Fe's flagships, which traverses a mountain terrain with spectacular views at every turn of the right of way, it can be as important as dinner, both esthetically and practically. Breakfast in the West is better anyway, where the preposterous proposition that a man can live until luncheon on coffee and Melba toast has never made any headway at all, and most railroad menus feature, as God intended they should, steak, liver, chops, and a variety of fish in addition to the conventional arrangement of eggs and pig products. Late breakfast can be had aboard the westbound “Super Chief,” as the train makes the grade into the Raton Pass, and passing above Uncle Dick Wootan's historic ranch a few miles southwest of Trinida is as good a place in the world as this department knows to have a rare break-fast steak flanked by an ample stack of little thin hot cakes assisted by a Niagara of good, black Harvey coffee.
In passing, it would seem worth the mention that, although you may imagine that every convenience available to the contriving of the Pullman Standar Steel Car Company has already been incorporated in the compartment cars of your recent experience, the geniuses of that firm have now evolved a new an spatterproof washstand and an adjustable, individual station-selection radio in every room in the train. In admiring any sort of mechanical music box, this department is, perhaps, taking leave of what good sense it may have possesse in the past, but this one seems foolproof in that it is wholly governed by the preferences of the individual passenger both as to volume and subject matter. The gadget is even so cunningly devised that it is automatically cut out when the corridor door is opened so as not to be offensive to the neighbors, a device which somehow strikes us as a milestone in the developments of wireless and melodeon technique.
Because of the multiple enchantments of the regions adjacent to the Santa Fe's high iron as well as the universally admired practices of its still romantic function as a railroad, this department coul continue almost indefinitely in a Santa-Fe-I-Love-You vein, but perhaps this chronicle of the mobile wonderments it embraces will suffice. Many years before Cyrus Halliday ever dreamed of a rail-road out of Kansas into the Southwest over what, before it became the Santa Fe Trail, was universally known as the Mexican Trace, and before the railroa wars secured for the Santa Fe the crossing into New Mexico over the Raton, William Hazlitt wrote: “One of the pleasantest things in life is to go on a journey.” The only thing that diminishes the delight of a journey over the Santa Fe is that, no matter how far you may go over its rails, the time so occupied is invariably too brief.
If it is recalled on the credit side of the dramatic ledger for very little else, the theater season of 1947-48 will be remembered as the pleasant time when things Victorian and Edwardian had an edge over any and all other settings for period-design plays and when New York was treated to such a profusion of vintage motorcars, Prince Albert coats, chatelaine watches, and tufte white silk upholstered sofas as haven't been confected in an old dog's age.
Entrants in this highly agreeable an atmospheric turn-of-the-century sweep stakes have included The Importance of Being Earnest, John Gielgud's wonderfully successful revival of the fragile manners of Oscar Wilde, a completely photogenic revival of Shaw's Man an Superman with all its 1910 properties intact and provocative, The Winslow Boy, a serious drama concerning a naval scandal in England almost a half century ago, High Button Shoes, which concerns itself with Mack Sennett an the Model T Ford and was confecte by GOURMET's own Stephen Longstreet, and, last but most magnificent, Strange Bedfellows, which is both a sumptuous and hilarious picture of senatorial life on San Francisco's Nob Hill at that ineffable period of history: the decade which preceded the earthquake and fire of 1906.
In these various dramatic devisings the scenic designers have, of course, ha a field day since it is well known that to no generation is any period in history quite so evocative of delight, wonderment, and wistfulness as only yesterday. The playwrights themselves have not been too hard-put to it to call up well remembered emotions and the enchantment of a world where security, peace, and rational human expectations still obtained almost universally. In a word, theater-goers at the moment are pushovers for period-design plays, especially if the term of their remoteness doesn't place their setting out of the reach of first-hand experience or, at the most distance, that of a single generation ago. It is very easy for any imaginative person to place his own knowledge and experience within that of his immediate family.Are Victorianism and Edwardian atmosphere a trend in the theater? Very likely they are. All the signs of previous seasons, Life With Father and I Remember Mama among them, pointed to an inevitable deluge of similar plays or at least plays within an adjacent perio pattern. Now that it has been definitely ascertained that audiences will react with instant recognition and delight to Oldsmobiles, speaking tubes, Inverness cloaks, and references to the McKinley administration and woman's suffrage, it is only reasonable to suppose that these will appear in ever-increasing quantities until a state of audience satiety has been achieved. So far, that state has obviously not even been approximated. Next season should see an even bigger boom in sets representing the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs, automobiling costumes including goggles and dust coats, and impersonations of Theodore Roosevelt. So far as this department is concerned, there can't be too many.
SHIRT-CUFF JOTTINGS: Gene Cavallero's Colony Restaurant is at the moment shy an excellent sommelier in the person of George Stich, who has opene more bottles in those classic premises than anyone likes to think about, but who has now taken over the “new” Salle du Bois Restaurant right around the corner in Sixtieth Street for his very own. …Ted Patrick's Holiday Magazine is scheduling an all-San Francisco issue in July with, almost inevitably, a full-dress piece on the Palace by this department. …Gene Fowler is working on a monumental life of Jimmy Walker for fall publication and is canvassing the mayor's old friends for material.…Last of the inveterate Inverness wearers is ex-Ambassador Joe Davies, who has ha half a dozen stormproof and evening cloaks run up in recent months by MacDonald-Heath, the Manhattan tailors to celebrities.…Customers at Romanoff's in Hollywood needn't be startled when the coat-check girl salutes them by name even if they aren't regulars: she's an importation from Sherman Billingsley's Stork on Fifty-third Street.…New York's Mayor O'Dwyer, happily enough and in contrast to the late LaGuardia, who had dyspepsia and hated food, is a considerable food fancier and dines regularly at the town's best restaurants: the Colony, Soulé's, and Voisin, and is reported by the staffs as knowing what's what very decidedly.…