Every now and then this department ventures into a discussion of some phase of the hotel business because (a) he is a hotel child and has lived in nothing but shebangs, el dumpos, and hogans of one degree of stateliness or another for the past quarter century; (b) because almost everyone likes to read about hotels and restaurants; and (c) it is probably the most fascinating single business in the world from the inside, and hotel men probably know more about human beings by the time they are junior receptionists than the most learned psychologists in Vienna when they are at the top of the professoring business. Everything happens in hotels, and now and then a play- wright or a novelist who recognizes them as an unrestricted hunting ground and one with no season makes a fortune out of his discovery.
There isn't, however, much that one can write about hotels that makes the hotelmen's associations happy unless it is unmitigated goose-grease and undiscriminating flattery. An individual hotel owner or manager can abide reading that his own premises is the quintessence of lux, is patronized solely by the old nobility, and that its restaurants make Voisin in Paris look like a hamburger joint. But remark that anyone else's hotel is comparable to this degree of elegance, and he is sore as a leading lady whose name has been spelled wrong in the reviews of her opening. A few months ago we remarked that we were, as we now are, in favor of mandatory jail sentences by Federal statute for hotel managers who charge from a dollar up, or indeed anything, for cracked ice, and since that time this department has spent most of its time in foxholes avoiding angry missionaries from the hotelmen's associations who want to sell him on the proposition that charging for ice, a preposterous and tactless larceny on the face of it, is practically something to be listed as an improvement in the service.
Pish and nonsense. Hotels have gotten away with so much murder during the past few years of easy money and immigration to cities that in many cases they have come to regard the guest as a boob or zany, who is no better than a victim type and fit only for insult and pillage. The time may be at hand when they will think differently. Certainly any reasonable intelligence hopes so.
Probably the trouble with all too many hotels is that they are managed and staffed by young men. It should be perfectly obvious that no man is fit for an executive position in any hotel, let alone one which requires his coming in actual contact with the guests, until he is fifty. By that time he has possibly acquired sense and probably manners. It may have been a crazy baboon with a credit manager's intelligence or it may have been a recent graduate from a college of hotel management, but it was certainly no hotelman of mature judgment or wide experience who dreamed up such an insult to his guests as charging them for ice. It is conceivable that some hotels, crazed beyond the ordinary with rapacity, would like to charge extra for the running water and run a separate account for the use of the carpets and mirrors, but these aren't generally considered reasonable by the standard American hotel code of ethics, although they may be at any time.
The art of running a hotel has almost disappeared in the United States, and it is because hotel owners, knowing that no outrage against decency is beyond the capacity of an ambitious young man anxious to get ahead, turned their properties and especially their front desks over to the juveniles. These shiftless, undressed, and uncourtly little juniors, to whom a French menu is a mystery and who do not even own, let alone wear, proper morning clothes, have taken over responsible positions once held by experts and veterans in whose generation of manners and graciousness no hôtelier could dream of a manager's job at a Railroad Street flophouse until he had served behind stairs for at least forty years in the more distinguished hotels of France, Switzerland, and Italy. When he could speak six languages flawlessly, could identify a hundred different Rhine wines by reference only to the aroma of the cork, and knew every traveling person of consequence in the United States and England by sight and that instanter, he was entrusted with a probationary job as a night assistant receptionist. Nowadays the graduate of a school of hotel management considers himself a failure if he isn't resident managing director the week he has learned that claret and Burgundy aren't the same wine. The manager of one of New York's stateliest hotels, while he may be an excellent purchasing agent or even a personnel manager, is still in his early thirties, and it is the opinion of most of the residents in his august hostelry that he should be put away out of sight for another twenty-five years.
The great hotels of New York were run by courtly, mature men of the world like Simeon Ford and Albert Keller, but about the only running that can be expected of a generation of doubtless wellmeaning, but still half-baked, college children is into the ground.
It must be reported that when it is of a mind to entertain for promotional purposes or any other, the New York Central Railroad can put its best foot forward, or perhaps it should be its best brake shoe, with a graceful and generous gesture with the best of them. The most recent occasion for the Central's keeping open house was the inaugural of its new Henry Dreyfuss-styled twin units of the “Twentieth Century Limited” which will have been in regular overnight operation on the New York-Chicago run long before this typeset greets the eye of subscribers to GOURMET. It did it with vintage wine, mammoth steaks, and gold traveling clocks for souvenirs quite in the Diamond Jim Brady manner, and ran its guests up to Poughkeepsie and back with dinner en route beside a lyric Hudson River on a translucent autumn evening.
This department takes exception to several things in the conduct of the “Century,” but the most important one is that it makes its run on far too brief a schedule. The train isn't run for the pleasure of tourists or railroad fans or any clientele except a solid, gilt-edged group of hurried businessmen from Wall Street and the Loop, but this department knows from countless rides aboard it and conversation with many “Century” regulars that there are a lot of them who would just as soon have a couple of hours longer amidst its luxuries and conveniences. A four o'clock starting hour at the New York end would inconvenience nobody and give passengers on all but the shortest light days of the year the pleasure of a daylight ride up the Hudson.
In point of actual fact, the modern décor, the telephone service, the streamlining, and the complexities of plumbing on the “Century” are assets quite secondary to its fame as a beautifully conducted train which for forty-six years has carried the most continuously distinguished passenger list in the world. Its proprietors know pretty well that its greatest asset as a show window de luxe for the rail- road's over-all service is the enormous good will which it has been building up ever since the first run back in 1904 when John “Bet-You-a-Million” Gates prophesied at the New York end of the run that it would eventually make Chicago a suburb of Manhattan, and at the other end forecast that New York would eventually be a handy faubourg of Chicago.
The initial run of the new equipment on a westbound trip, in which your reporter happened to participate as a paying passenger, also had all the glamour and swank of an abbreviated ocean crossing aboard a crack luxury liner: expensive cut flowers, mounds of Louis Vuitton luggage, film celebrities, the speed guns of news photographers, and big names by the hampers. Life magazine was represented by a complete photographic and reportorial crew; there was a monsoon of dry Martinis in both lounge cars before dinner; and celebrity collectors were gratified by the presence of Harold Ross of the New Yorker, en route to California to go fishing with Dave Chasen, of Clay Morgan en route to Sun Valley, and of President Gustav Metzman of the Central itself, en route simply to Chicago where his own business car was waiting to take him back to New York. By his own ruling, not even the president of the Central can have his private varnish attached to the “Century.”
In actual fact, the new “Century” equipment is almost indistinguishable from the old, which will now be relegated to the “Commodore Vanderbilt” and “Southwestern Limited,” the next trains in rank on the railroad. There are a few new tricks of plumbing and lighting and some changes in seating in the dining car which, when put into actual operation, were no improvement at all, but everyone, including Mr. Dreyfuss and the operating department, are happy as kids with firecrackers about the fluorescent lighting, the intercard and train-to-shore telephones, and new compartmentation of the sleeping cars.
The “Century” is so glittering in its appointments and so opulent with chic that it was with something of relief from the bon ton that your correspondent at Chicago climbed aboard the Burlington's “Exposition Flyer” and discovered in its consist an old-time brass-railed observation car of venerable age and well-worn armchairs. We have always been at heart a cinder-snapper, which is the railroader's name for a passenger who likes to ride the open platform cars, sticks his head out of nonair-conditioned windows, and generally gets soot in his hair.
Although the Nevada tourist season for 1948 will be a thing of the past and the high passes of the Sierras blocked with snow for the winter by the time this achieves print, readers of GOURMET may post it among their futures for next summer that during its brief season Nevada is possessed of wonderments which have no peer even in Colorado, long a Mecca of vacationists. Because of its brief summer, vast desert distances, and general absence of resort attractions save at Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, Nevada has not, until very recently, been a must in the schedules of well-to-do tourists, and Nevadans themselves take small profit and less pleasure out of the overexploited divorce trade. Except in the brassier spots of Reno, it isn't even visible.
But discerning folk have lately been discovering Nevada's fantastic mountains and deserts, its superlative system of highways, and the wistful souvenirs of yesterday to be encountered in Virginia City and its other ghost towns which only yesterday were roaring metropolises. During the past summer there were more pilgrims than ever before who rode the legendary Virginia and Truckee Railroad, a pastoral pike whose operations haven't discernibly changed since the seventies, discovered the antique shops of Virginia City's fabulous C Street, and dined in the Sky Room of Reno's new and glittering Mapes Hotel.
Except perhaps for Colorado's Central City and the inaccessible Leadville, Virginia City is, of course, the most romantic ghost town in the continent and, while its fabled Comstock Lode has long since ceased mining operations on any important scale, it has uncovered a minor but still paying bonanza in the tourist trade. On week ends especially, its saloons and roulette parlors are populated with paying customers who have tooled up the Geiger Grade from Steamboat Springs to goggle at the chandeliers in the Crystal Saloon, have a whirl of the wheel at the table where once millions were lost and won in the Washoe Club, and buy Victorian cruet sets and coal oil lamps from Florence Edwards' antique shop in the Silver Dollar Hotel.
The opening, too, of the Bonanza Inn, previously reported by this department, in a stately old Virginia City mansion by Ginny and Halvor Smedsrud has been a tremendous drawing card, and Nevadans and trippers alike have been enchanted to find frogs' legs provençale, snails bourguignonne, and other elements of classic French cuisine high in the ghost-haunted slopes of Mount Davidson. The premises are as informal as can be imagined with guests drinking with the management, wandering in and out of the kitchen, helping to maintain fires in the restaurant's open fireplaces, while Mrs. Smedsrud prepares dinner with a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other. When she writes the inevitable cookbook, she says it will be entitled: Cooking with Bourbon. The Bonanza's drinks confected by Douglas Moore, Yale '41, are quite in keeping with the formidable legend of Virginia's once famed International Hotel and Sazarac Saloon.
Make no mistake about it: Nevada, whether you prefer the dusty glories of the Comstock with their inescapable overtones of the golden past, or the whoopla of the Last Frontier down at Las Vegas, is increasingly on the pleasure map of the United States. But its principal charm is that it hasn't yet been overexploited, that it is possible to drive for an hour at a time on its incomparable desert highways without passing another car, and that its resorts are just as robust and uninhibited as they were when the bonanza kings were rolling over the Virginia and Truckee in their private Silver Palace cars and when Hank Monk was frightening the whiskers off Uncle Horace Greeley by skirting the breathless abysses of the King's Canyon Grade with his six horses at a dead gallop.