Legends of the Old West - FRONTLINE WOMEN Ep. 1 | “From Harvey Girls to the Navajo Ordnance Depot”

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Documentary filmmaker Katrina Parks brings a two-part miniseries to Legends of the Old West in honor of Women’s History Month. In episode one, Katrina traces the history of the Harvey Girls, who helped revolutionize the restaurant industry, from the Old West through World War II. She also covers stories of women who worked at the Navajo Ordnance Depot in the American Southwest. Visit Assertion Films at www.assertionfilms.com and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. This March on Legends of the Old West, in honor of Women's History Month, will look at some of the women who transformed the nation through their hard work and endurance. Fred Harvey had a vision to tame the wild, wild west. These girls that he would hire were a cut above the rest. Seldom in the limelight, but working on the frontlines day and night, these women paved the way for generations of women to come. This is episode one of a two-episode miniseries called Frontline Women,

and I'm the host, documentary filmmaker Katrina Parks. In this episode, I'll be interviewing acclaimed authors and historians Stephen Freed and John Westerlund about how women won battles. Whenever possible, you'll hear from the women themselves who were interviewed for my documentary film, The Harvey Girls Opportunity Bound. Generally speaking, women won battles not with firearms, but through building coalitions, rising above demeaning treatment, and ultimately advocating for equality. From the Harvey girls starting in the 1880s, to the women at the Navajo Ordinance Depot during World War II, these women faced serious obstacles.

But they were resilient, and most of them stuck with the path they had chosen. Here's Stephen Freed, author of the New York Times bestseller, Appetite for America. After the Civil War, America had like taken the original America, the original East of America, and just blown it up. Everybody was mad at each other. Everybody hated each other. They just all had almost killed each other. So a lot of our ideas about America were challenged. And so the West is the thing that everybody fell in love with after they were not sure they were in love anymore. With the theme of frontline women, keep in mind that women being on the frontline in thevey system was a multi-tiered thing it didn't start out that way railroads weren't allowed to serve food on trains

west of chicago they agreed that west of chicago they wouldn't serve on the trains because dining cars were too heavy and so they made the train trips too expensive so the tradition of having eating houses there had always been some eating houses in train stations. In the West, it became more important. And most of them were owned by local people. And most of them sucked because the people were usually going to come through one time. You're going to serve them bad food. They were going to go to wherever they're going to go. And if they're going to be mad at you, so what? So the Harvey system was based on the idea that if you had these local eating houses all run by the same company,

and so they all felt they had to be good, that it would be different. The company drastically improved the quality of food offered to travelers at their eating houses. They employed revolutionary concepts from growing their own produce to sourcing the best meat and using refrigerated train cars to transport it, all the while standardizing and tracking everything. Their next move was to regiment their waitstaff. Basically, at the very beginning of Fred Harvey in the 1870s, you had a few small places in Kansas. And then they, coming into the 1880s, they came into New Mexico. So the places in Kansas had a mix of men and women. I mean, we can see like from the census rolls who it was, but it wasn't a big deal yet.

The company was still pretty small. But what happened was two things in the 1880s. One was the company expanded greatly. So it went from having two places in Kansas and one in Colorado to having a dozen in New Mexico. So they had many more people they had to take care of. One. to having a dozen in New Mexico.

So they had many more people they had to take care of, one. Two, there were racial tensions in New Mexico that they had not experienced in Kansas. So African-American male waiters, which is what was traditional in New Mexico, always felt under siege, you know, because there were a lot of former Confederate soldiers who were now cowboys. So after a racial incident in Raton,

the company decided that they would hire centrally white women from the Midwest and they would train them and they would send them to different places. The company placed ads in newspapers recruiting respectable young women inexperienced or experienced as waitresses. Early on, Alice Steele was the executive in charge of hiring Harvey girls in Kansas City, and she did not take kindly to any applicants who arrived chewing gum or wearing makeup.

Harvey girl Eva Fuqua shared her memories at the Boleyn Harvey House Museum. And I was 17 years old and had never been over 50 miles away from home as I remember. I got a ride with a girlfriend that lived across the street. Her aunt took me to Kansas City because there was no jobs where I lived. That's where I got my job with Fred Harvey. And I never did get to go back home. That's where I got my job with Fred Harvey. And I never did get to go back home.

And they put me on the next train and sent me to Vaughn, New Mexico. It was the smartest thing, I think, that I could have done for that time. The railroad men showed a lot of respect to us, and most Tarleton girls married railroad men, and I did too. They were supposed to be single women. That was the whole point. They signed a contract saying they would stay single. So to have these women, and then of course they had to be always replaced because they weren't allowed to marry. They weren't allowed to have kids. So as soon as the things that happened in people's lives happened, there had to be more women. So this became very popular and women would apply to do this. And we know that by the 1890s, the middle 1890s, they were doing that in big

ways. There were Harvey locations in like 80 different cities. In terms of an overall, like a feminist move, you can't think of one thing that made a bigger deal so quickly because, of course, everything else in the West happened town by town. There were no chains of anything in the 1800s in order for something to happen in a chain at the same time. The Fred Harvey Company and the railroads were the only thing that crossed state borders like that. The Harvey girls were highly regimented like an army in order to keep up with the trains and provide a fine dining experience. Incredibly high standards governed

every aspect of the job, from their uniforms to the way they served food and interacted with customers. Harvey girls Ruby McCood and Irene Armstrong recalled this in detail. When the trains came in, the people on the trains had 30 minutes to get off the train, walk into La Posada, order their meals, eat it, and walk back. And so of course the people in the kitchen and the people on the trains kept in touch with each other and they knew ahead of time if the trains were going to be late, they were going to be crowded. Everything had to be precise.

There was a little system they taught. If you wanted coffee, you would turn the cup up. If you wanted hot tea, you'd turn the cup up if you wanted hot tea you turn the cup down if you had milk you turned the handle of the cup certain way if you wanted cocoa you turned it another way and the drink girl come along she pretty well knew what what was served the fact that it was young, single women also added to the mystique of the restaurant. Whoever you met in that restaurant, besides the maitre d', was gonna be one of these wonderful, well-trained, smart, well-dressed, exceptional frontier women.

The Harvey girl uniform was intended to counter the prevalent stereotype that working women and waitresses in particular were promiscuous. Harvey girls Rosine Geary and Zeta Sharon reflected on this. We were dressed like we were nuns. Our whole body was covered. There was nothing but our faces and our hands that showed. And those skirts on those uniforms, they were Indian head linen and they were heavy and they had to be starched stiff and they were awful to iron. A long black dress with a white apron and a small black bow at the neck was a typical Harvey girl uniform. A white dress with a black bow tie at the neck and uniforms incorporating

Southwestern themes were also company standards. Harvey girls typically rejected describing themselves as waitresses because the training and standards were so beyond what one would expect. Harvey girl Dorothy Boe explained this. I was a Harvey girl for the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Well, the first thing that really got to me was when they made you take six weeks of training to learn the French service, Russian service, English service, and be able to make a customer feel that they're very, very special. And that was his motto, was to feed the people right. And that's what turned me on.

I didn't feel like that I was just a waitress. I felt like more of an ambassador for Fred Harvey. One benefit of working for Fred Harvey was the ability to transfer to another restaurant at the end of a contract. Locations like the Grand Canyon were coveted because of the natural beauty and the clientele. Harvey girl Ruth Williams shared her memories. I went to Grand Canyon, to El Tuvar, and the maitre d', she was a woman, very, very strict. You had to do everything just right, and if she found a crumb on a woman, very, very strict. You had to do everything just right.

And if she found a crumb on a chair, she let you know about it very quickly. I never got tired of sitting on the rim of the canyon watching the colors. El Tovar was built at the Grand Canyon. It opened in 1905. And that's when people started having this essential American

experience, which I do think is so much part of the Fred Harvey story. There's nothing like the Grand Canyon becoming a place you can get to by train and you can go and stay at a four-star hotel right at the lip of it and be taken care of by Harvey girls. What really pushed it over was in the teens from 1914 to 1917 when America joined the war, all the people who used to go to all these exotic places in the world, they would never think of traveling in America. We live in America. Why would we go?

Suddenly realized the American West, they referred to it as our Orient. And we need to experience the American West. And so people poured into the West. So the Harvey restaurants were doing great. People were on the trains. There were starting to be some troop transport, but not that much because American troops didn't get involved in World War I until 1917. So in 1917, the U.S. government nationalized the railroads. And they basically said, okay, for the rest of the war, we're going to have one set of tracks between each place,

the best set of tracks that will allow people to send the most troops fastest and the most munitions fastest, and we're not going to compete on food. We're going to have one company that's going to run all the food for the entire railroad system for the country, and that's going to be Fred Harvey. The U.S. involvement in World War I was limited, And that's going to be Fred Harvey. The U.S. involvement in World War I was limited, but it provided a framework for the much greater mobilization of the railroads that would take place over a quarter century later. Here's a film called Loaded for War, made by the Santa Fe Railroad. Long before Pearl Harbor, the American railroads, ever conscious of the gathering clouds of conflict, worked out a plan of unified and immediate action should this nation be forced to accept the challenge of aggression. To their everlasting credit, this careful planning

was not to be in vain, for suddenly the infamous blow was struck. And overnight, engines of peace and progress were transformed into engines of war in a conflict unparalleled in the annals of human history. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch. And organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere.

They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system. So wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify has allowed us to share something tangible with the podcast community we've built here, selling our beanies, sweatshirts, and mugs to fans of our shows without taking up too much time from all the other work we do to bring you even more great content. And it's not just us. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Shopify is also the global

force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per Thank you. to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash realm. World War II was challenging because it was a two-front war, so the constant flow of trains across the United States in both directions provided endless work for the Harvey Girls. Harvey Girl Nina Strong was at work at the Castaneda Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico when Pearl Harbor happened. She gave me a tour along with guide Kathy Hendrickson. Over by that window, the last window, there was a coffee bar there. It was a hard time, it really was, because everything became ultra fast. You see, we were ready for Christmas break when Pearl Harbor happened.

I was asleep. Kay, Aunt Josie woke me up to tell me about the bombing. Everyone was in the dining room. Kitchen crew was all there, I mean, because it was almost panic. Of course it settled and everybody went ahead with their job, but right at the beginning it was pretty tense around it. And it changed everything. Not so much my duty or anything at the Cascade, but it changed everything at school because boys all started enlisting almost immediately. Thousands upon thousands of hardened, well-trained, superbly equipped fighting men to profile quickly aboard comfortable Pullman cars, their ultimate destination, a closely guarded military secret. Not a second was lost from caboose to head end,

get them rolling. And within a matter of hours from receipt of the initial order, hundreds of trains loaded with the world's finest soldiers, sailors, and Marines... If the troop trains were in, every table would be full around the counter and all. You know, every bit of space was used. I mean, the moment that they sat down, the food was ready out on the table very quickly. Would the American railroads meet the strain of wartime traffic

without delay or confusion? The Harvey Company had downsized during the Great Depression and now had to hire thousands of women. The ideal of a Harvey Girl as a white single woman from the East vanished as the company actively recruited former Harvey Girls who had married locals and had families and race barriers fell that had kept non-white women out of the workforce. Harvey Girl Luz Delgadillo Moore spoke to me with pride about her role as part of the home front of the workforce. Harvey girl Luz Delgadillo Moore spoke to me with pride about her role as part of the home front of the war effort in an interview

at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona. My name is Luz Maria Delgadillo Valadez Moore. All those names. And I was a Harvey girl during the war. I'm not a Harvey girl from the East. I wasn't a Harvey girl from the Midwest, the farms. I was a Harvey girl during the war. I'm not a Harvey girl from the East, wasn't a Harvey girl from the Midwest, the farms. I was a Harvey girl from the Southwest. And it was very difficult growing up because we had these barriers, you know, the story when I got to Santa Fe, New Mexico,

they ran out of the white, tall blondes, the Harvey house type of Harvey girl. And they met the first Indian and the first Hispanic girl. Well, they hired them. They came to Winslow, and I understand here in Winslow there was a Harvey girl, Hispanic, and a railroad man came to the counter here at the La Posada Harvey House, and he refused to be served by the Hispanic woman and the manager said no you go she stays well they can't open door for me and I had went to my father and I said Papa we

have to do something this war have to do something Papa he said no no my daughters don't have to work. And I begged and pleaded. Por favor, papá, déjeme trabajar. Hay muchos soldados que necesitan de comer. He finally said yes. We served hundreds and hundreds of cups of coffee because they didn't have a lot of time to eat. Baker made huge pies, and we would serve one-fourth of the pie. And of course, that delicious coffee, who could not pass that up?

The war was a pressure cooker for romance. Handsome young men and women in uniform exchanged information eager to connect. The men not knowing if they would come back and eager for a dream to hold on to. Harvey girls across the board, including Hilda Velarde Salas in Albuquerque, enjoyed the attention while still working incredibly hard. Whoever did the arrangements for the troops to stop in Albuquerque, they would announce to us the whole hotel was closed, and every room besides the hotel rooms was set up for the soldiers.

There was thousands of them. The troop trains, they would arrive and we had tables ready, the cooks had all the food, and we would just bring the food, and they were the nicest guys I've ever met. They were very generous. Once they ate, one person, we had different tables to serve, and one person would get a plate and pass it around, and they were generous with their tips. They would leave $20, they would leave, they didn't have no place to spend their money, so and we had a lot of fun with them. We flirted with them. The amazing volume of work,

the amazing number of people being fed, every experience repeated so many times. It's not like, oh, I met this one handsome guy and he sent me a letter. It's like, I met one handsome guy at one o'clock, he sent me letters. I met another one at three o'clock, he sent me letters. You know, at midnight, I was still serving people and then more handsome guys coming through.

So it's just an amazing American experience. Not every troop train could stop for a sit-down meal, and so the company branched into making sandwiches to feed the soldiers aboard the trains. For some Harvey girls, this was the bulk of their work. And for others like Catherine Augustine from Laguna Pueblo, it was the gateway to a job in the coffee shop. I was a Harvey girl at El Navajo in Gallup, New Mexico. A girl from Acoma and I were making these sandwiches for the troop trains.

and I were making these sandwiches for the troop trains. So the next year I went back and I actually got a job in the coffee shop. They had the white starched long sleeve blouses and they had the white skirt starched. They wore white shoes, the apron white white. And then they had a little black bow, and they had their number on it in silver, and my mother's number was four. Even the pressures of wartime didn't diminish the importance of an immaculate uniform to the Harvey Girls. Here's Harvey Girl Virginia Tayes-Wayne speaking about the enormous activity in

Gallup, New Mexico during the war years. I started making beds and then the second morning the manager he said would you like to work in the kitchen? I said sure. So I started making salads and then one of the girls didn't show up and we were short so he put me out front and that's where I started my career working as a Harvey girl. I worked a lot of troop trains. They came one right after another and we had to have the tables all set when they came in. When we were a Harvey girl, we had recognition from a lot of people because all those troop trains, you know, I got a lot of mail from them. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it? It's the best deal,

the highest cash back, the most savings on your shopping. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. To understand more about civilian women workers in World War II, I spoke to historian John Westerlund, author of Arizona's Wartown. It's interesting. In World War II, there were about over 19 million women at work. This was the huge increase in married women. Before World War II, most of the women working were single. But then World War II, we had to have workers.

One focus of John's research is the Navajo Ordnance Depot in Flagstaff, Arizona, which employed 2,200 civilian workers during the war, the majority of whom were women. This was one of 45 ordinance depots. Now, the word ordinance is a military word for the weapons and the munitions of war. And at this ordinance depot, the purpose of the depot was to store munitions for the war in the Pacific. Then when they were needed, the munitions would be shipped from Navajo Ordnance Depot to either Los Angeles or San Francisco. What's unique in Flagstaff is the fact that so many Native American women were here, and that was just really key to make this place operate. The name was originally Flagstaff Ordnance Depot, but when they realized that the Navajos would be so critical

in getting the depot built and then staying here, that they changed the name from Flagstaff Ordinance Depot to Navajo Ordinance Depot. The project manager out here, a man named Captain Myrick, knew that labor would be at a premium. He knew that Flagstaff could not supply anywhere close to the 8,000 construction workers that were needed. So Captain Myrick said we've got to go out on the Indian reservations and we've got to recruit Navajos and Hopis. Well they approached the Navajo and Hopi leaders and said listen, okay now what if we built an Indian village on the army base? And both the Navajo and the Hopi leaders they thought that over for a few seconds. said that would be wonderful so for the first time in American history a

large group of Native Americans moved on to a US Army base gladly during the war there would be probably around 3,500 Navajo and Hopi families that lived in something called Indian Village. So the women came along to help with the children, but they really weren't considered for employment at that time. When all the construction workers left in 1943, they had to get women out there for the permanent force. You can see women adjusting the fin lock nut on 500-pound bombs. On the assembly line, they did work with munitions. All of the information that had to be stenciled onto the green artillery shells

was done by Navajo and Hopi women, also Anglo women. And they would take fuses down, and they would drop test the fuse to see if it would explode or not. They were involved in anything that had to do with the removal of powder from shells so that gunpowder could be saved and used in other shells. One of the most dangerous was when explosives were damaged and they were no longer useful. If they could be repaired, obviously they would repair them. But some they would take out. They were so dangerous, they would take them out to what was called the open burn area and explode the explosives, the shells.

They actually took some chemical weapons. There were chemical weapons that were stored out there, and they would be exploded. But for others that weren't that bad, let's say an artillery shell, the TNT was so valuable inside the shell that it was salvaged. So you would have women at the depot who would dig out, probably with some type of wooden tool, the explosives from the shell. And that was a huge, a very, very dangerous task. There were no records of explosions.

1.2 tons of ammunition went in and out of the depot, and in order to attract more women to the labor pool, which was constantly understaffed, the depot developed a military-like uniform that instilled pride in the women who joined its ranks. Apparently what they did to attract women out there was this kind of a jury-rigged uniform for female civilian employees to say, listen, I'm part of the war effort. And of course, this was a huge symbol of pride. It wasn't just a professional appearance that motivated women. During the war, their output

at work compared favorably and frequently better than the men they had replaced. While the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor argued for an equal pay rate between men and women established on the basis of occupation, not on sex, women's wages never achieved that. Companies made dubious claims. They had to make facility changes, employ more supervisors. Women were subject to accidents and absenteeism, and above all, that paying women equally threatened the role of men as providers. equally threaten the role of men as providers. The men of America are carrying on our fight for freedom.

And back of them is another army, a woman's army. Women from every walk of life, of every race, creed, and color. Next time on Legends of the Old West, we'll hear about some of the 350,000 women in the military during World War II. From wax to nurses, we'll hear about women who the 350,000 women in the military during World War II. From wax to nurses, we'll hear about women who trained in the West, faced bitter discrimination, and risked their lives to save American soldiers, even when they didn't receive equal treatment. That's this week on Legends of the Old West. Thank you for listening to the miniseries Frontline Women. These episodes are executive produced by Black Beryl Media and Assertion Films. Theme song by Joanne Sanchez and music by Peter

Wingard and James Sale. Sound mixing by Thaddeus Homan. I'm host, writer and producer Katrina Parks. Find us on our websites, blackberylmediaand and assertionfilms.com. The podcast Frontline Women is made possible with generous support from Arizona Humanities.