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BY MICHAEL J. MOONEY

The legendary crooner is about to begin a new residency in Las Vegas—this time without his sister. It’s got him thinking about all the different eras of his life.

Donny osmond had an idea. The fabled crooner was wondering how he could possibly condense all the different eras of his career into one performance. He wanted a way to cover everything from his early days on “The Andy Williams Show” in the ’60s through his rise to intergalactic stardom in the ’70s, his stark fall from public favor in the ’80s, his dramatic return to the top of the pop charts, and his more recent run as a successful contestant on shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Masked Singer.”

Donny decided the answer — the best way to recap the highs and lows of his life in music — would be through a rap.

Yes, Donny Osmond. That Donny Osmond. And yes, rap.

He’s telling me this as we sit together in the den of his palatial home in Provo. He leans forward in his chair, flashing that impossibly charming smile — a smile that has set so many hearts aflame for so many years now. He’s trim as ever, wearing a T-shirt, workout pants and Nike tennis shoes. In front of him is the sleek, polished grand piano used in the original “Donny & Marie” variety show in the second half of the ’70s. Over his shoulder is a striking view of the nearby mountains.

Honestly, when he first tells me he’s planning on rapping for six minutes about his six decades in music — he calls it “Six in Six” — I can’t tell if he’s joking. But then he starts beatboxing, slapping the arm of his chair to add some bass.

Then he starts rapping.

“It started back in Utah, I was 4 years old,” Donny raps. “Started singing with my brothers and the sound was like gold.”

In rhyming couplets, he goes through his rise to stardom with his family, his solo success as a teenager, and his darkest days, like when he starred in “Little Johnny Jones” on Broadway in 1982 — which opened and closed on the same night. He even mentions his appearances on “The Love Boat.” He covers everything through the long-running Las Vegas residency he had with sister, Marie, and his runner-up finish on season one of “The Masked Singer.” He was the peacock.

The rap is actually kind of amazing, in that not-sure-if-it’s-OK-tolaugh sort of way. It is OK to laugh, it turns out. In fact, when he’s done rapping, Donny can’t contain himself anymore and he cracks up at himself, clapping his hands as he giggles.

This rap, he explains, is a song he’ll perform in his new Las Vegas show later this year. It’s a new residency at the newly refurbished Harrah’s on the Strip. And this time, it’s just Donny, no Marie.

The residency at the Flamingo with his sister was a staple in Las Vegas, one of the most popular and profitable shows in the city’s illustrious history. They started in 2008 for what was supposed to be a few weeks — and went on for 11 years. Over that span, they sold north of 9 million tickets and performed more than 1,700 times. Then, for reasons that have never been made public, they decided to end it. Their last show was in November 2019.

This time it’s just his face on that giant marquee, just his name printed on those expensive tickets. He’ll be the one deciding which songs to sing and when, what to say to the fawning or fidgeting audience. And that audience will be there for Donny and Donny alone. Sure, he’ll have producers and designers and backup dancers and an entire live band there on stage with him, but the success of the show will rest entirely upon the shoulders of Donny.

Planning all of this has given the 63-year-old Donny a chance to think back on his 58 years in the entertainment business. He’s met so many people, created so much music — he’s recorded more than 600 songs — and experienced a series of total reinventions. Working on the new show has made him a little introspective, almost philosophical. More than anything, it’s making him think about his own identity.

“Who am I,” he says. “I was a little kid on ‘The Andy Williams Show.’ Then I was this little kid singing ‘One Bad Apple.’ Then I’m this little teeny-bopper on fan magazines. Then Donny of ‘Donny and Marie’ is the Sonny Bono, the fall guy, the stupid guy.” He pauses, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. “All of these different personalities, and so many different careers. Who am I?”

I ask him if this new show in Las Vegas is a new chance to tell his audience who he is.

“No,” he says quickly, smiling again. “This is a chance for me to tell me who I am.”

Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, Donny Osmond bursts into song. Not in a showy way. It’s pretty casual actually. He seems to sing without even thinking about it. He’s recounting a story about a time in Chicago, when he was performing “Puppy Love” as it was climbing the charts — and he goes right into the opening line: “And they called it puppy looooove …” Later he’s telling me about something that happened when he was touring as Joseph in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” in Minneapolis — and a second later he’s singing “Close every door to me …” and then carrying on with the story.

And his singing voice is — well, it’s heavenly.

He’s been in the music business for almost as long as he can remember. He has literally one memory from before he was a professional entertainer. He was about 3 years old and he remembers playing in a sandbox. It was him and Marie, and a friend named Scott he’s since lost touch with. “I can’t believe I remember that name!” he says. He remembers playing with trucks and a shovel next to his baby sister and his friend.

“It was my haven,” he says. “And I left it at 3 years old.”

His four older brothers were already singing in a barbershop-style quartet when Donny joined them. He was 5 the first time he sang on “The Andy Williams Show.” Five. Think about a 5-year-old you know. Now think about that 5-year-old traveling, singing professionally.

By the early 1970s, Donny was emerging as the star of the group. More and more, he was put front and center. When he was 13, he had four top 10 singles on the radio. Thirteen years old. Imagine being world famous for something you did at 13.

By the time he was 17, he’d had 12 top 40 hits, either solo or with his brothers. Donny was the teen magazine cover boy of the time. He was Michael Jackson before Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber before Justin Bieber.

One time, he can’t remember exactly when, he trashed a hotel room — clogging the toilet, flipping the mattress, throwing things out the window — just because he could.

“My dad was so mad at me,” he says, a little embarrassed.

When he was 18 and his sister was 16, they had a weekly prime-time TV show that was so popular it spawned a line of “Donny & Marie” dolls and toys. Tiger Beat created an auxiliary publication, Donny & Marie magazine, dedicated entirely to the private lives of the two teen stars. He was barely 23 when he was asked to perform at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

Within a few years, though, all of that disappeared. No more toys. No more magazine covers. No more hit songs. Through bad financial management, the family lost something like $60 million to $70 million. The low point, as Donny sees it, came when he starred in the 1982 Broadway revival of “Little Johnny Jones,” the turn-of-the-19thcentury musical that produced the tunes “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “The Yankee Doodle Boy.” The revival bombed, closing after only one performance.

In his review the next morning, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called the musical “a listless, not to mention listing, farrago.” (Although he wasn’t entirely displeased with Donny Osmond’s performance, calling him “a give-his-all professional in a show in which professionalism is not exactly the holy grail.”)

“You really begin to wonder, ‘Maybe I’m not any good,’” Donny tells me.

He was 24 years old and he felt like his career was over. For most of the ’80s, his name was a punchline, a dated reference to a clean-cut bubblegum pop star from the giant-collar era of music. After all, he was the pitchman for Hawaiian Punch, the most ridiculously saccharine beverage in history. He was wholesome, innocent, pure, at a time when the American public wanted … not that.

At one point, he remembers his publicist suggesting Donny purposely get arrested crossing the U.S. border with drugs. He actually considered it for a moment — he was desperate — before eventually firing that publicist. In the end, he tells me, he just couldn’t imagine having to explain something like that to his wife and kids and siblings and all the people he taught Sunday school with.

“The problem was I knew it would work from a short-term point of view,” Donny says. “But long term, it would kill me.”

He realized he needed to change his image, though. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, even if he still sort of looked like one. Most of his siblings found success in the world of country music, but that wasn’t Donny. He’s always been a student of pop. So he started wearing cut-up jeans and a black leather jacket, like George Michael. He started working with singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, most famous for his single “Sledgehammer,” which was reportedly the most played music video in MTV history. Still, though, Donny couldn’t get a record deal.

In 1988, he debated quitting entertainment entirely and starting a security company in Utah. He’d always been an electronics buff, sometimes soldering his own circuit boards on tour as a teenager. And he’d always had a lot of security, so he figured he knew enough to start a successful business. (To this day, his house has an elaborate security system.) He thought this might be the only way to provide for his family.

Around the same time, he recorded the song “Soldier of Love.” It didn’t sound anything like the songs he’d made in the ’70s. Hearing it now, the song is quintessentially ’80s, replete with some intense keyboarding. The song was a top 30 hit in the United Kingdom, but at the beginning of 1989 it wasn’t even for sale in the United States.

Several program directors at pop radio stations around the country heard the song and liked it, but they didn’t think their audience would want to listen to a song by the former child star. So stations played the song without telling the audience the name of the singer. For weeks, as “Soldier of Love” climbed the charts in America, radio hosts encouraged people to call in and guess the identity of the “mystery artist.”

Donny remembers getting a call from his manager at the time.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” his manager told him. “The good news is you’ve got a hit song. The bad news is nobody knows it’s you!”

“I was excited and hurt at the same time,” Donny says now. “But I realized that this was an amazing opportunity.”

He was finally revealed live on the air at a station in New York. “Soldier of Love” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. Another single, “Sacred Emotion,” made it to No. 13 on the same chart. And Donny’s career was relaunched, no drug scandal required.

“I did it the hard way,” he says with a little laugh. “I did it with music.”

Nearly 10 years after the “Little Johnny Jones” fiasco, he got another shot at theater, touring in “Joseph.” This time the show didn’t close after his first night, either. He played Joseph in more than 2,000 performances. When it came to making the movie version, the musical’s creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, insisted Donny play the titular role.

By the late ’90s, he and Marie had another TV show, this time a syndicated afternoon talk show. He also sang “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” the most popular song in Disney’s “Mulan.” In the decade after that, he hosted a series of game shows, won his season of “Dancing With the Stars” and began the Las Vegas residency with Marie.

Can we talk, for a moment, about the way Donny Osmond looks? He’s 63, but he doesn’t look 63. He just seems youthful. No, his face isn’t as smooth as it was when he was 15, but whose is? Donny could pass for someone a decade younger. Some of that is from surgical adjustments, he’s acknowledged, but he also lives a healthy life. He’s mostly vegan. I get the impression he was exercising not long before I arrived this morning. And as a devout Latter-day Saint, he doesn’t drink or do drugs.

I ask him if he’s ever had alcohol in his life.

“Not on purpose,” he says.

There was a time, when he was a teenager, touring at the height of his fame, and during one moment in the show he was supposed to come offstage and take a few gulps of water. One night one of the stagehands thought it would be funny to replace the water with vodka — which Donny realized just as he was swallowing.

“I thought I was going to die,” he says. Then, after a beat, he jokes: “Best show I ever did in my life.”

When his dad found out, the stagehand was fired.

“That’s abusive to a teenager,” Donny says.

For what it’s worth, Donny also seems happy. He seems content. He’s been married to his wife, Debbie, for more than 40 years. They have five sons and 12 grandchildren, all but two of whom are boys. All but one of his kids live in Utah, and his house is the general meetup point. For years, while he and Marie were performing at the Flamingo, Donny commuted back and forth from Provo. He’d fly to Las Vegas on Tuesday, then fly back Friday night so he could be with the family on Saturday mornings. Think soccer games, birthday parties, that sort of thing. Then he’d fly back for the Saturday night show, then back to Utah again for church Sunday morning. The next Tuesday, he would start it all over again.

When he was on “The Masked Singer,” he’d fly back and forth from Los Angeles to Las Vegas every day, sometimes arriving at the theater with just minutes — or less — to spare.

He plans to do something similar for the new show.

When he’s not working on the new show, or his forthcoming studio album — his 63rd album overall — he spends most of his time behind his house, in his garden. He tells me he built a waterfall and a fire pit and planted one fruit tree for each of his grandkids. He’s even starting a vineyard.

“A vineyard?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m not doing a Donny Bordeaux or whatever,” he says. “I just love grapes.”

In fact, he says, he has some great grape juice in the kitchen if I’d like to try some.

So after talking in his den for more than an hour, we move to the kitchen, where he pours two glasses of iced grape juice. It’s delicious.

As we sip, we talk about other celebrities he’s known over the years. Elvis, Prince, Michael Jackson. Donny and Michael Jackson were on similar paths for a while. They were around the same age, both the young stars of their respective family bands, both successful solo artists. There was a time, especially in the ’80s, when Donny was jealous of the way Michael Jackson’s career just kept ascending. When they talked, though, Donny got the impression that his friend was actually jealous of him.

“Michael always wanted to talk about family,” Donny says. “He had a rough childhood, so he would always ask about my family.”

He says it was the same way with Elvis and Prince. He remembers them wanting to talk about family, too.

“A lot of people weren’t as lucky as I was,” he says.

Speaking of family: When he learns that my wife is pregnant with our first child, Donny’s eyes get bigger and he flashes that radiant toothpaste smile again.

“Boy or girl?!”

Boy.

“Oh, Mike,” he says. “This little boy is gonna —” he doesn’t finish his thought exactly. He just sits there, beaming at me.

When we finish our grape juice, he walks me out back to the garden he’s been telling me about. It’s a “garden” in the European sense of the word: a multiacre expanse of cultivated nature. A short gravel road winds past a dozen fruit trees, each labeled with a type of fruit and the name of a grandkid. He shows me the place where he’s putting the small vineyard, a system he has for collecting cut grass, and the massive rock structure he’s built around a pool in the far corner. Most of the area is invisible to the outside world. As we get to the chairs around the fire pit he tells me to sit down. He pulls out his phone and swipes at the screen a bit, then he looks up. Suddenly I hear the trickle of water pouring over boulders. He explains that he personally wired the waterfall to an app on his phone. (He’s really not kidding about this electronics stuff.) Within seconds we’re surrounded by the tranquility of moving water.

He’s talked about his anxiety over the years — he wrote a book about it in the ’90s. Since he was a little boy, he’s had an intense desire to be perfect for whoever might be watching him. When he’s recording a song, he spends hours going over it again and again, trying to get it just right. Same thing when he’s planning the new show.

“I’ve learned something interesting in my life,” he says. “Show business can really beat you up and consume you completely. And it will just take you away from the important things.”

When he feels himself drifting too far, he comes here. He cuts some grass. He prunes some trees. He turns on his waterfall and listens.

“I find it so necessary to just balance my life,” he says. Then he points at the gorgeous rocky crags in the distance and jokes: “I spent a lot of money to bring those mountains in.”

He says he was self-conscious about so many things for so many years. He knows his life hasn’t been “normal” — his word. He only went to school for two weeks in the second grade, then two weeks in sixth grade, then one semester at BYU. “Don’t talk to me about geometry or calculus,” he says. “When my kids were studying that, I was like, ‘I’ve got to go write a song.’”

More than the education though, he was self-conscious about his peers. He knew as a teenager that most boys his age weren’t listening to Donny Osmond. “They were listening to Jimi Hendrix while their sisters were listening to me,” he says. “I’ve never had the acceptance of the guys.”

Even when “Soldier of Love” came out and his career rebounded, most of his fans were women. Although by then, some had begun bringing boyfriends and husbands to his concerts. He assumed they were all being dragged to the show and hated it.

“That was intimidating.”

He had the same mentality when he started the residency in Las Vegas in 2008. Soon though, he decided he didn’t want to feel that way anymore.

You don’t want to be self-conscious, he told himself. Seeing the guys in the audience, you don’t have to be self-conscious anymore.

He says he entered shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Masked Singer” because he didn’t want to be self-conscious. That’s why he doesn’t feel weird about singing “Puppy Love” anymore. It’s why he’s comfortable rapping. And why now, he’ll often see the men in his audience, pick out one or two early on, and watch as their moods lighten throughout the show. Most of the time, by the end of the night, those men are dancing and swaying with everyone else in the room.

I ask him why he and Marie decided to stop their show at the Flamingo. They were still one of the most coveted tickets in Las Vegas, even after 11 years.

Donny says that Marie wanted to do it for another year. He’d already been talking to a producer about doing a solo show. He says there wasn’t one moment, one disagreement or something that ended it. He just felt like it was time for another reinvention.

The night before he made the announcement about the new show, he called Marie to make sure she knew. He says she told him that she wants to be in the front row on opening night.

“She’s a classy lady,” he says.

I can already see it. Every night, the audience at Harrah’s will absolutely weep. Tear ducts everywhere spilling forth. “It’s going to be a moment,” Donny says.

After talking for a while, Donny wants me to listen to a few tracks from his new album, several of which will also be part of his new show. Inside the office near the front of his house, he has a telephone booth-size recording studio, insulated with thick soundproofing on all sides. Inside the booth, there’s an open laptop with a file opened to the latest version of each track.

“Not many people have heard this,” he says, leaning over to start the first song.

I am legitimately not prepared for how contemporary Donny Osmond’s new songs sound or how much I like them. Several tracks could play on any pop station in America right now. If you didn’t know who you were listening to, you might think it was Mike Posner or Justin Bieber. One of his new songs, with a catchy refrain that repeats “It’s never too late to start again” sounds like it could go right in the middle of a Disney movie.

That song will also be in his new show at Harrah’s. He shows me a swatch of a new kind of purple paint that will apparently illuminate on its own, lighting the entire room at some point during the performance.

The purple paint is just one of the hints he gives me about the new solo show. When he sings “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” the room will fill with different moments from the animated “Mulan” — as long as he can get clearance from Disney. At one point in the show, he’ll stop and interact with the audience. He’ll call for requests, anything from his vast catalog, and he and his band will be prepared to perform 20 to 30 seconds of it, like some sort of live jukebox. He’s had to revisit hundreds of old tunes.

“Some of these songs I’ve never performed in public,” he says. “They were B-sides or album tracks.”

Of course, he’ll also do the “Six in Six” rap. There will be a tribute to his brothers, with old footage from “The Andy Williams Show.” And near the end, Donny will perform a tribute to his sister. He says the dialogue isn’t completely worked out yet, but it will be something like: “There’s only one person on this planet that shared these experiences, that can relate to what I went through, and that’s my sister.” Then, as the screens show footage of Donny and Marie through the years — their first duets, their prime-time show, their talk show — Donny will sing the Beatles song “In My Life.”

He hasn’t had his first show yet, but I can already see it. Every night, the audience at Harrah’s will absolutely weep. Tear ducts everywhere spilling forth.

“It’s going to be a moment,” Donny says.

He tells me that as he’s been plotting this out, he’s had a chance to look back at who he was at different times in his life. He says he understands and accepts the different people he’s been through the years. “I’m all of it,” he tells me. “I’m every one of them. They’re all me.”

He’s that successful child star. He’s the failure. He’s that young man in his 20s who hated the joke he’d become. He’s the anonymous artist. He’s Joseph. He’s Donny of “Donny and Marie.” He’s even that little kid in the sandbox. Though now his sandbox is huge and has a waterfall he controls with his phone.

“My garden is my sandbox,” he says. “But it’s also a place I can see my grandkids.”

Donny is also still that hopeful kid who grew up in a house full of music and wanted nothing more than to entertain whoever was in front of him. That’s what drives him, he says. When an audience loves him, it’s like a drug. It’s something he’ll completely reinvent himself to hold on to. He’ll work day and night, until he’s close to breaking down. Until he has to force himself to step back and focus on the only thing more important.

By midafternoon, Debbie is home and their third son, Brandon, has come over with his sons Peder and Benson. When Peder and Benson see their grandfather, they come running across the yard to give him a hug. Then they both tell him about their new ninja socks.

When Brandon learns I’m writing a story about his dad, he jokes about giving me dirt on him.

“Oh yeah, my dad is on all sorts of drugs,” he tells me, smiling.

“Yeah,” Debbie says without missing a beat. “Statins.”

Conversation moves quickly between Donny, Debbie and Brandon. Plans for the weekend: kids’ soccer games and helping Brandon and his family move. They talk about which days Donny will commute to Las Vegas when the show starts and whether Debbie will go with him. (She will.) They talk about how they want to expand the kitchen to accommodate the growing family, so this house will still be the meetup point for all the adult children and grandkids. Then, somehow, someone mentions one of the songs on Donny’s new album, and how much Peder and Benson like it.

“You like that song, don’t you?” Debbie says to them. But the boys are eating pizza and neither of them responds.

So Donny starts singing. Then Debbie joins in. Then Brandon joins in, too, the three of them subtly harmonizing. Then Peder and Benson nod and sing along. Just sitting in the kitchen, talking about nothing in particular, and suddenly all the Osmonds present are singing.

Donny smiles that smile.

Eventually it’s time for me to go. After a day of conversation and listening to music and watching water flow over rocks and drinking delicious grape juice, Donny walks me out and says goodbye.

He says he has some more work to do in his garden.

AS TRAVEL RETURNS, THE OPEN ROAD HAS NEVER BEEN MORE INVITING. THE STORY OF FRED HARVEY, WHO INVENTED HOSPITALITY AS WE KNOW IT, OFFERS THE MOST EXHILARATING PATH THROUGH THE SOUTHWEST

In may 1931, Will Rogers — the movie star and newspaper columnist and arguably the most famous person in America — decided to take his wife on a vacation for Mother’s Day. Rogers was well known for his near obsession with flying and had just piloted himself on a cross-country tour to promote his new film, a homespun adaptation of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee.” But he and Betty, both 52, had decided to leave their kids at home and do a driving journey: a version of what had already become the quintessential American trip, which people called the “Southwest Detour.” They would explore America’s most recently added states, Arizona and New Mexico.

From their home in Beverly Hills, they went first to Tucson, Arizona, and then drove over 450 miles east along the Mexican border to Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. There Will gave “Ma” a white desert flower and then “walked her for seven miles” through what he described as “the Grand Canyon with a roof over it,” the caverns featuring “all the cathedrals of the world ... with half of ’em hanging upside down.”

From Carlsbad they drove to Roswell, which had yet to be visited by aliens; they went to check out the polo instruction at the New Mexico Military Institute for their son, Jim. And then they drove several hours north to get onto the nation’s newest, most talked-about paved highway: Route 66.

Where they got onto Route 66, the 4-year-old road was almost completely parallel to the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the nation’s largest railroad, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles through the Southwest. So the best restaurants and hotels along the route were those in the major AT&SF train stations, run by a company — and a name — as well known as Will Rogers himself.

Fred Harvey, the British-born hospitality genius, had created the first national chain of quality restaurants, the first national chain of resort hotels, the first national chain of retail stores — in fact, the first national chain of anything — starting with a trackside restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, in 1876. He also had created one of the dominant social phenomena of the American West. By insisting that all his restaurants be staffed by single women recruited in the Midwest — the famous “Harvey Girls,” the nation’s first all-female workforce — he had become a matchmaking sensation, as waitresses married and settled down in all the restaurant towns, large and small. And the food in his restaurants and hotels was as good if not better than anything you could get in New York or Chicago or London, with the freshest ingredients shipped in by train; his company is credited with teaching much of America how to eat well, from local to international cuisine.

It is unclear how many Fred Harvey restaurants Will and Betty stopped at once they got on Route 66. Probably the first one they came to was La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because at that time Route 66 ran right up to the hotel, which is off the city’s historic main plaza. They most likely stopped at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, which was a favorite for movie stars on their way to or from Hollywood, and the city also had an amazing Native American art museum — the famous Fred Harvey Indian Building — in between the hotel and the train station, with live demonstrations of rug making and basket weaving. They may have checked out El Navajo in Gallup just to see the stunning murals, which had been adapted, with tribal leaders’ permission, from Navajo sand paintings.

But we know for sure that they spent some time at Petrified Forest and Painted Desert, which were right off Route 66. And then they ended up in Winslow, Arizona, where something fascinating and counterintuitive had recently happened: Even though the country was going into its second year of the Great Depression, the Fred Harvey Company had just opened its most ambitious resort hotel, La Posada. It was the newest Fred Harvey stop on the way to the one that had become the most renowned — El Tovar, the Harvey hotel at the lip of the Grand Canyon.

And as the couple ate at La Posada and toured the gorgeous sunken gardens and watched the trains go by bathed in the red-orange sunlight, Will Rogers decided to write about what this had inspired in him. He had a column that ran four or five days a week in pretty much every newspaper in the country; most of the papers ran whatever he wrote in a prominent box on the front page. And on May 12, 1931, he posted this populist paean to driving awed through the exploding colors of the Southwest and being taken care of by the holy host of American hospitality.

the utah-arizona state line from route 66

winslow, arizona

amtrak station, las vegas, new mexico train station behind la posada hotel, winslow, arizona

new mexico rail runner express, near pueblo, new mexico

new mexico highway 16, near kewa pueblo, new mexico

cabezon peak, new mexico

cuban cafe, cuba, new mexico

the new mexico-colorado state line from u.s. route 491 new mexico museum of art, santa fe

u.s. route 491 near shiprock, new mexico

monterey motel, albuquerque, new mexico

You folks that think a desert country is terrible should see Arizona and New Mexico. The whole states are covered now with hundreds of the most beautiful kinds of flowers. Saw the Petrified Forest again. What’s these Baptists that think the whole world started with Noah going to say about a thing like that? Just another miracle, I reckon. Wild buffalo fed the early traveler in the West and for doing so they put his picture on a nickel. Well, Fred Harvey took up where the buffalo left off. For what he has done for the traveler one of his waitresses’ picture (with an arm load of delicious ham and eggs) should be placed on both sides of every dime.

Like a lot of Americans, my wife and I reacted to 9/11 by shifting much of our travel to endlessly rediscovering the U.S. (something I suspect will happen again for many as COVID-19 travel restrictions abate). And while we’ve been all over, via our home airport in Philadelphia, it is that Southwest Detour we keep returning to. This is partly because of the unmatched scenery — the way you can see the next three weather systems coming toward you at a distance, sun then rain clouds with rainbows right behind them — as well as the incredible food, the long, astonishingly straight drives, the trout fishing. But it is also because the Southwest — especially northern Arizona and New Mexico — is the birthplace of American cultural tourism, living history.

It is home to the Grand Canyon, which began replacing Niagara Falls as the country’s favorite destination for natural grandeur, as soon as a railroad line was built so people could get there. The Southwest is also where, in the words of the late Native American historian Frank Waters, “the Fred Harvey System introduced America to Americans.”

Waters, who was part Cheyenne and was raised visiting the Navajo and Pueblo reservations in New Mexico, meant this as a tribute but also a backhanded compliment. The Harvey company was in the Southwest to run quality hotels and restaurants along the railroad tracks — and later dining cars and union stations as trains got faster and the number of food stops was reduced. But the company was, along with its partner the Santa Fe, part of an ongoing effort to bring tourists to the area without completely commercializing it; an extremely delicate balance. The company also began a process that was later joined by the National Park Service (which the Harvey company helped create) and continues to this day, attempting to tell an increasingly more perfect, more accurate, more diverse saga of American places with all the explanations and apologies necessary. As part of this effort, it was the Harvey company that lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to pass the 1906 Antiquities Act to stop the looting of Native burial grounds and abandoned cities. And the company partnered with Native American artists and craftspeople to create better local and national markets for their work.

The Fred Harvey Company went on to create some of the first multicultural tourist materials and books, which explained, much to the surprise of many tourists, that white people hadn’t been the first or even the second to populate the area, and that the scars of what the government had done to Native people were not going to go away just because white people had forgiven themselves. It was tourism seasoned with some diversity tension, because the company’s goal was to teach and challenge visitors, attending to their creature comforts without placating them.

The company — which was simply called “Fred Harvey,” one of the first and most famous acts of brand marketing in business history — began during the height of Reconstruction in 1876 and reached the peak of its fame in 1946 when MGM released “The Harvey Girls,” starring Judy Garland as a plucky Fred Harvey waitress in New Mexico (singing an Oscar-winning theme song, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” by Johnny Mercer). It was a private, multigenerational family business partnered with one of the world’s largest public companies, and continued that way until the mid-1960s, when it was sold to a hospitality conglomerate.

Its ethos then remained alive at the three legendary Harvey hotels that not only have never closed but also remain true to their architectural and cultural history — El Tovar and Bright Angel Lodge, at the lip of the Grand Canyon (where ’60s staff began referring to themselves as “Fredheads”), and La Fonda in Santa Fe. But, for most, it became a lost story of Americana.

And then, starting in the 1990s, several Western museums began to rediscover Harvey, and entrepreneurs with really good and unique taste — in design, food, customer service and American cultural history — began restoring the existing buildings to their original architectural significance. Nearly a half-dozen have been saved, two of them as utterly delightful full-service hotels: first the one in Winslow that inspired Will Rogers, and more recently the one in Las Vegas, New Mexico — the Castaneda, which Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated in 1899 by holding the first reunion of his famous Rough Riders there.

The hotels have been through their own rough rides during COVID-19 pandemic. Most of them, including those at the Grand Canyon, had to close for a period of time and then reopen with limited capacity. But they have a long history of resilience during national emergencies. After all, the Harvey system had to accommodate World War I — during which the railroads were nationalized and consolidated by the federal government — as well as the 1918 influenza pandemic. It had to accommodate the Great Depression when many smaller locations were shuttered by the railroad while the larger ones quietly took on the responsibility of feeding Dust Bowl refugees. And then all the Harvey locations had to be reopened during World War II and retrofitted to serve troops crisscrossing the country.

So, now is a perfect time to discover, or rediscover the world of the Southwest Detour, as American tourism reopens — and long-distance travel, by car and train, returns as the best way to experience the continuing marvel and challenge of our nation. And to explore the saga of how Fred Harvey first made that possible.

Harvey came from Liverpool, England, to New York in 1853, at the age of 17, to get a job during America’s first world’s fair. He worked as a “pot-walloper” — a dishwasher — at Smith & McNell’s, just a block or two from where he got off the boat. After 18 months learning the restaurant business there, he traveled to St. Louis, where he worked in a restaurant, became a U.S. citizen and then started his own place, the Merchants Dining Saloon, with a partner. It was popular until the Civil War erupted, causing Fred’s partner, a Southern sympathizer, to disappear with all their money. Fred was, by that time, married; he and his wife, Anne, had a young son and another on the way. But Anne died during childbirth, and Fred was left a penniless single dad with two little boys who would both soon succumb to scarlet fever.

He moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, home of the Pony Express, and restarted his life working for the railroad. He remarried, to Barbara “Sally” Mattas, a young Czech seamstress, and they moved across the river to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Fred worked as a ticket agent for rail, boat and wagon train travel.

grand canyon southern rim, arizona

When the route for what became the second transcontinental railroad ended up going through Kansas City, instead of Leavenworth, Fred and Sally remained in town to raise their family, but Fred became a railroad warrior — traveling the ever-extending train lines, selling tickets and booking freight.

At this time, railroads weren’t very concerned about passengers: Their motto was “freight doesn’t complain,” so they paid little attention to the comfort of humans. Dining cars weren’t allowed west of Chicago, so trains stopped every hundred miles and local people ran little restaurants in the train stations — usually awful restaurants, because most people were traveling to relocate. So even if they were dissatisfied, they were never coming back.

Harvey ate an enormous amount of this bad food, and since he already had some stomach ailments, he became acutely aware of the need for improved hospitality along the rapidly expanding western rail lines. He reasoned that if any railroad ever figured out how to make a long train ride across the country easier on your digestive system, and maybe even delicious, that railroad would succeed. So, at the age of 40 — with a full-time, full-travel job — he started a side business running trackside restaurants in small Kansas towns the way he learned they were supposed to be run in New York City.

He partnered with a new line called the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad — whose owners had dreams of one day replacing the historic wagon-train path, the Santa Fe Trail, with steel rails all the way to New Mexico (with a connection into Mexico). They let Harvey take over the dingy second-floor dining room at the Topeka station, which he reappointed as a big-city-quality restaurant with imported silver and linen tablecloths, and food fresher than anyone else could serve because it came literally right out of the refrigerator cars into his kitchen.

Soon, the railroad let him try something more ambitious — its hotel and restaurant in Florence, Kansas, which he transformed by audaciously hiring away William Phillips, the head of food service from his favorite hotel, in Chicago. As the railway added food service farther and farther west, Harvey and Phillips devised ingenious systems to instruct employees, maintain standards, plan menus and even signal ahead to stations what diners would be eating — by telegraph (this is all way before telephones) or train whistle codes.

Harvey had nothing but a handshake agreement with the AT&SF: The railroad provided the space in its depot buildings, took care of utilities and let Fred Harvey food and employees ride the trains for free. Harvey kept all the profits, and the restaurants were an immediate success.

When the AT&SF tracks reached New Mexico, Fred Harvey quickly tripled in size, opening in eight new towns in three years. And outside of its largest New Mexico location, Las Vegas, the railroad also built a huge health resort for Harvey to run, the Montezuma, taking advantage of the medicinal hot springs. But New Mexico presented unique challenges: It really was the Wild West, and the trackside restaurants were robbed often. There was also racial tension because most local waiters were Black men, many of the cowboys were embittered former Confederate soldiers and everybody had guns.

After a racial incident at his Raton, New Mexico, restaurant, Harvey experimented by moving the employees of color out of harm’s way into the kitchen and having the waitstaff be all single white women from the Midwest. “Harvey Girls” became the signature of his restaurants, especially as the AT&SF expanded from New Mexico across northern Arizona and all over California, and hundreds of waitresses had to be hired as quickly as possible.

Over the next decades, more than 100,000 single women would have the experience of being a Harvey Girl, traveling, escaping their hometowns and making new lives for themselves in the romantic West. Their training included innovations Harvey created to shave every possible second off the service, making a 30-minute food stop seem as unhurried for customers as possible. A “cup code” was invented so one Harvey Girl took your drink order, then moved your cup into one of several positions that told the pourers behind her what hot or cold drink to give you.

Fred Harvey was soon making the equivalent of $1.1 million a year personally, after all expenses (the country didn’t yet have taxes). But his health suffered. He had what today would be diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome and clinical depression, but at the time was described as the latest fad diagnosis: “Americanitis” caused by the pressures of being successful in America. So, he started living in England for part of the year as a treatment. And he asked his son Ford to leave college and start learning the business. Ford learned quickly and moved the company to Kansas City.

After the Depression of 1893, tourism in the West began to percolate, aided by an ad campaign with the slogan “See America First.” The AT&SF expanded south to Texas and finally added dining cars, maintained by Fred Harvey; it also made a big investment in resort hotels in the Southwest for the Fred Harvey Company to run. They started with the Castaneda in Las Vegas in 1899, and soon after began construction of a new hotel and southwest hub in Albuquerque. They also created a new branch line to the Grand Canyon so a hotel could be built there. (The Union Pacific had branch line service to Yellowstone; the AT&SF wanted its own competing natural wonder.)

Sadly, Fred did not live to see this; he died in February 1901. The Alvarado Hotel complex opened in Albuquerque in May 1902; El Tovar opened on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in January 1905. Western tourism would never be quite the same.

The Harvey company had always worked with local tour guides, allowing guests to book trips to nearby natural attractions or Native American pueblos. In 1925, Ford and his son Freddy decided to invest in their own company that would take tourists along the Southwest Detour — between Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, New Mexico, accessing all the sites one could visit from there. They bought and expanded La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe as its headquarters, bought Cadillacs and buses to be “Harvey Cars,” hired a new kind of Harvey Girl — college-educated women, “Detours Couriers,” who could lecture about archaeology and culture — and started advertising in magazines worldwide.

The Detours company itself was only run by Fred Harvey for five years. But during those years Route 66 opened and made the Detours route as drivable as it was accessible by train. It also became accessible by plane as Freddy insisted Fred Harvey become a partner in Transcontinental Air Transport, the nation’s first cross-country air-rail service, in 1928. Small airports were built near the Harvey hotels in Clovis, New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona; Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Will Rogers and other celebrity aviators were often seen there. With three ways to get to the Southwest, people came even during the Great Depression; after World War II, tourism soared to even greater heights.

It has been nearly 100 years since the Southwest Detour became America’s favorite cultural vacation, and a lot has changed. (I wrote a book about it — and the entire Fred Harvey saga — called “Appetite for America,” if you want to read the story or listen to the new audiobook while driving.) But the Southwest Detours route is still, today, teeming with energy, and awash in so many ways to access a uniquely American and startlingly diverse living history.

My wife and I have done the Detour more than a dozen times by car and twice by train. Every time we do it, we learn something new and meet fascinating people from around the world. (We especially enjoyed the

fun-loving group from Australia who drank us under the table at the bar at El Tovar during their Detour, which they were doing in a caravan of red Ford Mustangs.)

The only thing you really should plan well in advance is hotel rooms at the Grand Canyon, which is where we normally start, after flying into Phoenix and driving there. El Tovar and Bright Angel on the rim and tiny Phantom Ranch at the bottom (for hardcore overnight hikers) are the biggest reservation challenge and most smart travelers plan their whole trip around those room availabilities. I still remember my utter disbelief when I was first told what people do to get these reservations, a year in advance. On the first day of every month, at exactly 11 a.m. Mountain Time, Xanterra (the company that bought Fred Harvey and runs its historic hotels at the canyon) opens for reservation every room on the South Rim — for a one-month period exactly 13 months in the future. (You dial a toll-free number and keep calling until a reservation sales agent mercifully picks up.) The very best room is El Tovar’s presidential suite, which is one of only six suites that have balconies with canyon views. (Sleeping out on the balcony in a lounge chair under the stars — with full access to room service — is as close to “camping” as my wife, Diane, ever wants to get.)

At El Tovar, I relish being able to slip out of the hotel bar and stroll along the rim really late at night or flop out of bed at 5 a.m. to go watch what is arguably the greatest sunrise in America in my pajamas. During the day, we wander around the historic sites near the hotel. But the highlight is the scenic 26-mile drive to architect Mary Colter’s masterpiece, the 70-foot, stone silo-shaped Desert View Watchtower — the Sistine Chapel of the Southwest — which has astonishing paintings by Native artists all along its curved interior walls and spiraling staircases. The views from the watchtower are just amazing, especially when thunderstorms are following the blue-green Colorado River toward you.

From the canyon, we try to spend some time in Sedona — and get the Southwest’s most scenic lunch among the red rocks at Enchantment Resort. But our main goal is always to get to Winslow in plenty of time to check in at the original Fred Harvey La Posada Hotel and begin our routine of doing spectacularly restful nothing. I have gone out with a cup of coffee to sit in one of the rocking chairs and watch the trains pass at sunrise and gotten lost for hours daydreaming. I have read, and occasionally written, parts of books sitting next to Mary Colter’s sunken garden.

From Winslow we head east — this road across northern Arizona is so absurdly straight I could make and eat a sandwich while driving and never have to move the wheel. There are endlessly stunning and colorful rock formations much of the way, and the magical Petrified Forest/ Painted Desert National Park is right off the highway. Our gas tank is a constant worry. Not only are there long distances between filling stations, but some of them sell — besides gas, soda and chips — a full array of guns, big knives and, I’m not kidding, swords. (Diane has considered buying a sword on her way to the ladies’ room and returning the purchase on the way out.)

There’s nothing Harvey left to see in Gallup. More surprisingly, there’s nothing left of Harvey in Albuquerque either — the former center of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe universe in the Southwest let the Alvarado be demolished in 1970 and still hasn’t forgiven itself.

From Albuquerque it’s less than an hour to Santa Fe. When we get to town, we go immediately to La Fonda on the Plaza, as people have for almost a century. La Fonda has been restored with great Fred Harvey historical accuracy and loving hospitality by board chair Jenny Kimball’s

grand canyon, desert view watchtower, arizona

team, and it still has so much amazing artwork from the 1920s and ’30s that the hotel gives docent tours. Santa Fe is the eating and shopping and museum capital of the Southwest. I couldn’t even begin to tell you where to start, depending on your own taste. I will say we never leave town before we have eaten at La Plazuela at La Fonda, at Geronimo on Canyon Road (we go early to wander the galleries nearby), at Maria’s for New Mexican food, and at Harry’s Roadhouse for comfort breakfast, lunch or dinner. We always check out the New Mexico History Museum — which features the best permanent Fred Harvey exhibit in the country and holds the annual Fred Harvey History Weekend. And we often make the Harvey-themed daytrips to the charming Harvey House Museum at the old Belen train station and the newly restored Legal Tender Saloon at the old Lamy station.

From Santa Fe it’s just an hour’s drive east to Las Vegas, New Mexico, which was the first major Fred Harvey outpost in the Southwest. It can be done as a daytrip, but we always go and stay longer. That’s because Las Vegas is actually the most inspiring recent Fred Harvey comeback story, in terms of Western history and historic preservation.

By the late 1940s, both the railroad and Fred Harvey had abandoned Las Vegas and left its two most architecturally significant buildings to rot. One was the old Montezuma Hotel outside of town, which had burned down and been rebuilt twice in the late 1800s, by the same architects who created the famous White City at the Chicago World’s Fair. The other was the trackside Castaneda Hotel, the first of what became many Fred Harvey/Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Mission Style resorts. Both regularly made national lists of the most in-danger architectural landmarks. Then two completely different kinds of preservation miracles happened. In the 1990s, the land around the old Montezuma was used to build a modern new American campus for United World College; in 2001, the school spent $10 million to dramatically and rapidly restore the grand Montezuma building itself. (While it’s a private campus, you can tour the buildings with the fine local guide service Southwest Detours.) Its restoration made the pathetic condition of the Castaneda even more painful, and for decades people in town yearned for someone to save it.

In 2014, Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion — who had miraculously saved La Posada in Winslow in the 1990s — came to Las Vegas’ rescue and bought the shell of the Castaneda. They also bought an older but still-working hotel in town, the Historic Plaza, which had been a setting for a lot of films (including the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men”), and went to work.

Four years, $10 million and a lot of historic tax credits later, my wife and I and lots of Fredheads from all over were thrilled to be there — with a crew from “CBS Sunday Morning” — at the opening of the Hotel Castaneda’s public spaces and the unveiling of its newly replicated sign. And in early November 2019, we were there for the grand opening of the hotel and its sumptuous new restaurants, Bar Castaneda and Kin. We stayed in one of the 20 perfectly appointed suites, created from the original 40 rooms (one of which Teddy Roosevelt slept in). And the very first dinner in the main dining room ended dramatically, as Fred Harvey banquets did during the company’s heyday, with flaming baked Alaska that lit up the entire Land of Enchantment.

The next morning we got into our car and continued on our Southwest Detour. We can’t wait to get back on that road.