Ruth Murray recalls leaving a movie theater on Dec. 7, 1941, and hearing from people on the street that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Like Americans throughout the heartland, that event changed her life.
“I couldn’t believe that we were at war,” she said. “We were so isolated from the rest of the world at the time.”
The former Ruth Sheil had graduated from Great Bend High School earlier that year and then moved to Hutchinson to attend Salt City Business College. Her parents paid for her first three months of school, and then Ruth worked at various jobs as she finished her education. She would walk for blocks to clean homes or babysit, neither of which paid well; then someone at the college told her there were jobs for women of good moral standing at the Harvey House, located in Hutchinson’s Santa Fe railroad station and Bisonte Hotel.
Women were paid a monthly wage and were provided a uniform, and room and board. Ruth shared a bed with another young woman at a boarding house.
Today, Ruth is back in Great Bend and this December she will celebrate her 95th birthday. She and her son Steve Murray talked about her years as a “Harvey Girl” and then as an Army bride in the 1940s.
Fred Harvey opened Harvey House restaurants along railroads in the late 1800s and into the 1900s, including one in the Bisonte Hotel when it opened in 1908. Harvey had a policy of employing well mannered, single women to the serving staff. They wore a black uniform dress with a white cap and apron. The skirt was supposed to hang no more than 8 inches off the floor.
“The younger girls tried to shorten their skirts; they pinned their dresses up a little higher,” Steve said, recalling the stories his mother told over the years. She also told him one of the best things about working as a Harvey Girl was, “they got to eat all they wanted.”
Before it became common for trains to have dining cars, they would stop for lunch at Harvey Houses. During the war, the Harvey Girls saw many soldiers boarding or departing the trains and they would serve them in the hotel or carry lunches onto the train.
“The Harvey Girls,” a 1942 novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, was made into an MGM musical starring Judy Garland in 1946. Looking back over the years, Ruth Murray can almost picture herself being a Harvey Girl alongside Judy Garland, but by that time she was back in Great Bend.
Ruth graduated from Salt City Business College in 1942 and would go on to work as a bookkeeper. Her future husband, John Murray, hailed from Texas but during the war he was stationed at the Great Bend Army Airfield.
They met at a USO dance in the new City Auditorium.
“I jitterbugged,” Ruth recalled, saying it was hard to dance wearing heels.
The B-29 bombers being built in Wichita and flown out of Great Bend were a secret in those days, Ruth said. Her husband became a waist gunner with the crew known as Deacon’s Disciples.
“He was one of the first B-29s to go overseas,” she said. When they exchanged letters, everything they wrote was scrutinized by censors — even XXX’s and OOO’s at the bottom of a letter were subject to redaction.
After the war, John and Ruth Murray started Murray Casing Crews in Great Bend.
In 2016, the Santa Fe Trail Center Museum in Larned featured a Kansas Day program from the Kansas Humanities Council called “The Harvey Girls’ Multicultural Workforce.” Ruth and Steve attended the program given by Michaeline Chance-Reay, a professor at Kansas State University. When audience members realized they were in the presence of a real-life Harvey Girl, some of them asked for her autograph.
