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 | Sunday, July 14, 2002 |
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Business The man behind the hotel Jim Kershner
These days, people say a company has a "management style" or "corporate culture." Yet back in the 1920s, Louis M. Davenport wrote that every business had something a bit more human: a "personality." The Davenport Hotel certainly had a personality during its glory days, and everybody knew whose: the personality of Louis Davenport himself. "L.M. Davenport has interwoven his ideals and hopes into the mortar and fabric of this exceptional hotel," gushed one magazine writer in 1922. `'It sparkles and glows with a radiance that is but the reflected light of the genius that inspired it." Or, as one Seattle hotel owner put it more bluntly, "Seattle hasn't a hotel its equal, because it hasn't the man as big as Mr. Davenport to run it." So to understand the Davenport Hotel -- its history, its significance and its character -- it helps to explore this question: Who, exactly, was Louis Davenport? The young Davenport wasn't quite the fig Here's a typical account of his early days in Spokane, from a 1922 trade journal called "Hotel News of the West." "Starting with the munificent capital of $1.25 in 1889, Louis M. Davenport swung a pick and shovel as a member of the bridge gang which cleared away the debris of the memorable Spokane fire. Increasing his capital to $125, he purchased a tent, secured some meager equipment and spent some of his hard-earned money in getting a sign of generous proportions painted. This bore the startling legend, `Davenport's Famous Waffle Foundry' ... Some years later, this plot of ground fulfilled its destiny by becoming the site of the Davenport." "That story has gotten romanticized," said Davenport's only grandson, Lewis Davenport III (he and his father used a different spelling of the name). He owns and runs a farm and processing plant in Gooding, Idaho. "It was a popular thing at the time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Davenport himself wasn't above polishing that poor-boy-makes good image. In 1935, he told a Spokane Chronicle reporter that he had even less than $1.25 when he arrived. He said he had only 75 cents. However, Spokane historians Tony and Suzanne Bamonte ("Spokane's Legendary Davenport Hotel," Tornado Creek Publications) found that the young Davenport was hardly a penniless laborer. He came from a middle-class family, and his father owned a prosperous mercantile store in Red Bluff, Calif. At the time of the fire, Davenport, 21, had already attended business school in San Francisco, had worked in the family business for years and had become the co-proprietor of his uncle's restaurant, The Pride of Spokane. In fact, Davenport himself once said he had already nearly made a fortune in international trade when he arrived in Spokane in 1889. He and a partner had a wholesale dry goods brokerage in Kansas City, dealing with goods from 18 countries. Then they lost everything. "And it was all because my partner back in Kansas City, one of the finest fellows I have ever met, just couldn't stand prosperity," said Davenport. "Women and liquor got him, and our business as well." He said he came to Spokane to re-enter the dry goods business, but once he arrived, "I could see where a restaurant would make money." He did indeed start the Waffle Foundry after the Great Fire, but the word "tent" was misleading. It might have had a canvas roof at first, but it also had framed doors and windows, and even an upper story. In any case, within a year, he moved into a permanent building across the street, where the Davenport Hotel now stands. One fact not in dispute: He made a great success of the Waffle Foundry because of both his business acumen and his work ethic. During a tribute banquet in 1922, "Dutch Jake" Goetz, Spokane's earliest and most famous restaurant and gambling baron, said he noticed the kid's moxie right away. "I saw the boy was ambitious," said Goetz."He wanted more room (for expansion) even then. Doesn't he look like Napoleon? He worked long hours and he put his money into his business, not into his pockets or into diamonds. Today he has the greatest hotel in the world, and this hotel is the greatest asset that Spokane has." Davenport, at the same banquet, remembered those early days at the Waffle Foundry, working alongside Billy Hayford, his first employee. "The short shift, if I remember it, was about 15 hours, and the long shift about 18," said Davenport. "While one of us worked, the other slept in a cot in the upstairs of the tent, except during rush hours. He and I had a standing mutual challenge to which one could look after the biggest number of customers at one time on the opposite ends of the open square counter." Within a year, the Waffle Foundry had evolved into something far more ambitious, called simply Davenport's Restaurant. This establishment featured frescoed walls, electric call bells for waiters and an ultra-modern kitchen, complete with electric ventilator. Waffles were no longer the main attraction. Davenport's Restaurant gave Spokane its first taste of such exotic dishes as Pate de Foie Gras With Truffles (50 cents) and Caviara Russe (25 cents). It was an immediate hit among the newly minted mining and timber tycoons in town, as well as regular Spokanites who just wanted to feel like a tycoon for an evening. In 1895, The Spokesman-Review said it was the only first-class restaurant in Spokane to weather the Panic of 1893. Davenport told the paper that his restaurant survived because he "happened to have the money to lose and others didn't," which might have been his modest way of saying that he had managed the business smartly from the beginning. Business was soon booming again, and Davenport continued to pour the profits into improvements. By 1895, a Spokesman-Review reporter claimed that the restaurant was "known from Chicago to San Francisco" and that "one can travel a thousand miles in any direction" without finding a restaurant to approach it. "Spokanites feel as much pride in the place as though they owned a personal interest in it," wrote the reporter. Davenport kept expanding and in 1900 commissioned Kirtland Cutter to redesign the building in a Spanish Mission style. In 1904, he hired Cutter to create a banquet hall atop his restaurant, the grandly titled Hall of the Doges. One impressed customer told the Spokane Chronicle in 1908 that Davenport had "built a restaurant unsurpassed in many respects in America, if not the world." That customer was Thomas Edison, the inventor. So when a consortium of local investors decided in 1908 that Spokane needed a first-class hotel, they naturally approached Davenport about being the manager. The Chronicle reported in October 1908 that, "Finally, Mr. Davenport concluded to undertake the proposition," implying that he had to be talked into it. Six years later, the Davenport Hotel opened, and the name of Louis M. Davenport became known all over the country. But who was this new Western restaurant-and-hotel baron? To Edison, who toured the Davenport home, he was a man of "persistence and natural artistic temperament." To one national magazine writer in 1906, he was a "quiet, tireless, systematic, imaginative" businessman. He did not seek out attention, and the Hotel News of the West said that "his aversion to personal publicity very nearly approaches a passion." His business was his life, and if he had hobbies, they served a business purpose, too. In a 1919 article for a national business journal called System, he wrote that he went tramping (hiking) every Sunday with two close friends, R.B. Paterson, the president of the Spokane Dry Goods Co., and George W. Dodds, the managing editor of The Spokesman-Review. "Aside from the physical benefit and the pleasure of following new trails through the hills, we profit by picking to pieces each other's business methods," wrote Davenport. His tastes in entertainment ran to the old-fashioned. During an era when "hot jazz" was all the rage, he preferred the Davenport House Band to play "Swanee River." And despite the fact that his job put him smack in the center of the town's upper crust, he didn't seem to have a sparkling social life. In fact, when he married Verus E. Smith of Spokane in 1906 at the age of 38, The Spokesman-Review tellingly said the "marriage came as a complete surprise to all except the nearest friends." Children followed. Soon, he had two passions in life. "The two main priorities in his life were business and family," said Suzanne Bamonte. "He was a very devoted family man." He was organized, methodical and, unlike that early Kansas City partner, disciplined. And he firmly believed that doing a job beyond expectations was a good rule for life and business. "If you make it a rule to do only what you feel is expected of you, you do not distinguish yourself from the crowd," he wrote. "But if you go a little further than your customer anticipated, you start a stone rolling that, in spite of the old proverb, gathers moss in the shape of satisfied customers." He said you don't necessarily have to spend money to provide extra service; you just have to spend "thoughtfulness." He believed in the "prodigal" spending of thoughtfulness. Davenport was the quintessential detail man, who understood that attention to small things paid big dividends. Washing the customers' change, for instance, was a small thing, but soon the Davenport became famous for it. The Davenport was loaded with these little details: ice-water in the taps; never-extinguished logs in the lobby fireplace; aquariums and bird cages in the lobby. Tony Bamonte said Davenport thought out even the smallest problems, such as how to keep the rugs from wearing unevenly. "He told his employees never to walk down the centers of hallways, but to always walk down the sides," said Bamonte. "The regular customers walk in the middle, and that evens out the wear." One young employee back in 1942 learned never to stray from the strict Davenport way of doing things. Etter Milla of Spokane said that his job as a boy was to steam-clean the doormats every day. He and a co-worker were supposed to clean them in the garbage room, but they discovered an easier-to-use steam hose in the garage. So they used that until one day Davenport walked by, said hello and continued on. "The next day we were told not to use the garage to clean the mats," wrote Milla in a reminiscence. "The steam would get on the customer's cars." Davenport was, in today's jargon, a hands-on executive. One Portland hotel manager said he had talked to all of the leading hotel men in the world, and was mostly disappointed. "I found that the men whose names are on the stationery did not know anything about their hotels," he said. "But in Mr. Davenport, I found a man who can tell any man in the hotel how to do his work." Because of that, Davenport had a reputation as a tough and demanding boss. "I'm sure he wasn't easy to work for," said his grandson, Lewis Davenport III. "But I suspect he was fair." He was certainly fair to one fresh high school graduate in 1934. Mrs. Merle Rush of Spokane said she was hired as a waitress and one day committed the error of reaching around in front of some customers. One customer in particular glared at her. "One of the waitresses said he was Mr. Louis Davenport," she wrote in a recent reminiscence. "I nearly fainted and thought, `Well, that's the end for me.' But dear Mr. Davenport must have known I was a greenhorn because I was never reprimanded or discharged." Usually he had little patience with anything short of perfection. He outlined his employee philosophies in the System magazine article. "A surly look or discourteous word is more than enough to banish in a second all memory a guest may have of a comfortable bed or an exceptional meal," he wrote. "If (employees) are unable or unwilling to maintain our standards ... we feel they are a liability. The sooner they are eliminated, the better for us." But he admitted that "even employees with the best intentions fall down occasionally." To minimize that problem, he established an extensive training program. "We are not content with merely telling employees what they are to do or why; we tell them how," he wrote. "... The instructors lay down fundamentals in the use of inflections, the significance of tones, the impressions given by certain postures and gestures. But they go much further, and study individuals to note peculiarities, which it is their business gently and delicately to remedy." Sometimes, the remedy wasn't so gentle. John Luppert, who was one of the musicians in the hotel's house band in the late 1930s and early 1940s, wrote that if Davenport saw a bus boy with a "less than pristine jacket" he would tell the department head, "Fire that lout! He's wearing a dirty coat." There was no appeal. "Those of you who who have never worked for a late 19th century-type autocrat of the business world cannot fully appreciate an unbending despot like the late L.M. Davenport," wrote Luppert, in a reminiscence titled "The Glory Days of the Davenport Hotel." "While Mr. Davenport was a genius at operating a hotel, warmth and charm were not among his attributes." Today, it remains difficult to reconcile the apparent contradictions in the descriptions of the man. He was autocratic, yet unassuming. He was disciplined, yet imaginative. He had an "intense dislike of notoriety," according to The Spokesman-Review, yet he also named his restaurants and hotel after himself. Still, he never, under any circumstances, would have condoned naming the hotel restaurant "Louis D's" as the hotel did long after his death. "Mr. Davenport may still be turning over in his grave over that," wrote Luppert. "It is possible that Mrs. Davenport addressed him as Louis in the privacy of their chamber, but I can't imagine anyone else having the temerity to call him anything other than `Mr. Davenport."' Yet Lewis Davenport III remembers Davenport in a far softer role. "From a child's point of view, he was a great grandfather," he said."I have nothing but fond memories. I was only about 9 years old when he died, but he was kind of a jolly man from my perspective." Jolly? Not everybody would have guessed, but plenty of evidence exists that he was generally happy and content with his business and his life, all the way up to his retirement in 1945 and death in 1951. He told one Spokane Chronicle reporter in 1935 that he thoroughly enjoyed the life of a hotel man because "there was something new every minute." He clearly loved the Inland Northwest, and spent much of his life serving it. He was on the Spokane Park Board from 1908 until his death, and also served with many other boards and civic organizations. He missed few opportunities to extol his adopted city. "We of the Inland Empire live in the greatest country in the world," he told the Spokane Chronicle in 1935. "I wouldn't trade the smallest part of this country for any part of the East or Middle West." According to the reporter, Davenport then turned sharply in his swivel chair and exclaimed, "Have you ever noticed that the lines in the faces of people from back there run up and down? That's from worry and the pace that they have to travel in their business life. Out here, our faces are only lined from smiling. "No sir, I wouldn't trade places with any of them." •Jim Kershner can be reached at (509) 459-5493 or by e-mail at jimk@spokesman.com.
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