To escape his German captors in October of 1943, Capt. Harris O. Machus flung himself from a moving POW train in Italy. The Michigan State University graduate’s subsequent 18-month odyssey involved recapture, a camp in Germany, another escape, and a perilous Eastern European sojourn before he shipped for home from Egypt.
During that time, Machus was listed as missing in action. When he finally telegrammed home, his young wife, Elaine, joyfully spread the news throughout Birmingham. Harris soon returned to the town of 12,000 people where his late father, Hans, had sold pastries from a pushcart. Hans died in 1941.
Harris and Elaine had opened a bakery in Birmingham just as Army service beckoned, and she and her mother-in-law, Kathleen, kept it going during the war. Regular assistance came from a family friend, the future restauranteur Bill Knapp.
“I learned to love Birmingham,” Elaine told the Farmington Observer. “The people were wonderful to me.”
After Machus rejoined his wife, the bakery moved to 160 W. Maple Rd. in 1947. Prosperity increased with the 1950 arrival, nearby, of Jacobson’s department store. Adding a lunch counter made sales take off.
The bakery grew into a full-service restaurant called Machus 160 West Maple. The Machus Adams Square Cafeteria opened in 1965, and then Machus Red Fox was established on a former hunting grounds along Telegraph Road, south of Maple Road. A Lansing Red Fox was still to come.
By 1969, Machus Enterprises hummed along with its restaurants and bakery shops, employing 400 people and grossing $3 million annually. Machus served as president of the Michigan Restaurant Association in 1970. He also presided in terms at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club, and he was a director of Birmingham Federal Savings Bank.
“My God — for the peace and quiet of a German prison camp,” Machus would tell his wife.
The restaurant expansion program continued through the 1970s with the Machus Sly Fox in Birmingham, Machus Plaza One in Rochester, and Mr. Mac’s Stable and the Paddock, a Dearborn restaurant. Foxys restaurants were located in Troy and Rochester.
If Harris and Elaine Machus had a bête noire, it was from the events of July 30, 1975, when Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, having last been seen in the parking lot of the Red Fox in Bloomfield Township. A City of Birmingham podcast records the resulting proprietorial anguish.
“Machus hated the notoriety that Hoffa’s disappearance brought, worrying that people would think he ran restaurants for gangsters and that it would tank his reputation,” the podcast observed. Instead, notoriety made the Red Fox a destination, bringing in new patrons.
Meanwhile, the chain grew further. In a nod to Elaine’s hometown, the Hungry Fox (1976) opened in Jacobson’s Saginaw location, part of the “superblock.”
A tribute by the Castle Museum of Saginaw Valley History described the Hungry Fox as a “moody, dimly lit room (that) featured dark paneling and deep red leather booths … As this was the ’70s, the waitstaff was insistent on using over-scaled peppermills to pepper salads.”
Machus Enterprises also operated Le Buffet Café on the department store’s second floor. This “frothy confection of white and hot pink” was known for its Seven Layer Salad. Machus operated the Saginaw restaurants until the mid-1980s, and later ran the Palace Grille at the Palace of Auburn Hills.
No restaurant is operating today. When Elaine passed away in 1999, she and Harris had been married 65 years. Harris was 92 years old when he died in 2001. His legacy is all the greater because he narrowly escaped death in a tank in 1943, endured captivity, and brought the Purple Heart and a Silver Star back to Birmingham.
