Duncan Hines Read online

  DUNCAN HINES

  Duncan Hines, standing before his huge collection of cookbooks, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Fall 1953.

  Duncan Hines

  How a Traveling Salesman

  Became the Most Trusted

  Name in Food

  Louis Hatchett

  Foreword by Michael and Jane Stern

  Copyright © 2014 by Louis Hatchett

  The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Previously published in 2001 by Mercer University Press

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the 2001 edition of this book as follows:

  Hatchett, Louis.

  Duncan Hines: the man behind the cake mix/Louis Hatchett.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-86554-773-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Hines, Duncan, 1880-1959. 2. Businessman—United States—Biography. 3. Food

  industry and trade—United States—Biography. 4. Hospitality industry—United States—

  Biography.

  I. Title.

  HC102.5.H56 H38 2001

  338.7’664’0092—dc21

  2001004756

  ISBN 978-0-8131-4459-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-4484-9 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-4483-2 (epub)

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  For my Mother and Father

  Contents

  Preface

  Foreword by Michael and Jane Stern

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Bowling Green

  Chapter Two: Out West

  Chapter Three: Florence

  Chapter Four: Chicago

  Chapter Five: Leave Me Alone or I’ll Publish a Book!

  Chapter Six: The Dinner Detectives

  Chapter Seven: Florence Hines’s Last Year

  Chapter Eight: Those Who Make Us Wish for Hollow Legs

  Chapter Nine: Back Home Again in Bowling Green

  Chapter Ten: Life Changes

  Chapter Eleven: A Few Pet Peeves

  Chapter Twelve: The War Years

  Chapter Thirteen: Clara

  Chapter Fourteen: Let’s Watch Him Eat

  Chapter Fifteen: Enter Roy Park

  Chapter Sixteen: The World of Duncan Hines

  Chapter Seventeen: The Office Life

  Chapter Eighteen: Passing the Torch

  Chapter Nineteen: Duncan Hines Goes to Europe

  Chapter Twenty: We Dedicate This Box …

  Chapter Twenty-One: Aftermath

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  No one had ever written a biography of Duncan Hines before, so I needed a lot of help. Fortunately, a number of people rallied to my cause; I apologize to anyone whom I have omitted in the following list. The most important person to this project was Duncan Hines’s great niece, Cora Jane Spiller, who not only gave me her valuable time but who enthusiastically ran down leads for me when all other avenues to my investigation were blocked. Her enthusiasm for the book was infectious and encouraging from start to finish. Every biographer should have someone like her to work with. She has been with me through thick and thin from beginning and end; without her support, I would have abandoned this biography long ago.

  This book originally took shape as a thesis for a Masters degree in History at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the birthplace and home of Duncan Hines for his first 18 and last his 20 years. I wrote the book first and then scaled it down to 120 pages for the thesis. The first draft of the book was 840 manuscript pages, which I subsequently trimmed to 740 pages.

  My main thesis adviser, Dr. Carol Crowe-Carraco, was the one who provided me with the day-to-day thread that helped bring the work to completion. But perhaps my greatest contacts, particularly on arcane questions of style and format, came from Nancy Baird, Connie Mills, and Sandy Staebel, all long-time employees of the Kentucky Library and Museum, which sits on the Western Kentucky University campus. When Dr. Crowe-Carraco was not available, all three answered my innumerable questions. As I worked on this manuscript 100 miles away from their offices, I must have called them 300 times in the course of a thousand days. They always helped when I asked, and I record my deepest appreciation here.

  While writing this book, perhaps the biggest treasure trove of Hinesiana came when I went to the Procter and Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, then the manufacturers of the Duncan Hines cake mixes, and asked to see their Duncan Hines collection. I spoke with Ed Rider, head archivist at P&G, and after a couple of minutes, his staff brought out several large files of Duncan Hines material. After going over these files for an hour, I asked the P&G staff to xerox everything and send it to me. They complied, and about ten days later I received a forty-pound box that nearly mirrored their entire Duncan Hines collection. It took almost a year to fully digest and make use of everything they sent. I offer my sincerest thanks to Ed Rider and his staff for providing me with this material. This would have been a much shorter book without their cooperation.

  During my two-year effort composing this book, a number of other people also helped me along the way. I want to thank Jane Jeffries for the critique of the first 300 pages of this book. I also want to thank her for asking me to discard the first 100 pages or so, which pertained not to Duncan Hines but the history of his family. Sometimes a writer can get carried away with the research, and I was including everything I found; I finally realized that not many people would be interested in the fact that Duncan Hines’s brother, Porter, put in the first sewer system in Calhoun, Kentucky in 1899.

  When Jane left the project, Wendy Yates took her place in critiquing the final product. When the manuscript had been completed, she read it and thought it to be boring, and after I reread it again, I had to agree. So I took a full year to rewrite the entire thing from top to bottom—twice. To Wendy I owe profuse gratitude.

  There were a number of people that I interviewed that I would like to thank. Duncan Hines’s brother-in-law, Robert Wright, provided me with some valuable personal insights on Hines’s character; Thomas C. Dedman, of the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, gave me plenty of corroborative insight into Hines’s influence on the lodging industry; Paul Ford Davis supplied me with a wealth of information about his former employer; Sara Jane Meeks, Mary Herndon Cohron and Wanda Richey Eaton, three of Duncan Hines’s secretaries in the 1950s, furnished me with a plethora of information concerning the working conditions while employed by Hines; Elizabeth Duncan Hines, the wife of his nephew, yielded some useful information; Edward and Robert Beebe, nephews of Duncan Hines’s second wife, provided me with some information about their aunt that was unknown to the Hines family; Caroline
Tyson Hines, offered me additional and corroborative insights into the personality of Duncan Hines; Maj. Gen. Richard Groves, a nephew of Duncan Hines and son of General Leslie Groves (“Father of the Atomic Bomb”), gave me some critical insights into the early years of Duncan Hines’s life which opened up a whole vista of understanding; much help came from Paul Moore, who prepared most of the Duncan Hines guidebooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Top Orendorf, who was Duncan Hines’s lawyer, also had some useful insights. Duncan Welch, who was Hines’s great nephew, gave me all sorts of information as well as provided me with some hilarious stories. Larry Williams, of the Williams Printing Firm was a big help in providing me the history of his business and Hines’s relation to it. Finally, I want to thank William Jenkins, a former professor of Government at Western Kentucky University, for providing me with a key clue in unraveling Duncan Hines’s past.

  The staffs of several libraries were important to me. These people do not get enough credit. I want to thank the college library staffs of the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana, Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois for their untiring efforts in running down leads and books for me whenever possible. I also want to thank the staffs of the public libraries in Henderson, Kentucky, Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana for providing me with the materials I needed to complete this project. I especially want to thank Jean Brainerd of the Wyoming Historical Society, who was of tremendous help in helping me piece together the early life of Duncan Hines.

  I also want to thank the staff of Reminisce magazine for printing my query about Duncan Hines. From that single notice, I received a large number of responses from people who traveled across America during the 1940s and 1950s who used Hines’s restaurant and lodging guides exclusively as their source for getting from one place to another in safety and comfort. Of particular usefulness were the insights of Roberta C. Gilbert, Elinor Macgregor, Frances Wood, Shirley Wheaton, to name a few. To all of them I offer my profuse thanks.

  I also want to thank Tim Hollis of the National Lum and Abner Society for providing me with tapes of the Lum and Abner story line featuring Duncan Hines (who was played by Francis X. Bushman on that particular show). Terry Tatum was of tremendous help in finding all the homes that Duncan Hines lived in during his years in Chicago. Lastly, I want to thank Dr. Virginia Grabili, a retired English professor whom I had at the University of Evansville, for deciphering several letters written by Duncan Hines’s brother in the 1880s; since she is a master of this sort of thing, I knew she could do it if anyone could. She made instant sense of the scribbles I handed her. I wish I had her talent. I also want to thank Maggy Shannon, Marc Jolley, Kevin Manus, and the staff of Mercer University Press for giving me the opportunity to tell a story worth reading and remembering.

  I do not think I have exhausted the subject. If I had been given a grant of several hundred thousand dollars, I could have flown all over creation to investigate every nook and cranny where Hines once trod. As it turned out, I think I did well with the slightly over $500 I spent on this project. But for the author who wants to investigate this subject further, this is a good place to start.

  22 March 2001

  Henderson, Kentucky

  FOREWORD

  Today, everyone’s a restaurant critic. In 1936, when Duncan Hines first published Adventures in Good Eating, he defined the job. Into a nation where eating on the road could be a genuine health hazard and where the few city guides were puffery financed by the restaurants they reviewed, Hines blazed a trail of honesty, reliability, and, most important of all, discovery. His groundbreaking achievement, brilliantly described in this book—which is so much more than simple biography—is as significant in the world of food as Thomas Edison’s is in lighting.

  Starting as nothing more than a hobby of jotting notes about the superior eating places he found during his work as a traveling salesman, Hines’s penchant for ferreting out good meals gained such a reputation among colleagues, friends, and friends of friends, all of whom sought him out for dining tips, that he decided to summarize and disseminate his notes along with his 1935 Christmas cards. The plan was for his little list to get all the advice seekers off his back so he could pay more attention to his real job. But as you will read in the following pages, “Hines had created a monster. Everyone, it seemed, wanted his restaurant list.”

  In an era long before television could create instant fame and blog posts could go viral, Hines’s singular way of recommending restaurants transformed him into a celebrity almost overnight, making him “America’s most authoritative voice on the best places to eat.” He was a man who had clearly found his destiny, for his unique gift was an ability to use simple, minimal verbiage to not just enumerate an eating place’s virtues but do it in a way that conveyed the flavor of the food and the feel of the dining experience. There have been many talented restaurant critics since Duncan Hines, but we know of none with such self-effacing skill.

  Louis Hatchett, himself a respected authority on regional American food, notes that Hines’s great contribution wasn’t only to tell people where to eat, but also to demonstrate that interesting meals could be the highlight of a road trip. His discoveries were exactly right for a population that had begun to see automobile travel as a privilege of life in America. While many of the places he recommended were big-city landmarks, his signature discoveries were more the rural tea rooms or pancake parlors, the small-town taverns or out-of-the-way country inns (as well as Colonel Sanders’s original fried-chicken café). Prior to his inventing the job of itinerant restaurant reviewer, travelers who strayed off the beaten path risked, at best, lousy meals or, worse, food poisoning. But a hungry nation soon learned that if Duncan Hines recommended a place, you could count on it. To follow him was to realize something that most of us now take for granted: eating out can be a great adventure. To read this book is to share in that adventure, as lived by a true culinary pioneer.

  Michael and Jane Stern

  Roy Park and Duncan Hines at Sales Executive Club, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, September 24, 1951.

  Left to right: Ruth Wakefield, Duncan Hines, Kenneth Wakefield, Clara Hines, The Toll House Restaurant, Whitman, Massachusetts, October 14, 1950.

  Duncan Hines in Hines-Park’s Test Kitchen, Ithaca, New York, October 13, 1953.

  Duncan Hines at work in his office. Bowling Green, Kentucky, April 23, 1951.

  Clara Hines at home, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Notice portrait of Duncan Hines above her (circa 1915), April 23, 1951.

  Left to right: Willard Rutzen, Marian Odmark of This Week in Chicago, and Duncan Hines in front of birthday cake, 10th annual Duncan Hines Family Dinner, Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, May 8, 1951.

  Duncan Hines Day, Palm Crest Hotel, Haines City, Florida, February 12, 1953. Left to right: Edward Marotti, Walter Jones, F. A. Randall (President Emeritus of Haines City Citrus Growers Association), Mrs. Roy Park, Harold Schaaf, Jim Hogge (Sales Manager), Carol Russ, R. V. Phillips, Clara Hines, Mrs. R. V. Phillips, Roy Park, Mrs. Nichols (Manager of the hotel), Mr. Mathias (horticulturist), Duncan Hines, Forrest Attaway, Ruth Higdon, Tom Brogdon.

  Cutting the cake for the second birthday of the Duncan Hines Cake Mixes. Chicago, Illinois, May 11, 1953. Left to right: Roy Park, Clara Hines, Duncan Hines, Allan Mactier (president of Nebraska Consolidated Mills).

  Clara and Duncan Hines, cutting a cake in the Duncan Hines test kitchens, Ithaca, New York, September 17, 1957.

  Roy Park addressing Duncan Hines Family Dinner members, Chicago, Illinois, May 5, 1958. Left to right: unidentified, Stewart Underwood, Dean Lundberg (Florida state senator), Carlton Dinkier, Jr., Allan Mactier, Bob Shetterley (P & G), Leonard Hicks, Senator Hruska, (Nebraska senator), Roy H. Park, Duncan Hines, Clara Hines, Dean Meek, Bob Grison, Matthew Bernatsky, Dean McAllister (Oklahoma University), Wright Gibson, Ned Cummins.

  Duncan Hines, with his brothe
r, Porter Hines, at latter’s home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, February 1959, just before he died.

  Duncan Hines and Mr. Hackney (proprietor of Hackney’s, said at the time to be the largest seafood restaurant in the world) in front of live lobster purifying pool, Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 22, 1949.

  Duncan Hines and Clara at Croton Heights Inn, Croton Heights, New York, May 29, 1949.

  Duncan Hines carving a turkey at home, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Fall 1953.

  Duncan Hines speaking with Bill McBride, host of the Cup & Saucer Club on WOW-TV, Omaha, Nebraska, March 14, 1952.

  Duncan Hines helping prepare a meal with World’s Largest Frying Pan at chicken supper given by the Poultry and Egg Association, Schollkopf Field, Cornell, Ithaca, New York, July 5, 1955.

  Bob Sebree with letters which came with the gifts from various restaurant, hotel and motel operators around the country to buy the Cadillac for Duncan Hines’s 70th birthday, Phoenix, Arizona, April 14, 1950.

  Duncan Hines being presented the key to his new Cadillac by Bobby Gosnell, outside of Green Gables restaurant at 70th birthday party, Phoenix, Arizona, April 14, 1950.

  Duncan Hines and Roy Park, sampling Duncan Hines Ice Cream, July 24, 1950.

  Duncan Hines on the set of “Prince Valiant” at 20th Century-Fox, with Debra Paget and Janet Leigh, Los Angeles, California, August 11, 1953.

  Clara and Duncan Hines at reception for Duncan Hines Day at the Town House Hotel, Los Angeles, California, August 11, 1953.

  Roy Park, Duncan Hines, Merle Johnson, Jim Cathey standing before billboard welcoming Duncan and Clara Hines to Los Angeles, August 11, 1953.

  Duncan and Clara Hines being interviewed at the World’s Largest Display of Duncan Hines Cake Mix on WBBC in Flint, Michigan, October 1, 1953.