Duncan Hines

by Louis Hatchett

  Mary Herndon remained in his employ from the summer of 1951 until the first couple of weeks in 1954. When she applied for the job, she had just completed two years of study at Highland Park Junior College in Highland Park, Michigan. Shortly after her graduation in May and her return to Auburn, a small town located 20 miles west of Bowling Green, she learned of an employment opportunity with Hines by way of a family friend, Hines’s niece, Louise Hines. When she applied for the job, she expected to be interviewed by one of his secretaries. To her surprise, her interviewer was none other than Duncan Hines himself. With little fanfare she was hired on the spot and told to return the next day. She was given no tests or applications to fill out. She was hired on a trial basis to see how she would work out. Hines would quickly discover for himself if he wanted her to remain. On her first day on the job, he took her into his living room, offered her a seat at a card table, sat down across from her and began dictating letters. She found his style of dictation surprisingly eccentric. Unlike the straightforward, curt manner most businessmen used, his manner of dictation was much like his speech and train of thought: jerky, frequently unorganized, and filled with a profusion of jokes and ad-libs. The whole purpose of each letter was to amuse the reader. Entertainment was the most important consideration. She never anticipated a boss like this in secretarial school. As did his other secretaries, Herndon adjusted. When she typed her first letters, she asked the other secretaries if Hines was really serious about signing his correspondence “the head rooster.” It was explained to her that he used that nom de plume only in letters to his friends. Nevertheless, for the first few days, his unusual method of dictation nearly drove her crazy, and she was more than thankful that another secretary took most of it.580

  When his secretaries were not taking dictation for his thousands of friends, they often composed many of his letters. While personal letters required an individual response, they learned quickly the language to use when responding to a particular type of letter, such as someone asking if Hines would endorse a product or if he would check out a restaurant. “We pretty much knew what we had to write,” said Herndon. Their replies were, more or less, form letters. “A lot of times,” she said, “we would just write our own letters and he would read them and sign them.”581

  Her duties were numerous. Herndon sent out questionnaires to members of the Duncan Hines Family; made corrections in the guidebooks when the questionnaires were returned; transferred that information to new, upcoming editions; and prepared the prototype for each guidebook page before it was sent to Paul Moore in Nashville. Specifically, she sent correction cards to all establishments listed in the guidebooks to ascertain if there were any changes that differed from their last listing. When the information was returned, she had to make the necessary changes in the next edition’s working prototype. All new changes in the listings, even if they were nothing more than little, insignificant details, were retyped. Paul Moore then transformed Herndon’s cut-and-paste pages into a tentative text and returned it for final proofreading before she handed it over to Hines for his final inspection and approval.

  In the early 1950s Clara and his secretaries saw the gradual ravages of age creeping into Hines’s personality. Some days he was his usual self, but other days he was a little difficult to work with. Said Herndon, “He got to the age [where] sometimes he would do things and wouldn’t tell us. Or he would try to tell us to do something in a way that we knew wasn’t the right way. And sometimes we would have to go to Mrs. Hines and explain [the situation] to her and let her talk to him.” He may have been called “the head rooster” but they knew who ruled the roost; he always listened to Clara and never questioned her judgment. She was his protector and friend. And she kept her husband’s secretaries happy, when she could.

  Herndon saw many things come in the mail while she worked for Hines. People sent him all manner of food to taste. But the item the office most received, it seemed, was fruitcake. They received so many fruitcakes at Christmas that Hines unceremoniously gave them to his secretaries to enjoy. In fact, there was no telling what might turn up in the mail. Once in July 1953, said Herndon, “somebody from Arkansas sent him a 600-pound watermelon.” There is no record of how much postage was used to send it, or how long it took to dispose of it, but Herndon and her fellow employees all got a chance to sink their teeth into it.582

  The woman who was employed by Hines longer than any other was Sara Meeks, a Bowling Green native who worked for him from 1951 to 1959. After leaving high school, she went to Bowling Green Business University583 because Western Kentucky Teachers College at that time did not offer business courses.584 She enrolled in 1950 and took the usual secretarial courses, which included typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and penmanship. After graduation in May 1951, the college’s employment department learned that Hines needed an employee and directed her to his doorstep.

  Meeks soon found herself taking most of Hines’s dictation, much of which was directed to Roy Park. She was also assigned other chores, such as proofreading the guidebooks. “I didn’t know much about the marks that you were suppose to make when you were proofreading,” said Meeks, but she did “know that if there was a place that [Hines] no longer wanted to be listed, we would write T/O through the listing,” which was a shorthand signal for “take out.”

  The task Meeks felt most honored to undertake was billing the sign rental clients. Her duties were simple enough. She kept track of two sets of signs; one set was 16” wide by 20” inches high, while the other set was somewhat smaller. She also kept track of what she charged each customer who used them; Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. charged its customers $20 for the sign and $10 each year for the tags that were attached to little hooks in the sign’s design. The tags indicated the year of the latest recommendation; if the year was 1950 but the sign’s tag read 1949, it meant the establishment’s recommendation had not been renewed. All information pertaining to the sign rentals was kept in an office safe in twelve heavy, metal books, one for each month. Each book told whose rent was due. For instance, there was a metal book for all January rentals, another for all February rentals, etc. For Meeks the busiest month—and the heaviest book—was September. Once each month, she opened the safe and retrieved the metal book for that segment of the calendar. Meeks never tired of this assignment and found it “an honor” that Hines let her do it, because she knew how important it was to him.

  Many owners of the establishments Hines recommended would buy more than one sign. Some of the extra “Recommended by Duncan Hines” signs they bought were nailed to roadside billboards, so passing motorists would see them. Some proprietors bought as many as ten signs and nailed them to fence posts. Needless to say, it pleased Hines when they did this. The income he derived from his sign business was also used to pay his employees, who received a weekly salary (in 1951) of slightly over $40 or, more precisely, a monthly salary of about $165, which was considered good pay at the time. Hines offered no benefits, such as retirement or health coverage but, in that day and age, few employers did. Employees were encouraged to save their money, not spend it.585

  On her first day on the job, Sara Meeks was introduced to Edith Wilson, the office manager, who had been efficiently running the office since 1946. In Hines’s office the redheaded Wilson displayed a stern self-discipline and an exacting attention to detail. Hines valued this quality, and he owed her (and Clara) a debt of gratitude; thanks to them his business and financial affairs were not a total mess.

  At about the time Meeks came there for employment, Hines had been having problems with Mrs. Wilson. Earlier in the year, she informed him that she was going to leave to pursue a career as a legal stenographer and court reporter. It is unclear as to precisely why Wilson left him, but it could be that the pleasure of working for Duncan Hines had worn off. The two were temperamental opposites. Hines was usually a relaxed, easygoing individual, taking his time in whatever he did. Wilson, by contrast, was just the opposite. As his office manager, she did not exac
tly treat her fellow employees like marionettes, but by all accounts she ran a tight ship. But Hines and Wilson were, however, alike in one respect; there were times when both could become rather volatile if their tempers were stretched beyond a certain point. The two were both of Scottish descent, and the human chemistry between them, over the years, may have added more than a few gray hairs.586 Wilson probably left Hines when she had endured his lackadaisical business practices long enough. She probably also surmised that Hines’s inefficient office conditions, as she saw them, would only get worse with time. He would never change his passive manner of running his business. She may have concurred with Clarence Welch’s assessment that Hines’s business was only a highly successful hobby.587 Although Sara Meeks did not get to know Mrs. Wilson very well, she remembered the older woman as “maybe a little pushy. She felt her importance. At least that was the way the young girls who were working there felt toward her.” Although Mrs. Wilson was very kind to them, Meeks added that, “I felt like there was friction at one point between she and Mr. Hines and Mrs. Hines. I felt like her days were numbered, and evidently they were.”588 That may very well have been the sentiment in the office at the time, but it is contradicted by those who knew Edith Wilson in her later years. Until the day she died (30 September 1993)589 she had nothing but complimentary things to say about Hines—and especially about Clara; she was always very proud that she had once been employed by Duncan Hines.590

  Although Hines was suddenly without an office manager, he assumed he could find a replacement without any trouble. But in this case he was wrong. Over the next few months looking for an office manager to replace Mrs. Wilson proved to be a frustrating experience, and it ultimately led to his handing over his entire business operation to Roy Park. At first, everything looked rosy. In February 1952, eight months after Edith Wilson left for greener pastures, Hines replaced her with another office manager, a young man named Donald H. Molesworth, who had been recommended to him by acquaintances who thought very highly of his organizational and business skills. Molesworth, he was told, was the one who would increase sales and transform his office staff into a crackerjack operation.

  Not long after Molesworth had been hired, he began earning his keep by firing several of Hines’s employees, who, in his estimation, were not worthy of a paycheck. In March 1952 Molesworth fired a woman who had been serving as the office stenographer. In her place, he hired nineteen-year-old Wanda Richey, a young woman who had graduated from high school a year earlier. On her first day on the job, Richey was surprised that her office companions were approximately her own age; she had expected the staff to be much older. Her new friends and co-workers were Sara Meeks and Mary Jo Agee, among others. Over the next month or so, Molesworth continued hiring and firing other secretaries until he settled on an office crew he believed to be reliable. When he fired the office’s billing clerk, he gave the job to Richey. A few days later, he asked Mary Jo Agee to take Richey’s place as stenographer.

  As billing clerk, Richey’s job was “to bill the people we shipped the books to.” The only other job Richey was required to do was take dictation when Meeks was out of the office. At first she felt intimidated at the prospect of taking dictation from a famous man like Duncan Hines, but the first time he asked her to come into his office for a dictation session, he went out of his way to make her feel comfortable. As Mary Herndon had discovered, so now did Richey: taking dictation from Hines was quite an experience; no one in secretarial school had ever prepared her for such colorful expressions. Overall, though, she enjoyed the five months she worked for him, offering that he “was not hard to work for” at all. Richey left Hines for another job in August 1952. When the day came to tell him the news of her imminent departure, she dreaded the experience. She thought he might chew her out. But when she went into his office to tell him of her decision to leave, he surprised her with his thoughtful understanding, and as she walked out the door that afternoon, his blessing “left a very good impression.”591

  Donald Molesworth, on the other hand, did not even attempt to make a good impression. His co-workers hated him. Molesworth, who was in his late twenties or early thirties, was by all accounts, an attractive young man who let it be known that from now on he ruled the roost.592 And he crassly reminded everyone that he had Hines’s blessing to run Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. as he saw fit. “I don’t think he went over with any of us very well,” said Mary Herndon. “I was not impressed.”593 None of those under his thumb could stand his arrogant, overbearing manner. Meeks said that one day “he came in,” and announced that “he was our boss” and let them know it in no uncertain terms. Molesworth’s personality notwithstanding, for a time he had the run of the place and forcefully took charge of the company’s day-to-day operations. So confident was Hines in the young man’s abilities that he even gave him a company car, which, said Meeks, “was really something in those days. You didn’t hear of a company car that often.” For a while Hines was very happy with Molesworth. The young man was bringing in plenty of new business. But one day in June, after only four months on the job, Hines abruptly fired him and angrily told him never to set foot in his office again. The cause of the rift was probably ignited when Hines inspected the company car that Molesworth was driving and discovered candy wrappers and “other things” in the floorboard that made him wonder if his company car was being used for recreational rather than business purposes.594

  J. T. “Top” Orendorf, who usually served as Hines’s Bowling Green attorney, was in his office the following day when Molesworth came to see him. Orendorf had been expecting this meeting. Upon his arrival in Bowling Green, Molesworth had consulted with him, and asked Orendorf for advice on the pros and cons of working for Hines. The lawyer told the young man that while it was not generally well known outside Bowling Green, Duncan Hines’s temperament could on occasion “flare up from time to time,” particularly as he got older. Orendorf advised Molesworth that he had better protect himself, just in case his employment became an incompatible affair. Molesworth followed the lawyer’s advice and got a written three-year contract outlining the terms of his employment. Hines thoroughly trusted the judgment of the party who had recommended Molesworth, so he eagerly signed the document the young man shoved under his nose. Now Molesworth sat before Orendorf, astonished, suddenly without a job, wondering what to do about it.

  Orendorf wrote Hines with regard to Molesworth’s predicament. He also talked to Hines’s certified public accountant, Cecil “Hoot” Holland, who kept possession of all his bookkeeping records. Orendorf said, “Hoot, I’ve got this lawsuit, and I have to know in this lawsuit what happened to the business after this young man went there.” After examining the books, Orendorf concluded that Hines could not defend Molesworth’s firing on the grounds that he caused Hines to lose business; nor could Hines use the argument that Molesworth was inefficient; on the contrary, every indication showed that he had increased sales perceptively; in fact, in the short time he had worked for Hines, sales had doubled. After looking at the figures, Orendorf could only conclude that Molesworth “was a fine salesman” and that Hines had no grounds for firing him. Orendorf attempted to discuss the matter, but Hines “just blew up” saying Molesworth was “no count” and refused to talk about it. His mind was made up. Molesworth was not going to work for him—contract or no contract. “As a last resort,” on 23 June 1952, Orendorf filed a lawsuit against Hines in federal court. Since Hines’s usual attorney was on the other side of the argument this time, he hired Bowling Green’s G. D. Milliken, Jr. to defend him.595 On 13 November 1952, a jury trial was held. The case could not be tried in a Kentucky court, because Hines’s business had originally been incorporated in Illinois, so the trial was held in Federal court in Bowling Green. All current and former employees who had worked for Hines during Molesworth’s tenure were summoned to testify at the jury trial, which began at 9:00 A.M. that morning and was resolved the same day.596

  During the course of the trial Milli
ken, acting on Hines’s behalf, repeatedly tried to demonstrate the things that Molesworth had not done well.597 Milliken contended that Molesworth had methodically changed the structure of Hines’s office to the point that it was unrecognizable to his employer. All Hines wanted in an office manager was someone to maintain the structure he had created—and make it run smoothly; he did not need to employ someone who was anxious to tear it apart, even if it was at times inefficient.598 Sara Meeks, like the other employees who had worked under Molesworth, had to testify against him. “I was supposed to testify that this man did not do a good job…and I remember that when I came off the stand, Mr. Hines looked at me,” nodded his head approvingly, and said softly ‘good job.’ “He was happy with what I had said.”599 The definitive moment during the day-long trial came when Hines’s own accountant, Cecil “Hoot” Holland, took the witness stand and testified that, based on the company’s bookkeeping, Hines’s business had prospered during Molesworth’s tenure.600 Toward the end of the day the jury returned their verdict in favor of Molesworth. To put the contentious proceedings to rest, an order of satisfaction was filed in court six days later by both parties on 19 November 1952. In the end, Hines was ordered to pay Molesworth (who, by the time of the trial, had moved to Westminster, Maryland)601 a sum of $8,850,602 a considerable figure by 1952 standards. Despite his financial loss, Hines was glad the trial was over. Said Meeks, “He was so happy to get rid of [Molesworth] that he didn’t care what he had to pay him.”603