Thanks to Edith Wilson’s inauguration of a sensible work arrangement for Hines’s operation in the mid-1940s, by 1950 there were four employees working for Hines at all times, although sometimes their duties would overlap. Their desks were arranged in a circle in the middle of the office. Since the area where they worked was not large enough for Hines to have his own office, he spent much of his time in the building’s adjacent living quarters. There he worked through the morning, ate his noonday meal in the kitchen, took his ritual afternoon nap, which lasted until about 2:00 P.M., and worked some more until 5:00 P.M., when everyone went home.604
Although his employees worked hard for Hines and were not disloyal to him, they did draw the line in one respect. Hines revered the cooking skills of his black maid, Myrtle Potter, and so gave her free rein in their kitchen. Each day Mrs. Potter ensconced herself in their kitchen, preparing new concoctions for the noonday meal. More often than not his employees were the beneficiaries of these sumptuous, sometimes spectacular meals, usually compliments of Clara. Unfortunately, their palates were used to plain, home-cooked country food. The culinary gifts Clara proffered were sometimes so rich they could not finish them—and sometimes could not swallow them. As a result, they stealthily flushed many a meal down the toilet. They did not want to hurt the Hines’s feelings, so they always said they immensely enjoyed the food. “They liked different foods than we did,” said Sara Meeks. “They were used to these gourmet foods, and we were used to country cooking, like peach cobbler and chocolate cake, but when it came to all these tortes and things like that, we didn’t know what to think of it.”605 Mary Herndon, who also did her share of flushing, added that “they used a lot of liquor in some of the recipes… and neither Sara Jane nor I were not very fond of that taste. So I guess we told a few white lies from time to time. If we didn’t have time to flush it down the toilet, [the food] got shoved into our desk drawers real quickly, and we hoped that Mr. Hines wouldn’t have us get something out while he was standing over our shoulder.” Sometimes, “as soon as we’d taste it in front of him, we’d race each other to the toilet as soon as he went out the door. We’d enjoy some of it, too,” but some of their samples, particularly the desserts, were so laden with alcohol they dared not strike a match in the bathroom for fear the toilet bowl would burst into flames.606
18
PASSING THE TORCH
One of the many companies licensed to sell Duncan Hines products was Nebraska Consolidated Mills, Inc. The company was primarily a flour milling operation with little experience in consumer marketing. That quickly changed. Under the able leadership of Allan Mactier, the company’s ambitious 32-year-old president,607 Nebraska Consolidated worked out a satisfactory franchise agreement with Roy Park to sell flour-based products. A few months after the contract was signed, the small milling company began producing sixteen different kinds of cake and specialty mixes.608 Headquartered in Omaha, the company operated mills in four Nebraska cities, and one in Decatur, Alabama. After more than a year of laboratory and consumer testing, they introduced the Duncan Hines Cake Mixes in Nebraska and Iowa on 26 June 1951. In the winter of 1952 Nebraska Consolidated launched Duncan Hines Buttermilk Pancake Mix; in April 1953 it was followed with Duncan Hines Blueberry Muffin Mix. “All mix recipes were developed in Nebraska Consolidated’s kitchens, with the help and supervision of Duncan Hines and his staff.”609 While other mixes had been marketed as “just add water or milk” convenience items, the new company altered the formula: they left in the dried milk and disposed with the dehydrated eggs.610 Using Hines’s name proved a boon to the new enterprise: three weeks after the Duncan Hines cake mixes were introduced in supermarkets in Omaha, Nebraska, the product captured 48 percent of the cake mix market.611 If Roy Park ever worried about his company’s future, his thoughts of failure vanished after this success. From that point forward, Hines-Park Foods, to use Park’s apt word, “snowballed.”612
Products from Hines-Park were not at first widely available; initially, they were found only in supermarkets in selected cities. But once the company managed to firmly ensconce its products on supermarket shelves in targeted markets, it expanded to other geographical sections. For a variety of reasons, Park believed it the wiser strategy to infiltrate the nation’s supermarkets methodically rather than blanket the country with its products. His strategy proved sound, for in time most of them, particularly the cake mixes, began to catch on with the public through the best advertisement of all: word-of-mouth.
The best test of the public’s approval of the cake mixes was at the cash register. In mid-1952 Nebraska Consolidated Mills reported on its sales in Iowa and Nebraska: “All the Hinky-Dinky Stores ran out…. Safeway ran out during the afternoon, too, so we set out with two five-ton trucks and delivered 389 cases directly to the seventeen Safeway Stores in Omaha and Council Bluffs.” Within the next few months the plant delivered to supermarkets in these two states over 10,000 cases of Duncan Hines cake mix. That spring Hines-Park arranged to make their products available in the South. As in other states, housewives rushed to the supermarket to buy them. The cake mixes out-performed all other products. For example, on the first day that they were available in Bowling Green, Kentucky, one store’s entire supply of 1,400 packages was exhausted in just a few hours. The same phenomenon was replicated in grocery stores across the country. Everyone, it seemed, had to sample the latest Duncan Hines product.
Meanwhile, sales for Duncan Hines Ice Cream were going through the roof. By December 1951 ninety-five plants in locations from Los Angeles to Boston churned out nearly 3 million cartons of the expensive dessert each month, and there seemed to be no end to the public’s appetite for it.613 By early 1952 the rich, flavorful dairy product was available in 39 states.614 The company’s fortunes were further sweetened in July 1952 when the Duncan Hines ice cream bar was made available.615
By the end of 1951 Hines-Park had approved 165 different products from 120 food producers. The array of food Hines endorsed included twenty jams and jellies, eighteen jars of pickles, three types of mushrooms, and eleven ice cream toppings.616 The company’s product line-up also included fruit sherbet, salad dressing, ketchup, steak sauce, Worcester sauce, chili sauce, and sea food sauce. There was also a Duncan Hines Bread, which first appeared on supermarket shelves on 6 May 1952. Each loaf sold for about 25 cents, and it soon became one of the company’s better sellers; much credit to its success was due in part to its recipe of unbleached flour, honey (instead of sugar), and plenty of milk.617 Hines said that if a list could be compiled of his three-year-old company’s products it would become dated before the print was dry. In a short time the firm’s strategic and organizational efforts in placing and marketing its merchandise were successful enough to make the rest of the food industry take notice.618
When a grocery store customer bought a box or can from Hines-Park’s product line-up, his decision was often influenced by Ag Research, Hines-Park’s advertising arm. In 1949 Ag Research’s advertising budget was only $10,000; by 1952 that figure had climbed to over $1,000,000.619 But advertising alone could not account for the firms’s spectacular sales. This was proved when L. W. Hitchcock of the James H. Black Co. reported to Hines-Park executives of an experiment he conducted in Chicago. With the cooperation of a Chicago food distributor and several grocery stores it supplied, Hitchcock put Duncan Hines salad dressing on supermarket shelves to see if anyone would buy it based on the strength of Hines’s name. For five weeks there was “no advertising, store signs, no promotion of any kind.” The results were phenomenal. No matter where the salad dressing was displayed, supermarkets quickly sold all available stock. When it was later advertised in Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, supermarkets sold almost 9,000 cases in a few days.620
To promote the introduction of the company’s cake mixes, Roy Park put his best salesperson to work. Duncan Hines, with Clara at his side, journeyed across America on a public relations campaign to let the American public know what was waiting for the
m on supermarket shelves. As a pure public relations ploy, Park arranged for several cities and small towns to celebrate “Duncan Hines Day” or “Duncan Hines Week,” each of which was highlighted by an appearance by his famous partner.621 These promotional appearances were punctuated by scores of color newspaper advertisements as well as Hines’s appearances on radio and television. Throughout the promotional tour, when he was not entertaining a bevy of reporters, Duncan Hines was being hailed as a ceremonial guest of honor in dozens of cities across the country. During these public tributes to his integrity and character, Hines was often given the key to the city or an equivalent honor as he stood in front of a supermarket where his company’s cake mixes were on sale.622 He was on the road nearly every day, or so it seemed. His schedule would have exhausted most men his age, but Hines never complained; he was the center of attention and reveled in it.
By 1953 three flavors from the Duncan Hines line-up—white, yellow and devil’s food—had captured ten percent of the national cake mix market. Earlier that year Hines-Park Foods had “brought out other Duncan Hines mixes—for pancakes and waffles, gingerbread and muffins.” All sold very well. One year later, in the summer of 1954, according to a survey taken in the Southern states for Progressive Farmer magazine, “the Duncan Hines cake mixes ranked fourth behind Aunt Jemima, Pillsbury and Swansdown, and the pancake mix was fourth behind Aunt Jemima, Pillsbury and Ballard’s. In the Spokane market, Duncan Hines cake mixes were now “third behind Betty Crocker and Pillsbury, while the muffin mix” was first. A Fort Wayne, Indiana, market survey, released in October 1954, revealed the Duncan Hines cake mixes to be “ahead of all other brands.” When the cake mixes were introduced in Des Moines, Iowa in 1951, within months they had garnered 26% of the market; by 1954 they had snared 41% of it.
The Duncan Hines brand changed the way housewives perceived cake mix preparation, and its introduction stirred up the industry. “When they originally appeared on the market,” reported Advertising Age in an article reviewing the brand name’s spreading popularity, cake “mixes were promoted mainly as a convenience product.” Housewives who bought a box were expected to follow the printed instructions: “Just add water and pop in the oven…. The Duncan Hines mix turned the tables on the established brands by telling the housewife to add two fresh eggs as well as water.” Adding authority to the product, the cake mix package carried a picture of Duncan Hines next to his statement: “I have found that strictly fresh eggs mean a bigger, better cake…in appearance, flavor and freshness.” This approach to manufacturing cake mixes attracted an increasing number of consumers and was soon copied by other food production firms.
By the mid-1950s the objective that Roy Park had originally set out to accomplish—to create a product people would respect and enthusiastically purchase regardless of its price—had largely been met. When asked about his success, Park explained that marketing “quality” was a sound selling approach, “because it recognizes the desire and ambition of every American to move up toward a higher standard of living. It’s not enough…to stress nutritional values. Food has tremendous possibilities for glamorizing, and we should sell all the joys that go with good eating.”623
As Hines-Park Foods was expanding, Duncan Hines’s life was taking all sorts of interesting turns. In October 1952 he began appearing regularly on network radio with Roy Park. According to one newspaper account, Hines inaugurated “a five-day-a-week radio show over the Mutual Network,” the purpose of which was “to feature chats about good food, where to find it, and where to spend the night after you have eaten it.”624 Meanwhile, Hines was honored on Broadway, when his persona was acknowledged in Guys and Dolls in the song “If I Were a Bell.” He even had a horse race named after him: Omaha’s “Duncan Hines purse.” None of this publicity hurt his syndicated newspaper column which by November 1951 could be read in 100 newspapers around the country with a combined circulation of 20,000,000.625
In the summer of 1953 Adventures in Good Eating, Inc., was overhauled. The change came when Hines finally concluded he was no longer physically able to maintain his hectic pace of life. While he had been looking for a capable person to manage his business, in the end he turned to Roy Park, who had no qualms about operating it. Running it was the least he could do for the person who had helped make him a wealthy man. Of course, because Hines-Park was located in Ithaca, Park could not operate it from Bowling Green. Therefore, on 29 July 1953,626 Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. was relocated to Ithaca, New York, and reconstituted as the Duncan Hines Institute with Roy Park as its president.627 The institute’s activities included not only publishing the guidebooks and cookbook but also leasing the famous “Recommended by Duncan Hines” signs.628 In early 1954, six months after Park had staffed his Ithaca organization and assigned them specific duties, Hines relinquished his daily responsibilities. In his hands, Hines was sure, Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. would continue serving the public responsibly. The new books still retained Hines as its “editor-in-chief,” but the older man had almost nothing to do with the final product.629 Park hired his own “dinner detectives” to uncover America’s best dining experiences. Each “detective” was given a territory to cover, and as a team they inspected the growing number of listings that kept filling the guidebooks’ pages. Their number eventually totaled thirty-seven individuals armed with notebooks that read “Duncan Hines Sent Me.” They did efficient, excellent work, but they were not cut from the same cloth as those that worked with Hines. They were more or less products of man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit-America who did not become giddy, as had their predecessors, over finding a restaurant that served “real” mashed potatoes.630
Nevertheless, with characteristic thoroughness and professionalism, Park spared nothing on his new endeavor. His “conception of what the guidebooks should encompass outstripped anything Duncan Hines alone had been able to accomplish.”631 Regular purchasers of Adventures in Good Eating could detect a difference as soon as they laid eyes upon the new edition. Unlike the plain, bright red books Hines produced, the new version was a multicolored, modern-looking affair that featured a happy family of four dining within the atmospheric confines of luxury and splendor.632 As editor-in-chief, Park wrote the introductions to each guidebook. Toward the end of his remarks, he added that the Duncan Hines Institute’s three guidebooks now listed a combined total of over 10,000 eating and sleeping establishments. Park closed with a subject dear to Hines’s heart: restaurant cleanliness. “Nothing is more important than cleanliness,” wrote Park. “The sanitary conditions under which food is prepared, cooked and served are important in promoting and safeguarding your health.” In a bow to Hines’s influential crusade over the past two decades, he wrote that in recent years, “many laws have been passed in states all over the nation to safeguard the public’s health.” As Hines did before him, Park warned readers that “people eating out should give sufficient thought to the kitchen of a public eating place…rather than be guided solely by chromium fronts and attractive interior decorations.”633
Another aspect regular purchasers of Adventures in Good Eating noticed about the new book was that it was made of cheaper material. Gone was the sturdy, high quality publication Hines had created. It was now a paperback book, one that could easily fall apart after a year’s use. Gone also were the spacious margins large enough to write notes alongside the restaurants in question; now the listings were tightly packed. Also, while guidebook buyers certainly had more entries than ever from which to choose, they were also hard to read. The biggest void in the new editions, however, was the pleasure in reading it. Park replaced Hines’s folksy writing style with one that was sparse, businesslike, and to the point, mainly because, at a still static price of $1.50 and an ever expanding number of listings, it had to be. While the new guidebooks lacked Hines’s special sparkle, blame for the compact look and their curt, terse style should not go to Roy Park; rather, it should go to Hines. Thanks to him, among other extenuating factors, by 1955 there were so many g
ood restaurants and quality lodgings from which to choose that Park found it increasingly difficult to compress all his information in a single volume.634
While the abundance of fine restaurants and quality lodgings was now Park’s headache, not Hines, the famed eater did not slow down too much. At age 74 he had a lot of life left in him, and he put it to good use as the roving ambassador for the Duncan Hines Institute. Radio and television appearances between restaurant meals began to occupy more of his busy schedule. And he was still entertaining to read about. One day in January 1954 Hines told his local newspaper about his problems with the department of agriculture. Possibly because he resided in the countryside, census takers had listed his occupation as that of “farmer.” Because of this unwanted classification, for several years the department had been sending him, in his words, “enough literature on crop raising to satisfy half of Kansas.” Exasperated by this waste of paper, he told the census takers that the only things that grew on his property were weeds.635
Throughout 1954 the reading public saw plenty of Duncan Hines, perhaps more than they had in the previous five years combined. He seemed to be featured either on the cover or within the pages of every major publication in the country. As the year began, he and Clara were the subjects of the 12 January edition of Look, the popular, pictorial weekly newsmagazine. In this extensive piece, Hines revealed his choices for what he believed were the ten best motels in America. The genesis for the piece came in the early fall of 1953, when Look asked him for help on a piece about motels designed for the traveling public. With the prospect of 40 million vacationing Americans traveling across their nation that summer by car instead of the traditional way—which before the Second World War was by train—Look magazine felt that readers needed guidance from a pre-eminent authority. The magazine pointed out that in the coming year a dwindling number of Americans would frequent hotels; they would instead be traversing the far reaches of the countryside in their new automobiles and would be miles away from large cities—and most hotels. Due to this development, consequently, more Americans than ever would be sleeping in the next best form of accommodation: motels. Times were changing, and that included types of accommodations. What better way to inform the public on where to stay, what to look for in a good motel, and which ones to avoid than to get such information from America’s best known traveler, Duncan Hines, whose book, Lodging for a Night, listed over 3,000 potential places? Besides, if it was recommended by Duncan Hines, how could American travelers go wrong?
Duncan Hines Page 25
