Duncan Hines

by Louis Hatchett

  In the fall and winter of 1957, Hines appeared on several radio and television programs. On 6 November 1957, he appeared as a guest on CBS Radio’s “Sez Who Show” and made an appearance as a guest on CBS television’s “To Tell The Truth.” His media appearances were not sporadic; listeners in the middle Atlantic states could still hear him each weekday on a Mutual Radio Network program called “Let’s Travel,”721 which was broadcast over more than 300 stations.722 As 1957 faded into 1958, Hines began to slow down. While he may have tried to continue his hectic schedule, he took things a little easier. As the end of his eighth decade approached, he began letting Clara do more of the driving. They would start out each day taking turns at the wheel once an hour, but, after lunch, Clara more often than not took the wheel for the rest of the day.723

  In December 1957 Adventures in Good Eating celebrated its 50th printing, which now included nearly 3,000 restaurants. Lodging for a Night, meanwhile, had recently gone through its 40th printing,724 and Hines’s cookbook, Adventures in Good Cooking, had expanded its scope to include 700 recipes.725 Five months later, on 5 May 1958, this accomplishment was brought up at the Duncan Hines Family Dinner, which was held once again in Chicago. Roy Park announced at this meeting that there was a new development in the sale of the guidebooks; Park said that he had begun selling them to the nation’s libraries—something Hines had never considered; over 3,000 public libraries stocked their reference shelves with each annual edition.726

  By August 1958 Procter and Gamble was having a hard time keeping the grocery shelves full of their new Duncan Hines cake mixes. Their smoother batter, which created a moister cake, was proving to be very popular. As expected, because the Duncan Hines name was affixed to their packages, they moved at a dizzying rate. At Ralph’s Market in Los Angeles, California, 800 dozen packages of Duncan Hines cake mix, measuring 34 feet long by four feet deep, disappeared in a few days. At the Oakwood Super Market in Kingsport, Tennessee, store manager Dale Simpson reported that his 517-case display of Duncan Hines cake mixes sold out in three weeks. The Duncan Hines display of 350 cases at the Gold Star Market in Levant, New York, sold out in two weeks. In West Patterson, New Jersey, a 250-case display was set up on a Tuesday afternoon and was sold out by Friday. The store ordered fifty more emergency cases of the cake mix just to get through the weekend.727

  No one remembers exactly how Hines’s diagnosis for cancer came about, but the best recollection is that he was in Florida visiting family and friends in January 1958, when he felt ill enough to visit a local doctor who gave him his suspicions. Hines arranged through his Bowling Green physician, Dr. A. D. Donnelly, to be examined in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was there that he was officially diagnosed as having lung cancer. Although he remained active for a few more months, from that point on until his death, he was in and out of the Bowling Green hospital, suffering greatly, waiting for the inevitable.728

  In September 1958 Sara Meeks’ daughter was born and by that time Hines had become seriously ill. Meeks kept telling Clara, “I can’t come back to work. I don’t have anyone to keep this baby.” Clara responded by saying, “Sara, I can’t believe you would do this. [Mr. Hines] has been so good to you over the years, and he needs you now to help with his correspondence, and you’ve just got to come.” Meeks reluctantly agreed after it was explained to her that she did not have to come to work every day, but only on days when she was needed to write some letters. Therefore, when she was needed, Meeks took her baby to work with her. Hines paid her by the hour rather than put her on a regular salary. The overall experience, however, “was a pain in the neck,” Meeks recalled. Nevertheless, she was sympathetic; she could plainly see that Hines needed some one to help him. “He was not well at all. He didn’t care” about anything, she said. While she was trying to write his letters, her baby cried all day long, and while it did not bother Hines, it certainly bothered her. Sometimes Myrtle Potter, their black cook, would carry the child into the living quarters while Meeks typed. After a while, Meeks could plainly see that bringing her child to work did not sit very well with Clara, so occasionally she found a baby-sitter.

  By January 1959, Hines had lost much weight. Even though he was gravely ill, he never complained.729 He spent much of his time in bed, sometimes seeing guests and assorted friends. In retrospect, that he should meet his end as a result of lung cancer was not surprising. In the days before Americans knew for certain that cigarettes were harmful to one’s health, Hines smoked them to his heart’s content. “I almost never saw him without a cigarette in his hand,” said Mary Herndon.730 He always had a package of cigarettes and matches lying on a nearby table, ready to grab for his use. He would never carry them around in his shirt pocket; instead, when he was about the house, it was his habit to sit on the sofa in front of the coffee table, tear off not just a corner of the cigarette package but the entire top and chain smoke them one after another until they were gone.731 In the end, his pastime proved to be his undoing. At 7:30 AM on Sunday, 15 March, 1959, eleven days before his 79th birthday, Duncan Hines died in bed in his Bowling Green home.732

  21

  AFTERMATH

  Duncan Hines’s body remained at his home until about an hour before his funeral. The funeral services commenced at 2:00 P.M. on 17 March 1959, at the Christ Episcopal Church in Bowling Green.733 After the service had been performed, he was laid to rest next to his siblings in Bowling Green’s Fairview Cemetery.734 One month later, Hines’s estate was probated in Warren County court. According to the terms of his will, Clara was named executrix of his estate and was notified that he left her an estate worth $25,000.735

  On the occasion of his death, Hines was remembered for his gentle Southern sense of humor and how this quality emerged from the pages of his publications. Also remembered was “his criteria for evaluating eating places” which insisted on “cleanliness, courtesy, and ample portions served unobtrusively.”736 Said the Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hines was a perfectionist, as a real gourmet must be. He demanded not only excellent fare at the table, but decent service and a clean kitchen…. His influence on American cooking was considerable…. His accolade was enough to keep many small, out-of-the-way eating places in business.”737

  H. B. Meek, dean of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, summed up Hines’s importance to American culture when he said that “while Duncan Hines’ appraisal of public restaurants could not be expected to be infallible, his listings constituted a real service to the traveling public. To the operating restaurateur, Mr. Hines was equally helpful in that he recognized quality and publicized it.”738

  A few days after his death, he was eulogized in Congress by Rep. William Natcher, a native of Bowling Green, who stated that “All America has benefited from Duncan Hines’ ‘hobby,’ and every time a diner feels the satisfaction and glow that results from an excellent repast he can be grateful to Mr. Hines for recommending the restaurant that prepared the meal.”739

  Clara Hines’s life changed little after her husband’s death, with one exception. She felt uncomfortable living 2 miles from Bowling Green’s city limits and wanted to live in town. The home she had shared with her husband was rather small for her tastes so she decided to sell it. She had enough money from Procter and Gamble royalties to build a sizable home, so she built one three times as large. Early in 1960 she purchased a tract of land in Bowling Green’s upscale suburbs and built a three-bedroom home.740 On 1 June 1960 it was announced that her once-famous home had been purchased for $32,500 by W.B. Hardy, a funeral director from the nearby community of Smith’s Grove. Hardy took possession of the property on 1 July 1960 and immediately announced plans to turn the property into a second site for his funeral home business, adding that he would construct an adjoining $10,000 chapel to the existing structure.741 Today, when one drives by the building, he can easily distinguish where the structure Hines constructed ends and the newer addition begins.742

  In the fall of 1962 American travelers assumed that the
1963 Duncan Hines guidebooks would soon be issued for the coming year. But they and the proprietors who profited from them were to be disappointed. In late November each member of the Duncan Hines Family received in the mail a letter from Roy Park which stated some devastating news, which said that “publication of the Duncan Hines Travel Books will be discontinued for 1963. Sales of the books and the display of official Duncan Hines signs will continue until 31 December 1962. Unsold books…after that date may be returned for refund. If you are leasing official signs, you will receive special instructions concerning lease termination, refunds and returns…. This is, of course, a major decision. It means the suspension of a publishing activity which has provided a valuable service to American travelers for 27 consecutive years. It means that all of us…will be ending a long and friendly business association with you.”

  He explained his decision to terminate the business. He had concluded that

  the American traveling public no longer need[ed] the services provided by the Duncan Hines Travel books. The great need of 27 years ago has been erased by the remarkable upgrading of eating and lodging facilities all over the country. Today’s traveler is no longer a hardy pioneer challenging an uncharted sea with a stomach of iron and a back of steel. No matter his personal tastes, his financial well-being, or the direction of his wandering, the traveler today has a near infinite choice of high quality eating and lodging places. For example, Duncan Hines could find less than 200 places he thought worthy of mention at the time he published his first list of superior eating places. But today it is next to impossible to list all the worthy eating places in a practical-size[d] book. The same is true of places to lodge. The tremendous growth in the lodging field…has also greatly lessened the need for travel guide books.

  In his farewell letter Park pointed out

  the reliance of motorists on guide books has been reduced further by the rapid growth in turnpike and tollway traffic. Almost every toll or limited access highway has many convenient eating and lodging places which adequately serve the hurrying traveler. In view of all these changes, I believe you will agree that the traveling American has moved past an era of concern and moved into an era of confidence about traveling. That America now really loves to travel (but no longer views a guide book as a glove compartment “must”) is a great tribute to the pioneering efforts of Duncan Hines. Mr. Hines’ uncompromising crusade for improved hospitality along America’s highways…played a vital role in the constant upgrading which has brought about the present happy state of affairs across the country.

  He thanked everyone and wished them well. And the service which began with an unusual Christmas card became another relic of America’s cultural history.743

  Some quarters were saddened by Park’s announcement. “The American roadside will not look the same again,” the New York Herald-Tribune editorialized. “Within the next few months every one of those thousands of ‘Recommended by Duncan Hines’ signs, which hang in front of restaurants, hotels and motels and have become almost as familiar to motorists as Burma-Shave advertisements will be removed from the highways and by-ways of the U. S.” By June 1963 the last of the familiar signs with the distinctive logo had been eliminated from America’s roadside culture. While they lasted, the public snapped up the remaining Duncan Hines travel books; by the time the last one had been purchased, more than five million books had been sold. After 31 December 1962, they became collector’s items.744

  Some months after Roy Park made his stunning announcement, he moved his company from Ithaca, New York to Procter and Gamble’s company headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He remained with them as a consultant745 and left the organization in 1969,746 using his accumulated wealth to enter the multimedia field that would, in time, make him one of America’s wealthiest men.747 He was an astute businessman, and his company’s profits increased at an annual rate of 22 percent each year between 1963 and 1988. For Park the communications business was more of a congenial avocation than a ruthless, cutthroat enterprise. Chester Middles-worth, who looked after Park’s communication properties in Kentucky and North Carolina, said of his employer, “Even though he has a great deal of money, he does not strive or plan hour after hour for money.” Through Park’s eyes, what he did for a living was just easy.748

  The years slipped by, a couple of decades passed, and then Clara Hines died at her home at 7:45 A.M. after “a lengthy illness” on 8 August 1983, surviving Duncan Hines by twenty-four years. She was taken to the Gerard-Bradley Funeral Home and later buried near her husband.749 By then the Duncan Hines books were nothing more than a memory. And to most Americans, the name Duncan Hines was just a name on a cake mix box. After his death Hines’s face was removed from the cake mix packages, leaving only the familiar Duncan Hines logo, which remains to this day. In time, the man for whom the cake mix was named was largely forgotten.

  Roy Park died of cardiac arrest on 25 October 1993, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. At the time of his death he was eighty-three and still living in Ithaca. Shortly before his death, Park was listed in Forbes as the 175th richest man in America; he owned twenty-two radio stations, eight television stations and 144 publications, mainly periodicals located in the North Atlantic and Southern states. His estimated net worth was $550 million. Park once admitted that although he made plenty of money over the years, the most fun he had while making it was through his association with Duncan Hines.750

  In December 1997 Aurora Foods of Columbus, Ohio bought the Duncan Hines brand from Procter & Gamble for $250 million. Matt Smith was appointed to run the Duncan Hines division in 1998. He was followed in that position two years later by Michael Hojnacki.

  Several factors contributed to the termination of the Duncan Hines guidebooks. As Roy Park stated when he ceased publishing them, by 1962 there were far too many good restaurants and lodgings to be listed in a single volume. The day had passed when one book could contain them all. Perhaps his best reason, though, was an unspoken one: Duncan Hines was no longer around to actually recommend anything. After his death, somehow the phrase “Recommended by Duncan Hines” didn’t mean as much.

  When Americans travel today, it is mostly by Interstate, and the choices offered on restaurant menus from one end of this highway system to the other are increasingly limited and familiar. Writes David Schwartz,

  Whether in Massachusetts or Montana, run-of-the-road family restaurants seem to interpret American cuisine as breaded pork chops, Salisbury steak and fried fillet of (unnamed) fish accompanied by green beans out of a can…. Bogus theme restaurants with their decor ordered from a design catalog may serve regional specialties, but all too often the meals come as prepackaged, portion-controlled servings that were cooked up in a factory kitchen, flash-frozen and shipped halfway across the state to be microwaved back to some semblance of life—not a state of affairs that would have cut much mustard with the man from Bowling Green.751

  The interstate highway system has inadvertently created an American public who not only has forgotten how to enjoy the experience of traveling but the art of roadside eating. Many, if not all, have never practiced the pleasure of discovering little wayside restaurants that offer a smorgasbord of regional delights especially prepared in subtle and distinctive ways that can be found nowhere else. To any cultured palate a country ham cured in Hawaii is vastly inferior to one cured in Kentucky. Likewise, the pineapple dish prepared in a Hawaiian restaurant is stupendously better than one prepared in a rural Kentucky tavern. In his “autobiography” Duncan Hines saw the day of widespread regional differences ending, but he was optimistic that they would somehow always be with us. “Some regional preferences go on and on, pretty much unchanged from one year to the next,” he said.752 And he was right. Regional specialties still exist, the desire to cook recipes native to one’s geographical location will probably never die, and the food to prepare it will probably always be in abundance. Millions of families have recorded the recipes of countless regional dishes and many
of these have found their way into American restaurants. All one needs is the will to seek them out, taste them, and savor the joy they afford.

  In his 1938 Saturday Evening Post article, Milton MacKaye said of Duncan Hines after meeting him that there was “through his conversation a tender and touching attachment to such items as unsweetened corn bread, white, first-run maple syrup, and properly cured hams, which at once stamps him as a sentimentalist and poet.”753 MacKaye was correct, but Hines was more than that. He was a true American original who changed our expectations toward restaurants and what one should find when entering them. He created within the public mind an attitude that restaurant kitchens should be immaculately clean and above suspicion. In time, thanks to him, restaurant patrons came to demand that criteria, no matter where they dined. They believed their dining experiences should be ones to remember, not regret.

  So the next time the reader dines in a restaurant that affords him a memorable meal, the savory pleasure of which causes his tongue to sparkle and brings a smile to his face, he should remember Duncan Hines for a moment and lift a glass to toast his memory. Somewhere, you can be sure, Duncan Hines will wink and reciprocate the gesture.

  1 Cartoon, Moonbeams (December 1958): 6. Moonbeams is Procter and Gamble’s company magazine.

  2 Cora Jane Spiller, Interview with Louis Hatchett (Bowling Green KY): 10 May 1994.

  3 n.a., Descendants of Henry Hines, Sr. 1732-1810 (Louisville KY: John P. Morton & Company, 1925) 10. CSA is an abbreviation for Confederate States of America.