Duncan Hines (18 page)

On 20 December 1938, after traveling most of the month through the Southwest, Hines's car pulled in front of his sister Annie's Bowling Green home. He spent Christmas there, trying to relax as he decided how to manage his time and newfound fame.

Hines may have had thoughts of opening an office in Chicago, but his sister had other ideas. During his Christmas visit, Annie, ever-protective of him, insisted he leave Chicago and return to Bowling Green. She told him that, since Florence was no longer around to look after him, she wanted to take her place. “What if something happened to him?”, she asked. “To whom would he turn?” Hines hesitated making a commitment, but Annie insisted he seriously consider her suggestion. He therefore gave it some prolonged thought, turning over in his mind the myriad problems and organizational turmoil such a move would entail. Returning there did have some merits. He was almost 59 years old and not getting any younger, and since he and Florence were childless, there were no close relations in Chicago he could turn to in case of emergencies. In this light, Bowling Green offered some security. Then another factor entered his mind's calculus. Now that he was financially secure, he no longer needed Chicago and its myriad printing firms to secure lucrative sales jobs. But perhaps the most important argument that clinched his decision, made by both Annie and his brother, Porter, was that he had been away from home too long. It was time to come home. After several days, Hines agreed to return to the city of his birth in the spring.
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Before he could move, though, there was much work to do. Hines spent the winter of 1938-1939 preparing his new guidebook editions. The days passed quickly. On 1 February 1939, Hines gave the Donnelley company the proof-sheets for the new 1939 editions of
Adventures in Good Eating
and
Lodging For a Night
. He ordered Donnelley to print 10,000 copies of the lodging book and 25,000
copies of the restaurant guide.
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Both editions had become considerably fatter in appearance since their last printings. So much new information had passed across Hines's desk during the preceding year that both guidebooks had to undergo many changes, additions and subtractions. It was hard work but worth the trouble. The new edition of
Adventures in Good Eating
now had over 2,000 listings, and it had expanded, as had the lodging book, to 288 pages. In all subsequent printings, Hines tried to hold his publications' page length to that number.
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His printing bill for the restaurant guide cost him $4,936, while the bill for the lodging guide cost him $1,789. Depending on the size of the order, additional printings of 5,000 or 10,000 units cost him between $1,100 and $1,800.
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Fortunately, Hines could now afford such expenses. By his own estimate, within forty months after the appearance of his first book in 1936, the cumulative number of units published under his name came to a figure that well exceeded the 100,000 mark.
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Of
Adventures in Good Eating
alone, Hines estimated that by the end of April 1939 it had sold 75,000 copies.
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Upon completion of releasing his latest guidebooks to the public, Hines turned his attention to moving to Kentucky.

The decision to move back to Bowling Green was not an easy one. Despite the desire to return to his boyhood residence, Chicago had been his home for the past thirty-four years; leaving it meant leaving his friends behind. One of the move's drawbacks was that few of his boyhood friends still lived in Bowling Green; most had either departed for other cities or had died. Still, the choice of returning there was his, and Annie and Porter Hines made sure he never regretted it.
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On 31 March 1939, Duncan Hines's nephew (Annie's son who was also named Duncan Hines) and his young wife, Elizabeth, journeyed from Bowling Green to Chicago to help their famous relative move his belongings to Kentucky. In Elizabeth Hines's view, helping her husband move his uncle back to Bowling Green was an odd experience. Hines was a stranger to her. She had only met him once a few years earlier, when he and Florence had
stopped through Bowling Green for a quick, one-hour visit. She felt a little uneasy about helping a man she barely knew move into her already crowded home. Elizabeth lived with her husband's parents, Annie and Scott Hines, and though their house was a sizable one, it was not large enough to easily accommodate five people. She feared the addition of a distant relative from Chicago would create tension within the household. Still, the Hines family was a very close-knit one, and loyalty to family came first, and for that reason she agreed to accompany her husband to Chicago. Annie could not make the trip because her husband had a delicate heart condition and could not exert himself enough to travel that far without serious repercussions. Due to this circumstance Annie insisted her son and daughter-in-law go in her place. The young couple's trip took all day. When they arrived at his Chicago apartment that evening, Hines was waiting for them, ready to go.

Before they headed south for Kentucky, however, Hines took the young couple out for a night on the town. He “thought…that the Morrison Hotel was the best place to eat in the whole world,” said Elizabeth, recalling the night they departed. “I remember going to the Morrison Hotel for dinner.”
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Afterward, the three returned to their uncle's apartment and picked out items to be sent by freight to Kentucky, then waited until Hines made arrangements by phone to have the articles collected and shipped. With that completed, they packed his remaining belongings into both Hines' automobile and their own, and as the moon shone high above them, headed southward through Indiana down U. S. 41 for Kentucky. Said Elizabeth Hines, fifty-four years after the event, “I can't believe that we left at night.” Her husband drove the lead car, while, at his insistence, Hines drove the second vehicle, with Elizabeth at his side. It snowed on the way down, and throughout the trip Elizabeth believed Hines to be “the worst driver in the world that night…. It was a snowy, blustery night—terrible.”
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Despite her opinion of Hines's driving skills, on the following morning, 1 April 1939, both cars arrived “safely home” in Bowling Green without incident.
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With the exception of the downtown area, Bowling Green in 1939 was markedly different from what is there today. There was no by-pass encircling the compact town, nor was there an interstate highway and a toll-road intersecting near the city. The town square, known as Fountain Square, served as the metropolis's focal point. Surrounding it were the bank, the post office, the courthouse, and a variety of offices and stores, which were surrounded by the city's residential area.
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For a few months after his arrival, Hines lived with his sister Annie at 902 Elm Street, just a few short blocks from Fountain Square. He temporarily used her home as his business location until he could find an office. Once Hines settled in, though, he returned to his natural state: perpetual restlessness. He missed the daily hustle of city life. To counter the tranquility he found in Bowling Green, he began to pursue various hobbies when he was not working. Weeks after his arrival, Hines and his namesake nephew, Duncan, tried curing country hams in barrels of brine. For some reason the venture was not terribly successful. Nevertheless, Hines was not idle. “I don't think there was ever a time when his mind wasn't clicking,” said Elizabeth Hines.
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When he was in town for a week or two, Hines and his brother, Porter, who lived a few blocks away on Park Street, spent much time together. They were wonderful companions, sometimes spending two or three evenings a week in Annie's living room or on the front porch, swapping riotous stories of their boyhood days. Like most close-knit Southern families, the Hines clan gathered for formal dinners on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. On these occasions, Porter Hines carved the ham while Duncan simultaneously carved the turkey.
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To make Hines feel more at home when he was with them, family members kidded him about being “the head rooster.” This nickname, which Hines proudly wore, eventually led family members to giving him toy roosters as gag gifts. The inside joke with roosters even extended to Hines's employees. One of his secretaries once asked him to autograph a cookbook; Hines complied with her request, scribbling his signature along with the initials, “H. R.” When Hines was away on long trips many years
later, it was this same secretary's responsibility to watch the office all day alone. To show her his genuine appreciation for her loyalty, Hines frequently brought her little gifts from his travels. After returning from one trip, Hines, with a twinkle in his eye, presented her with two ceramic roosters.
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His relatives did what they could to make him feel welcome; they cordially invited him to their annual outdoor activities and were delighted when he came. The Duncan family always had a July picnic in Browning, Kentucky, at the home of Dillard Duncan, the grandson of Joseph Dillard Duncan. It was Dillard Duncan's tradition on these occasions to prepare a wonderful noon-time barbecue; other family members supplemented the feast with their own home-made dishes. Little get-togethers such as these went a long way to prevent Hines from missing Chicago. He may have had some initial qualms about returning home, but after his first summer there he never regretted it.

Regardless of how warmly he was received upon his return, Hines still had plenty of work to do. He had to find an office and quickly reorganize it if his guidebook business was to operate smoothly. Some of his business problems were handled by others. Before he moved to Bowling Green, he hired a Cincinnati advertising agency to handle general public relations for Adventures in Good Eating, Inc. Then he hired a Chicago firm to handle his books' publicity upon their publication. He also retained his regular attorney in Chicago, James Black, should he need legal advice.
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All during April he searched for permanent headquarters. Within a few days he found an office in a single room on the second floor of the American National Bank.
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Once Hines set up shop, any visitor could reach his office via the stairway from the banks back entrance. The visitor who entered his office could always find a secretary seated at the front desk, answering his voluminous pile of mail, while another secretary was filling innumerable book orders for his thousands of customers. The bank building was a much better location for an office than his apartment in Chicago had been, but before many weeks had passed, business volume forced him to expand into the adjacent room.
Still, even with this improvement, so heavy was the volume of mail, it soon became apparent that a larger office was needed. In fact, so much space was taken up by filing cabinets that there was scarcely any room for Hines and his two secretaries. Some cabinets contained files on each recommended restaurant, hotel, and motel, while others held the scores of letters that daily cascaded into his office. When Hines answered a letter, a carbon copy of his reply was always made and filed in the appropriate folder, and this took up still more file space. For these reasons, coupled with his desire to increase the number of institutions covered in his guidebooks, the need for a larger office became acute. Due to the spatial limitations, Hines began to consider building a combination of house and office.
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Because his business was inundated with mail each day, Hines could ill afford to start from scratch and train a completely new staff. Most of his time was spent on the road investigating new leads and he did not have time to remain in the office and explain how he wanted it to function. Therefore, before he moved to Bowling Green, he persuaded two of his Chicago secretaries, Olga Lindquist and Emelie Tolman, to also move there. Shortly after the newcomers had ensconced themselves in their new environment, Ms. Lindquist and Mrs. Tolman became the talk of the town; the newcomers impressed the Bowling Green natives with their business-like efficiency. In a geographical area of the country where all matters were approached in a sometimes overly relaxed fashion, the two secretaries' matter-of-fact demeanor commanded attention, if not always outright respect. When at the office, neither engaged in much conversation during business hours. This was somewhat jarring for Bowling Green's citizens, because it was the habit of the average female employee there to tell all within earshot fifty things about her family before she ever waited on a customer. What the locals did not realize was that Olga and Emelie did not have time to talk; there was too much work to do. The mail just kept pouring in from all parts of the country, and they had to answer it. So much of it came in into the office that, quite often, Hines took it on the road with him, where he answered it from the
desk of the hotel or motel room of wherever he happened to be. When he answered his mail, he sprinkled his replies with excuses like “I've been away” or “My desk is piled high.” Recipients of his correspondence could usually pinpoint his location by the letter's postmark.
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No doubt all this work and the frenzied coordination it involved sometimes drove Olga and Emelie nearly crazy. If one wonders what it was like working for Duncan Hines, very few secretaries are still alive to impart that information, but those who survive sum up their experience in one word: Busy. A typical day for one of them might begin by examining the various notes that Hines had left on her desk; these were usually responses to letters he had read the night before. After typing these for the outgoing mail, her day's activities could involve numerous chores. Every day was a little different. Whatever she faced that day, her hectic pace did not stop until the office closed that evening. When she went home, her day may have been over, but it was not for Duncan Hines; there was simply too much work to do. Sometimes he worked well into the night, answering as much mail as he could before placing his replies on his secretaries' desks and going home to bed. When he arose early the next morning, he quickly went to the office to answer the remaining mail before going to the post office to fetch another sack load.