Duncan Hines (2 page)

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

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).