Duncan Hines (20 page)

Hines also prevailed upon his relatives and co-workers for recipes. The book even included some culinary treasures his grandmother Duncan had made for him as a boy.
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Many of the book's 460 recipes were first tested in his sister's kitchen. After each dish had been approved, Hines's secretary, Emelie Tolman, typed it up on a slip of paper, all of which were assembled into a manuscript. Hines read through the final draft, made suggestions for amending the text, and soon sent it to the printers. The result of this effort came to fruition on 1 October 1939 with the publication of
Adventures in Good Cooking and The Art of Carving In The Home
. Shortly after the cookbook was published, the public bought 15,000 copies.
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He knew covers with primary colors increased a book's sales so Hines selected bright yellow for his newest publication. It must have helped because, for a while, the cookbook outsold his guidebooks. Its recipes did not consist of the American home-style variety, i.e., the often tasteless and vapid culinary hodgepodge found at church socials. Instead, they were easily some of the richest foods many Americans had ever encountered. A few of the recipes were a bit sophisticated for the average homemaker, and sometimes their unusual ingredients were not always readily available at the corner grocery store. But there was no doubt that,
when prepared exactly as directed, they produced delightful results.
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The 256-page book broadened Hines's name recognition beyond his usual customers. It also associated his name with good food as never before. There were not too many cookbooks on bookstore shelves in the late 1930s, and that fortunate circumstance enabled Hines's effort to stand out among its competitors. The book stirred interest. The concept of a book collection of recipes from famous restaurants was, at the time, unique.

Although Hines's secretary, Olga Lindquist, was not unattractive, it was his other secretary, Emelie Tolman, a blonde, Northern-speaking, slightly portly woman of Scandinavian descent in her mid-40s, who was more frequently found in his company. There was such a backlog of mail piling up on his desk and so little time to answer it that Hines began taking Emelie on the road with him. Emelie spent so much time with him that, after a few months, they decided to get married.
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Although Hines's family had their reservations about his intentions to marry again, they did not reveal their thoughts. They were perhaps concerned about the differences in their ages, but that was the extent of it.
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Emelie E. Tolman was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 18 October 1896. Her father's name was Peter Daniels; her mother's maiden name was Catherine Oberhofer.
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In 1920 Emelie Daniels married Lee Tolman; the marriage was an unhappy affair and ended in divorce about a decade later. Emelie no doubt hoped that her second trip down the aisle would be more successful when, at age forty-three on 9 December 1939 in Rockport, Texas, she became Mrs. Duncan Hines.
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As Emelie adjusted to Bowling Green's customs and conventions, she made several friends, although none were close. The Hines were on the road so much that intimate friendships with the citizens of Bowling Green were hard to form. When the two did meet, though, they noted that she talked a little differently than
they did. Overall, in their estimation, Emelie was a well-organized, neat, efficient career woman, but they didn't get to know her very well. Emelie, almost from the first, hoped they wouldn't live in Bowling Green forever. Used to Chicago's fast tempo, she found Kentucky's slow pace of living tiresome. It was so different from the speedy environment to which she was accustomed. She also did not like the clannish tendencies she detected in Hines's family.

As to why Hines married Emelie in the first place, his reasons are not difficult to understand. He was lonely. He had not adjusted well to life without Florence. He needed a traveling companion, someone who could fill his emotional void—and someone who could handle the sackfuls of correspondence he carried around the country in his car. He needed a wife, and in Emelie he found what he was looking for. She understood the peculiar sort of work in which he was engaged and could accommodate its occupational vagaries. It is not for certain they deeply loved each other, but each provided the other with the lure of security. She needed a husband to provide her with a measure of protection; he, on the other hand, was sort of helpless without a woman about the house. In short, it was a marriage of convenience.

There was another aspect that determined his decision to marry Emelie. Despite Annie's help, without a wife it was he who had to do those myriad things about the house for which he had no talent or, more likely, no patience. These were things Florence had handled over the years with aplomb and efficiency. Emelie filled a void here, too. Even before their marriage, she was sending out his laundry and taking care of the whole panoply of his other daily needs. So it should not have been a shock to anyone when, after a few months, their decision to marry was, more or less, a natural progression toward an obvious conclusion for two people who did not have anyone but themselves. Though their marriage was not built on a solid emotional foundation, Hines, for a time at least, was happy. Thanks to her, his life slowly stabilized, and that, at least, was enough to soothe the past year's pain and anxieties.
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Although life had not been uncomfortable for Hines while living with his sister, he hated imposing on her. Just before he married
Emelie, he moved a few blocks away into a recently constructed, late Tudor architecturally-styled, efficiency-apartment complex known as the Arms Apartments.
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It was a convenient location, as it was two blocks away from Hines's office and three blocks from Annie's home.
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Even before Hines moved into it, he knew it was only a temporary home. He had no intention of remaining there long. He wanted an abode of his own, one where he could sit on the front porch in the evening and chain-smoke cigarettes while watching the cars go by. For these reasons and others, he decided to build a house in the country. Since summer he had spent his spare time exploring the Warren County countryside in search of a tract of land to build not only a home but a structure which would serve as the location for his ever expanding business.
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In September he finally found a piece of property that suited him. On 11 October 1939, he bought a parcel of land located 2 miles north of Bowling Green on the southeast side of highway 31-W, known locally as the Old Louisville Road. E. F. Wilkinson and Edgar and Irene Walker sold it to him for one dollar; construction commenced immediately.
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For a month or so after he and Emelie were married, the couple made his apartment their home.

While waiting for construction of his new home to be completed, Hines and Emelie continued to ply the roads of America in search of new guidebook additions. No matter where they went, Hines almost never failed to drop by the local newspaper office to spread the gospel. For example, in early December, when he visited Oklahoma City, in addition to revealing some of his personal habits, such as writing his books at 3:00
A.M.
because it was the only time that “people don't drop in, the telephone doesn't ring and ring and ring, and one can concentrate” and letting it be known that more than 300 “dinner detectives” were currently checking places for him, he mostly discussed restaurants. He began by pointing out that when one chooses to dine in a restaurant, its atmosphere was not the only factor to consider. There were three others. First, was cleanliness: “If a place is not clean,” said Hines, “it can't be good.” The public, he said, should also consider
who
cooks the meals; he shuddered when he thought of how much good food
untalented cooks ruined. The third thing to look for was food quality; many kitchens routinely produced over-or undercooked food made from poor quality ingredients. “If people knew the poor quality of [the] food so often proffered them,” Hines lamented, they would not “touch it with a ten-foot pole.” He also stated that so long as the customer paid his bill, most restaurant personnel didn't care. He concluded the interview with a dig at male cooks, the thought of which made Hines laugh. “Men can't cook, they don't know how and never will learn…. They have the notion that cooking is women's work and that the men's distinction comes in squeezing icing in curlicues on top of cakes. That's not cooking. It's a mess.”
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By year's end Duncan Hines had become one of the nation's best selling authors with a distinction: he was also his own publisher. As the nation began lifting itself out of the decade-long Depression, his books were fast becoming a fixture in the glove compartments of hundreds of thousands of American cars. Thanks to the war in Europe and other social, political and economic factors, Americans began to regularly put money in their pockets. After a decade of economic drought, many Americans now pursued a little leisure—and for many that meant an occasional meal in a nearby good restaurant. Also, by year's end, Hines books had collectively sold almost 100,000 copies that year, “a figure that could then be claimed by only thirteen other best-selling authors.”
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Eighty percent of Hines's books were sold from his Bowling Green office; the rest were sold by vendors who supplied bookstores and newsstands. At the end of the year Hines gave his publishing representative in New York, Frank M. Watts, the number of books sold through those vendors:
Adventures in Good Eating
12,430 copies;
Adventures in Good Cooking
2,017 copies;
Lodging for a Night
5,949 copies, bringing total sales to 20,396 copies.
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The R. R. Donnelley Company produced excellent work for Duncan Hines through early 1940, but the long distance between Chicago and Bowling Green made continued involvement with the company difficult. If a problem with the books developed during
production, Hines could not give it immediate attention. What he needed was a highly competent book publishing firm near Bowling Green. The problem was where to find one. Which company could he turn to? He had seen many incompetent publishers over the years and was unwilling to hire just any firm.

For the past several years his brother, Warner, had lived in Nashville, Tennessee. Now that he and Duncan lived only an hour's drive from each other, the two visited more often. One evening late in 1939, while Hines was visiting him, he complained of his publishing problems. Hines said he wanted to switch to another firm, but he had to be cautious for fear of being saddled with an incompetent publisher. If he hired a firm that proved to be inept at book production, the good will the public placed in him might suffer. After all, they expected quality from everything associated with his name, including the sturdy quality of his books. Fortunately for Hines, Warner had just the printer for him. He told Hines of a printing firm that handled his oil company's business, and assured him that they were both fair and competent. Warner gave him the printing firm's business card and told him to call them. Duncan said he would. When he left for his hotel that evening, he had already predetermined they would publish his books. As far as he was concerned, if it was good enough for Warner, it was good enough for him.
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Warner Hines was a vice-president of Nashville's Spur Oil Distributing Company. The firm he had recommended his brother to investigate was that city's Williams Printing Company, which handled Spur's print advertising, particularly its ubiquitous billboards.
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Larry Williams, who later became the owner of the Williams firm, explained how the marriage between Duncan Hines and his company came about. “It was a Saturday afternoon,” he recalled, “when Duncan Hines called the Williams Printing Company from [Nashville's] Hermitage Hotel.” James R. Overall answered the call. Hines told him, “Come up here. I've got a box full of copy for a book I want you to print.” Overall said, “Thank you very much,” and hung up the phone. Tom Williams, one of the company's vice-presidents, who was sitting across from Overall's
desk, asked, “Who was that, Jim.” Overall replied, “Aw, some nut. He called from the Hermitage Hotel. He told me to come up there and pick up some copy. I ain't gonna do it. I'm goin' home.” Williams, thinking he might not be a nut, decided to go to the hotel to check out the potential client. Williams' hunch proved fortuitous, because the meeting between the two men began a long, fruitful relationship. After a quick handshake, Hines thrust into Williams' hands two large envelope boxes which contained his manuscript. Williams asked him if he wanted a price on it. Hines said he did not. Williams asked him if he wanted to know something about his company. Hines said, “I know all I need to know.” Williams said, “Mr. Hines, what do you want me to do?” Hines replied, “I want you to print this book. Go back and go to work.” Williams brought the two boxes back to his office and set them on his desk. After examining its contents, a collective agreement was made among the executives that the project was too large for their small company to handle. So they arranged to have the Methodist Publishing House
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print the book for them. A few days later, after Larry Williams and Paul Moore, another Williams employee, proofread and prepared the book for printing, they sent it to the larger printer, which quickly produced it to Hines's specifications. The books were shipped across town to the Williams firm, then put on a truck, which delivered them to Hines's Bowling Green office. Through an arrangement made with Hines, the Williams firm sent the other volumes via the postal system to book distributors across the country. The quality of the work so impressed Hines that he transferred his entire printing business from the Donnelley company to the Williams firm.
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