Look for opportunity more than security and stability. Consider the breadth of an opportunity and do your best.
—Roy H. Park
After formal research and several weeks of old-fashioned brainstorming by Ag Research employees testing as many as 500 names, nothing seemed to stand out with the universal recognition they were looking for. As a last resort, Bob Flannery suggested maybe they should “bring in Duncan Hines.” A lightning bolt struck, and my father instinctively knew that was the name that would work.
Pops decided that he might as well aim high. The man to go to was Duncan Hines. As the best-known food, restaurant, and lodging expert in the country in the late 1940s, his name was, in the minds of most Americans, synonymous with good food. The Bowling Green Jr. Women’s Club said he was better known across America than the United States Vice President Alben Barkley, even in Kentucky, the home state of both.
Travelers didn’t venture far from home without Hines’ book of roadside restaurant reviews called Adventures in Good Eating, as well as guidebooks on lodging, resorts and cooking. Hines had helped millions of hungry Americans find good food, even in the least likely locations. My father was determined to get that name, and its seal of approval, on his products. Hines had, of course, been approached time and time again by people promising to make this self-made man far richer than he ever dreamed, and time and time again he rejected their offers.
After all, he had a national reputation and was doing just fine on his own bottom line.
Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on March 26, 1880, Hines was the youngest of six siblings. His mother died when Duncan was four, and he and his youngest brother spent their summers at their grandparents’ farm in the country. His grandmother was a wonderful cook who made full use of the farm’s bounty of fresh and wholesome food: candied yams, sausage, country ham, turnip greens with fatback, beaten biscuits, cornbread, and pecan pie. Hines recalled that it was not “until after I came to live with Grandma Jane did I realize just how wonderful good cookery could be.”
Duncan left home in 1898 to work as a clerk for Wells Fargo clerk in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a year later was assigned to their Cheyenne, WY, office, where he met Florence Chattin, his bride-to-be. His courtship was complicated by her family’s opposition to their marriage for the next four years because his job level and bankroll did not make him a worthwhile suitor for their daughter’s hand.
In 1902, he changed jobs, ending up in Mexico with a mining company, and worked hard to make money, establish a nest egg, and embellish his image. During his travels, with a palate accustomed to good food, he continued to find it a challenge to locate eateries good enough to accommodate his discriminating taste. Then, after her father passed away, Florence moved to New Rochelle, NY, and Duncan left the mining life to join her. They were married there in September 1905, and shortly after, he and his new bride moved to Chicago, where he worked for thirty-three years for the J.T.H. Mitchell company as a traveling salesman designing, writing, and producing corporate brochures.
As Pops told it, “Duncan was a specialty advertising and printing company salesman from Bowling Green, KY, who was also a freelance promotion man. He would go out and find a large company where—as he put it—the ‘smoke was coming out of smokestack’—and he’d talk to the president about writing a book or a brochure.” My father smiled at the recollection, “Most of the time they bought it.”
Of all his accomplishments, Hines took the most pride in a book he did for Brink’s Express. The manager he saw there said that most journalism was very poorly done, and that if Hines could produce a book without one typographical or grammatical error, he could set his price. But if there was only one error, he would be paid nothing. Hines accepted the challenge and pulled it off. He told my father that there was actually one error in the book, but they never found it at Brink’s.
In the course of his work, Hines traveled a great deal, often taking Florence with him, and together they began to “collect” the names of restaurants and hotel dining rooms that consistently served excellent food. He would return home with fond memories of a certain deep-dish apple pie or the recollection of the taste and texture of a particular batch of buttermilk biscuits.
Hines’s restaurant “collection” became a passion. People began to drop him notes about other good eating places, and he would advise his customers and good friends where to eat. In 1935, instead of a conventional Christmas card, the fifty-five-year-old Hines sent out a small brochure listing 167 superior eateries in thirty states and Washington, DC. He headed it “Adventures in Good Eating,” and the response was overwhelming. Friends requested additional copies, as did strangers who had seen the list. Public relations was Hines’ profession, eating merely his hobby, but in 1936, he realized that he could turn his hobby into a business and began publishing the book Adventures in Good Eating. The first edition was not an overnight success, selling 5,000 copies and netting a $1,500 loss. But by 1938, an article in the Saturday Evening Post and word-of-mouth put Hines firmly in the black, and he left sales and moved back to Bowling Green to review restaurants full-time, traveling up to 50,000 miles a year.
Hines’ strategy of simply letting the public know where they might find quality food, carefully prepared by a competent chef in clean surroundings, answered a real need. In his many years on the road, he had visited his share of bad restaurants. Of one, Hines wrote, the gravy resembled “library paste.” Another offered meals “as tasty as seasoned sawdust.” Cleanliness was a problem, too. As he said about one greasy spoon, “If you get anything after the cockroaches are finished, you’re lucky.” Diner beware, Hines warned: “Usually the difference between the low-priced meal and the one that costs more is the amount you pay the doctor or the undertaker.” Poor restaurants offended him personally, and he said he often expressed a wish to “padlock two-thirds of the places that call themselves cafes.”
Fine restaurants were another story, and the places he liked best received enthusiastic, joyful write-ups. According to Hines, one Massachusetts institution made “a fellow wish he had hollow legs.” One of his trademarks was to mention each restaurant’s specialties.
A 1941 listing for a restaurant in Tampa, FL, read: One of the most popular eating places in the South, four dining rooms, famous for its Spanish and French dishes. Marvelous sea food, especially their grilled Red Snapper steaks. Try their stuffed pompano, or crawfish, “Siboney style” or stone crabs, “Habanera” when in season. And to top all, have some “Espanol” or cocoanut cream dessert. Prices consistent with excellent quality.
Another in Central New York: Watkins Glen State Park in the heart of the Finger Lakes region is said by many to be the Grand Canyon of the East. While here, you may put up at The Homestead, where “mother does the cooking.” Chicken, steak or lake trout dinners their speciality. B., 35c up; L., 50c up; D., 50c to $1.
Newsweek magazine called him a “full-time eater-publisher,” and the Saturday Evening Post called him “the country’s champion diner-out.”
With a second edition of critiques in mind, Hines sometimes grazed through six or seven restaurants a day and relied on a network of trusted volunteers to keep him up to date on those he couldn’t reach. Their ranks included corporate chefs, bank and university presidents, and well-known personalities from cartoonist Gluyas Williams and travel lecturer Burton Holmes to radio commentator Mary Margaret McBride and Lawrence Tibbett, the opera singer. He was doing what Tim and Nina Zagat reinvented nearly fifty years later. Meanwhile, he branched out, publish
ing in 1938 the Lodging for a Night motel and hotel guidebook to help travelers find the best places to stay. “What do I care if Washington slept here?” Hines demanded, describing his reviewing philosophy. “Do they have a nice, clean bathroom and do the beds have box springs? That’s what I want to know.”
The same enthusiastic listing he used for the restaurants applied to lodging he liked. For example, a 1962 description for a motor hotel in Charlotte, NC, read: 156 rms. A.C., Ph., TV. Baby cribs, baby sitters. Sundeck, heated S.P., wading pool. Free ice. D.R., C.L. An outstanding new establishment. Airy units with dressing areas, some with studio arrangements, and a unique bubble enclosed pool for year-round swimming. Fine dining facilities. SWB $9-$12. 2WB $12-$15. Suites avail. No pets. Res. advis. Tel. ED 2-3121.
So the former traveling seller of advertising specialty items, brochures, and business pamphlets, in an era long before such establishments as McDonald’s and Holiday Inn guaranteed uniform standards, became the source advising thousands of travelers on where to eat and sleep while on the road. By the end of 1939, his books sold 100,000 copies a year. Claiming there was “hardly a hamlet or crossroad” in the U.S. he had not visited, he also traveled to Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii and seven countries in Europe. Between his two books, more than 7,000 “recommendations” were listed. I should point out here that all of these listings were free. Other guidebooks were financed by the very establishments they purported to review, but Hines consistently refused all offers of advertising.
In 1939, Hines first published a book of his favorite recipes, Adventures in Good Cooking, and he had become virtually an institution, unique in the country. Perhaps no one, until the advent of Julia Child, had a comparable influence on American cuisine.
By the time he was sixty-eight, he was internationally renowned for his ratings on eating places around the world and sales of his three guidebooks, including the Duncan Hines Vacation Guide published in 1948, rose to half million a year.
So here was my thirty-nine-year-old father with a lineup of food producers looking for a brand name after Duncan Hines, at age sixty-eight, had already become a household name. But as Leo Burnett, whose advertising agency handled Procter & Gamble products, and whom my father was later to meet and work with, said, “When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one. But you won’t come up with a handful of mud, either.”
The challenge Pops faced, he said, “was how to tie the bell to the cat. I sent my people to the Cornell library and had them research everything they could find on Hines. Before I met him, I knew more about him than he did about himself, including his passion for watches.”
Of course, Hines had no idea who Roy Park was, so he had no intention of granting him an audience. But the two self-starters who had come off a farm had a lot more in common than either one of them thought. After months of trying to get through the door, and thanks to his exhaustive research on the life and achievements of Duncan Hines, my father prevailed upon a prominent restaurant owner he knew in Raleigh to call a friend of Hines who was a restaurant owner in Virginia to arrange a meeting with him.