In 1956, after his sale to Procter & Gamble, my father was retained for the next three years by P&G as vice president and director of Hines-Park Foods, Inc and for the next seven, as a consultant, without competing. But he was also allowed to conduct his own business 50 percent and he became a director of ConAgra Foods, Inc. in Omaha, NE, shortly after the sale. He also became a director and member of the executive committee of the First National Bank and Trust Company and a director of the Ithaca Gun Company, both in Ithaca. All in all, he became a director of some eight other corporations from Florida to New York during this six-year period, all the while casting around for a new career.
My father hated being a part of corporate life, and with his P&G stock as collateral, he was keeping his eyes open for a new opportunity. He was in a position to choose any number of different directions—and he knew that fortune favors the prepared. He already had publishing, public relations, promotion advertising, and franchising under his belt. He wanted to call his own shots, again. In the meantime, he endured and despised the corporate world with its schedules, meetings and rules.
There was, however, one part of the job that I could tell my father enjoyed, because he frequently talked to us about meeting and working with Leo Burnett, P&G’s Chicago advertising agency handling the Duncan Hines cake mix line. I could tell he identified completely with Mr. Burnett, its founder and CEO, who he said was one of the hardest working people he’d ever met. He told me that even when Burnett was walking from one office to another, he had papers he was reading in his hands, and was intent every minute on his work. I am not sure if Leo Burnett, himself, told him the story where late one night he was so involved with the papers in his hands that he opened the door of what he thought was the men’s room and ended up in the janitors’ closet.
According to the story, the door locked from the outside before he realized where he was, so Burnett spent the night with the mops, brooms and washtub sink until he could get an employee’s attention the next morning by banging on the door. My father said he told him he had a light and enough work he carried with him to keep him from being entirely bored during his imprisonment.
During this time, Pops continued to publish and print the Duncan Hines guidebooks at his press in Ithaca. By the end of 1956, Adventures in Good Eating was in its forty-ninth printing, Lodging for a Night was in its thirty-ninth, Adventures in Good Cooking was about to come out for its twenty-sixth publication and Duncan Hines Vacation Guide was going into its eleventh revision.
If you never heard about or saw one of these guidebooks, the write-ups, as illustrated in Chapter 3, gave a comprehensive overview of each establishment that was fun to read. There were detailed recommendations on the specialties restaurants were famous for, the range of prices, the dress code and ambiance, and whether children were welcomed. The resort and lodging guidebooks even rated the number and quality of bath towels and washcloths, the way the beds were made up, and what perks came with your stay.
Right after Procter & Gamble purchased the Duncan Hines business, my father learned that all of the big shots at P&G took their vacations in New England, many at Cape Cod. He was determined, therefore, to make sure the Duncan Hines–recommended restaurants and resorts were highly reputable. Not only did he want to drop listings of places that weren’t up to the Hines standard, he also planned to add as many new places with outstanding reputations as possible.
During the summer of 1960, going into my senior year at Carolina, I was hired as a New England field inspector for the Duncan Hines guidebooks. I was actually a Procter & Gamble employee since the company now owned the Duncan Hines Institute, but I reported to my father, which afforded me additional insights into “family business.” I had wanted to go to Alaska, where the guidebooks were making inroads. I even bought and had sawed-off a 30-30 rifle for the expedition. (I considered the rifle a necessity because I was warned that during the summers when bull moose are in rut they could charge cars intruding into the back roads of their territory.)
I was just one of dozens of inspectors hired all over the country. The summer job did not pay well, but room and board were covered. We worked on a draw where we were paid $10 to inspect each restaurant, and had to inspect between five and eight a day just to make ends meet. My father was not the most generous person when it came to compensation, and he expected everyone who worked for him to really earn it.
I didn’t do what Duncan Hines had done, which would be to head for the back of the restaurant to detect odors from the kitchen, condition of the refuse and garbage cans, and presence of cats or other scavengers.
I went in the front door, and these inspections were intensive and thorough. From measuring the temperature in the meat lock
ers to removing the vents over the stoves to checking for grease accumulation to checking out the laundry facilities in hotels and resorts, they were, in fact, as rigorous as a health department inspector would conduct. Many times our investigations upset both the chefs and the owners of the restaurants. I remember being chased around the kitchen by a Chinese chef with a chopping knife when I made a comment about the way he was storing food. I was lucky to emerge with my head.
Our inspections were not only to see if a restaurant qualified for a Duncan Hines listing, but also for those already in the book that didn’t measure up, we had to remove the signs hanging in front of their establishment. And they definitely didn’t like that.
We were paid $5 for each “Recommended by Duncan Hines” sign we took down from restaurants that failed the inspection. There were times when I had to come back at night and stand on the hood of my car with wire cutters to take down a sign in order to avoid a confrontation with the chef or restaurant owner.
As David M. Schwartz wrote in his article entitled dunCAn hines: he MAde gAstronoMes out oF Motorists, in the Novem
ber 1984 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, “Hines was not the only one to profit from the success of his guides. Mere mention was enough to save an innkeeper from a break-even existence or outright bankruptcy. With each revision, restaurant owners dreaded the possibility of being dropped from the ‘Duncan Hines Family’ the way society women feared omission from the latest Social Register. The pressure to get in—and stay in—exerted in oft-mentioned influence of the quality of road food.” Even long after the guidebooks ceased publication, nobody ever wanted to give up the signs.
The sad part of the job was that none of us were allowed to eat in the restaurants that we inspected. It was too expensive. We submitted expense accounts for overnights in low-budget motels, as well as whatever we could grab in the way of meals at a fast-food or family diner in each area. I can tell you that these expense accounts were very carefully scrutinized and a thorough comparison was made on the expenses filed by each representa
tive on a division-by-division basis.
As I mentioned earlier, I had taken up fencing at Cornell my freshman year. The person who became my supervisor that summer was none other than my fencing coach, since he had worked in Europe as an inspector for the Michelin Guide Books. He only traveled with me two or three times during the entire summer, and during those times I knew I was safe from harm, since he was an established kick-boxer as well. When we overnighted together, he would exercise by keeping a sofa pillow in the air continuously with his feet, with his hands behind his back, without letting it hit the floor. In the heat of the New England summer he wore a wool sport coat at all times. We were required to be well-dressed and I wore a shirt and tie but without a coat until I entered a restaurant or resort.
I finally asked him how he could stand to keep that wool coat on at all times since there were always drops of sweat pouring down his forehead and below his ears. He took the coat off to show me his shirt had only a front. It was backless, and he explained to me that it was cool under the wool coat, which he said insulated him from the heat. While I appreciated his theory, the results were not quite what he maintained, since he always looked like he had just emerged, dripping from the surf on Cape Cod.
After covering every restaurant from Connecticut to New Hampshire, I worked my way to the real objective, Massachusetts, and in particular, Cape Cod. After I covered the listings and tried to bring in a number of new resorts along the Massachusetts coast, I settled in on Cape Cod for the last month of my tour of duty. I picked the elbow of the Cape, Chatham, as a hub and was able to get a weekly rate to keep expenses down on a room in a boardinghouse close to what became my favorite hangout, the Christopher Ryder House.
Since our food costs were limited by an allowance, I paid the extra bucks to have dinner there at least two or three nights a week. The food was great, along with the scenery. The scenery included a dozen waitresses from various universities, mostly from Cornell.
The Christopher Ryder House was fun because it had a huge circus tent in the back, and around 10 pM each night they brought in a band. I hung out with the young people who worked at the restaurant, and toward the end of the evenings, we were able to take advantage of the dance floor.
About two weeks into my stay in Chatham, I passed an Indian reservation and spotted a young boy with a baby raccoon on a chain. I also spotted the For sALe sign. Being an animal lover, I couldn’t resist. For 20 bucks, I had the raccoon in my car. He was a cute little fellow and would sit on the back of the seat with his paws holding on to my neck while I was driving and he didn’t seem to mind staying in the car when I made my inspections.
However, after about a week the landlady discovered the raccoon in my room, and I was told to get rid of it or get out. Four of the gals who worked in the restaurant roomed together in a house they rented for the summer, and I prevailed upon them to keep the raccoon, which they thought was adorable, in their basement.
Later that summer, Tetlow was traveling in New England with her parents, and since they were staying in Boston, I drove over and picked her up one night. I made the mistake of taking her to the Christopher Ryder House for dinner. The girls were surprised to see me with a date, and when she went to powder her nose, I learned later, they paid her a visit en masse. I guess she was pretty ticked when the questions got around to “How well do you know Roy?” After dinner we danced and I drove her back to Boston, never suspecting a thing. The next night when I tried to find a dance partner at the restaurant, I was shut down. For the rest of the summer, not one girl would speak to me. I learned later what had transpired in the ladies room. Tetlow used a variation of the technique my father had employed when he was courting my mother, and told the girls we were secretly married.
At the end of the summer, I collected my raccoon from the not-so-friendly coeds and brought it home with me. He lasted in my upstairs study until he pulled all of the books out of my bookshelf, and I took him to a place that rehabilitated raccoons so he could be released in the wild.
It was at the end of the summer, just before I was to become a graduate student at Cornell, when it became clear that Procter & Gamble wanted to keep only the best-selling Duncan Hines products, the cake mix line. Procter & Gamble is known as a company that does its homework. It was not about to run a widespread food-licensing operation when the money was in the mix. All the other licensing arrangements went by the board—and the product that had enabled a small company to hold its own against the giants ended up in the hands of the largest advertiser in the country.
P&G’s strategy required phasing out all the other product lines, and included on the hit list were the Duncan Hines guidebooks. The guidebooks had annual sales of a half-million dollars, but that was chicken-feed to P&G, and they wanted no part of it.
After my summer as a field inspector, I could understand why they didn’t want to be involved in the intensive, continuous inspections that needed to be done to keep the guidebooks going, and the national staff that had to be hired and trained to do this.
I remember when my father called me into his study to explain an opportunity that P&G had offered, to see if I had any interest in it. They had given my father the opportunity to continue the publication of these books, which, at the time, were the American equivalent to the Michelin Guides in Europe. Procter & Gamble told my father they would allow him to maintain publication of these four books, as long as the Duncan Hines name was dropped and changed to a name of his choice. He was given three years to make the transition. Bottom line was P&G granted my father the opportunity to hold on to the best guidebooks in the nation, but they wanted the exclusive use of the Duncan Hines name for their cake mix.
My father and I both came up with an appropriate transition name at the same time. Our middle name was Hampton, which had more class than “Roy.” It had a distinguished quality that we thought could possibly work: Hampton Park Adventures in Good Eating.
My father had other fish to fry, so the offer was dumped in my lap. The question became whether or not I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a plump gourmet driving around the country, as the celebrity behind the new Hampton Park guidebooks. This did not appeal to me, since it would have been a lifetime commitment. My desire was to build a career in the advertising business. It may have been a missed opportunity, but I didn’t regret that decision. It led to the end of the most personalized guidebooks America ever had.
Stewart Underwood recalls the massive effort and complexity of dismantling the guidebook program by Procter & Gamble. Leases had to be broken, over 185 billboards around the country torn down, and hundreds of Duncan Hines shingles in front of establishments returned. I remember how hard it was for me to remove just one sign when a restaurant was de-listed. It was a full-time effort for well over a year, and P&G made sure this was done expeditiously, installing a personal representative in Ithaca to monitor the entire procedure.
Duncan Hines had gone into semiretirement at age seventy-six. He died two years later in 1959, by which time five million copies of Adventures in Good Eating had been sold. The knowledge that a listing could mean the difference between success and bankruptcy motivated many restaurants to improve their menus and clean their kitchens. Hotels, diners, and inns across the country proudly displayed reCoMMended By dunCAn hines signs. The popularity of his name was so widespread it was part of the song, “If I Were a Bell” in the Broadway musical Guys & Dolls, and a small diner in the Ithaca countryside displayed a parody of his sign in its window that read: drunken hines Cooks here. With all the time he spent on the road, it was fitting that, according to Wikipedia, after his death a portion of U.S. Highway 31W north of Bowling Green was named Duncan Hines Highway.
One chef concluded in 1961 that Hines had “done more in four years to lift the standard of the American cuisine than all the cooks had done in the previous forty.” In his 1984 article in Smithsonian, David Schwartz also said the Adventures in Good Eating guidebooks “became a fixture in automobile glove compartments, and when wartime gas rationing was lifted, bookstores nationwide were swamped with requests for the latest edition of the little red paperback. For two decades, the name of the author, Duncan Hines, was etched on the biting edge of the American appetite.”
And even as recently as 2005, renowned gossip columnist Liz Smith, in her book Dishing (“on great dish and dishes”) opened her first chapter “Food, Glorious Food!” with a quote from Duncan Hines. It read “Nearly everyone wants at least one outstanding meal a day,” and Mr. Hines dealt in good eating every day of his life.
In the meantime, with the guidebooks gone, my father , while still consulting with P&G, entered his fourth career, founding Park Broadcasting, Inc. in 1961 with the purchase of two radio stations in Greenville, NC. The same year I reentered Cornell, this time seeking a master’s degree from the Johnson Graduate School of Management.