Duncan Hines (24 page)

As noted earlier, Hines had no patience with people who had failed in life. If they failed at one career, they would probably fail at another; he told the commission he did not want these individuals to enter the restaurant profession, because they would undoubtedly fail again—and at the customer's expense:

It seems to me that the American public has suffered enough from food being prepared by people who have failed in previous occupations and possess no knowledge of the proper preparation of food, its cooking or the importance of maintaining cleanliness in all departments. I believe there isn't any profession that requires more artistry and talent than the careful preparation and cooking of good food. I believe no license or permit for operating a public eating place should be issued unless the owner can pass an examination which would prove his knowledge and ability in the proper preparation and correct cooking of wholesome, appetizing food.

As to his well-known pet peeve, restaurant cleanliness, Hines testified that “it has been found that silverware and dishes become carriers of disease if they are not thoroughly rinsed in 180-degree water after washing….30 percent to 45percent of the deaths in the United States are caused by diseases in this way. So when a place does not look or smell clean in the kitchen and in the back end, all their chromium fronts won't inveigle me to eat in their dining room.” He added that it “seems that many owners of eating places compete with others to see which can raise the largest and most cockroaches. Many of them apparently look upon roaches as friendly pets.”

Turning to another topic, Hines told the commissioners he did not have much faith in State Boards of Health. While their efforts were welcome, in his view, they were usually ineffectual. Hines said he had recently,

received a letter from a State Board of Health reporting to me on eating places. They thought these places were clean because the State Board of Health inspected them. Once a year might be better than never, but not much. A place may go to the dogs almost overnight. In my opinion, it is first a matter of education to the owners, managers and employees of public eating places…. There should be frequent and adequate inspection. For first violations[,] a written warning; the second violation, [a written warning and] a stiff fine, and for the third violation, a permanent revocation of license.

When the government penalized a restaurant with a fine, he said, horselaughs ensued; what the government did was a joke. He cited one recent government report which detailed over 250 restaurants which had violated the health laws. “A little over 8 percent were fined,” he said, and of that remaining percentage, the transgressors were punished with a hefty fine, usually a whole dollar. “Imagine,” exclaimed Hines, “a fine of only one dollar.”
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At a Rotary Club meeting in Cave City, Kentucky, Hines told his audience of how his publishing operation was coping during the global conflict. “I am very happy to report that my books have found a place in the war effort,” he told them.

Millions…have been transformed from civilian to military life. They are taxing our transportation facilities to the limit, traveling all over the nation. My travel books…are going with many of them—guiding them to the best in unfamiliar places throughout America. I wish you could read the enthusiastic letters I receive from men in the service who are using the books. The government has placed the travel books in the libraries of many camps, also in large deluxe transport planes for the use of navy personnel.
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Despite the limitations the worldwide discord had placed on his ability to conduct business, Hines managed to earn enough profit to avoid a temporary shutdown. One newspaper revealed that his
books had “been reprinted [at least] 10 times in one year,” and that the accumulated sales of all three of his volumes now exceeded over a million.
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After a burst of extremely robust sales for the guidebooks during the war's early days, by 1943 activity had tapered off. In a letter Hines sent to his Duncan Hines Family members, he wrote, “The sale of my travel books naturally has slumped,” but sales for his recipe book,
Adventures in Good Cooking
, had picked up. “I hope the sale of this book will help meet our office expenses for the duration.”
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Sometime that year Hines established the Duncan Hines Foundation, the purpose of which was to promote restaurant sanitation. The Duncan Hines Foundation was established to provide scholarships to students in hotel and restaurant management schools of both Cornell University and Michigan State University. “He was very proud of that,” his secretary remembered.
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Hines also chose to create a scholarship fund at Cornell University because it was the best hotel management school in the country.
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Hines was one more name in a long line of individuals who contributed to the school's fortunes.
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A month after the D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944, the pivotal event for the Allied involvement in the Second World War, Duncan Hines published a short piece in
Table Topics
, a trade publication for wholesale food distributors. The war, he wrote, had kept him quite busy. Since it began, his dining guides had undergone fourteen printings. He knew they would cease being authoritative sources if they remained out of date and the numerous printings were the result of his attempt to remain current with the frequent changes in the restaurant industry. Hines reported that many places either in the country or on the outskirts of cities that were dependent on transients for their business had been forced to close their doors. As many as 500 deletions and additions were made to the guidebook's pages to keep it as current as possible. Hines said, “If I had foreseen the enormous amount of work it was going to involve to maintain my books on an unbiased basis, perhaps I never would have started it as a hobby.” Still, he reflected, “It has now become a serious business and, although there is hardly
enough profit in it to justify the time and work involved, I am rewarded to some extent by hundreds of letters of appreciation from [its] users.”
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The guidebooks underwent so many changes that by 1945 Hines had sent revisions to the Williams Printing Company twenty-eight times. Restaurant and lodging circumstances could change every few months and Hines could not afford to print large quantities of each edition. If he did, he could very easily be stuck with thousands of out-dated copies. Therefore, he managed to solve his problem by printing small quantities of corrected editions every few months. This business decision was still not profitable for Hines because, then as now, it cost more to print small quantities than large ones.
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By the time the war came to its cataclysmic close, the task of keeping the guidebooks updated was becoming horribly difficult. So much was happening so fast. Hines said it was as bad as keeping track of railroad timetables. “Divorce, change of ownership, death, fire, and war shortages are the background for most of the listing changes.”
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One day toward the end of 1944, Bowling Green's newspaper reported that Marion Edwards, a staff writer for
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine, had recently visited the Duncan Hines home and advised readers to look for an article about him in its upcoming pages.
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The article was published in May 1945. In her article, Edwards revealed that Hines's restaurant guide was now in its sixteenth printing since Pearl Harbor and the public was buying it at the rate of 3,500 copies per month. In fact, so many were being sold that she noted it was a common sight to find a copy of
Adventures in Good Eating
peeking “out of the back pocket of dusty G. I. trousers” as well as from “the crowded traveling cases of tagalong brides and wartime businessmen.” Everyone, it seemed, was using it.

Because the public was using it, the book was gradually helping change American attitudes. Based on his travels and conversations with thousands of individuals, Hines could see the beginnings of several trends that boded well for the future. When Edwards visited him in Bowling Green, he explained how the war was changing the
eating habits of millions of American soldiers. “Let men loose in a restaurant before the war,” he thundered, “and what did they order? Steak, French fries, iron-crusted rolls, pie! They drowned the steak in hot sauce so they couldn't tell whether they were eating meat or ground rubber bands.” Hines found their habit of dousing sauce on top of their meat to be an insult to the beef. Pointing a finger at himself, he exclaimed, “When a waiter comes up to
me
with a lot of condiments, I ask him, ‘What's wrong with the meat?'” Nevertheless, he continued, wartime rationing and mess halls had combined to bring about a changed attitude toward food among the American public, especially men. Before the war they cared little for what they swallowed. So long as their stomachs were filled, they were satisfied. But during the war men found opportunities to experience new types of food. Much of this changed attitude, Hines explained, came about because of the shortage of meat. Searching for a substitute, mess halls on military bases began experimenting with and serving such items as “an appetizer, soup, and salad before the entree…. Men liked it. And the boys in the mess halls got balanced meals—often for the first time in their lives.” Hines predicted that “when these fellows come back, they'll surprise people with the way they eat. They won't be satisfied with leathery eggs or vegetables in billboard paste or dishwater soup. They'll have sampled meals around the world, and they'll expect [the cooks in their] home to produce the best.” He was not far off the mark. At war's end, this changed attitude created not only a demand for better food, it also created a parallel attitude for better food in restaurants. This development could not have pleased Hines more.
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In this vein, Hines had some other thoughts which had ripened within his mind concerning the effect the war was going to have on restaurants. “The wartime family habit of going to the restaurant once a week to save rationing points,” he said, was going to carry over long after the war ended, mainly because wives across America had enjoyed the liberating experience of not having to cook every single day. Wives would be demanding a day off from “kitchen
duty” once a week, and their husbands would acquiesce, if only to preserve domestic tranquility.

While no definite cause and effect can ever be shown—because human experience is so varied—an outline began to take shape. Americans, regardless of their income level, began to expect more from life. They had suffered through the Great Depression. They had endured the Second World War. When the global bloodbath had finally ended, they had survived both calamities to find themselves citizens of the greatest nation on earth—and they knew it. With this knowledge came an expectation to be treated better in all realms of life—and, though it was small in the wider perspective of historic change—their expectations included eating a well-prepared, sanitary meal at a public restaurant at a reasonable price. After what they had been through, Americans felt entitled to expect as much. Thrown into this human calculus was the renewed strength of the American economy, a factor that had been building since 1940 but which had taken on strengthened vigor by 1945. In the spring of that year, with the war in the European theater nearly over and with a domestic economy improving daily—particularly after the government lifted tire and gasoline rationing—there came the desire and the opportunity among Americans to spend the discretionary dollars they had saved throughout the conflict. The collective release of this pent-up desire produced a surge in travel by Americans. They used any mode of transportation available to them, whether it be automobile, truck, train or plane. Regardless of how they reached their destinations, more Americans than ever before were soon in some sort of transit from one location to another, often traveling to places they never expected to visit.

With this development came another expectation. Whether those in transit be military personnel or civilian populace, whether they ate on a train or on a plane or in a roadside inn in the middle of nowhere, they insisted that what they put in their mouths be of high quality. In addition, the military had taught hundreds of soldiers how to cook for large numbers of people, unintentionally creating a whole new generation of chefs. Hines had predicted as much, forecasting that many new restaurants would open in the
near future, “operated by G. I. cooks, whose culinary” abilities would be highly regarded by the public.
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Meanwhile, Hines began taking an enthusiastic interest in the new technological kitchen innovations that were becoming available. He began insisting that to get his approval “every restaurant should install electric dishwashers and as much automatic equipment as they can once it's available.” To push restaurants along in this progressive direction, he began to examine other factors in restaurants, such as “acoustics, design, air conditioning, dishes, and furniture.” Hines said, “restaurants will have to throw out juke boxes and chipped dishes and buy comfortable chairs. They'll have to get modern.” Little by little, he pushed the industry into the modern era.

Due to wartime gas rationing, the war slowed the activities of Hines's dinner detectives. While many chose not to travel as frequently, Hines was grateful for those who gave him any information. However, he did make one significant change with respect to their activities. During the conflict he instituted among them a system whereby they were to “carry little cards identifying them as his representatives, to be presented after they [had] paid their bills. The cards request[ed] the privilege of inspecting the kitchen and sleeping quarters” of either those establishments already in his guidebooks or ones under consideration. Sometimes these “checkers” sent in “voluminous reports, sometimes a cursory note.” One note that came into his office during 1944 read: “The dump you recommend here is lousy, but it's the best place within 150 miles.” As in the past, if there was no better alternative, the recommendation went into his book until a more suitable substitute could be found. As always, the dinner detectives refused any payment for their recommendations. Any proprietor, whether he be a restaurateur or an innkeeper, could easily spot a phony Hines representative, and he knew what to do if one showed up and requested payment for a listing: point the imposter toward the door.
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