Duncan Hines (40 page)

Although his organization was now a subsidiary of another company, Park continued working in Ithaca at the Duncan Hines Institute as if nothing had happened, overseeing, protecting and sanctioning all food products associated with the Duncan Hines name.
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Publication of the guidebooks and the cookbook continued; at the end of 1956
Adventures in Good Eating
was in its 49th printing;
Lodging for a Night
was in its 39th;
Adventures in Good Cooking
was about to be published for the 26th time; and
Duncan Hines Vacation Guide was
about to see its 11th revision.
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After Roy Park took control of his partner's book business, there was little left for Hines's employees to do; by the middle of 1954 they had found employment elsewhere. Only Sara Meeks was retained for her services, which mainly consisted of watching the office. Now that the sign business was being administered in Ithaca, she did not even have that to occupy her hours. Once Park took over, said Meeks, “there was nothing to do there except Mr. Hines' personal correspondence. And that's why I got to stay on, because he liked the way I did his letters, I guess.” Hines and Clara, she said, still “traveled a lot…. Sometimes for two or three weeks. But he wanted someone to be in that office in case a visitor would stop by, and to take care of the mail, and answer the phone. And that was my job. It was very boring for a while, because I was there by myself all day.” Although there was little to do, she dutifully came to work each day about eight in the morning and stayed until five that afternoon because, she said, “I was afraid he would call and check on me.” Hines subscribed to various newspapers and a host
of magazines. Taking advantage of her paid indolence, she sat at her desk and read.

When she took Hines's dictation and typed his correspondence, most of it consisted of personal matters he conducted with his many friends, including restaurant owners whose establishments he had recommended, as well as some of his former dinner detectives.
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By the mid-1950s Hines's daily mail had declined a bit, down to 140 letters a day.
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Perhaps the biggest daily chore she performed was sorting and collecting all letters pertaining to business now transacted in Ithaca. When Hines was home, he opened his own mail. If he could not answer a letter, said Meeks, and “didn't know what to do with it, or if it was anything that needed a reply, he'd say ‘send this to Roy Park,' and we would have big envelopes going out to Roy Park” daily. Another of her duties was to plan his trips. This was fairly easy to plot out, because if the couple had nothing important scheduled, they seldom traveled more than 150 miles a day. If she needed anything while they were gone, John Henry Foster, the black custodian and groundskeeper, who lived in the little house on the property, was there to help. Foster also cut the grass, kept the property looking neat, and did all the odd jobs that required regular attention. If Meeks needed Foster to run an errand for her, which was a rare occasion, she would ring a farm bell to signal him to come into the office. Every now and then travelers would see the huge Duncan Hines sign in the front yard and stop by for a visit. “Oh, they would get so excited,” she remembered. “They would come in and look around the office. He had a lot of pictures of himself and a lot of awards, and they just thought it was wonderful.” After several months of genuine boredom, Meeks informed the Hines that she wanted to quit. They persuaded her to stay a while longer. A while longer turned out to be a few more years.
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Little evidence remains of Hines's daily activities after the Procter and Gamble purchase. When he was not traveling, he spent his leisure time at home with his nieces and nephews. They would drop by to see if he would entertain them, because they knew his real love was entertaining others, and he was never short of ideas,
particularly when he wanted to play cards.
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He was also full of mischievous stories. Hines liked to tell everyone that each morning he would wake up and eat two breakfasts. The first breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee, a task he was better off preparing for himself anyway, considering how finicky he was about how it should taste. When he had finished consuming a cup or two, it was his habit, he said, to shuffle the chairs, dishes, pans and any other objects at his disposal until Clara woke up and fixed him his second breakfast, which usually consisted of another cup of coffee, orange juice, and corn flakes topped with a large dollop of vanilla ice cream.
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The full array of Duncan Hines cake mixes did not appear on grocery shelves until very late in 1957. Procter and Gamble spent the last few months of 1956 and practically all of 1957 giving their new products little improvements—a result of the most intensive consumer testing program in the company's 120-year-old history.
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More than 40,500 blind taste tests were conducted nationwide. This massive testing led the company to expand the size of its baking mix laboratories and test kitchens. The company examined and analyzed every aspect of its mixes. Nothing was left to chance. As for packaging the final product, P&G engaged the services of one of the best-known experts in the area of industrial food package design. Before the new packages were put on grocery shelves, P&G executives knew—because of their exhaustive research—exactly what psychological buttons to press to make housewives ignore their competitors and purchase their new products. The biggest factor executives were counting on, though, was the famous signature logo. Because Duncan Hines's famous smiling face and logo were emblazoned across the top of each package, automatically conveying to many a guarantee of quality, no one was too worried about its success.
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In July 1957 a columnist for the Louisville
Courier-Journal
caught up with Hines as he was about to embark on a trip to Alaska. Hines looked forward to his excursion. Alaska, he joked, would be a spot on the earth where he would not be recognized and where people would not be asking him out to eat, forcing him
to put on his Sunday clothes for the occasion. While his books had collectively sold around two million copies in 21 years, Hines said, “I've never made a cent off the books…. The money I make comes from other sources.” One of those sources now came in the form of hefty royalties from Procter and Gamble for using his name. Although his cut only came to a fraction of one cent for 24 packages, there was something that those who thought he got a raw deal failed to consider. As he pointed out, his critics did not take into account that every “20 minutes some 20,000 packages” of those cake mixes were being purchased. After a while, he said, that added up. The income he received from that venture alone was more than ample to make his semi-retirement a comfortable one.
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In the fall and winter of 1957, Hines appeared on several radio and television programs. On 6 November 1957, he appeared as a guest on CBS Radio's “Sez Who Show” and made an appearance as a guest on CBS television's “To Tell The Truth.” His media appearances were not sporadic; listeners in the middle Atlantic states could still hear him each weekday on a Mutual Radio Network program called “Let's Travel,”
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which was broadcast over more than 300 stations.
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As 1957 faded into 1958, Hines began to slow down. While he may have tried to continue his hectic schedule, he took things a little easier. As the end of his eighth decade approached, he began letting Clara do more of the driving. They would start out each day taking turns at the wheel once an hour, but, after lunch, Clara more often than not took the wheel for the rest of the day.
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In December 1957
Adventures in Good Eating
celebrated its 50th printing, which now included nearly 3,000 restaurants.
Lodging for a Night
, meanwhile, had recently gone through its 40th printing,
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and Hines's cookbook,
Adventures in Good Cooking
, had expanded its scope to include 700 recipes.
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Five months later, on 5 May 1958, this accomplishment was brought up at the Duncan Hines Family Dinner, which was held once again in Chicago. Roy Park announced at this meeting that there was a new development in the sale of the guidebooks; Park said that he had begun selling them to
the nation's libraries—something Hines had never considered; over 3,000 public libraries stocked their reference shelves with each annual edition.
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By August 1958 Procter and Gamble was having a hard time keeping the grocery shelves full of their new Duncan Hines cake mixes. Their smoother batter, which created a moister cake, was proving to be very popular. As expected, because the Duncan Hines name was affixed to their packages, they moved at a dizzying rate. At Ralph's Market in Los Angeles, California, 800 dozen packages of Duncan Hines cake mix, measuring 34 feet long by four feet deep, disappeared in a few days. At the Oakwood Super Market in Kingsport, Tennessee, store manager Dale Simpson reported that his 517-case display of Duncan Hines cake mixes sold out in three weeks. The Duncan Hines display of 350 cases at the Gold Star Market in Levant, New York, sold out in two weeks. In West Patterson, New Jersey, a 250-case display was set up on a Tuesday afternoon and was sold out by Friday. The store ordered fifty more emergency cases of the cake mix just to get through the weekend.
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No one remembers exactly how Hines's diagnosis for cancer came about, but the best recollection is that he was in Florida visiting family and friends in January 1958, when he felt ill enough to visit a local doctor who gave him his suspicions. Hines arranged through his Bowling Green physician, Dr. A. D. Donnelly, to be examined in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was there that he was officially diagnosed as having lung cancer. Although he remained active for a few more months, from that point on until his death, he was in and out of the Bowling Green hospital, suffering greatly, waiting for the inevitable.
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In September 1958 Sara Meeks' daughter was born and by that time Hines had become seriously ill. Meeks kept telling Clara, “I can't come back to work. I don't have anyone to keep this baby.” Clara responded by saying, “Sara, I can't believe you would do this.
[Mr. Hines] has been so good to you over the years, and he needs you now to help with his correspondence, and you've just got to come.” Meeks reluctantly agreed after it was explained to her that she did not have to come to work every day, but only on days when she was needed to write some letters. Therefore, when she was needed, Meeks took her baby to work with her. Hines paid her by the hour rather than put her on a regular salary. The overall experience, however, “was a pain in the neck,” Meeks recalled. Nevertheless, she was sympathetic; she could plainly see that Hines needed some one to help him. “He was not well at all. He didn't care” about anything, she said. While she was trying to write his letters, her baby cried all day long, and while it did not bother Hines, it certainly bothered her. Sometimes Myrtle Potter, their black cook, would carry the child into the living quarters while Meeks typed. After a while, Meeks could plainly see that bringing her child to work did not sit very well with Clara, so occasionally she found a baby-sitter.

By January 1959, Hines had lost much weight. Even though he was gravely ill, he never complained.
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He spent much of his time in bed, sometimes seeing guests and assorted friends. In retrospect, that he should meet his end as a result of lung cancer was not surprising. In the days before Americans knew for certain that cigarettes were harmful to one's health, Hines smoked them to his heart's content. “I almost never saw him without a cigarette in his hand,” said Mary Herndon.
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He always had a package of cigarettes and matches lying on a nearby table, ready to grab for his use. He would never carry them around in his shirt pocket; instead, when he was about the house, it was his habit to sit on the sofa in front of the coffee table, tear off not just a corner of the cigarette package but the entire top and chain smoke them one after another until they were gone.
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In the end, his pastime proved to be his undoing. At 7:30 AM on Sunday, 15 March, 1959, eleven days before his 79th birthday, Duncan Hines died in bed in his Bowling Green home.
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Duncan Hines's body remained at his home until about an hour before his funeral. The funeral services commenced at 2:00
P.M.
on 17 March 1959, at the Christ Episcopal Church in Bowling Green.
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After the service had been performed, he was laid to rest next to his siblings in Bowling Green's Fairview Cemetery.
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One month later, Hines's estate was probated in Warren County court. According to the terms of his will, Clara was named executrix of his estate and was notified that he left her an estate worth $25,000.
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On the occasion of his death, Hines was remembered for his gentle Southern sense of humor and how this quality emerged from the pages of his publications. Also remembered was “his criteria for evaluating eating places” which insisted on “cleanliness, courtesy, and ample portions served unobtrusively.”
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Said the Louisville
Courier-Journal
, “Hines was a perfectionist, as a real gourmet must be. He demanded not only excellent fare at the table, but decent service and a clean kitchen…. His influence on American cooking was considerable…. His accolade was enough to keep many small, out-of-the-way eating places in business.”
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H. B. Meek, dean of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, summed up Hines's importance to American culture when he said that “while Duncan Hines' appraisal of public
restaurants could not be expected to be infallible, his listings constituted a real service to the traveling public. To the operating restaurateur, Mr. Hines was equally helpful in that he recognized quality and publicized it.”
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