Duncan Hines (41 page)

A few days after his death, he was eulogized in Congress by Rep. William Natcher, a native of Bowling Green, who stated that “All America has benefited from Duncan Hines' ‘hobby,' and every time a diner feels the satisfaction and glow that results from an excellent repast he can be grateful to Mr. Hines for recommending the restaurant that prepared the meal.”
⁷³⁹

Clara Hines's life changed little after her husband's death, with one exception. She felt uncomfortable living 2 miles from Bowling Green's city limits and wanted to live in town. The home she had shared with her husband was rather small for her tastes so she decided to sell it. She had enough money from Procter and Gamble royalties to build a sizable home, so she built one three times as large. Early in 1960 she purchased a tract of land in Bowling Green's upscale suburbs and built a three-bedroom home.
⁷⁴⁰
On 1 June 1960 it was announced that her once-famous home had been purchased for $32,500 by W.B. Hardy, a funeral director from the nearby community of Smith's Grove. Hardy took possession of the property on 1 July 1960 and immediately announced plans to turn the property into a second site for his funeral home business, adding that he would construct an adjoining $10,000 chapel to the existing structure.
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Today, when one drives by the building, he can easily distinguish where the structure Hines constructed ends and the newer addition begins.
⁷⁴²

In the fall of 1962 American travelers assumed that the 1963 Duncan Hines guidebooks would soon be issued for the coming year. But they and the proprietors who profited from them were to be disappointed. In late November each member of the Duncan Hines Family received in the mail a letter from Roy Park which stated some devastating news, which said that “publication of the Duncan Hines Travel Books will be discontinued for 1963. Sales of the books and the display of official Duncan Hines signs will continue until 31 December 1962. Unsold books…after that date
may be returned for refund. If you are leasing official signs, you will receive special instructions concerning lease termination, refunds and returns…. This is, of course, a major decision. It means the suspension of a publishing activity which has provided a valuable service to American travelers for 27 consecutive years. It means that all of us…will be ending a long and friendly business association with you.”

He explained his decision to terminate the business. He had concluded that

the American traveling public no longer need[ed] the services provided by the Duncan Hines Travel books. The great need of 27 years ago has been erased by the remarkable upgrading of eating and lodging facilities all over the country. Today's traveler is no longer a hardy pioneer challenging an uncharted sea with a stomach of iron and a back of steel. No matter his personal tastes, his financial well-being, or the direction of his wandering, the traveler today has a near infinite choice of high quality eating and lodging places. For example, Duncan Hines could find less than 200 places he thought worthy of mention at the time he published his first list of superior eating places. But today it is next to impossible to list all the worthy eating places in a practical-size[d] book. The same is true of places to lodge. The tremendous growth in the lodging field…has also greatly lessened the need for travel guide books.

In his farewell letter Park pointed out

the reliance of motorists on guide books has been reduced further by the rapid growth in turnpike and tollway traffic. Almost every toll or limited access highway has many convenient eating and lodging places which adequately serve the hurrying traveler. In view of all these changes, I believe you will agree that the traveling American has moved past an era of concern and moved into an era of confidence about traveling. That America now really loves to travel (but no longer views a
guide book as a glove compartment “must”) is a great tribute to the pioneering efforts of Duncan Hines. Mr. Hines' uncompromising crusade for improved hospitality along America's highways…played a vital role in the constant upgrading which has brought about the present happy state of affairs across the country.

He thanked everyone and wished them well. And the service which began with an unusual Christmas card became another relic of America's cultural history.
⁷⁴³

Some quarters were saddened by Park's announcement. “The American roadside will not look the same again,” the New York
Herald-Tribune
editorialized. “Within the next few months every one of those thousands of ‘Recommended by Duncan Hines' signs, which hang in front of restaurants, hotels and motels and have become almost as familiar to motorists as Burma-Shave advertisements will be removed from the highways and by-ways of the U. S.” By June 1963 the last of the familiar signs with the distinctive logo had been eliminated from America's roadside culture. While they lasted, the public snapped up the remaining Duncan Hines travel books; by the time the last one had been purchased, more than five million books had been sold. After 31 December 1962, they became collector's items.
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Some months after Roy Park made his stunning announcement, he moved his company from Ithaca, New York to Procter and Gamble's company headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He remained with them as a consultant
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and left the organization in 1969,
⁷⁴⁶
using his accumulated wealth to enter the multimedia field that would, in time, make him one of America's wealthiest men.
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He was an astute businessman, and his company's profits increased at an annual rate of 22 percent each year between 1963 and 1988. For Park the communications business was more of a congenial avocation than a ruthless, cutthroat enterprise. Chester Middles-worth, who looked after Park's communication properties in Kentucky and North Carolina, said of his employer, “Even though he has a great deal of money, he does not strive or plan hour after
hour for money.” Through Park's eyes, what he did for a living was just easy.
⁷⁴⁸

The years slipped by, a couple of decades passed, and then Clara Hines died at her home at 7:45
A.M.
after “a lengthy illness” on 8 August 1983, surviving Duncan Hines by twenty-four years. She was taken to the Gerard-Bradley Funeral Home and later buried near her husband.
⁷⁴⁹
By then the Duncan Hines books were nothing more than a memory. And to most Americans, the name Duncan Hines was just a name on a cake mix box. After his death Hines's face was removed from the cake mix packages, leaving only the familiar Duncan Hines logo, which remains to this day. In time, the man for whom the cake mix was named was largely forgotten.

Roy Park died of cardiac arrest on 25 October 1993, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. At the time of his death he was eighty-three and still living in Ithaca. Shortly before his death, Park was listed in
Forbes
as the 175th richest man in America; he owned twenty-two radio stations, eight television stations and 144 publications, mainly periodicals located in the North Atlantic and Southern states. His estimated net worth was $550 million. Park once admitted that although he made plenty of money over the years, the most fun he had while making it was through his association with Duncan Hines.
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In December 1997 Aurora Foods of Columbus, Ohio bought the Duncan Hines brand from Procter & Gamble for $250 million. Matt Smith was appointed to run the Duncan Hines division in 1998. He was followed in that position two years later by Michael Hojnacki.

Several factors contributed to the termination of the Duncan Hines guidebooks. As Roy Park stated when he ceased publishing them, by 1962 there were far too many good restaurants and lodgings to be listed in a single volume. The day had passed when one book could contain them all. Perhaps his best reason, though, was an unspoken one: Duncan Hines was no longer around to actually recommend anything. After his death, somehow the phrase “Recommended by Duncan Hines” didn't mean as much.

When Americans travel today, it is mostly by Interstate, and the choices offered on restaurant menus from one end of this highway system to the other are increasingly limited and familiar. Writes David Schwartz,

Whether in Massachusetts or Montana, run-of-the-road family restaurants seem to interpret American cuisine as breaded pork chops, Salisbury steak and fried fillet of (unnamed) fish accompanied by green beans out of a can…. Bogus theme restaurants with their decor ordered from a design catalog may serve regional specialties, but all too often the meals come as prepackaged, portion-controlled servings that were cooked up in a factory kitchen, flash-frozen and shipped halfway across the state to be microwaved back to some semblance of life—not a state of affairs that would have cut much mustard with the man from Bowling Green.
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The interstate highway system has inadvertently created an American public who not only has forgotten how to enjoy the experience of traveling but the art of roadside eating. Many, if not all, have never practiced the pleasure of discovering little wayside restaurants that offer a smorgasbord of regional delights especially prepared in subtle and distinctive ways that can be found nowhere else. To any cultured palate a country ham cured in Hawaii is vastly inferior to one cured in Kentucky. Likewise, the pineapple dish prepared in a Hawaiian restaurant is stupendously better than one prepared in a rural Kentucky tavern. In his “autobiography” Duncan Hines saw the day of widespread regional differences ending, but he was optimistic that they would somehow always be with us. “Some regional preferences go on and on, pretty much unchanged from one year to the next,” he said.
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And he was right. Regional specialties still exist, the desire to cook recipes native to one's geographical location will probably never die, and the food to prepare it will probably always be in abundance. Millions of families have recorded the recipes of countless regional dishes and many of these have found their way into American
restaurants. All one needs is the will to seek them out, taste them, and savor the joy they afford.

In his 1938
Saturday Evening Post
article, Milton MacKaye said of Duncan Hines after meeting him that there was “through his conversation a tender and touching attachment to such items as unsweetened corn bread, white, first-run maple syrup, and properly cured hams, which at once stamps him as a sentimentalist and poet.”
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MacKaye was correct, but Hines was more than that. He was a true American original who changed our expectations toward restaurants and what one should find when entering them. He created within the public mind an attitude that restaurant kitchens should be immaculately clean and above suspicion. In time, thanks to him, restaurant patrons came to demand that criteria, no matter where they dined. They believed their dining experiences should be ones to remember, not regret.

So the next time the reader dines in a restaurant that affords him a memorable meal, the savory pleasure of which causes his tongue to sparkle and brings a smile to his face, he should remember Duncan Hines for a moment and lift a glass to toast his memory. Somewhere, you can be sure, Duncan Hines will wink and reciprocate the gesture.

¹
Cartoon,
Moonbeams
(December 1958): 6.
Moonbeams
is Procter and Gamble's company magazine.

²
Cora Jane Spiller, Interview with Louis Hatchett (Bowling Green KY): 10 May 1994.

³
n.a.,
Descendants of Henry Hines
,
Sr. 1732-1810
(Louisville KY: John P. Morton & Company, 1925) 10. CSA is an abbreviation for Confederate States of America.

⁴
Spiller, 10 May 1994.

⁵
Park City Daily News
(Bowling Green KY), 16 February 1920.

⁶
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

⁷
Descendants of Henry Hines
, Sr., 10.

⁸
Spiller, 10 May 1994.

⁹
Edward Ludlow Hines, autobiographical paper, no. 1 and no. 2, n.d., n.p.

¹⁰
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

¹¹
Times-Journal
(Bowling Green KY), 16 February 1920.

¹²
Park City Daily News
, 16 February 1920. The master commissioner and circuit court clerk are now two separate positions.

¹³
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

¹⁴
Ibid.

¹⁵
Milton MacKaye, “Where Shall We Stop For Dinner?,”
The Saturday Evening Post
(3 December 1938): 211:17.

¹⁶
Robert Spiller, 16 August 1993. Although his father was a Democratic Party stalwart, Duncan Hines was a lifelong member of the Republican Party. He never referred to President Harry S. Truman as “the President,” but preferred instead to jocularly anoint him as “that son of a bitch.”

¹⁷
Cora Jane Spiller, 16 August 1993.

¹⁸
Ibid., 16 August 1993 and 10 May 1994.

¹⁹
Ibid., 16 August 1993.

²⁰
Kentucky Registrar of Vital Statistics, file no. 29188.

²¹
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

²²
Kentucky Registrar of Vital Statistics, file no. 29188. Kentucky's Department of Vital Statistics gives Markham Hines death date as 12 October 1917, but that may have been when it was filed. The family Bible states his death as 10 October 1917.

²³
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

²⁴
Park City Daily News
, 4 December 1951.

²⁵
Spiller, 16 August 1993.

²⁶
Park City Daily News
, 6 December 1935.