While in Mexico, Hines continued to correspond with Florence. He told her of his good luck and asked her to wait for him until he became the successful man her mother wished him to be. She agreed. He spent two years in Cananea, from mid-1903 to the late summer of 1905, all the while earning a fabulous fortune and collecting for them a sizeable future nest egg. After a few months on the job, he received pieces of interesting yet disturbing news from Florence. In early spring 1903 she wrote to tell him the barriers to their potential marriage had disappeared. Her mother had died on 28 March.102 Nevertheless, he decided to remain in Mexico. Jobs like his did not avail themselves to ambitious young men every day. He wrote Florence, asking her to continue waiting for him until he had accumulated a sizable fortune—or at least enough money that would enable him to handsomely provide for her comfort. He added it would be crazy for him to leave his job right now, certainly one paying $500 a month. Late in 1903, he received another letter from Florence that bore the news that her father had also passed away.103 A few months later, in early 1904, she sent him another letter informing him she had taken care of her family’s estate and was leaving Cheyenne. She was going to be living at Fort Slocum in New Rochelle, New York, with her sister Grace and her husband, Maj. Richard H. Wilson, who had just been transferred there from his command at Fort St. Michael in the Alaska Territory.104 She also said her oldest sister, Eva, now an artist, would be living with them.105
In late summer 1905, Duncan Hines decided to quit the mining life. He had accumulated a sizable bankroll, and he was ready to get married and move on to some other line of work. He had earlier proposed to Florence via the mail and she eagerly accepted. In September 1905, after he had settled a variety of loose ends and amicably severed his ties with the Green Copper Company, he packed his bags and left Cananea by rail for New Rochelle. Never did a train ride seem so long.
4
CHICAGO
Duncan Hines and Florence Chaffin married on 27 September 1905,106 at Fort Slocum in New Rochelle, New York, in Col. Richard H. Wilson’s quarters.107 Florence’s older sister, Grace, wrote a few years after Duncan and Florence were wed: “The biggest event of our stay [in New Rochelle] was…[Florence’s] marriage…. The wedding took place in our living room one afternoon. The ceremony was conducted by the post chaplain…. Then [Florence] left us to live in Chicago.”108
Why Hines and Florence chose Chicago as their new home is unknown. Nor is it known why he chose to work in the advertising profession. He may have thought he had a talent for selling himself and sought to take full advantage of it. When the newlyweds moved to Chicago that fall,109 Hines was quickly hired by a pioneer in direct mail advertising, the J. T. H. Mitchell company, which was a sophisticated operation for its day that had offices in Chicago’s Marquette Building.110 Before much time had passed, his gregarious personality soon made him one of the firm’s best sales representatives. The Mitchell firm had a reputation for excellent service, and Hines quickly learned he had a knack for providing Mitchell’s clients with what they wanted: imaginative advertising ideas that effectively sold their services and products. As a Mitchell employee, he did not call on his customers; instead when they wanted to begin an advertising campaign, they called him. He could only be reached by appointment. Although many customers were from Chicago, more than a few were from cities and towns as far away as Ohio and beyond. When he received a call from a distant client, he usually took a train.111
Hines liked his role as a salesman. It suited his personality, and there was prestige in what he did. His customers liked him because he was “a straight shooter” and did not try to sell them things they did not want. They found him jovially outgoing in his demeanor and not irritatingly aggressive—unlike some salesmen they had encountered. He made his customers feel comfortable and relaxed when he was around. In fact, he was almost courtly toward them. Hines was gentle but firm, and his customers always wanted to buy something from him. This was the secret to his success.112
Although Hines was now living closer to his Kentucky home, his family did not see much of him. He visited them once a year, but that was all he could manage to arrange.113 After five moves in seven years, in 1912 he and Florence found a permanent residence in an apartment house at 5494 Cornell Avenue;114 it remained their home for their marriage’s duration.115
Hines and his boss, John T. H. Mitchell, got along fabulously; quite often they called on distant corporate clients together. So highly did Mitchell regard his employee’s ability as a salesman that it was not an uncommon sight to see them together, bustling down the Midwestern breadbasket’s highways in Mitchell’s car, with the boss at the wheel and Hines in the passenger seat. Although Hines could not drive, this lack of knowledge did not seem to bother Mitchell, who enjoyed his company.116
Sometime between 1910 and 1914 the Mitchell company chose to discontinue its involvement with direct mail and plunged itself into the printing business. Within several months the company became a major Midwestern printer. Hines’s role within the reorganized company was unaffected by the changeover, because Mitchell could always use his valuable selling talents. The printing industry, however, intrigued him, and Hines sought to extend his knowledge of it. He learned as many facets of the trade as he could, and within time the industry regarded him as one of its more knowledgeable experts. Before long Mitchell gave him new duties. Although officially still a salesman, Hines soon found himself designing, writing, and producing corporate brochures as well as books and catalogues for the industrial firms he called on, which increasingly were outside the Chicago area. As he came to realize, the time he took to learn the many aspects of this new trade proved a valuable asset.117
It was while traveling for the Mitchell firm that Hines first began jotting down in a memorandum book the names of good places to eat. He traveled through so many cities and towns over the years that writing them down and noting what they served seemed to him a sensible practice; he could revisit them when he was next in town. He even extended the practice when he went on vacation. One of the places he investigated on a 1915 vacation via train through the Midwest with Florence was the Golden Lamb restaurant in Lebanon, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati.118 He stepped through its doors because friends had told him it was the oldest hotel in the state and had “a great deal of historical romance connected with it.” However, he also went inside because he “was curious to know what kind of food they served.”119
Over the years, the entries in Hines’s restaurant memorandum book grew as he found more good restaurants in which to dine. When on a sales appointment in a town he had not visited for a year or two, a quick look at his notebook told him where to go to devour a delicious meal. By the late 1910s fellow salesmen who knew of his notebook gave him their lists of favorite eating places in exchange for his. They, too, were interested in such restaurants; few places serving good food existed, especially beyond large cities. When he investigated a particular place and found it of high quality, the restaurant’s name and address and what it served were recorded in his memorandum book for future reference. His colleagues in sales had good reason to ask for and keep such lists. They did not want to die of restaurant food poisoning, as many did. Any seasoned man in sales then knew that knowledge of a good, clean restaurant was treasured information. “More people will die this year from hit-or-miss eating than from hit-and-run driving,” Hines stated repeatedly over the years, and everyone in the business knew it.120
Sometime in late 1914 Hines left the J. T. H. Mitchell Company.121 He was a resourceful young man, however, and by early 1916 he was once again working for another employer. His well-known skills as a salesman in the printing field were quickly appropriated by Mitchell’s rival, Rogers and Company, another Chicago printing firm.122 They employed him until late in 1927 when Rogers and Company was purchased by the Mead-Grede Printing Company.123 At the new company’s request, he remained for a few months as a Mead-Grede employee. As he had with the Mitchell company, his duties with both the R
ogers and Mead-Grede operations involved selling. In addition to the usual printing wares, he also sold creative “advertising specialties,” items such as key chains, erasers, calendars, fans, pens and pencils that featured a company’s logo.124
One day in the summer of 1918, while discussing food with some acquaintances, the subject turned to lobsters and the best way to prepare them. Hines’s friends kept telling him of the wonderful flavor New England lobsters possessed, that it was simply heavenly, that there was no finer in the world, and that he ought to come to New England with them to discover this truism for himself. He became intrigued with the idea and his friends agreed to take him and Florence on a gastronomic tour of New England—from Provincetown, Rhode Island, to Portland, Maine. An eating tour seemed to him an enjoyable way as any to spend a summer vacation. Therefore, a few weeks later, Hines and Florence climbed into the back seat of their friends’ roadster and headed for New England. Within a few days they were well into their quest, visiting “every notable seafood restaurant” along the New England coastline, with an emphasis on exploring the many varieties of lobster. Hines remembered it well: “For days I devoured lobster in every shape, manner, and form of preparation,… but we never did decide which was the best way to prepare” lobster.125 As a result of the trip, however, Hines could see the advantages of owning a car—something he had been putting off for years. Until he left the Mitchell Company, his primary means of transportation in Chicago was either by foot or train. Before 1915, all of his long distance excursions by automobile had been while sitting in the passenger seat; now he was without a boss to chauffeur him around. Once he joined Rogers and Company in 1916, he discovered he could not call on some clients because they were in small towns without rail service. He spent several frustrating years working around this problem, but after much hesitation, he finally decided to purchase an automobile. Although he considered learning how to drive a car a formidable challenge, he also believed he needed one if he was to remain a successful salesman. It was becoming evident in his eyes that, except for very distant sales calls, non-ownership of an automobile was becoming a handicap he could ill-afford to suffer. Therefore, in late 1919, he bought his first roadster and, at age 39, began mastering its use. Over the years his taste in cars would change a bit. He traded in his old car for a new model every year. His “first car was a big, expensive, hearse-like contrivance,” but by 1938 he favored automobiles that were light and fast.126 By the 1950s his taste in cars returned to larger models, especially Cadillacs.127 Nevertheless, once he had mastered driving his vehicle, he made the most of it. When he met a client in a distant city, he no longer took the train; instead he drove to the client’s factory. The more he drove it, the better he liked it. Soon, for him, driving his car was a way of life.128
Hines kept busy during the 1920s. He was in his car or on a train nearly every weekday. As the 1920s unfolded and as more roads were paved, he increasingly forsook train travel for the pleasure driving his car afforded him. It was not unusual in those days to see him steering his car down the road to his next appointment, the vehicle stuffed full of “advertising specialties” and printing catalogs. He traveled to “manufacturing plants in the Middle West.” On a typical train trip he might go from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, on Monday; from Buffalo to Bradford, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday; from Bradford to Wheeling, West Virginia, on Wednesday; and from Wheeling to Huntington, West Virginia, on Thursday, before heading back to Chicago on Friday.129 After 1925 he began to travel well beyond the geographical confines of the Midwest, often traveling into the Deep South or the far Western states. Regardless of where he was, after keeping his daily appointments, he busily familiarized himself with the town’s restaurants by asking its residents about the best places to eat and recording their comments.130
The Hines’s Chicago apartment was home not only to them but, from time to time, to Florence’s sisters. The 1920 census shows that Eva, Florence’s oldest sister, was living with them.131 Florence’s other sister, Grace Chaffin Wilson, had a daughter, whose name was also Grace, a fact that no doubt created much confusion. In February 1921,132 Grace’s daughter married Leslie R. “Dick” Groves, an ambitious West Point graduate and engineer. When Leslie and Grace Groves were living on the grounds of Chicago’s Fort Sheridan, where he was stationed, they frequently enjoyed the company of Duncan and Florence Hines. In fact, Leslie Groves and Duncan Hines became not only compatible in-laws but great friends; the two men had a lot in common in their outlook on life.133
In 1916, during the first World War, while Col. Richard H. Wilson, was in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa across the Mexican landscape to no avail, Florence’s sister, Grace Wilson, lived with the Hines for more than a year. After the war, Florence Hines and her niece, Grace, spent much time in each other’s company, usually shopping in Chicago’s many stores.134
Ten years later, during the last weekend of November 1926,135 Leslie and Grace Groves came to Chicago to attend the Army-Navy football game held at Soldier Field. During their stay, Leslie Groves had business elsewhere that day, so Grace Groves visited the Hines in their Cornell Avenue apartment. At one point Grace and her aunt Florence decided to leave the apartment to see a movie, and Hines was asked to baby-sit for the Groves’ son, Richard, whom they called “Little Dick.” Before he could change his mind, they were gone, leaving him alone with the child. Hines only had one problem with this situation: he had no idea what to do with the boy. What followed was a scene reminiscent of an Edgar Kennedy movie short, as Hines tried to cope with the mischievous child. Not long after Florence and Grace had left, Little Dick, who was about five years old, snuck up behind Hines while he was reading the newspaper and hit him square in the chest. The boy “bust the dickens out of me,” Hines said later, and even broke his glasses. This was probably not the best way to win Hines’s favor. At one point Hines told the boy to go to bed. The child dutifully went to his bedroom but stayed there for only about five minutes before becoming restless. Little Dick was lugging around, in Hines words, “this doggoned monkey,” and the child began using the stuffed creature as a stratagem to resist going to sleep. Little Dick told Hines that his monkey, Snooky, wanted a drink of water. So Hines got up from his chair, went into the kitchen, and brought the child the requested glass of water. But neither little Dick nor Snooky would touch it. “Then about five minutes later,” the child would squawk, “Snooky wants a drink.” Hines, once again, complied with the child’s request, getting the boy another glass of water. This was only the beginning. The boy asked twice more for a glass of water for his thirsty pet monkey and twice more Hines acquiesced in the boy’s request. But after several more requests for water and several more trips to the sink, Hines became exasperated. So he went to the sink, filled up a scrub bucket of water, and said “All right, Little Dick, are you sure Snooky wants a drink?” And with that he took the monkey “by the legs” and “shoved him…in the bucket of water,” letting him have all the refreshment he wanted. The situation then became very unpleasant. The boy began to bawl and “he finally wore himself out and went to sleep.” When his mother returned home with Florence and heard his explanation of what he had done, she was not amused. Hines later rationalized away his behavior, saying, “Not having any kids of my own, I didn’t know what to do with them except give them candy or something like that.”136
After being separated from his wife all week, Duncan Hines did something many traveling salesmen still do not do. Instead of flopping down on the sofa and refusing to travel another mile, he and Florence spent their weekends together in their car, traveling the highways of America. In the introduction to an early edition of his book Adventures in Good Eating, Hines related how he and Florence first became interested in traveling on weekends:
My interest in wayside inns is not the expression of a gourmand’s greedy appetite for fine foods but the result of a recreational impulse to do something ‘different,’ to play a new game that would intrigue my wife and give me her companionship in
my hours of relaxation from a strenuous and exacting business. She [did] not play golf, [was] not addicted to bridge or to society functions and apparently like[d] to ‘go places’ with her husband better than she like[d] any other kind of relaxation…. The nature of my business oblige[d] us to live in Chicago, although we would [have] like[d] a house in the country. One day on the golf links I suddenly realized the fact that it was unfair of me to find my relaxation in something which my wife could not share. I decided to reform. We had both been accustomed to refinements in good living and on occasional automobile trips together I had noticed that she was especially interested in these provisions for the comfort and pleasure of tourists. This gave me the idea of giving our recreational motoring trips the spice of definitive objective. Why not make a game of its resources in inns and tourist accommodations?
Therefore, when he returned from business on Friday evening, they “hit the tourist trail, sometimes driving all night to enjoy the scenery by a bright full moon.”137
When Florence Hines was not keeping herself busy with housekeeping, she was either having her many friends over for coffee and tea, or she was shopping with them. Hers was an enjoyable, uneventful life. But as soon as her husband came through the front door, she spent all her time with him. Each was the other’s best friend and trusted confidant. When Hines found his business was increasingly keeping him on the road, she did not demand that she travel with him to keep an eye on him. Duncan Hines was not that manner of man and she knew it. Besides, he was not always gone every week, all week long. Nor was he always in some distant city. Sometimes he spent the whole day meeting clients in Chicago. Every week was different. But when the weekend came, they were inseparable.138
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