Duncan Hines

by Louis Hatchett

  When a motel provided its customers with luxuries that only a few years ago seemed unimaginable, Hines noticed. If the establishment was of exceptionally fine quality in all respects, he included it in his lodging guide. Well, almost. After the war, the motel also had to offer one other important item to receive his recommendation: a good dining facility. He only gave his blessing to motels with high quality dining rooms and coffee shops, and he believed his reasoning was justified. People were tired upon their arrival and they did not want to leave the motel to find a place to dine. Besides, when a motel offered both a place to sleep and eat, each feature simultaneously promoted the other. His insistence on this feature therefore, is why almost all good motels of the day began to have dining facilities.472

  Craving anonymity when he could find it, Hines did not advertise his arrival when he slept somewhere. As with restaurants, he believed his readers would be badly served if he alerted an innkeeper he was planning to spend the night there. Why give a proprietor the whole day to create for him a false impression? It was either a good place to sleep or it was not. To avoid this potential travesty, he made his reservation under another name. Once ensconced in the lodging of his choice, he walked around the premises to “scrape up conversations with other travelers…[to discover] what places they liked along the highway….” In this way he usually learned of even better lodgings elsewhere. When he arrived at one of them a day or so later, instead of checking in for the evening, he first asked to see an unoccupied room. After being shown one, he performed a routine yet thorough inspection in an effort to see just how clean and comfortable it really was. First he “would thump the beds to see if they [had] springs,” then he would “count the blankets, try the plumbing,” and “turn on the lights to see if” he was “paying for burned-out or thirty-watt bulbs.” If anything fell below his standards, he asked to see another room. If he could not find a room to meet his specifications, he left.473

  As in any hotel or motel, there are better rooms than others. Hines had a stratagem for getting a good one. “The way I make sure the room is the one [I] want is by asking, after I register, ‘May I see the rooms you have available?’ If I’m an early bird, I know there is some choice. It takes some nerve to do that…but in these times the timid traveler gets the leftovers.” He noticed that unlike hoteliers in the cities, “motor court and tourist-home operators are invariably gracious about showing rooms; that is one reason why they are luring business away from the hotels.” But he had another theory as to why motels were increasingly attracting business away from those polished palaces: the “convenience of having your car near your room, and the ease of getting away without a spasm of tipping.” Tipping. Hines was sure this was why so many people hated hotels, and it was his biggest pet peeve about them. “Lodging the customer for the night has become a racket,” Hines said, “particularly in some of the big hotels, the object of which is to separate him from as much cash as possible, and as fast as possible.” He grew exasperated every time he mentioned the subject. He wrote that “the tipping racket is driving customers out of the hotels” and “into the motor courts and tourist homes. It begins with the doorman and the bellboys. You drive up to a hotel, the doorman unloads your baggage; he has a smile, is very courteous, and you tip him. He proceeds to set the bags inside the door and go back on the street to wait for the next customer. Then comes the bellboy, and he carries the bags into the lobby and stands by your side while you register, and says, ‘Yes, sir, your bags are right here and I am watching them.’ So you tip him, thinking he is the boy who is going to escort you to your room. But as soon as you give him a tip he disappears. Then another boy comes along and carries your bags up, opens the door and the window, turns on the lights, and asks you if there is anything else. There being none, you tip him and he is gone. Then, inside of ten minutes, along comes the maid, and she says, ‘Yes, ma’am’—whether she is talking to me or my wife. ‘I just want to inspect the beds and see if they have clean sheets on them, and see if you’ve got plenty of towels.’ Just for the devilment, I say, ‘If we haven’t got all those things, why the heck will they rent me a room at eight bucks a day?’ She says, ‘I don’t know. I just want to make sure you are comfortable.’ So what? You give her fifty cents to get rid of her.” Little wonder why Hines called tipping “a racket.”

  In the restaurant industry “another racket is headwaiter tipping,” he said. When he and Clara arrived at a high-priced restaurant, they usually discovered that they had to wait in the lounge or bar until called. Hines noticed this never failed to happen despite the fact he had made reservations well in advance. When he spied several unoccupied tables and pointed them out to the management, it made no difference. On these occasions Hines sometimes slipped the waiter two dollars to get a seat, but only to prove to himself the “tipping racket” was alive and well. Usually when Hines dined he had a firm rule about tipping: “…twenty-five cents per person, when I am served with courtesy. If the waiter is surly, I give nothing.”474

  Hines and Clara developed a routine when on the road. Before starting out that morning they ate a light breakfast. Shortly before noon they dined on an equally light lunch. They ate just enough during these first two meals to taste and comment on them. Unless circumstances dictated otherwise, their big meal was reserved for that evening. Before going to a restaurant for their feast, however, they relaxed. They usually pulled into a hotel or motel around 3:00 or 4:00 P.M., stretched out on the bed after settling into their room, and took a nap. They had been driving for six or seven hours and relaxation before dinner was essential; they were always meeting people wherever they dined, often individuals of some importance; so Hines could ill-afford to be seen as tired and cranky. He wanted to feel fresh when he arrived at the restaurant. He also wanted to be seen as immaculately dressed. No one ever saw him in dirty clothes. Even when he attended family picnics in Bowling Green and wore work clothes, his garments were excessively clean.475

  Clara traveled with Hines just as much as Florence did a decade earlier. An example of their extensive travels together was one that took place during July and August 1947. On 6 July they left Bowling Green shortly after noon and arrived in Evansville, Indiana three hours later, where they spent the night at the McCurdy Hotel, a large opulent structure about which Hines wrote: “Most hotel food is blah, but that is not true of this hotel.”476

  The following day they arrived at their destination, Urbana, Illinois, where Hines spoke at the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel to a group of students and faculty members from the University of Illinois on the importance of restaurant cleanliness and other related topics. From there he and Clara drove to Chicago. While in town they received a call from a friend in Negaunee, Michigan, located in Michigan’s upper peninsula, who invited them to sample that area’s local cuisine. Hines and Clara accepted the invitation and drove there a day or two later, where they were treated to dishes of Cornish pasty, venison steak, and partridge. The following day they visited another friend’s lumber camp and ate flapjacks with the lumberjacks. The size of the flapjacks suited these men perfectly, being one quarter-inch thick and nine inches in diameter, twelve to fifteen of them piled high on each plate. Their table also included “17 varieties of sweets.”

  The next day Hines and Clara journeyed to Rochester, Minnesota, and visited the Mayo clinic for a thorough medical examination; said Hines afterward, doctors found both he and Clara “disgustingly healthy.” From there they crossed the Wisconsin state line and headed for Mineral Point, the home of one of Hines’s favorite restaurants, the Pendarvis House. Wrote Hines some years earlier,

  Pendarvis House is one of the few places in this country where real Cornish meals are served, prepared from old authentic recipes, and where scalded cream (often called Devonshire or clotted cream) may be had. Their Cornish pasty, hearty and appetizing, is served for luncheon or dinner with homemade relishes and pickles, and green salads with fresh herbs. Wild plum, citron or gooseberry preserves with the scalded cream, t
ea and saffron cake, served as dessert, are delights which will thrill the most jaded gourmet’s palate.477

  As he had so many times before, Hines enjoyed his meal but was especially ecstatic over the Pendarvis House’s cream of spinach soup.

  The next day they drove southward to St. Charles, Illinois, to eat at the Thornapple Lodge. “Here you get a Swedish dinner,” said Hines, “with loads of smorgasbord.”478 The following day was a long one, as they drove first through Indiana and then into the adjacent state before stopping, finally, in Ashland, Ohio, where they ate salad, T-Bone steak, chicken, and pie at the Cottage Restaurant on Main Street.479 From there it was on to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, not so much to eat at the Penn-Wells Hotel but to take advantage of the lovely, 50-mile drive through Penn’s Grand Canyon, which was estimated to be 1,000 feet deep.480 While traveling through this scenic landscape, they were forced to make a detour over an unpaved road, which resulted in a tire “blow out.” After repairing it, they continued eastward until they stopped to eat and sleep at the Rip Van Winkle cottages, located at the foot of the Catskill Mountains.

  After a night’s rest, they traveled over the Mohawk trail through the Berkshires and on to Concord, Massachusetts to eat in the Old Mill Dam Tavern, a restaurant that was once the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There they dined on Vermont sausage and baked beans before heading for Boston where they stayed at the Parker House. Here, Hines let Clara loose upon the city for a day’s worth of antique hunting. That night they ate swordfish steaks at Boston’s Union Oyster House at 41 Union Street. The following evening they feasted on beef steaks at that city’s famed restaurant, Durgin Park, located at 30 North Market Street, which was across the road from Faneuil Hall and was the home of 4,000-5,000 daily customers who gobbled down the New England fare that Hines proclaimed to be the best regional food in America.

  They could not leave Massachusetts without walking through the doors of an old Hines favorite, the Toll House in Whitman, Massachusetts and tasting once again the magic of that restaurant’s “lemon pie with four-inch-high meringue.” So they made a side trip to visit Hines’s old haunt, and the visit gave Hines a chance to introduce his friends, Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield, to his new wife. After their visit, Clara described the restaurant as the “most beautiful place in New England.” From there the couple made their way to Kingston, Rhode Island, about 30 miles from Pawtucket, where they dined on chicken and lobster at the Crossways, a New England tea room, before driving over to Weston, Connecticut, to dine on home cooking at the Cobb Mill Inn, where they were waited on, to their delight, by “butlers in a barn.” Late that afternoon they pulled into Norwalk, Connecticut, where they supped at the Silver Mine Tavern, a restaurant, “on a terrace overlooking an old mill pond.”481 There they spent the night.

  Upon arising the following morning, they drove into New York City and checked into Hines’s favorite hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria. Toward sunset they began a gourmet tour of the town that was to last for several days. To begin their journey into gastronomy, they first chose the restaurant Le Cremaillere, “where they had a leg of lamb for an entree and imported filet of sole cooked in white wine.” For their next meal they entered Giovanni’s to dine on “minced clams in aspic, breast of chicken with truffles, gnocchi (which is similar to fried mush) and, for dessert zabaglione.” For their third restaurant, Hines and Clara chose Seman Brazilian Gardens where they sampled South American food. Their breakfasts, of course, were eaten at the Waldorf, delightful spreads which Hines could not stop praising. After three days of feasting on some of the finest cuisine in America, the couple elected to leave New York before they became permanently spoiled. Philadelphia was their next destination.

  Once in the city of brotherly love, they sat down at the Bookbinders restaurant at 125 Walnut Street and ordered a sumptuous meal of red snapper chowder. It was so hot that day, though, that Hines decided to literally head for the hills—the Appalachian Mountains. While driving through the rich scenery the Pennsylvania mountains afforded, they stopped long enough to sample the culinary fare at the Harris Ferry Tavern and the Georgian Hall at Camp Hill. Toward sunset, they stopped in Cresson, Pennsylvania to sleep at the Lee Hoffman Hotel, which had long been another favorite Hines haunt. That evening they remarked to one another that although they had fled Philadelphia for the coolness of the mountains, they now had the opposite problem: it was too cold. In fact, the mountain air was so cold that evening that they could not sit outdoors on the hotel porch after dark; they had not thought to bring their overcoats with them in the middle of August. The next morning Hines and Clara feasted on buckwheat cakes, Loretta Farms sausage, and small green onions before heading down the road to Pittsburgh, where Hines was scheduled to attend an autograph party; that afternoon he signed 700 books in three hours.

  Much of the next day was spent driving; Hines and Clara put 465 miles on the speedometer in eight or nine hours as they headed for Chicago; Hines wanted to visit friends there. Upon their arrival, however, they found the climate too hot and humid for their taste and, after a night’s rest, headed for another old haunt, one that Hines and Florence had frequently visited years earlier: Arthur and Nelle Palmer’s Lowell Inn in Stillwater, Minnesota. Continually filling their plates with fresh brook trout, they stayed there until the weather cooled a bit. Upon their departure, Hines and Clara set out again for Chicago. This time the city’s humidity was bearable, and it afforded them a comfortable visit with several of Hines’s friends.

  Upon their departure a day or so later, they set off southward before coming to rest in Bedford, Indiana, where they retired for the evening. Early the next afternoon, after forty days of traveling, fifteen states, and about 6,500 miles, they pulled into the gravel driveway of their Bowling Green home. For dinner that evening, after gorging themselves on some of the nation’s richest cuisine, they swallowed, in Hines’s words, something simple: “ham hock, greasy beans, corn pones, and some of Clara’s biscuits with new grape jelly—and,” he said “that sounds good, too.”482

  The more Duncan Hines’s recommendations were appreciated, the more an ever-growing cadre of admirers wanted to learn about him. In November 1947, he was featured in the widely-read general interest magazine Coronet. The article introduced him as the “gregarious Southerner” who, “through his lively interest in food and people[,]…has influenced the eating habits of a nation.” The article’s substance was drawn from an interview with him earlier that year in Tampa, Florida. On that occasion, the writer for Coronet witnessed a scene that was beginning to occur more frequently. Hines and Clara seated themselves at the table of an unnamed restaurant (most likely the Columbia, which was known for its Spanish and French dishes), ordered their dinner, and were quietly awaiting its arrival, when the house orchestra, a feature commonly found in the better restaurants of the day, struck up “My Old Kentucky Home.” Said the writer, “Waiters appeared with huge platters of delicacies—far more than Hines had ordered. As he unfolded his napkin, the dining room was vibrant with suppressed excitement. Everyone was aware that they were about to witness a performance of major significance—like watching Bobby Feller pitch or Arturo Toscanini conduct. They were going to watch Duncan Hines eat!’ The attention he received was on a par reserved for royalty. It is not known what he did on that particular occasion, but there can be no doubt he was highly embarrassed by the spectacle of having all eyes fixed upon him as he plunged a forkful of food in his mouth. He didn’t realize he had been spotted by the management. Although he preferred to walk into restaurants unnoticed, eat his meal, pay his bill, and leave, as the postwar years rolled on, those days were becoming increasingly rare. He was a celebrity now and had to accept the trappings that came with it. Nevertheless, he was amazed that people could be so interested in what he did for a living. Said Coronet, “His name has become a national byword; as author, publisher and unofficial arbiter of the American tourist’s eating habits, his fan mail rivals that of a movie star.” Indeed, his mail by this time, if anything
, was increasing in volume nearly every day. And there was no sign it would stop. The more people bought his books, the more mail his office received. By late 1947 Hines had sold nearly 2,000,000 copies of his books since 1936.483 In 1947 alone sales of his books totaled around 225,000 copies.484 He had become so popular he was now getting book orders from “people in India, China, South America, Australia, Europe—even Tahiti,” who told him they were planning to make a trip to the United States and wanted to plan their vacations around the restaurants and inns he recommended.

  By 1948 the postwar demand for his books had subsided to a manageable level. Although he still had representatives in the field selling them on a commission basis, business was steady enough to enable him to reduce his office overhead. By the end of that year, he employed only three full-time secretaries. He would, on occasion, hire two or three temporary workers for those occasions when things became hectic around the office, such as when the Williams Printing Company deposited a huge order of books at his doorstep, forcing his staff to quickly fill an enormous backlog of prepaid orders. But other than that, his office ran like clockwork. Hines’s office manager, Edith Wilson, described him as “the perfect boss.” Said Wilson, “If the outgoing mail stacks up faster than we can handle it, he’ll pitch in and help us wrap packages and seal envelopes.”485