Duncan Hines (11 page)

After several weeks of typing, cutting, and pasting the manuscript in his Cornell Avenue apartment, his compilation of his expanded Christmas card soon emerged into the first edition of
Adventures in Good Eating
. Aside from Florence, his friends, Harold and Eleanor Beebe, also gave Hines much help with his project; Eleanor was one of Wright's secretaries. Also helping in the endeavor was another secretary employed by Wright, Eleanor's sister, Emelie Tolman.
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Hines placed his printing order with the Wright Company on 9 June 1936, and soon 5,000 copies of his 96-page book rolled off the presses. Wright charged him $1,131.07 for the job.
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He wanted his book to have the look of quality, yet he could not afford to produce one with a hardback cover. Therefore, the format he finally chose was neither hardback nor paperback. Instead, large, perforated holes ran down the publication's left side; enmeshed through them clung a cylindrical, bright-red plastic
binder. The first title of this thin, pocket-sized edition was
Adventures in Good Eating for the Discriminating Motorist
.

In addition to writing and editing his book, Hines now had other duties. He effectively became his own publisher and distributor. “He had no regular channels of distribution, but he did permit restaurants which he had recommended to sell his book.” The Chicago bookstores also put it on their shelves. If one could not purchase the book through these avenues, Hines sold him a copy by mail. To defray printing costs, he sold it for $1.00. But it was not an overnight success. Despite the fact he sold all copies by year's end, he lost $1,539.
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But its publication did serve one useful purpose; the constant stream of daily phone calls from restaurant hunters ceased; there was no excuse to call him now. Within a few weeks appreciative letters commending him for his effort replaced the daily phone queries. Little did he know what he had set in motion.

In his short introduction to
Adventures in Good Eating
, Hines conveyed his mission when he wrote that when he first took to the road:

The highways were crowded with gasoline pilgrims whose main interest seemed to be the relative merits of inns. They fairly oozed information about the places we ought not to miss…. Most of these tourists produced private lists of ‘best places' and nearly all of them remarked that there ought to be a reliable directory of the most desirable inns available to motorists. Being a printer, this idea intrigued me. After years of travel over the highways I found I had the names of several hundred inns, scattered over the country, the desirability of which was enthusiastically vouched for by those who had patronized them…. This recreational quest has revealed the fact that…there are thousands of these gasoline pilgrims to whom the price of a meal is a minor consideration…. Tourists are free spenders and ‘eating out' amid country surroundings is the…prevailing recreational fashion. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent throughout the motoring season in these
roadside inns. To make this expenditure more satisfactory is the purpose of this directory.

He followed his introduction with a cautionary note on the book's accuracy. He wrote that although he made a valiant effort to create a book free from errors and as current as possible, he could not control restaurants' destinies. Some changed management. Others went out of business without warning. Some lost their cooks—and thus their reputation for fine food; this was especially true if their chefs ran off with the restaurant's recipes. One reason he lost money on the first book was because he spent a considerable sum making sure his book was error-proof. Despite his best efforts, Hines reasoned the average diner would not expect perfection. If the cook dropped dead or was discharged or whatever, and a restaurant patron subsequently had an unpleasant meal, he was confident his readers would not blame him for these misfortunes. “No doubt they will be generously overlooked; any other reaction would be unreasonable.” He cautioned his readers that any restaurant, even a good one “…may seem to have the automatic perfection of a machine. But it isn't a machine; it is a coordination of the efforts of a group of human beings—and occasionally this fact will demonstrate itself in imperfections.”

Hines closed his introduction with a short litany that soon characterized and defined his persona in the minds of the American public. In time, these words would forever earn him the public's trust, and they contributed to his emerging fame: “I have never accepted a free meal or any other consideration from any inn. Those mentioned are included because, in my judgment, they are entitled to be listed on the merits of their food and their service. Until a meal has been eaten and paid for, no mention of the directory is made—and then only if the inn meets its standards.”
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Duncan Hines's ability as a writer also contributed to his book's success. Few could so succinctly inspire daydreams of dining on wondrous meals in distant locales as he. Those who read his book found charming wordage that tempted them to hop in their car and investigate the culinary delights told thereof. Of Stute's Chick-Inn,
a restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he wrote, “Imported Italian foods the specialty here. But it is their good, old, American menu of thick porterhouse or broiled milk-fed chickens that has made Stute's famous. And their beaten cream biscuits, the like of which you have seldom tasted.”
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Of his favorite Kentucky restaurant, the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Hines described it as a “white-pillared mansion built in 1847” that for 20 years had served…”Southern hospitality at its best. Their food specialties are fried yellow-legged chicken, two-year old, genuine country-cured, hickory-smoked ham…delicious beaten biscuits, [and] an ample variety of fresh vegetables.”
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Designed for specific information as well as simple browsing, one could spend an afternoon with his guidebook, reading his concise, enjoyable descriptions of restaurants and leave the experience feeling as if he had taken a culinary tour.

There were restaurant guides available, even in Duncan Hines's day. No doubt he and Florence tried to use these a time or two, but to no avail. They were useless because they were unreliable. David Schwartz writes,

Adventures in Good Eating
was not the first restaurant guide intended for defenseless wayfarers. The
Guide Michelin
had already come to the rescue of discriminating French travelers…but the American guides were mostly a sham, financed by the very establishments they purported to review. Hines, on the other hand, snubbed all offers of advertising. He fiercely guarded not only his independence but also his anonymity, making reservations under an assumed name and, in the early days, frontispiecing his books with a 20-year old photograph of himself as a natty young blade. But most important,
Adventures in Good Eating
oriented itself to the automobile at a time when owning one was coming to be regarded as an American birthright. Although Hines included big-city restaurants in the book, his was a trailblazer in featuring the small-town places, the uncelebrated inns and tea-rooms and taverns that his urban audience
needed
to know
about in order to eat well between one city and another. And he told them about these places without the slightest trace of snobbery or literary affectation in a style that exuded humor and humility.
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Not long after the book was released, a Chicago newspaper printed a profile of Duncan Hines. Chicagoans learned he was probably that city's only resident who thought nothing of making a round-trip to Detroit by car in a single day just to eat lunch. He also revealed he frequently drove over 400 miles to Nashville, Tennessee, to dine in a restaurant that served America's best apple pie, the crust of which Mary Gotscholl prepared by mixing chicken fat with the shortening.
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At the article's conclusion, Hines let loose with a volley of opinions, exclaiming that, overall, food was “cheaper in Chicago than in New England, and cheaper on the Pacific coast than in Chicago.” He said San Francisco had more restaurants than any other city, New England had the highest concentration of them in America, Southern food was “too greasy,” and any restaurant sign bearing the words, “Home Cooking” was “a delusion.”
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Quotable statements as these, in city after city, soon made him a favorite with newspaper editors. His newspaper interviews were calculated to make the public wonder about him, to ask, “Who is this man, anyway?” Surely, they reasoned, a man who drives 400 miles to eat in a restaurant must know something others did not. The curiosity he created about himself was transformed into book purchases. His method of attracting attention surpassed anything an advertising agency could devise.
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To discover new restaurants he may have missed, Hines devised a way to learn of them. Between the last page and the back cover of his book appeared three perforated postcards pre-addressed to Wright's Chicago printing firm. For the price of a one-cent stamp a reader could send him the names of other restaurants he believed merited investigation. Across the top of the post cards read the words: “Editors: I found dining at the following places an unusually pleasant and satisfactory experience. I believe that their standards of food and service entitle them to honorable mention in
the next edition of
Adventures in Good Eating
. They are recommended for your consideration.” This was followed by space enough for three recommendations which asked for the name of the establishment, its exact location, and its distance from the nearest city. The endorser could check a box if he wanted his name acknowledged in the next edition.
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Although he had earlier accumulated a number of contacts for new restaurant recommendations, it was from this postcard that he found a new generation of individuals whose passion for fine roadside dining surpassed even his own. His interaction with them soon gave birth to an informal society, a group later dubbed as his “dinner detectives.”
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With each passing week the postcards Hines had provided for his readers poured into his office in growing numbers, each giving him new restaurant leads to investigate. The task of trying to organize this mass of information eventually became overwhelming. By early 1937 Hines realized he had to rely on others of like taste and temperament if he were to investigate all leads that came across his desk; the job of inspecting every potential restaurant that met his criterion had become too large an endeavor for one man. To tackle this problem, he recruited friends who shared his opinions on matters of good food.
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Many were more passionate about quality dining than even he, and they made his job of compiling information much easier. Several approached Hines soon after buying the first edition of
Adventures in Good Eating
. After they tested Hines's veracity for detecting wonderful dining experiences, they began to correspond with him regularly, recommending other places for him to include. They formed with him a common bond of friendship. If he tested several restaurants a culinary compatriot had recommended and found the correspondent's standards in dining to be equal or superior to his own, he relied on his judgment thereafter. He encouraged the correspondent to keep him informed of other delectable restaurant “finds” that would
intrigue him and the discriminating public. Afterward, he usually heard from the correspondent two or three times a year. One by one, this is how Hines's informal network of “dinner detectives” evolved.

One aspect to recognize is that his dinner detectives were usually successful people. In Hines's day, people from this social strata tended to travel frequently enough to experience “adventures in good eating”; hoi polloi did not. People who had succeeded in life, Hines felt, could be trusted; they had competently managed their careers and finances to the point where they were considered honorable members of society. By extension, when these people traveled, they did not just eat or sleep anywhere. They were discriminating; they were picky; they were much like himself. Thus, in his eyes, successful individuals had superior tastes when it came to the finer things in life—such as good restaurants.
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There was another reason why the “dinner detectives” were valuable to Hines. His guidebook was published annually and he was keenly aware that no matter how good a restaurant's reputation, its maintenance was nothing less than a daily gamble. Anything could put a restaurant out of business quickly—even a good restaurant—such as a fire, a flood, a rerouted road, the death of the owner or, perhaps, the death of the chef whose knowledge of the restaurant's recipes died with him. Anything could happen. Therefore, he tried to keep abreast of any restaurant changes he listed so as to assure his readers they still measured up to his exacting standards. For this reason alone he needed his “dinner detectives” to keep tabs on them. Thanks to his correspondents, each new edition of
Adventures in Good Eating
was kept current. By early 1937, “many purchasers [had] a standing order with Hines for all new editions.” Hines decided to print a second volume due to the enthusiastic support his book received from those who found it a godsend when traveling.
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During 1937, Hines tried to juggle both his printing duties with the Wright company and his guidebook business. It was an exhausting experience. While his book's second edition was being prepared, he was also on the road all the time, albeit working for
Wright less and himself more. Even if Wright had paid him to spend his entire time investigating restaurants, there were simply too many leads coming in to follow up; he could not begin to answer the enormous volume of mail that daily flooded his office. Something had to be done. During the latter half of 1936, Hines had used a secretary on a part-time basis, but now he needed one full-time. Therefore, in the spring of 1937, he hired an unidentified secretary to come to his Cornell Avenue home to handle his voluminous correspondence and answer his phone while he was out of town. When he was home, though, he rolled up his sleeves and helped her. He wrote out in longhand or dictated for his secretary as she typed all the descriptive matter found inside the book. He also laid out its design.
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Despite his help, Hines's secretary was overwhelmed. There was too much mail coming in each day to adequately answer it with care. Therefore, within a few weeks, he hired several more women to answer his correspondence. They worked out of his home after business hours. Two of them were Wright's employees, Emelie Tolman and Olga Lindquist. Later they left the Wright company to work for Hines full-time.
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There were days when his secretaries wished they had never taken the job. By the middle of 1938, they were answering as many as a thousand letters a week.
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As to what Hines looked for when hiring, a former employee said, “I think he was rather impulsive.” He would hire someone “if he decided he liked somebody's looks. There wasn't any rigorous testing.” But if he discovered they could not do precisely what he wanted and in the way he wanted it done, he quickly replaced them with someone who could.
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