Duncan Hines (8 page)

The town later to become the capital of Wyoming was not quite a year old when the Chaffins arrived. In fact, there had been scarcely little civilization there only a few months earlier. Even so, by the time construction of the Union Pacific finally reached the city on November 13, 1867, approximately four thousand citizens had already established a town. Citizens might be a polite term. The town that greeted them was primarily filled with professional gunmen, soldiers, promoters, gamblers, and confidence men who enjoyed both quick money and cheap liquor, not necessarily in that order. Yet, within a short time the city matured and the rough elements went elsewhere. Within a few years, Cheyenne became the site of an expanded army post, Fort D. A. Russell. Originally built in 1867 to protect the Union Pacific workers from Indian attack, it became one of the country's largest military outposts.
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The Chaffin family quickly grew to become one of Cheyenne's most respected families. Upon his arrival, John Chaffin first provided for his family as the cashier at Cheyenne's Wilson bank.
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Later he was employed in several other positions including a stint as Wyoming's territorial assessor. This occupation kept him preoccupied for over a decade while his wife, Mary, kept house and tended to the needs of their growing family.
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Indeed, the Chaffin family seemed to grow as fast as the town. In addition to Eva, there soon followed Fred (1870), Grace (1872), and Howard (1876). The couple's last child was Florence.
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Sometime during the early-1880s John Chaffin left his position as the state's property assessor and became the city's major florist, an occupation he held until he died.
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Before Hines ever met Florence Chaffin she had previously suffered through an unhappy marriage. The marriage took place, either soon before or after 1 January 1900, to an army officer stationed at Cheyenne's Fort D. A. Russell. The marriage was mercifully brief and after their divorce, it was an unspoken rule that no member of the Chaffin family was to ever speak of the ill-fated union.

What little evidence remains of Duncan and Florence's courtship indicates that, after they met, the two began to see each other frequently. Florence, however, did not rush into his arms. Perhaps because of her previous marriage, she was a bit reticent about hurling herself into another potential disaster. But even if she had thrown herself at him, there remained one obstacle in their path to happiness: her mother. Like millions of young men before him, Duncan Hines, despite his best efforts, could not convince his potential future mother-in-law he was worthy of her daughter's hand in marriage. Mary Chaffin did not think too much of the young man from Kentucky. She liked the idea that Hines's family, like her own, had come from the South, and that his father had served with the Confederacy, but she was not convinced Duncan Hines was a good match for her youngest daughter. The two biggest strikes against him was that he was three years younger than Florence and his future looked as if it had no special prospects for a successful career—not, at any rate, as a relief man for the Wells-Fargo express office. Her parents pointed out that Florence's sister, Grace, had married Richard H. Wilson, an army officer, and Mary
Chaffin believed Florence could do just as well. It is not known if Florence temporarily acceded to her mother's wishes and tried to get Duncan to forget about her, but if she did, her efforts failed. She simply could not keep her young suitor from pestering her with his attentions. Their romance remained in an awkward, frustrated state for quite some time.
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Probably because of Mrs. Chaffin's refusal to let him marry her daughter, late in 1902 Duncan Hines left Cheyenne and the Wells Fargo company. He had an image problem and he was determined to rectify it. He was making a passable living, but not a great one. Therefore, he left Cheyenne not to forget Florence, but to prove to her mother he was indeed a worthwhile suitor for her daughter's hand.
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He did not have to travel far to find work. He moved 9 miles across the state line into Colorado where he found a job with the Coal Fuel Oil Company that mined coke, which was then shipped to Mexico.
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Early in 1903, after a few months on the job, he was awarded a vacation and chose to go to Mexico. To get there, he boarded a trainload of coke his company was hauling across the border. The train raced through the American Southwest before coming to a stop 45 miles past Nogales, Arizona, at a “dry, dusty, hot little town” named Cananea, Mexico. After dismounting from the locomotive, Hines hailed a carriage to take him into town. He sought out the town's general store, went inside and bought some Mexican cigars. He was about to find a place to spend the night when a man approached him, asking him if he was interested in a job. He asked how much it paid. “Five hundred dollars a month—in gold.” This was approximately ten times the average wage, and Hines accepted on the spot. When he asked what he would be doing to deserve such a rich bounty, Hines was told he would be a “trouble shooter in the traffic department” for the Green Copper Company, which desperately needed someone to fill the job. “The vagaries of Mexican customs and the natural slowness of transportation…often resulted in delayed shipments of mining equipment and other supplies. Delays were costly, and the company was more than willing to pay a good salary to the man
who could keep the supply lines open and functioning smoothly.” Within a few days he found himself a permanent resident of Cananea, working, eating and living with twenty-five other young Americans approximately his age, most of them mining engineers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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She also said her oldest sister, Eva, now an artist, would be living with them.
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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.

Duncan Hines and Florence Chaffin married on 27 September 1905,
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at Fort Slocum in New Rochelle, New York, in Col. Richard H. Wilson's quarters.
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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.”
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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After five moves in seven years, in 1912 he and Florence found a permanent residence in an apartment house at 5494 Cornell Avenue;
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it remained their home for their marriage's duration.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Sometime in late 1914 Hines left the J. T. H. Mitchell Company.
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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.
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They employed him until late in 1927 when Rogers and Company was purchased by the Mead-Grede Printing Company.
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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 Rogers 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.
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