Duncan Hines (9 page)

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.
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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.
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By the 1950s his taste in cars returned to larger models, especially Cadillacs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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Ten years later, during the last weekend of November 1926,
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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 dog-goned 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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During the 1920s, the two made it their habit to spend their weekends together “motoring.” Within a few weeks, they had “tasted the narcotic of touring” the country.
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Their weekend sojourns were spent burning gallon after gallon of gasoline as they drove across the country in a vehicle that freed them from all thought of geographical confinement. Every weekend brought them the pleasure of being able to zip down rural roadsides at high rates of speed, all the while gaping in wonderment at America's rural and urban beauty. Every weekend they stopped at a multitude of roadside restaurants to eat something before finding a tourist camp or hotel by nightfall. This was their hobby, and because they had no children, their expenses were few.
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From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, their travels together averaged between 40,000 and 60,000 miles annually, this in addition to approximately the same number of miles he traveled during the week. Despite the mileage he accumulated over the years, he never had a traffic accident. Year after year he would preen himself as a model driver. Explaining his secret in 1938, he said he rarely drove at night and “I obey the signs.” He also never tried to drive either at dusk or early dawn, the time when most traffic fatalities occur.
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Over the years, as Hines criss-crossed the continent while working for his various employers, his search for good restaurants was a matter of trial and error. Although he always had his restaurant memorandum book with him when he traveled, quite often the places listed in it were nowhere nearby. On these occasions, he was at the mercy of chance and luck. He knew there
were many restaurants around, but he had no way of knowing which were the sanitary ones with good food. Since he had to eat somewhere, the only course of action left to him in the early years was to walk into a restaurant that looked half-way clean, order something, and hope the kitchen's chef did not poison him. He experimented at least once a day in this way, relying on serendipity in his quest for a good solid meal that would satisfy his taste buds. Sometimes his meals were good, sometimes they were not. Sometimes the reputation of an establishment lived up to its good name, but just as frequently it turned into a disappointment. When the meal was not worthy of his fastidious standards, however, he groused and remembered never to enter the restaurant again. When he began to explore America's restaurants, he noted there was usually “good food in the cities, but in small towns and along the highways the average restaurant was a place of dirty tablecloths, crankcase coffee and pork chops cooked to a cinder.”
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Once while dining in a roadside inn, he was served “soggy French fries and battleship-gray beef'; his response was to immediately stand up, pay the bill, and walk out without tasting it. If the food did not look good, it probably tasted worse.
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When Hines and Florence spent their weekends traveling, his restaurant memorandum book always accompanied them. With this in hand, he and Florence kept “check lists” whereby they “judiciously balanced the succotash of one inn against the smothered cabbage of another.”
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They were “determined not to wander too far from good provisions.” After all, they did not care where they went—or how far, but they knew the joy they received from traveling would be robbed if the food they ate was inedible.
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As they explored the continent, they made a game of their restaurant hunt. First Florence suggested a place to stop and eat, then later Hines suggested another. In this way, meal by meal, they slowly made additions (and subtractions) to his already sizable notebook. Sometimes their weekend food “safaris” took them to eating spots as far as 250 miles from home, “stopping two or three times a day for waffles, sausage and eggs, and at least as often for fried chicken, baked clams or black-bottom pie.”
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Sometimes,
however, the food they were served was simply dreadful. Hines later remembered “the library paste served as gravy in some ‘short order' places was a personal insult.”
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One trend they noticed in their travels was that, more often than not, much of the unpleasant roadside fare they were served was fried. Once, while passing through a little town in Mississippi, they discovered a restaurant that even fried custard.
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