Background

Duncan Hines was born on March 26, 1880 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States. He was the son of Edward Ludlow Hines, a lawyer and local politician, and Cornelia Duncan, who died when he was four years old. He was reared by a grandmother and educated in the local public schools.

Education

Hines attended Bowling Green Business College for two years but did not obtain a degree.

Career

In 1898, suffering from an asthmatic condition, Hines moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he became a traffic clerk for the Wells Fargo Express Co. In 1905, after a two-year stint as salesman for the Green Copper Co. , of Cananea, Mexico, he married Florence Chaffin and settled in Chicago. The marriage was childless. Joining a local advertising and printing firm, he worked for the next thirty-three years on a commission basis marketing "creative printing ideas" to industrial firms throughout the country.

Not until he was well into his fifties did Duncan Hines begin the career that would make his name a household word. From boyhood he had appreciated good food well served, and in his years on the road he made a hobby of seeking out locally notable eateries. Gradually, friends began to ask his advice; and in 1935, in lieu of Christmas cards, he sent friends and business acquaintances an annotated list of some 160 restaurants that he had found exceptionally good. The following year he published Adventures in Good Eating in paperback and offered it for sale at one dollar. The book did well from the first, and after 1938, when it began to receive national radio and magazine publicity, sales increased dramatically. Leaving his old position that year to devote himself full-time to his new enterprise, Hines added two further titles, Lodging for a Night (1938) and Adventures in Good Cooking (1939). He regularly updated the restaurant guide and personally supervised the printing and marketing of all his books.

Hines then returned to his native Bowling Green, where he built a capacious home and headquarters for his growing business, which now included the sale of hickory-smoked hams under his own name. In 1943 he established the Duncan Hines Foundation to provide scholarships to graduate students in hotel and restaurant management at Cornell and Michigan State universities. By the late 1940s eleven salesmen were on the road promoting Hines's books, the cumulative sale of which he estimated in 1948 at $2 million. Although he still traveled widely to keep his evaluations current, he was assisted by a corps of some 400 part-time volunteers, including such peripatetic celebrities as Mary Margaret McBride and Lawrence Tibbett. The touring public, too, volunteered comments and criticisms at the rate of some 50, 000 letters a year.

The transformation of these enterprises from an essentially one-man operation into a complex corporate undertaking was the work of Roy H. Park, a young businessman from Ithaca, New York, who in 1949 joined with Hines to form Hines-Park Foods, Inc. The company licensed manufacturers to use the name Duncan Hines on a variety of food products, of which the cake mixes manufactured by Omaha's Consolidated Mills proved to be the most popular. In 1953 Hines and Park set up another company, the Duncan Hines Institute, Inc. , which took over the publication and marketing of the guidebooks, which now included Duncan Hines' Vacation Guide (1948). Park served as president and sole owner of both these Ithaca-based companies until their acquisition by the Procter and Gamble Company of Cincinnati in 1956.

Apart from periodic revisions of the restaurant directory, Hines's involvement with the various companies bearing his name was, after 1949, largely that of a figurehead. He owned no stock in either but was remunerated on a fee and royalty basis. He still traveled incessantly and dined out frequently, however, savoring his role as a celebrity. He died in Bowling Green.

Achievements

• Hines played a useful role by providing a measure of consumer protection to the traveler in unfamiliar regions, and by giving restaurants and inns a strong incentive to upgrade the quality of their service. He never accepted advertising in his guidebooks, and his reputation for integrity was an important factor in his success. Adventures in Good Eating and the other guidebooks did not long survive their originator, however, and it was as a trademark on cake mixes, muffin mixes, and a line of stainless steel cookware that the name Duncan Hines continued to be known a generation after his death.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Duncan Hines' food odyssey

    (Before becoming a household name for cake mixes and other...)

  • Adventures in Good Cooking

    (Kentucky native and national tastemaker Duncan Hines (188...)

  • The Dessert Book

    (Kentucky native and national tastemaker Duncan Hines (188...)

  • Duncan Hines Classic Recipes

    (Chocolate Obsession, Collectible Cookies, Fruit Fantasies...)

  • Adventures in Good Eating

    (Good Eating Places Along The Highways Of America. 1952 Ed...)

  • Adventures in good cooking and the art of carving in the home: A Duncan Hines book. Famous recipes

Personality

A bluff and gregarious man with a keen sense of humor, Hines freely dispensed opinions to reporters, writers, and radio food commentators. Most American restaurants, he told the Saturday Review, "cook beef gray as a battleship and almost as tough. " In another often repeated culinary judgment, he suggested that vegetables were usually so overcooked in the United States that it would be more nutritious to throw them out and drink the juice. He praised America's regional cuisines and deplored the encroaching standardization of restaurants. He was sometimes portrayed as a sophisticated gourmet and cosmopolite, but the image he cultivated was that of an average tourist simply seeking a good, honest meal. Cleanliness and the appetizing preparation of simple fare won higher marks in Adventures in Good Eating than attempts at sophistication or haute cuisine. For all his reservations about American cooking, he patriotically insisted that it was the best in the world--an opinion to which he clung even after his first and only trip to Europe in 1954.

Connections

On December 9, 1939, following the death of his first wife, Florence Chaffin, Hines married Emelie Elizabeth Daniels. His second marriage ended in divorce, and in his later years he was joined in his travels by his third wife, Clara Wright Nahm, whom he married on March 22, 1946.

Father:

Edward Ludlow Hines

Mother:

Cornelia (Duncan) Hines

Spouse:

Florence (Chaffin) Hines

Spouse:

Clara Wright (Nahm) Hines

Spouse:

Emelie Elizabeth (Daniels) Hines

Brother:

John Porter Hines

Brother:

William Warner Hines

Brother:

Hiram Markham Hines

Sister:

Annie Duncan Hines

Brother :

Edward Ramsey Hines

References

• Duncan Hines: How a Traveling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food