A Mixed Legacy
LEVIN, EDMUND
A Mixed Legacy The rise and fall of Duncan Hines. BY EDMUND LEVIN With 150 million boxes of cake mix sold each year, the name of Duncan Hines is as well known as ever. Aurora Foods, which owns...
...As a boy," Hines recalled, "the only thing I was really interested in was eating"—sure-ly a remarkable statement for an American boy of any era...
...Hines once expressed contempt for the average American "who wants his food in a hurry...
...In 1934, the Chicago Tribune ran a feature article about this man who knew all the best places to eat...
...Park was an operator...
...Aurora Foods, which owns the product line, boasts Duncan Hines has "92 percent unaided name recognition...
...Determined to put the calls to a stop, in November 1935 Hines and Florence compiled a list of the 167 best restaurants they had dined in over the years in some thirty states...
...More people recognized Hines's name, they found, than that of Vice President Alben Barkley...
...He was ahead of his time in championing regional cooking with fresh, local ingredients...
...Park was confident that putting Hines's name on a product would cause it to fly off the shelves...
...It's impossible to imagine any cake mix, even one with two fresh eggs, doing anything but offend his palate...
...Hatchett, who is overly worshipful of his subject, doesn't ask the question...
...Hines claimed to sit down to as many as eight meals a day, sampling, he said, "two soups, four entrees and at least three desserts" at a sitting...
...Park's researchers concluded that housewives didn't really grasp the concept of quality when it came to food...
...At eighteen, Hines took up a career in Chicago as a traveling salesman for a printing company...
...In short, Sunkist had glamorized the orange...
...After World War II, Park occupied himself with a problem of intense interest to his clients: How to convince Americans to pay higher prices for quality food...
...Within months his market research team had the answer: "The name housewives most frequently associated with good, quality food was that of Duncan Hines...
...He was also a tireless crusader for restaurant sanitation...
...So why didn't he use it...
...Hines was at heart a dilettante...
...It was, in a way, Roy Park's ultimate victory...
...Which leads to the great mystery: How in the world could Duncan Hines—this man who second-guessed the overly spicy sauces Floridians put on Pompano, who yearned for "dumplings soft as thistledown," who railed at the "sinister influence" of the drugstore lunch counter, who obsessed about the quality of food and of his reputation—how in the world could he consent to putting his name on a box of cake mix...
...Hatchett tells the forgotten story of how this odd couple became the most powerful team in American food...
...Though the Hines name would eventually be found on more than 200 products, from bread to pickles to cooking ranges, all that remain today are the cake mixes and frostings...
...He didn't know it, but it was the genesis of the pioneering restaurant guide that would make Hines a household name...
...Louis Hatchett's Duncan Hines: The Man Behind the Cake Mix offers conclusive proof that Hines was not only a real human being but an American culinary hero, a contender for the greatest gourmand this country has ever produced...
...The first book version of Adventures in Good Eating appeared in 1936...
...Or as Park recalled years later, he told Hines this was his chance to "upgrade American eating habits...
...The name had become synonymous with the product—the product, with the name...
...Hines wasn't terribly interested in money...
...The key to Hines's success was that he cared about only two things: food and his reputation...
...Park's firm, Agricultural Advertising and Research, represented retail farm cooperatives across the country...
...I have found that strictly fresh eggs mean a bigger, better cake...
...No, no...
...Park had his mission: find a way to glamorize his clients' products...
...They purchased their groceries "in a grudging manner" marked by "price watching" behavior...
...The only answer, it seems, is that Hines was simply under the spell of Roy Park...
...How obsessed with food was he...
...When his agricultural clients gave thumbs-down to the marketing plan, Park—ever the operator—created a new company, Hines-Park Foods...
...Hines's first wife Florence shared his obsession...
...He wasn't much interested in money, and for years turned down lucrative endorsement offers...
...in appearance, flavor and freshness," Hines proclaims on the box...
...After Hines's death in 1959 at age seventy-eight, his picture was taken off the boxes...
...Hatchett finds it difficult to say anything critical, but it's hard not to feel that Hines was had...
...He hoped the calls would abate, but they didn't...
...After traveling a thousand miles on business during the week, Hines would pick up Florence and they'd hit the road in search of culinary satisfaction...
...More people will die this year from hit-or-miss eating than hit-and-run driving," he liked to say...
...It changed his life forever...
...The list grew...
...Park (who would die in 1993 as America's 175th richest man) most certainly was...
...The Duncan Hines cake mix line was soon vying for number one...
...Hines started jotting down the names of good places to eat, and solicited colleagues' recommendations as well...
...Park was not trying to make Hines rich...
...Hines was a proselytizer for good food in a country that was often indifferent to it...
...Paul, or the Pillsbury Dough Boy...
...Hatchett tells us Hines "frequently drove over 400 miles to Nashville, Tennessee, to dine in a restaurant that served America's best apple pie, the crust of which [the chef] prepared by mixing chicken fat with the shortening...
...He wanted to create food products in his honor...
...No one today has anything like the stature Hines had in the food world of the 1940s and 1950s...
...In the public imagination, the Hines name evoked two qualities: integrity (he accepted no free meals or advertising) and an obsessive devotion to quality...
...The day the story ran, Hines's phone began ringing off the hook: "Executives bound for conferences, musicians going on the road, honeymooners choosing their destination—perfect strangers all— called for advice," Hines later said...
...Food poisoning was an occupational hazard...
...How did Park succeed in wooing and winning Hines where so many others had failed...
...Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Wild Cherry Vanilla Frosting: Judged by Hines's first seven decades, his was just about the last name you'd expect on a box of cake mix...
...Reader's Digest quoted a famous chef to the effect that Hines "had done more in four years to lift the standard of the American cuisine than all the cooks had done in the previous forty...
...Distance was no obstacle...
...For a premature foodie like Hines, this was a problem...
...He studied his mark until he understood him from the inside out...
...Newspaperman Ernie Pyle wrote that Hines "had become something of a 'messiah' to travelers" who carried his "little red book" in their glove compartments...
...But there was one exception: the Sunkist orange...
...While the Betty Crocker and Pillsbury products stressed pure convenience—"just add water or milk"—the Hines formula left out the dehydrated eggs and gave the housewife the feeling she was doing real baking...
...When he started out, Hines recalled, there was "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...
...And so did their friends . . . Hines had created a monster . . . To keep from going broke on printing costs, he began charging a dollar for it...
...Park grasped that, aside from his stomach, there was only one alternative route to Hines's heart: his sense of integrity...
...As Hatchett writes, Park concluded most Americans saw food as just something "to fill an intestinal void...
...A brilliant advertising man, Park was everything Hines was not...
...We ate all the time . . . apple pie, pecan pie . . . country ham, candied yams, turnip greens with fatback, beaten biscuits and corn-bread . . ." In childhood, Hatchett tells us, Hines discovered "his great passion: eating remarkable meals...
...The popular image of Hines, Hatchett writes, had him "lurking around the back doors of restaurants, discovering public hellholes serving unsanitary food too dreadful to contemplate...
...Born in 1880 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hines learned about good food at the knee of his Grandma Duncan...
...He detested restaurants that "denied their geography...
...At some point in 1935, he realized he was spending all his time answering the phone...
...But today few under retirement age realize that Hines was more than just a figment of the American marketing imagination like Betty Crocker, Mrs...
...The answer consists of two words: Roy Park...
...The irony that emerges is as vivid as the Day-Glo gleam of Edmund Levin is a writer at ABC's Good Morning America...
...The public's memory of why they originally trusted the name faded, but they still kept on buying...
...What happened, Hatchett recounts, is that "friends began deluging him with requests for still more copies...
...They had no children and few outside interests other than food...
...Calling the list Adventures in Good Eating, he had a thousand copies printed and sent them along with his Christmas cards...
...Hines's contract gave him veto power over any product...
...The first Duncan Hines cake mixes were introduced in 1951...
...He met with Hines in November 1948, and within two days Hines had agreed to a product endorsement deal...
...Alone among food producers, Sunkist, Park discovered, "had overcome the suspicion barrier . . . housewives regarded a Sunkist orange as something fresh, something tasty, something well worth the price...
...When he told an interviewer that people should inspect restaurant kitchens themselves, thousands did just that, causing quite a bit of commotion at some establishments...
...A 1938 Saturday Evening Post profile of Hines found running through his conversation "a tender and touching attachment to such items as unsweetened corn bread, white, first-run maple syrup, and properly cured hams, which at once stamps him as a sentimentalist and a poet...
...Ten years later, his books (including a recipe collection, Adventures in Good Cooking, and a guidebook, Lodging for the Night) were selling a quarter-million copies a year, and Hines was one of the best-known men in America...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 41
