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

Preface

PREFACE No one had ever written a biography of Duncan Hines before, so I needed a lot of help. Fortunately, a number of people rallied to my cause; I apologize to anyone whom I have omitted in the following list. The most important person to this project was Duncan Hines's great niece, Cora Jane Spiller, who not only gave me her valuable time but who enthusiastically ran down leads for me when all other avenues to my investigation were blocked. Her enthusiasm for the book was infectious and encouraging from start to finish. Every biographer should have someone like her to work with. She has been with me through thick and thin from beginning and end; without her support, I would have abandoned this biography long ago. This book originally took shape as a thesis for a Masters degree in History at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the birthplace and home of Duncan Hines for his first 18 and last his 20 years. I wrote the book first and then scaled it down to 120 pages for the thesis. The first draft of the book was 840 manuscript pages, which I subsequently trimmed to 740 pages. My main thesis adviser, Dr. Carol Crowe-Carraco, was the one who provided me with the day-to-day thread that helped bring the work to completion. But perhaps my greatest contacts, particularly on arcane questions of style and format, came from Nancy Baird, Connie Mills, and Sandy Staebel, all long-time employees of the Kentucky Library and Museum, which sits on the Western Kentucky University campus. When Dr. Crowe-Carraco was not available, all three answered my innumerable questions. As I worked on this manuscript 100 miles away from their x PREFACE offices, I must have called them 300 times in the course of a thousand days. They always helped when I asked, and I record my deepest appreciation here. While writing this book, perhaps the biggest treasure trove of Hinesiana came when I went to the Procter and Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, then the manufacturers of the Duncan Hines cake mixes, and asked to see their Duncan Hines collection. I spoke with Ed Rider, head archivist at P&G, and after a couple of minutes, his staff brought out several large files of Duncan Hines material. After going over these files for an hour, I asked the P&G staff to xerox everything and send it to me. They complied, and about ten days later I received a fortypound box that nearly mirrored their entire Duncan Hines collection. It took almost a year to fully digest and make use of everything they sent. I offer my sincerest thanks to Ed Rider and his staff for providing me with this material. This would have been a much shorter book without their cooperation. During my two-year effort composing this book, a number of other people also helped me along the way. I want to thank Jane Jeffries for the critique of the first 300 pages of this book. I also want to thank her for asking me to discard the first 100 pages or so, which pertained not to Duncan Hines but the history of his family. Sometimes a writer can get carried away with the research, and I was including everything I found; I finally realized that not many people would be interested in the fact that Duncan Hines's brother, Porter, put in the first sewer system in Calhoun, Kentucky in 1899. When Jane left the project, Wendy Yates took her place in critiquing the final product. When the manuscript had been completed, she read it and thought it to be boring, and after I reread it again, I had to agree. So I took a full year to rewrite the entire thing from top to bottom-twice. To Wendy lowe profuse gratitude. There were a number of people that I interviewed that I would like to thank. Duncan Hines's brother-in-law, Robert Wright, provided me with some valuable personal insights on Hines's character; Thomas C. Dedman, of the Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, gave me plenty of corroborative insight into Hines's influence on the lodging industry; Paul Ford Davis supplied me with a wealth of information about his former employer; Sara Jane Meeks, Mary Herndon Cohron and Wanda Richey Eaton, three of Duncan Hines's secretaries in the 1950s, DUNCAN HINES xi furnished me...