Postcard History

There are vintage restaurant, hotel, and motel postcards that display a recommendation by Duncan Hines. When such a card is found you can’t help but ask, “What was the connection between Duncan Hines, the cake mix company, and the restaurants, motels, and hotels that received his endorsement?”

A quest for an answer led to a well-researched biography, Duncan Hines: The Man Behind the Cake Mix by Louis Hatchett (Mercer University Press, 2001). Mr. Hatchett tells the fascinating story of how a traveling salesman influenced American tourism and cuisine from the mid-1930s through the early 1960s and became a household name.

Originally from Bowling Green, Kentucky, Duncan Hines (1880–1959) encountered problems finding suitable lodging and restaurants when he traveled representing a Chicago printing company during the 1920s and ‘30s.

Hines was raised by his grandparents, due to his mother’s death when he was four. His grandmother was a major influence on how he rated restaurants because she, as an intuitive cook, used only fresh ingredients.

As a young man, Hines ate at the Harvey House Restaurants, a firm that operated forty-five restaurants in railroad stations across the western United States. He was impressed by their high standards of cleanliness, fast service, and ample portions for a reasonable price. Harvey House provided another standard by which Hines judged restaurants.

Traveling by car, Hines often had concerns about the sanitation standards in roadside restaurants and diners. He believed that two-thirds of restaurants should be closed due to cleanliness issues or substandard cooking. During that era, health inspections of restaurants, particularly in rural areas, were rare. Before eating at a restaurant, Hines checked the back of the restaurant. If the restaurant failed to meet his standards for cleanliness, Hines moved down the road to find one that did. To his dismay, many roadside restaurants offered only fried foods. These restaurants often used poor quality ingredients, and their cooks lacked culinary skills.

At night in a hotel lobby, he swapped information with his fellow salesmen about hotels and restaurants, keeping notes for his own use. In the early 1930s Hines’s notebook contained a list of nearly a thousand suitable restaurants. Despite traveling for his job all week, Hines and his wife Florence enjoyed touring the country on the weekends. They often traveled 40,000 to 60,000 miles a year.

In 1935, Duncan and Florence published a list of 167 restaurants in thirty states that they had visited. They included the list with Christmas cards sent to 1,000 friends and business associates, and soon they were besieged by requests for his list and decided there was a market for it.

Five thousand copies of a large guidebook, Adventures in Good Eating, were published in the summer of 1936. Hines served as both publisher and distributor, and by the end of the year, all 5,000 copies had been sold.

Duncan Hines recommended Mason’s Seafood Restaurant in Norfolk, Virginia. Usually, his endorsement is found on the back of a postcard.

Many hotels and motels failed to meet Hines’s demanding standards of cleanliness and service. In the 1930s, there were few lodging chains and the ones that existed concentrated on providing hotels in major cities. Hines was wary of motels since some were fronts for the world’s oldest profession, and he preferred hotels over motels. In the summer of 1938, Hines published Lodging for a Night, a listing of 3,000 top-quality hotels and motels that met his exacting standards.

Hines believed that motels should adopt a code of ethics. Only guests with luggage should be checked in and they should remain all night, drinking should not be permitted on the premises, and all questionable individuals turned away. Motel rooms should offer complete lavatory facilities with plenty of hot water, comfortable beds with clean linens, parking adjacent to the room, a quiet location away from highway noise, and cross ventilation for guests to remain comfortable in warm weather. Many of Hines’s standards were adopted by early lodging chains. By the 1950s, Hines changed his mind and preferred motels over hotels due to their convenience and the absence of staff like bellhops expecting tips.

Mr. Hines’s books provided a wealth of information that was unavailable elsewhere about motels and restaurants in rural areas. The size of the guides enabled a motorist to keep the books in the glove compartment of their car.

The December 3, 1938, issue of the Saturday Evening Post profiled him, and his books in a lengthy article, and Hines became a household name. Recommended by Duncan Hines quickly became the gold standard for finding dining and lodging.

The Hines guidebooks did not accept advertising, however hotels, motels, and restaurants paid a small annual fee (approximately $10) to display “The Duncan Hines Seal Of Approval” in their window. The lodging sign was blue; the restaurant sign was red. Even if the traveler did not possess the guidebooks, the Seal of Approval assured a good meal or a restful night.

Hines soon began offering annual editions. In 1939, the company that printed his lodging and dining guides suggested that Hines produce a cookbook. Even though he was not a cook (his wife did the cooking at home), Hines gathered recipes from relatives and favorite restaurants to produce two cookbooks: Adventures in Good Cooking and The Art of Carving in the Home. In 1947, his guidebooks and cookbooks sold over 225,000 copies.

As Americans hit the road after World War II, Hines presented the Duncan Hines Vacation Guide in 1949, and in 1955 he published the Duncan Hines Dessert Book that contained 555 recipes to satisfy America’s sweet tooth. Again in 1955 he published Duncan Hines Food Odyssey, a travelogue of the many restaurants he had eaten in over the years.

In the early 1950s, after entering a partnership with advertising executive Roy Park, Hines began lending his name to food products that met his exacting quality standards. One of the first products to bear his name was ice cream. Duncan Hines ice cream was 25% heavier than other ice creams on the market and contained 33% more butterfat. Over fifty food products received his endorsement including bread, jams, ketchup, salad dressings, Worcestershire sauce, and pickles.

In 1951, Nebraska Consolidated Mills began producing cake, muffin, and pancake mixes bearing the Hines name. Unlike other mixes that contained dehydrated eggs, the Hines cake mix required the baker to add eggs resulting in a richer, moister, more flavorful cake. After American housewives tasted the difference, Duncan Hines mixes flew off the shelves.

Proctor & Gamble acquired Nebraska Consolidated Mills in 1956, and Hines-Park Foods merged with Proctor & Gamble that August. Proctor and Gamble insisted on exclusive use of the Duncan Hines name and the other products bearing his name disappeared from grocery store shelves as licensing agreements expired. Today, Conagra Brands owns Duncan Hines Cake Mix.

By the late 1950s, Duncan Hines had recommended over 9,000 lodging and dining establishments. Hines died in 1959, and the Hines guidebooks ceased publication in 1962. By 1963, the Duncan Hines seal of approval had disappeared from motel and restaurant windows. Yet his influence on the travel industry continues to this day.

***

Postcards with Duncan Hines recommendations are plentiful

You can find them from border to border…

… and coast to coast.