Duncan Hines by Louis Hatchett Page A

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,furnished me with a plethora of information concerning the working conditions while employed by Hines; Elizabeth Duncan Hines, the wife of his nephew, yielded some useful information; Edward and Robert Beebe, nephews of Duncan Hines’s second wife, provided me with some information about their aunt that was unknown to the Hines family; Caroline Tyson Hines, offered me additional and corroborative insights into the personality of Duncan Hines; Maj. Gen. Richard Groves, a nephew of Duncan Hines and son of General Leslie Groves (“Father of the Atomic Bomb”), gave me some critical insights into the early years of Duncan Hines’s life which opened up a whole vista of understanding; much help came from Paul Moore, who prepared most of the Duncan Hines guidebooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Top Orendorf, who was Duncan Hines’s lawyer, also had some useful insights. Duncan Welch, who was Hines’s great nephew, gave me all sorts of information as well as provided me with some hilarious stories. Larry Williams, of the Williams Printing Firm was a big help in providing me the history of his business and Hines’s relation to it. Finally, I want to thank William Jenkins, a former professor of Government at Western Kentucky University, for providing me with a key clue in unraveling Duncan Hines’s past.
    The staffs of several libraries were important to me. These people do not get enough credit. I want to thank the college library staffs of the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana, Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois for their untiring efforts in running down leads and books for me whenever possible. I also want to thank the staffs of the public libraries in Henderson, Kentucky, Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana for providing me with the materials I needed to complete this project. I especially want to thank Jean Brainerd of the Wyoming Historical Society, who was of tremendous help in helping me piece together the early life of Duncan Hines.
    I also want to thank the staff of
Reminisce
magazine for printing my query about Duncan Hines. From that single notice, I received a large number of responses from people who traveled across America during the 1940s and 1950s who used Hines’s restaurant and lodging guides exclusively as their source for getting from one place to another in safety and comfort. Of particular usefulness were the insights of Roberta C.Gilbert, Elinor Macgregor, Frances Wood, Shirley Wheaton, to name a few. To all of them I offer my profuse thanks.
    I also want to thank Tim Hollis of the National Lum and Abner Society for providing me with tapes of the Lum and Abner story line featuring Duncan Hines (who was played by Francis X. Bushman on that particular show). Terry Tatum was of tremendous help in finding all the homes that Duncan Hines lived in during his years in Chicago. Lastly, I want to thank Dr. Virginia Grabili, a retired English professor whom I had at the University of Evansville, for deciphering several letters written by Duncan Hines’s brother in the 1880s; since she is a master of this sort of thing, I knew she could do it if anyone could. She made instant sense of the scribbles I handed her. I wish I had her talent. I also want to thank Maggy Shannon, Marc Jolley, Kevin Manus, and the staff of Mercer University Press for giving me the opportunity to tell a story worth reading and remembering.
    I do not think I have exhausted the subject. If I had been given a grant of several hundred thousand dollars, I could have flown all over creation to investigate every nook and cranny where Hines once trod. As it turned out, I think I did well with the slightly over