Duncan Hines (29 page)

Late in 1948 Hines was on the promotion trail, traversing the nation's highways in his six-passenger Cadillac, extolling the virtues of his
Vacation Guide
, which was about to be published. When he reached New York City, reporters caught up with him at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Hines, whom one of their number described as “a homey individual with thinning gray hair and glasses who looks like everybody's grandfather,” told them “with a wisp of petulance,” that he had spent all summer working on the
Vacation Guide
and that the effort had spoiled his summer. “I really had wanted to go to California,” he said.
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“If memory serves me,” he continued, “there wasn't a completely-paved highway across the country the first time I drove to California. I know that in some places in the West I drove for miles in thick roily clouds of dust that liberally coated me and the car.” On that first trip across the Western states, he said, the road was so rough that he “bumped and banged” his way across it until it almost dislodged his back teeth.
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As he held court while seated in a chair in one of the Waldorf's meeting rooms, the conversation turned to food and then to his “eatin' book,”
Adventures in Good Eating
. He began to describe the food in some of the restaurants he and Clara had recently sampled. Earlier in the day they had tested the culinary fare at the popular restaurant known as Brussels, where they dined on
moules a la flamand
, and
lapin a la creme
along with a good wine. Most high-priced
restaurant meals in 1949 cost $2-$5 or more; the bill for this particular meal totaled $48, with Hines remarking that this was an extravagance for them. “We save our nickels for months for this,” he said. “‘Course we manage to live nice just the same. I won't eat hamburger for anybody.” Moments later, he leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and answered a variety of questions from reporters. The first one concerned methods for producing quality beef. “I don't like raw beef, see,” said Hines. “But if you want the true flavor you mustn't cook it too long.” He explained that grass-fed beef had an inferior flavor when compared to corn-fed beef. “It's easy to tell the difference…. The fat of grass-fed beef is yellow; on corn-fed beef it's white.” He said the same was true with peanut-fed hams. “Know those peanut-fed hams?…Why those sweet little piggies never get to see very many peanuts. First place, the peanut crop is too valuable, so they get mostly corn. If they ate all peanuts you couldn't eat the pig. Its flesh would be too oily.” The subject soon turned to a more prosaic matter: the best place to dine that evening. Hines told reporters he was debating with his stomach over whether or not he should visit his favorite New York restaurant, Voisin, on the east side of the city. “Mmmm—man, does it taste good!” he said, “If I hadn't had so much food this noon I'd be over there tonight. Come to think of it, I might go anyway.”
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Hines, by this time, was quite content with the course his life had taken. He was the publisher of four successful books. The company he had organized in Bowling Green paid all his salary and traveling expenses. He could go where he wanted, when he wanted, and was treated royally everywhere he went. By way of the nation's media organs, he was influencing and changing the ways many restaurants and lodging facilities were being operated. His influence was everywhere to be seen. All things considered, he was a relatively happy man. What more could a human being ask for? One man found out.

Over the years Hines had turned down hundreds of schemes promising to make him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. If only he would willingly allow his name to be used to endorse this or that product, he was told, fabulous riches were his for the asking. He readily retorted to such blandishments that he was already rich—certainly wealthy enough to satisfy his needs. He had everything he could possibly want. And with those words he shooed them away with the back of his hand. Roy Park had better luck.

Roy Hampton Park was born on a large, family-owned farm outside of Dobson, North Carolina on 15 September 1910. An industrious youth, when he was twelve years old he became the correspondent for two weekly western North Carolina newspapers. Upon graduating from Dobson High School at fifteen and filled with dreams of financial success, he made preparations for a successful career in the world of commerce. A few days before his sixteenth birthday in 1926, he applied, was accepted and entered Duke University at Durham, North Carolina, with the intention of becoming a doctor. His dreams of practicing medicine, however, lasted only four days. He could not find a job in Durham that would support him during his quest for a medical degree, so he
dropped the idea of becoming a physician and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he enrolled in North Carolina State College, now North Carolina State University, to pursue a degree in journalism with a minor in business administration. To finance his education, his older brother secured for him “a job as a delivery boy for an afternoon newspaper.” While enrolled, W. J. MacFarland, bureau chief of the Associated Press in Raleigh, “gave him a part-time job at $4.50 a week. The tasks he was asked to perform were menial ones. Eventually, though, he “taught himself to use a typewriter, operate a teletype machine” and soon he was writing news stories for the AP. By the summer of 1928 MacFarland put him to work as one of the Associated Press's two full-time staff reporters in their Raleigh bureau, paying him $15-a-week. Shortly afterward he received a $3-a-week raise.

During the 1928-1929 school year, Park was not only taking a full-load of college classes, he was also working full-time for the Associated Press and free-lancing feature articles for several North Carolina Sunday newspapers. He did not stop there. He also reported news and wrote a column for the college weekly newspaper,
The Technician
. He attributed his success in keeping up with his demanding schedule by adhering to a strict schedule of work, meals, sleep and rest.
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Park emerged from his three years at Raleigh in 1929 with a degree in Journalism.
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That summer he began looking for work; surprisingly, he was unable to find it because, at nearly age nineteen, employers deemed him too young to hold down a mature adult job. He then discovered the editor of his college newspaper “was not only paid a salary, but reaped one-fourth of all advertising profits.” In that light, editing the campus newspaper looked like a worthy goal. Shortly afterward he embarked on a year of post-graduate work in business administration and he became the newspaper's editor. As a result of his drive to succeed, the campus newspaper was transformed into a more professional-looking journal and, at the end of his tenure as editor, the paper had earned more money in one year than it had during the
publication's entire history. At the very depths of the Depression, when dollars were scarce, this was no small feat.
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After he was granted a Masters degree in Business Administration from North Carolina State College in 1931, Park began looking for a job that challenged his considerable abilities. With his characteristic methodicalness, he kept a close eye on the want ads in the Raleigh
News & Observer
and wrote ten letters each day to those he considered leading prospects. One of the potential employers that interested him were the farm cooperatives; in the early 1930s they were touted as an exciting industry with which to become involved. Two of them were headquartered in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, one each for cotton and tobacco.
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One day the North Carolina Cotton Growers Association answered one of his letters and scheduled him to be interviewed. Confident of his abilities, Park put on his best black clothes, shined his best black shoes, and strode off to a job he was certain was his for the asking. But at the interview, he was disappointed when he was told by the interviewer, the head of the organization, Uriah Benton Blalock,
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that the Association was looking for an older man, one with more experience.
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This qualification did not deter him from his objective. He was determined to be hired, one way or another. Each day, he staked out the Growers Association's post office box (number 701) at the Raleigh post office, and each day, when Mr. Blalock arrived to pick up the association's mail, Park politely yet firmly hounded him for a job. Nevertheless, Blalock's answer was still “no.” Park kept asking him every day anyway. One day he discovered Blalock's automobile had three flat tires and promptly changed them for him while wearing a white suit. Blalock was duly impressed by this act, but the answer was still “no.”
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Park then obtained a letter of introduction from the president of North Carolina State College and a family friend, Josephus Daniels; he also got letters of recommendation from several faculty members. He even wrangled a job recommendation from the Governor of North Carolina. But despite all his efforts, Blalock's answer was still “no.” Undeterred by steady rejection, one day he confronted Blalock and offered to work for nothing. Blalock, who
by this time was beginning to wear down, liked his spunk, and began talking to him at length. At one point in the conversation, Park requested a monthly salary of $250; Blalock hired him for $100 a month.
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Elated, Park could not have been happier; he had secured his job over 800 applicants and had proved something to himself: anything is obtainable if one is never daunted by obstacles.

Park's official title was assistant to the general manager; in this capacity, he was given a number of things to do. One of his jobs was to edit and publish the cooperative's membership newspapers. As the association's publicity director, another of Park's jobs was to create publicity for them. Not long after he was hired, he did just that. One day at a meeting, Park suggested to the association's leaders that since their organization was in the business of promoting cotton, they should sponsor a “Cotton Ball.” What Park had in mind, he told them, was a grandiose Southern reception that honored the daughters of the state's most prominent families. To draw a crowd, Park suggested the association hire a well-known dance orchestra for the occasion. The association's members were an extremely cautious coalition and did not like the idea. “It looked like a money loser to them.” Park then offered to underwrite the cotton ball himself and pocket any profits that accrued. Since no money was to be extracted from their pockets, the association members agreed to Park's proposal. Park then hired the Kay Kyser Orchestra to play for the event and put his publicity skills into action. Subsequently, the event was a roaring success. When the festivities were over, Roy Park was several thousand dollars richer—much to the consternation of some of the association's members—but they did not argue with Park afterwards. The following year Park hired the Fred Waring Orchestra for $2,100 and earned the Grower's Association a tidy sum.

Park calculated that his regular duties for the Cotton Growers Association only took 25% of his time; because this inactivity left him restless, he became involved in more projects. He “persuaded the Cotton Growers Association to change the format of its trade journal and allow him 25% commission on all advertising.” This move resulted in the publication of
The Carolina Cooperator
, the
format of which Park modeled after
Time
magazine.
The Carolina Cooperator
eventually amassed a subscriber base of 100,000 readers. Park then “established and operated a printing plant” for his employers, of which he owned one-third.
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In 1936 “the Carolina Cotton Growers Cooperative expanded its activities from the sale of cotton and set up a purchasing cooperative, the Farmers Cooperative Exchange, used by farmers to buy seed, fertilizers, and other farm supplies. Park remained with the two organizations as director of marketing and public relations.” But even this level of activity did not satiate Park's restless nature.
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In 1937 Park took “a six-month leave of absence to travel over much of the country on an assignment out of Washington as a special assistant to do area surveys and publicity for the recently formed Rural Electrification Administration [REA], studying farm problems and rural electrification.”
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While with the REA, Park made the most of his publicity skills. Through newspaper supplements, he showed rural audiences the many ways in which electricity could benefit America's farmers. “The supplements carried advertising by merchants offering farmers everything from electric water systems to toasters and electric stoves.”
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In 1940 Park launched his first personally-owned periodical,
Cooperative Digest
, a journal that served farm cooperative executives and agricultural leaders. It eventually developed a paid circulation of 15,000. Twenty-five years later it was still the only publication of its kind.
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In 1942 Park began publishing a second magazine of which he was sole owner,
Rural Electrification Digest
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. “With the thought that hundreds of local electric co-ops would soon burgeon across the country, collectively spending hundreds of millions of dollars for supplies and equipment,” Park, “conceived the idea of a trade magazine,” that would have a local focus and would “meet the needs of these co-ops.”
Rural Electrification Digest was
later published as
Co-Op Power,
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later it became
Farm Power.
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One day in 1940 he met Howard E. Babcock, who was not only the founder and general manager of the co-operative known as the Grange League Federation Exchange (GLF), “which operated in
New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and bordering states,” he was also at the time Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Cornell University. Babcock was also a charter member of
Cooperative Digest
, who at one point attempted to buy into the magazine for the purpose of extending the publication's coverage. Park resisted selling “him any stock in the journal, but told Babcock he could buy all the subscriptions he wanted.” And he did. Almost overnight circulation of
Cooperative Digest
jumped from 200 to nearly 4,000. Babcock admired Park's business abilities. He made an unsuccessful bid to persuade him to move his family to Ithaca, New York, so that Cornell University could take advantage of his knowledge, business skills and organizational abilities. Park resisted but he left the door open a crack when he told Babcock that if he ever left North Carolina for Ithaca, it would be to run his own business. With this in mind, one day in March 1942 Babcock informed Park of an opportunity that forever changed the direction of his young friend's life. He told Park of a small, twenty-year-old, four-man advertising agency in Ithaca, New York, that was for sale, of which the Grange League Federation was its principal account.
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He advised Park to buy it and move his family to Ithaca. When Park wavered, Babcock offered to lend him the necessary cash to buy the agency. Babcock's hunch proved correct; Park could not resist. On 1 April 1942,
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Park journeyed to Ithaca, carefully investigated the advertising agency's business potential, discovered it had billings guaranteed for a year, and quickly moved to Ithaca. He never looked back.
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