Each year, the Brown County Democrat celebrates some aspect of Brown County history in our Founders Day section. This year we’re writing about residents who are about 80 or older, who have incredible stories to share and who define “Brown County character” in some way or another. If you have a suggestion for a person to feature in the next Founders Day issue, send it to [email protected] or call us at 812-988-2221.

Sitting down to lunch in the tiny town of Newman, Illinois, Graham “Teed” Howard couldn’t help but notice the bottle on the restaurant table.

It was a Hootie Doot, sure enough. He, more than anyone, would know.

“I said, ‘You know what you have here?’ They had no idea.”

Over 17 years, Howard and his wife, Mary, pored over every detail of that dressing while building the company from the ground up, from the recipe, to the bottling and labeling, to the distribution and delivery. Howard himself was the “delivery boy” for Hootie Doot dressings until he had to get his knees replaced.

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Hootie Doot, based in Brown County, began in a shared kitchen space in 1998. The products were sold in 22 stores and shipped to as far away as Oregon, California and North Carolina before the couple scaled back their work drastically about three years ago.

“It makes me appreciate little startups, you know?” Mary, now 81, said about her time as an entrepreneur. “There’s much more to it than throwing your product out there.”

Indeed, surprising things can come from tiny origins.

Starting small

Howard, now 92, was born in Indianapolis weighing only 2.5 pounds. That was a time in history when babies that size were being shown in sideshow exhibits on New York’s Coney Island.

“They put me in a shoebox with a lightbulb for an incubator,” he said.

The doctors at St. Vincent Hospital who tended to him nicknamed him “Teeny.”

Of course, that wasn’t a name he wanted to carry forever. It ended up getting shortened to “Teed.”

That tiny baby would go on to become a 40mm antiaircraft and “quad 50” machine gunner in World War II.

He studied forestry in the 1940s at Yellowwood State Forest for two years. He served in the Korean War as a surveyor despite not knowing anything about that sort of surveying.

“What happened was that on my college transcript, it says ‘surveyor,’ but it’s wood surveyor. I can tell you the number of board feet in a tree, but they figured I was a surveyor for engineering,” he said.

He spent that wartime service with a Purdue engineering manual in one hand while building railroads, tunnels and bridges with the other.

“The only thing I never could learn was how to make a curve,” he remembered. “We used to push the railroad car around the curves we made so if it fell off, we knew it wasn’t good.”

Teed’s mother was a teacher in Indianapolis and his father had retired from Army service. They had met through the USO. They moved the family from Indianapolis to West Lafayette when Teed, an only child, was about 6 months old. Their names were Helen Elizabeth and Fred Wallace — “which is interesting, because she’s also a Wallace,” Teed said, motioning to his wife.

“We may be related,” she chuckled.

“But he was from Missouri,” Teed added.

Mary grew up in Paris, Illinois. Her father, Lloyd Wallace, ran a popular restaurant there.

She remembers coming to Brown County as a child, probably about 10 years old, because her father had a cousin who lived here who was instrumental in starting the Brown County Art Gallery.

Teed and Mary didn’t get together until later in life. They moved separately to Brown County and met through a mutual friend, then married in 1997.

“Every old woman in town was after Teed,” Mary teased as he shook his head. “It’s the truth!” she insisted.

Teed had had a 39-year career working for the Boy Scouts. To spend his retirement years in Brown County, he earned his real estate license and worked for Abe Martin Realty, then Jane Gore Realty for 20 years. “We just picked up our desks and carried them across the street,” he remembered.

Teed had been a Scoutmaster while in college at Purdue. The older boys in his charge asked for something different to do than the younger boys, and they decided they wanted to study Native Americans.

“I didn’t know anything about them,” Teed said. “So I hitchhiked to Wisconsin. I didn’t have a car. … And I found the right people and they started training me, and ever since then I’ve been lucky all the way down the line. I get lucky with knowing the right people.”

In 2016, the National Eagle Scout Association awarded him the Outstanding Eagle Scout Award for a lifetime of dedication to his “profession, avocation, community and beliefs.”

Teed still attends Native American powwows. He’s going to one this week.

For years he also kept himself busy researching the facts behind Brown County lore, including stories that involved the Native American culture. The only story he researched and wasn’t able to fully prove involved the Delaware Tribe. The story was that they were buried standing up after a battle over who could use the Brown County salt wells.

“We proved all the way around it, but we didn’t ever find the bodies,” he said.

Mary came to live in Brown County by way of the other Nashville, the one in Tennessee. She’d come to this Nashville to meet her daughter for a visit. “And I said, ‘That would be a good place to live. … It’s pretty, you know?’”

Her daughter, Sherry Hibschman, bought a card shop in Brown County and Mary moved here to help her.

She ended up opening a massage office in 1998, which she closed when she retired about three years ago.

In 2010, Mary and a small group of other volunteers started the Create It With Gingerbread log cabin competition. What started out as a fun way to celebrate the holidays in Brown County grew into a very competitive and extremely detailed show of creativity with food. Every part of each gingerbread creation had to be edible.

Some people worked for a year on their entries. “Remember the one with the outhouse and the little toilet roll?” Teed said.

“The marshmallow for a toilet paper roll — that was cute,” Mary said. “I mean, they really were inventive.”

One of the entrants even went onto the national gingerbread house competition and won a prize, Mary said.

But in year six, with only four people signed up to enter, the organizers called off the local contest. Ironically, they had more sponsors and prize money lined up for that year’s contest than ever before, but they couldn’t get people to participate, nor could they find another group to champion the program, like 4-H. They had to give all the prize money back to the sponsors.

“Each year we tried to redo the categories so people wouldn’t feel intimidated” by the level of competition, she said.

“But it was really fun.”

Between that contest and her massage clients, and Teed’s involvement in real estate, the Rotary Club and veterans groups, the couple has made a lot of lasting connections in Brown County.

And, of course, there was the dressing company, too.

Hootie Doot

Teed had received the original Hootie Doot dressing recipe from a friend around 1978. The couple started making it and giving it away as Christmas gifts around 20 years ago.

“Everybody loved it, and people would say, ‘You ought to sell this,’ but she gave it to him with the understanding that he would not sell it until after she died,” Mary explained.

They met a person connected with a shared commercial kitchen space in Madison. That’s where Mary and daughter Sherry developed five other dressings in addition to the original, making a whole line of Doot products: Hootie Doot, Dilly Doot, Fruity Doot, Hoosier Doot, Bella Doot and La Doot.

“It’s always been a practice in our family that if something is above average and really good, we call it a ‘hootie doot,’” Mary said.

“Or a ‘grand pooh bah,’” Teed interjected.

“But we didn’t think people would buy that. They even questioned ‘Doot,’” Mary said.

The Howards, Mary’s daughter and son-in-law and other family members helped in the venture. The product was a big seller at the Brown County IGA and was used in several area restaurants. They also shopped the product around at food shows.

But as demand grew, “we had a tough time,” Teed remembered.

“We wanted somebody to help make it so it would free us up. Well, the people who were to make it didn’t make it right, so we had to throw that away. We found that we needed a distributor, and when we went to them we could not find any that didn’t say to us, ‘We want a guaranteed sale.’ … Walmart wanted 40,000, and at the end of the month, ‘What we haven’t sold you’ve got to buy back.’ We couldn’t handle that.”

Another manufacturer wanted to change the recipe so it would go through its bottling machine, Mary said. They didn’t want that. “So, we had to give it up,” she said.

However, buyers continue to find them, as they have for years.

“We got a call from a lady. … She said, ‘My name is ‘Doot,’” Teed remembered.

“I found a lot of Doots, actually,” Mary said. “They wanted to buy it for gifts to give to their families for Christmas and birthdays. It was incredible.

“We were going to set the world on fire, with dressing,” she laughed. “But it was good. And we still get calls for it.”

[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Graham ‘Teed’ Howard” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]

Age: 92

Place of birth: Indianapolis, on Fall Creek Boulevard

Spouse: Mary Falker Howard

Children: Three, plus eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren

Parents: Helen Elizabeth (Wilson) and Fred Wallace. The Wilsons are his “Scottish side.”

Siblings: None

Occupations: Veteran of WWII and Korea; field executive, district executive, field director, Exploring director and Scout executive in Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota for 39 years; Brown County real estate agent for 20 years; co-owner/co-founder of the Hootie Doot salad dressing company; over-65 print model for the Helen Wells agency.

[sc:pullout-text-end][sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Mary Falker Howard” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]

Age: 82 in November

Place of birth: Paris, Illinois, at home on Marshall Street

Spouse: Graham “Teed” Howard

Children: Three, plus eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren

Parents: Nila (Doris) and Lloyd Wallace

Siblings: One brother, deceased

Occupations: Housewife in the Mississippi Delta; certified massage therapist in healing touch, craniosacral, reflexology and shiatsu; co-owner/co-founder of the Hootie Doot salad dressing company

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