Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt.
—William Van Horne
So in 1942 my father was brought to Ithaca, the home of Cornell University, to take over the small GLF advertising agency, with the provision that as long as he handled the GLF advertising, he would be free to engage or solicit any other clients he wanted. He would also, with Babcock’s help and no money up front, be able to buy the agency over time.
With a public relations career under his belt, he began one in advertising. He arrived in Ithaca, NY, with his extended family, including me, during a snowstorm on April Fool’s Day in 1942. He abandoned his secure job of eleven years with the Cotton Growers Co-op, which had offered him both a pay raise and a promotion to stay, and in addition, he took a cut in pay. On top of that, the blizzard was so heavy he thought at the time we should turn around and head back south.
As he said in an interview with the Ithaca Journal reporter, Judith Horstman, “My wife and I and our young son were staying at the Old Ithaca Hotel, and as I looked out the window at all that snow and thought about the flowers that were blooming in Raleigh, I began to wonder if I’d made a good decision.”
But later, he said the smartest thing he ever did was to see what he could do under his own steam, and my father began, at age thirty-two, his second career. This part, Johnnie Babcock, the son of the man who brought him to Ithaca, tells best: “In the early 1940s, my father, H.E. Babcock, learned of Roy Park’s exploits in promoting the North Carolina Cotton cooperative. It took more than a fair salary to persuade Park to leave his native state. Babcock offered the young southerner the opportunity to work out payments to buy the GLF’s Ithaca ad agency. The chance to own his first real business brought Park a-running,” Johnnie remembers.
“The ad agency, Agricultural Advertising and Research, Inc., or Ag Research, was located up some twenty linoleum-clad steps inside an ancient building on Ithaca’s State Street. Park nailed down a spacious private office overlooking the busy street, though no one ever saw him raise the blinds to look out. His focus was on the business inside and the staff he assembled.
“People falling all over themselves in a rapidly expanding business? Hardly. Park maintained (as he would in every business he built or acquired) a minimal staff of multitask workers, preferably with a farm background and farmers’ traditional ethic of hard work. Their humble upbringing also made farm-raised folks more affordable for Park.
“An outdoorsman, gifted creative artist and professional print executive, Bob Flannery answered as production manager, art director, print estimator, idea man, and staff coordinator. A retired newswoman, Grace Smiley wrote almost all the copy on her old L.C. Smith typewriter, dispensed editorial counseling, and got the morning coffee. Another mature lady, Louise Holcomb, kept the books and prepared the payroll. Roy himself retained a proficient secretary and trusted assistant. There were also less important employees: a receptionist, typist, and other clericals. Roy brought in a business manager with strong accounting credentials. Someone who you will understand is best left unnamed.
“A hands-on manager, Roy literally bounded up to the second-floor offices, two-steps-at-a-time strides belying the fact that he never observed an exercise regime. He was usually the first one to arrive. He dashed to his secure office, entered with his private key and took his commanding position behind a massive desk that was to become his office trademark. Park sensed that an appropriate space between employer communicating with employee was to his advantage, and a huge intervening desktop did the job perfectly.
“Though Park closely monitored the attendance and performance of each employee, the business manager had assumed a unique measure of independence. He picked up and emptied the contents of the post office box on the secretary’s desk where Park opened most first-class mail personally. The business manager made the daily bank deposit of checks or cash received. Park personally initialed approval for payment of even the smallest trade expense and held unpaid bills to the last day they were due, and often a few days more. The business manager then wrote, signed and mailed the company checks.
“At night and on weekends, Roy studied the fundamentals of small business stewardship and bookkeeping, but in those early days relied heavily on his business manager.
“Few business owners personally reconcile the company’s month-end bank statement and canceled checks with the books.
But Park’s confidence in his top man was replaced by suspicion when some questionable payments prompted Park to take the company records home one weekend to review every bill, payment, and canceled check and reconcile them with the bank statement. Bingo! Some payables were listed as made to a routine recipient, but the check for that amount was made out to the business manager.
“His key man glibly explained that a few people in a small town like Ithaca insisted on cash, and that he made those cash payments after paying the amount due to himself. That’s all that savvy Park needed. Henceforth there would be no checks ever issued that he did not cosign.
“Park thought he had caught the manager red-handed. He took him to court, but sloppy preparation for the trial failed to yield a conviction. For the first time Roy H. Park had been taken to the cleaners. He vowed it would never happen again.
“This incident prompted revision of Ag Research’s entire bookkeeping process. Park hastened to establish ironclad controls and authorized contacts. They became the disciplined framework for management, not to say micromanagement, of all his subsequent business ventures. As a result of his failure to catch the man in the act, Park assumed that people who worked for him might well be guilty until proven, over many years, innocent. This paranoia provided employment for a considerable number of internal and external auditors for years to come.
“Never straying far from his youthful passion for the printed word, Park’s acquired agency continued to publish Co-op Digest, a trade publication focused on several farmer cooperatives. He opened offices in Albany, NY; Raleigh, NC; Richmond, VA; and, to promote potato farming and marketing in the east, set up a Washington, DC, office headed by lobbyist Whitney Blair.
“Flannery designed an attractive masthead that held up well over the years and saw to the printing of Co-Op Digest. Park micromanaged the magazine’s content from a variety of contributors, making subtle and important editing changes that kept the magazine both appropriate to support of the farm co-op cause and a vehicle to expand his list of farm clients. It was well written and professional.
“New clients were brought aboard with carefully drafted contracts that called not only for routine trade commissions for the ad agency but for an annual prepaid service fee of several thousand dollars to cement Park’s personal involvement and leadership. Ag Research had become a going concern, Park’s flagship business.
The agency provided services and placed advertising right up to Park’s death.
“A boisterous, growing business required dedicated and skilled management. Park’s evolving style required a high standard of staff accountability and hard work. To keep everyone at maximum output, he required frequent personal reports from those supervising employees. He rarely visited individual workspaces, relying instead on examining the end product or progress reports in his lair. He was a good listener and an incisive critic.
“When one of his most trusted employees was on the carpet, he would lean back in his high-back chair and gently twirl the plastic knob at the end of the control cords of the large Venetian blind behind him as he listened to the report. He never opened the blinds—the outside world was an unnecessary distraction. He took notes during each report and referred to them at the next session, reminding the employee of promises for improvement or change made at the last session, reiterating deadlines, and setting expanded work assignments.
“He did enjoy lunch meetings at the Dutch Kitchen restaurant in the regal Ithaca Hotel. The maitre d’ always ushered Park and his guests to the same large round table in the rear of the restaurant. Once everyone was seated, Park put a written agenda on the table; it was the script that determined what would be discussed at lunch. He loved to have H.E. Babcock join him, but when my father was in town, he preferred to eat lunch at his Sunnygables Farm out in Inlet Valley. So Park’s guests were usually officers of GLF, occasionally a Cornell farm economist, and when appropriate, a Park employee pertinent to the outside guests. Park was always a discerning and generous host, a practice he observed throughout his entire career.
“When Park left the downtown office for the day, he carried with him a briefcase bulging with financial reports, business publications and newspapers mailed to him from the southern markets he served. He read and studied every night and for the better part of Saturday and Sunday. He had a voracious appetite for almost everything in print, and a prodigious memory for facts.
There was never a doubt that he worked longer hours than any of his employees or associates.
“Park was poised for greater things. As a brilliant businessman, he might well have invented the admonishment Buy Low, Sell High. But he practiced only the first part. He drove a hard bargain as a buyer because he always was better informed about the offering than even the seller. Park, as we will see, rarely sold anything, especially if it was profitable,” Johnnie points out.
But there was a devastating exception to this, which we’ll come to later. Johnnie continues: “As a balance to their aggressive conduct of business, executives such as Roy Park proudly cited their rural roots as witness to love of nature, purity of heart, devotion to hard work, and thrifty family values. These attributes describe lots of farm folk, and they are guideposts to many business success stories. As a suitable preparation for acquiring business acumen, a solid farm background ranks right up there with the school of hard knocks. People from both backgrounds often claim that they are prerequisites for business success.
“Like Roy, I really did get my start on the farm, not just a homestead in the rural countryside or a small town, but a real working farm. My early memories are not of a poor lad scuffling barefoot down a dirt road to while away time fishing with a bamboo stick and bent pin.
“My boyhood years during the Great Depression had firm direction and called for hard work. I did not wear threadbare clothes and never missed a meal. My family lived in an 1851 Greek Revival house with eleven gables and nineteen rooms. And we got up when it was still dark to start a farmer’s long day.
“We raised chickens, dairy cows, sheep and hogs. We owned or boarded saddle horses and broke-to-harness teams of draft horses that were sold or worked on our farm. My father had come from a hardscrabble farm, and as a teenager vowed to escape its squalor and devote his life to improving the lot of the Northeastern farm family.
“He purchased Sunnygables, the farm where I was raised, in 1921 and moved his own father from the stony hills above Gilbertsville, NY, to a small dairy farm near our Inlet Valley place. He did all of this on borrowed money. I have his tax returns recording negative net worth during the Depression years.
“We three kids, my brother, Howard, Jr.; sister, Barbara; and I, shared the tasks expected of children in farm families. Backbreaking chores and responsibilities, undertaken with plenty of help and encouragement from Mother and Dad, were the fabric of family well-being. Every meal was a family gathering and a forum to talk things over. Early to bed, early to rise was more than a saying—it was a way of life.
“Dad was a primary founder of the Grange League Federation in 1921. He took over as general manager when the new organization was about to fail. Widely known as “Ed” or “H.E.,” Dad shaped the popular, member-owned production and marketing organization into the largest farm cooperative in the country.
“GLF was named for its founding agricultural groups: The National Grange, The Dairymen’s League, and The Farm Bureau Federation. Other regional farm co-ops soon followed. One was the Carolina Cotton Growers Association, Roy Park’s first full-time employer.
“Books were written to honor the exploits of Ed Babcock, and I wrote one myself called Farmboy. For now, however, I’ll stick to the story of my own background prior to becoming Roy Park’s number-two man.
“Dad worked us kids hard during harvest season, but about the time I got sick and tired of rising lame and sore in the morning from hard physical work the day before, he would perform a miracle. One memorable event when I was twelve was being spirited off with a hired-hand companion to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. We country boys marveled at the plush accoutrements of our sleeping car, and the splendor of the Union League Club in the windy city. I loved the fair, and my older teenage chaperone bragged for decades about seeing the erotic moves of famous fan dancer Sally Rand.
“I had a choice of going away to boarding school during my high school years and then to attend Cornell or of finishing at Ithaca High and going away for my college years. The family helped me decide to leave Ithaca High after my sophomore year, and benefit from the privilege, again arranged by Dad, of attending what was arguably the finest preparatory school in the country, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. “It was a humbling experience. After easing by with all As in my first year in high school, I was set back a year in New Hampshire and barely survived the cut after the first year at Exeter. I finally caught up with the program, graduated with respectable grades as an English major, and entered Cornell as a cocky freshman in the fall of 1941.
“At Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, I completed the curriculum for acceptance to medical school and took courses in economics and animal husbandry. Since courses at Exeter covered material on a level of many college courses, I breezed through my classes, hardly cracking a book my freshman year. Life was easy, and beer was 10¢ a glass. My farm experience training horses helped me make the polo team. But by fall 1942, there wasn’t much time for polo, since a gathering stream of students were called up or enlisted for service in World War II.
“I signed up in the enlisted reserves, and soon enough Uncle Sam invited me to join the Infantry in 1943. That was the time I should have asked Dad to intervene. He was in an influential position as chairman of the board at Cornell and could have arranged either a softer assignment or a transfer for me. I had passed up the opportunity to be an artillery officer after basic drill in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). I heard that junior Artillery officers stood a good chance of being assigned as forward observers in combat zones, and that wasn’t for me. “Called to active duty, I spent months in basic infantry training and field maneuvers. I was sure the war would be long over before I made it overseas. Fate was not that kind. I found myself in an infantry division shipped out for the European Theater of Operations (ETO). Things moved rapidly, and suddenly in December 1944, there I was in a frozen foxhole on the front lines facing a bunch of snow-covered German pillboxes.
“That started 127 days of digging foxholes, artillery bombardments, shooting and getting shot at during the Battle of the Bulge, crossing the Rhine River over the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, and the final mopping up of the German army. A PFC (one stripe) in the States, I rose through the ranks to technical sergeant, earning three stripes and two rockers during combat. The fighting was desperate and the battlefield incredibly cold. My promotions in rank to platoon sergeant should have been based on bravery and ability. Fact is, I rose through the ranks in replacement of those who were struck down before me. World War II combat stands as the most draining and frightening experience of my life. My main achievement was survival. Fifty GIs in my rifle company, many of them barely eighteen, were not so lucky.
“I was busy studying and playing at college before the war when Roy Park came to the notice of my father as a replacement manager of the advertising agency employed by GLF, Agricultural Advertising and Research. Dad told me he had brought this bright young man in, and if he lasted, he might open up a writing opportunity for me after the war. It turned out to be just that.
“After combat, I was promoted to first sergeant (which added another rocker and star), and came back from Europe. After I was discharged, I returned to Cornell and studied English and literature in the Arts College. I met Roy and accepted a part-time copywriting job at the old offices on State Street. Most of my pieces dealt with co-op membership events and news reports on their one-man, one-vote meetings.
“Until then, I had known very little about his immediate family. His attractive and engaging wife, Dorothy, charmed me. Their two children—Roy, Jr., and his younger sister who was born in Ithaca, Adelaide—were seldom mentioned by him and very briefly acknowledged when I visited him at his home. I remember one evening before bedtime, little Roy (a denigrating southern appellation instead of Jr. for a son named after his father) timorously inquiring whether he could perform a magic show for his dad and me. His father granted permission but asked that the lad be brief.
“Young Roy mounted a few stairs toward the sleeping quarters. From that improvised stage, with various acquired aids, he performed a few sleight-of-hand tricks. While I applauded and encouraged him, his father, openly bored, asked him to wrap up his performance and get on up to bed. The dismissal had all the bonding and affection of a master telling his little dog to get lost.
“As the children grew, Roy provided plenty of discipline but not much rapport. It was hard to imagine that in an apparently normal family, the children were being raised in the shadow under a basket. There was no playing ball in the yard with Dad, no hikes with the kids, no family fishing trips. Roy was ill-suited for the rounded give and take of family life. “My part-time work writing copy in Ithaca was good training.
I quit school to open an Ag Research office for Park in Richmond, VA, to handle advertising for Southern States Cooperative, a mirror image of the GLF organization I knew so well. The pay was low even for those times, but sufficient for a single man living in a rented bedroom on a farm outside Richmond. I saw little of Roy. He not only failed to visit the Richmond office but also never asked me a question about my experiences in the military. I never volunteered a word myself.”
Johnnie concludes that, “I realized that while Roy showed every sign of being an even more formidable businessman than my dad, he lacked Dad’s warmer human attributes. In any case, my path would diverge from Roy Park’s when the Richmond experience ended with my return to Ithaca after Dad’s first heart attack in 1949.”