No question that 1957 was a memorable year in my life. After I busted out of Cornell, I buckled down at UNC to face the real world and started out on a hard-driving course that changed my life and times. While other teenagers, students and otherwise, were listening to music that led them in directions I began to dislike, I was listening to a different drummer and walking a narrow path of my own.
I arrived in Chapel Hill as a sophomore in 1958. I lost track of what my father was up to, since I was concentrating heavily on making my marks in college. And during this first year at UNC, my father was intent on making sure I had my nose to the grindstone. One of the ground rules that he laid down was that for that first year, to keep me away from roommates, fraternities, and the other temptations I experienced at Cornell, I was to be quartered in a small room at the Carolina Inn, a hotel smack in the middle of the campus.
To show good faith and gain experience, I wrote articles for the local newspaper, the Chapel Hill Weekly, the owner being a former professor in Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. One of these was an interview with a man who started a pizza parlor in the heart of downtown Chapel Hill. He came to North Carolina from New York, telling me of his vision of serving the students and the community. I reported this in a beautifully sympathetic article, which made students flock to his door.
A month later, the pizzeria had been emptied of everything except the rats. The owner fled Chapel Hill with his belongings plus a lot that didn’t belong to him, including all the kitchen equipment for which he had not paid. So much for being kind to people in articles, since that can come back to bite you on the backside. I took a lot of flack from townspeople and my fellow students on that one.
Aside from my studies, I had time on my hands, little to sidetrack me, and a lot to think about. Cloistered in a tiny room under a stairwell in which the only furnishings were a desk and a bed, I had plenty of time to turn my thoughts inward and learn about writing—by writing. I wrote occasional letters and stories for the Chapel Hill Weekly, the Raleigh Times and the News of Orange County. As I said, I enjoy putting words together, receiving my highest marks in writing courses from grade school on up, and with my coursework then concentrated in journalism, I also wrote for fun.
So along with articles, stories, and notes I made reflecting the things I remembered about my life, I tried my hand at my version of poetry. The oldest definition of poetry, from the Chinese, is that it is “the expression of earnest thought.” Confucius said: “Who does not study poetry has no hold over words.” I was going to deal with words in a big way for the rest of my life, so I figured it would be helpful to get an early hold on them.
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” said William Wordsworth, and “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” I certainly had plenty of tranquil time, so I expressed my emotions in a number of poems.
THAT (LONELY) LOVIN’ FEELING An Open Letter to a Girl It will be a long time before I’m With you again…perhaps never. But the impact of what I left behind, Will last. It might have been an orchid in the Cold heights of Everest, Or a gardenia in the depths of Hell.
Most probably, it was just an angel On earth. Because of you, I know the old world Is not black and Godless As it often appears to be. I know too, that the girl I shall Someday search for, fight for, And love, Does now exist in more than Imaginary terms. You will be an inspiration to many, Before you become an inspiration To one. Let no man break the stem which Connects you to life in its real sense. A blossom on the stem serves God’s Natural purpose before it dies; One in the florist’s window has only A short moment of glory, and Dies… Purposeless. Think in terms of eternity and You shall become a part of it. Think only in terms of this world, And You shall become a part of it, too. But whereas eternity is endless, the Dust of this small world cannot last Forever… Real love is immense: so great that it May never be confined by any one Aspect. I only hope that someday we may Both Feel the pure happiness it can bring Until then, stay just as you are… The poems I wrote, like the one above, were published fairly regularly in the Raleigh News & Observer on the editorial page under the heading todAy’s nC poeM. Some of them were about lost loves. I’d had a number of them during my summer breaks in Ithaca while I was at Lawrenceville, and a few more at Cornell. But none yet at Carolina.
Being pretty sequestered in the Carolina Inn, I hadn’t met anyone. Besides, while I was at Carolina, the only girls on campus were graduate students or nurses. I was not old enough to easily capture a date with a grad student, and I thought not experienced enough to get a date with a nurse.
But things worked out and improved in 1959 on at least one memorable occasion. I ushered for a wedding in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Henry Ford II's mother, Eleanor Ford, was a close friend of the bride's mother who arranged for me to be a guest at Charlotte Ford's coming-out party.
And then there was my encounter with the formidable mother of a future president of the United States.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSE KENNEDY It was my father’s idea to interview Rose Kennedy when she swung through Chapel Hill, campaigning for her son. She was headquartered at the Carolina Inn, and, of course, she also campaigned in Raleigh and Durham, NC. Pops, who was in Raleigh on business at NC State at the time, heard she was staying in “my” hotel, and thought it would be a coup for me. The staff was secretive about her schedule, and I explained the difficulty of getting through to her with her unknown schedule and my full class load. Pops thought about that and developed a strategy.
His idea was a twist on his application for his first job in Raleigh. He suggested that I write down on a notepad all the questions I wanted to ask her, leaving space under each for her to handwrite her reply. He felt that I could persuade the desk clerk I knew at the Carolina Inn to put this in her box along with my room number in case she decided to respond.
I took this a step further. I called her on the phone in her room when the desk clerk informed me she had returned around 10 pM. I told her what I planned to do, and since she seemed to be in a receptive mood, I asked her if she could talk for a minute and was able to carry on a phone interview for the next half hour. She also had a copy of her speech that day sent down to my box.
After our conversation, I wrote her a note confirming that I was a student in the journalism school also staying at the inn. My note said: Dear Mrs. Kennedy, Thank you for allowing me to look over your speech.
I don’t know if you saw my list of questions, but if you don’t have time to look them over, perhaps your maid could leave them in Box 1017 when you check out. If you did have the time to go through them, you could leave both the questions and answers in the same box, or at the Carolina Inn desk in Chapel Hill.
There are many students, as you know, in the area who will be voting for the first time and would like to know about Kennedy when he was their age. I am sure this would be of interest to them.
Enjoyed talking with you over the phone last night, and am sorry I did not get the chance to meet you.
Very sincerely, Roy H. Park, Jr., University of NC I picked up the written interview she left in my box the next morning, along with her handwritten note which said: Thank you for your interest. While awaiting the car I have tried to help. Rose Kennedy. Combined with the notes I took during our phone conversation, I had an article ready to go before noon.
Calling the major newspapers in the area, I found the Durham Morning Herald to be immediately receptive, drove over, and handed the article to them, and was delighted to see it featured at the top page of the second section on October 3, 1960, the next morning: Mom Tells of Kennedy’s College Life, Childhood by Roy H. Park, Jr.
(Durham Hill Company Inc. Reprinted with permission from the Durham Morning Herald, October 3, 1960.)
UNC Journalism student Roy H. Park, Jr., taking advantage of a visit Mrs. Rose Kennedy paid to Chapel Hill during the weekend, came up with a bevy of questions which the famous mother hadn’t faced in thousands of previous interviews.
Mrs. Rose Kennedy, who rested this weekend in Chapel Hill, took time out to answer questions about her son that only a mother could answer. “Was Jack a good student in college?” Her answer, “Good at school, but not brilliant. He did not make all A’s.”
The Democratic presidential aspirant graduated at 22 from Harvard, class of 1940. Mrs. Kennedy said Jack “was probably one of the best informed college graduates of 1940.” One thing that most moms invariably complain about is the lack of correspondence originating from their sons or daughters away at college. Jack, however, wrote his mother “weekly,” and as an afterthought, “usually” was added. It is true his father gave him $1 million when he was 21. Mrs. Kennedy also named his favorite sport as sailing.
“Jack was a prodigious reader when he was young. He was particularly fond of adventure, history and biographies.” Mrs.
Kennedy said, “Boston abounded in monuments of this country and Jack heard about them and viewed them when he was knee high and then, when he would return home, he would read books which I had bought for him to supplement his knowledge. And we would discuss these stories at family meals.
“In those days there was no radio or television. And he grew to know and love the great heroes and American history, much the way some boys today know and love their wild West heroes on television. That love and knowledge of history that increased over the years went on until as a teenager he could answer almost any question on American history.”
In a telephone conversation, Mrs. Kennedy said, “We used to play games where one person described a famous person and the rest tried to guess who it was. Jack always won.” Did Mrs. Kennedy ever think that her son might someday be a presidential candidate? “Every mother has that privilege,” she said. At one time, however, she felt her eldest son would be the politician in the family, but he was killed in World War II.
Mrs. Kennedy herself went to the Boston public schools, Dorchester High School, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Aix-la-Chapelle in Germany and New York. She also “had been in a German convent and had visited Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union.”
“As a little girl,” Mrs. Kennedy went on, “I lived on a farm in New England about 25 miles outside of Boston. Those were the days when we slept in feather beds and read by the light of a kerosene lamp and our milk came in a five-gallon can. But I was happy and contented helping my grandmother in the garden and riding home proudly with my grandfather on a load of hay after the men had piled it high and packed it down in the old farm wagon which was drawn by the farm horse.”
Were these trips she is taking her own idea or Jack’s? “I started the idea,” she replied.
In a telephone interview, Mrs. Kennedy expressed some slight concern over the religious feeling in the South. The following morning she called it “a pity to waste time on it when there are so many issues of worldwide importance. France and Germany both have Catholic leaders, and there is no interference from Rome, which is an idea of the middle ages.”
How does she think Jack’s chances would have been if he were not backed by the Kennedy wealth? “Excellent. He has the family tradition, tenacity, personality, intelligence and interest in world affairs.” Mrs. Kennedy added that “As a baby Jack was practically rocked in his cradle to the sound of political lullabies.”
Why did not Jack’s father give him more public support? “It’s easier for a son if a famous father gives him the complete stage.”
The complete stage? I didn’t need that, but this stuck with me for life, because once I went to work for him, my father seldom gave me any part of the stage, even a corner behind the curtain.
He did, however, like another poem I wrote that appeared in the News & Observer in July, 1961. Since I was a student in the journalism school, I decided it was appropriate to write it: Credo for a Journal If this journal can Bring to just one person, As well as to many, A single slender ray of The sharp, cleansing beam Of Wisdom, If it can help us here To pass on a small fragment Of Faith in the good, And the clean, And the pure, Or to touch one lonely, Unnoticed heart With a tiny crystal of Laughter, If it can represent Courage That holds up in the face of Pain and evil and death, Clean Moral defiance at Corruption and fraud, And the concealed Beauty of The tiniest things… If it can project one sharp, White, Thunder-bolt Of unprejudiced, clarifying Truth Into the world around us, Unblind one eye, Or unlock one heart, Anywhere, Then it has done its job.
Later, much later, when I was working for my father and he got into the newspaper business, he asked me to share this piece with all of his publishers.
KEEPING IT PLATONIC As I said earlier, the reader should bear in mind that my father’s greatest fear was a paternity suit, and my greatest fear was providing grounds for one. Three occasions come to mind: At Cornell, after bombing out with the Freshman Queen, I struck up a close relationship with another very popular and attractive coed who had a great sense of humor. I had pledged Sigma Phi, one of the Union Triad, the first three to found the fraternity system in the nation, and my nine freshman fraternity brothers were intrigued by our relationship. Particularly when they learned that the two of us were going to my home in Ithaca, a short distance from campus, to study together in the evenings. They were convinced that we studied a lot more than books, although that was not the case.
Telling them nothing only fired their imaginations. We could have made speculation reality, but our friendship was more important, and we thrived on what became our campus-wide notoriety.
In 1959, the summer before I transferred as a sophomore to UNC, my date and two other couples (one of them bringing along a male white rabbit they carried everywhere) went to the Newport Jazz Festival. I was dating the same girl who followed my bike back in elementary school, and I had finally caught up to her height. We had rented space in advance in a boardinghouse in Newport, Rhode Island, and when we got there discovered there were only two rooms: a front room with two single beds and a back room closed off by a curtain with a double bed. The arrangement made it impossible to split up with guys in one room, girls in another. One of the couples was engaged, so no problem. My date, said she had no intention of sharing one of the smaller beds, but the third couple thought it was fine. So we ended up in the “private” room with the double bed.
But I had to promise her I would stay on my side of the bed. Keeping my father’s fear in mind, I promised, and it was not hard to fall off to sleep since I’d had plenty to drink. When I woke up and said “Good morning,” I was greeted with silence. I asked her what was the matter and her response was, “You just don’t understand women.” The white rabbit nodded in agreement. I understood then, too late, and I never got another date with her. But I’m glad we went to the Festival that year, though, because riots caused performance cancellations the following year.
During my junior year at UNC, I was attracted to a cheerleader I had seen riding around town in convertibles with members of the football team. I found out she was from the New York City area, and being from New York myself, I made the Yankee connection work and stole her away from the team.
She invited me to go home with her on one of our breaks, and her parents appropriately separated our sleeping quarters. Her bedroom was upstairs, and mine was a sofa bed directly behind the glass doors of their study at the base of the second-floor stairway.
After her parents went to sleep, she slipped downstairs, and all they had to do was look down the steps to find us together. The sound of my heartbeat alone would have been enough to wake them. I could feel a paternity suit hovering, and both a father and a potential father-in-law on my back. It was a short visit, and all this caution was of no benefit to me. But it did honor my father’s wishes, and I figured I was saving him money. Of course any appreciation he might have shown could not offset my sacrifice, and he didn’t show any, anyway.
NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE I got through my first year with high marks, and at the beginning of my junior year, I moved out of the Carolina Inn into an off-campus boardinghouse. All of the rooms were either doubles or triples, so I moved in with a student I knew. Another friend, Jim Frazier, whom I met when he was a student working tables at the Carolina Inn (and who was taking some of the same courses I was), also moved into the house. There were four other students in the various combinations in the house, and we all got along well.
This time, I didn’t have a car and the walk to campus along the unpaved red Carolina clay paths was messy. You looked like an advertisement for the “Red Shoe Diaries” by the time you arrived on campus. The journalism school was on the same side of the campus as the rooming house. That was good since I spent a lot of late nights in the library researching articles we had to write. I even made a run for student council as an Independent, which was a futile effort since the fraternity guys had the candidacies sewed up. It did give me a taste of what you have to do in politics, which permanently inoculated me against ever running for public office again.
Along about the second semester of my junior year, I persuaded Pops to let me have a car again, one from his antique car collection in Ithaca—a 1952 Nash-Healey sports car. It is inter
esting that this same car was featured in 2004 on stamps as one of eight classic America on the Move “Sporty Cars” of the 1950s issued by the United States Postal Service.
This time I used the car sensibly because I didn’t want to lose it—as well as my ability to date off-campus. Since Carolina was not truly coeducational at the time, the best place to find girls was at the Women’s College, nicknamed “WC,” in Greensboro. It is now known as The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It was a good hour’s drive over there, but the guys said that all you had to do was to drive through the campus in a convertible and the girls would pour out of the dorms and jump into your car. That was not true, but it sounded good, and it was as close to a smorgasbord as you could get for those of us who had a tough time getting dates on the Chapel Hill campus.
I made a number of new friends during the year, and a bunch of us decided to make another move our senior year, even farther off campus. By that time, we all had cars, so six of us rented an entire two-story house in Carborro and made it our home. It had four double bedrooms with kitchens. When we rented the house, one bedroom was already occupied by two nurses. Occasionally we needed them, and it made it even more like home.
The floors in the old Carborro house were tilted. The beds leaned downhill or sideways, depending on how you placed them, and you had to turn them every so often to sleep in the opposite direction to even out whatever circulates in your brain.
My housemates, some of whom I still keep in touch with, also remember the many parties we had there, with streamers and balloons all over to dress the decrepit old place up. Even the water in the tropical fish tank was safely colored Carolina Blue with vegetable dye.
A month or so into my senior year, my father came down to Raleigh for a business meeting, accompanied by my mother, and invited me to come over to his hotel and have dinner. Of course he asked me if I wanted to bring along any of my friends and their dates since this would be a special occasion. I wasn’t dating anyone seriously at the time and wanted to find somebody special.
One of the guys in the house was going steady with a girl at WC, and I asked him if he could help me line up an attractive blind date. I told him the circumstances and promised him and his girl a fine dinner with my parents, as well, if they came through.
I had double-dated with them on several occasions and his girl was attractive and personable, so I thought she would do well by me. I learned later she carefully picked a blind date for me with someone she felt had no interest in finding a boyfriend, or in getting tied down, and the date was set up.
MEETING MY FUTURE WIFE I think it is unusual for parents to meet their future daughter
in-law on their son’s first date with her, but that’s what happened.
She was well-known as the granddaughter of John Oliver Newell, the only doctor for miles around Franklinton, NC, where I drove to pick her up on a Friday during Thanksgiving break.
I remember her later telling me when she looked out of the louvered front door before she opened it, all she could see was my shoes. They happened to be Italian loafers with a snakelike twirl stitched on the top, and her first thought was that she was going to kill her friend who had set up the blind date.
When she opened the door, I was blown away. I knew I owed her friend big-time for her choice. I made a great impression on her right from the start, as well, when her father, William Brooks Parham, asked me what I would like to drink. I told him Scotch, and he disappeared into the kitchen. I later learned that he asked his daughter what kind of jerk she was dating that would ask for Scotch in Bourbon country. I settled for Bourbon, but he never forgot it.
We joined my mother and father for dinner at the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, and we all had a lot of fun that evening. At the time, none of us knew this match would take, and that Elizabeth Tetlow Parham would become my wife a few years later. Her nickname was Tet, and when I asked her how she got that name, she said her mother didn’t feel Elizabeth suited her, so she called her by her middle name, which her friends naturally shortened.
I drove her home and asked if I could pick her up on Sunday to take her back to school. She was a little miffed that I didn’t make a date the following day on Saturday, which left her wondering if I was going out with someone else. The jealousy factor helped, although I didn’t learn about it until later.
Tet told me that when she got back to the dorm Sunday night, her friend asked her how she liked dating me. Tet said she thought it was fine and that I was going to ask her out again. That was when her friend burst into tears, and when she stopped crying she said she hadn’t expected Tet to get involved with anyone. She had picked her for that reason, and that’s when Tetlow learned her friend had set her own sights on me. But her friend got over it, and our blind date led to our going steady.
I spent a lot of time driving to Greensboro to pick her up, or to Franklinton, where Tet spent her weekends. Although I am not a slow driver, and during my sixty-nine years I’ve driven hundreds of thousands of miles, I’ve only had one speeding ticket in my lifetime. A second I should have gotten, but didn’t, showed me how much pull Tetlow and her family had in their small town.
While dating, I drove to Franklinton from Chapel Hill on many Sundays to take Tet back to Greensboro. I made it a point of arriving by 11 AM to go to church with the family. Once you got off the major highway, on the last stretch to Franklinton, the road went up and down like a roller coaster and had plenty of curves. One particular morning I was late and was roaring along at eighty-five mph to make up the time. I could handle this in my sports car, although it was a dangerous speed. But there were no radar detectors back then.
I realized that I had flown by a sheriff’s car when I saw the flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. I was more afraid of being late for church than I was of getting a ticket, so I nudged the ac
celerator up to ninety-five and saw the flashing lights disappear behind me on the winding road. I had pulled up in front of the church and was on my way in when the sheriff caught up to me with his siren wailing. He had had no trouble finding me, since the car was distinctive, and the church was in the center of town.
“Son, I don’t know how fast you were going,” he told me, “but you gave me a run for my money. What’s your rush?” I explained that I was late for church with the Parhams, and I couldn’t believe it when he smiled and gave me a pass with the warning that if I ever did that again, he would throw me in jail.
Of course, the siren just outside the church doors had inter
rupted the service, and when I entered the building the entire congregation turned to look at me. I just slipped into the pew be
side the family with an angelic expression on my face and didn’t admit “nothin’” until the service was over. In the interim, I sang my praises to the Lord along with the best of them.
When our relationship became comfortable enough to feel secure, I branched out a bit and acquired a dog. The Russian wolfhound was a beautiful animal with a brain that did not match its size. When he rode with me in the car, the dog was so big that he took up all the passenger side and a good portion of my side, as well.
I named him Sabre and took the wolfhound along on our dates, which Tet tolerated—barely. That type of tolerance is to be commended since she had a choice of either having the dog’s drooling head or its back end in her lap when we drove around. Encounters like this also brought out her sense of humor, which was a match for mine. So we laughed a lot and dated steadily through my senior year, going to discos and restaurants within an hour’s drive from Chapel Hill.
I liked her father, too, who did not suffer fools gladly, and we had that in common. We both liked boating and fishing and generally keeping things stirred up. He also had a great sense of humor, so the time we spent together was lively and entertaining. I learned the invaluable lesson—you don’t just marry the girl, you marry her family, as it were, so good relations with your in-laws are not just a luxury, it’s a necessity for a happy and lasting marriage. Fortunately my future in-laws not only seemed to like me at the time, they liked (I thought) my oversized hound. But they did learn that when you get to thinking you might be a person of some influence, it doesn’t extend to ordering someone else’s dog around.
But Sabre had a sad end. When I flew home for Christmas break, no one in Chapel Hill had a crate large enough to ship the Russian wolfhound on a plane so I built a huge carrying case out of plywood.
I drilled sufficient air holes, I thought, and put a rope handle on each end since it needed two people to carry it. The crate was put aboard at the same time I boarded, and carried, believe it or not, into the pilots’cockpit instead of being placed in the baggage area. I was assured my dog would be OK. Unfortunately, the plane was grounded in Atlanta for two hours with engine trouble and everyone left the plane while repairs were being made. The temperature in the cockpit rose to ninety-plus degrees, and when I arrived at my home airport and opened the crate, I found my dog dead from suffocation.
I think one of the toughest things a person can experience is losing a dog. As Will Rogers said, “If there are no dogs in Heaven… then when I die, I want to go where they went.” The oldest fossil evidence shows that dogs and humans started a relationship at least 10,000 years ago. It’s still an open question if humans adopted dogs or dogs adopted humans, but the relationship is long-standing, dynamic, and deep, and the loss of a dog is devastating. As someone who has observed dogs for a long time, M. Acklam, said, “We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare, and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It’s the best deal man has ever made.”
I love dogs, and if you feel the same way, check out Appendix I: Dog Story.
As Dean Koontz perceptively wrote in his heart-gripping 2007 book, The Darkest Evening of the Year, “If you are a dog lover...and not just one who sees them as pets or animals, but...perhaps being but a step or two down the species ladder from humankind...you watch them differently from the way other people watch them, with a respect for their born dignity, with a recognition of their capacity to know joy and to suffer melancholy....
“If you watch them with this heightened perception...you see a remarkable complexity in each dog’s personality, an individualism, uncannily human in its refinement, though with none of the worst of human faults. You see an intelligence and fundamental ability to reason that sometimes can take your breath away.”2 I’ve had many dogs since Sabre, and have them now. But back then it was a long time before I could muster up the will to think about replacing Sabre with another dog. In the meantime, I had plenty of other family things to think about.
A FATHER’S LETTER: MY FIRST DEGREE Entrepreneur: A person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for a business venture.
Tetlow was two classes behind me when I graduated from UNC and came back to the graduate school of management at Cornell. Pops was about to negotiate the purchase of his first two radio stations at the same time he was running the Duncan Hi