At the end of the summer, Tetlow and I returned to Ithaca together, me for my second year in the MBA program, and Tet to work as a medical receptionist for a group of obstetricians in order to help put me through college. I dropped her off at work each morning on my way to classes. I should mention that my father refused to cover my tuition, now that I was married. I had gone against his wishes and was ignored for doing it. So to make ends meet, I also found a job with a local advertising agency in the afternoons when classes were over. Laux Advertising turned out to be a great experience, confirming that advertising was the field I wanted to go into when I graduated.
On our return to Ithaca, I had rented a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building overlooking Cayuga Lake above the Yacht Club. The location was on the opposite side of the lake from Cornell. The drive to get to campus took twenty minutes. During the winter with the wind coming off the lake, it was bitterly cold. We burned candles inside the convertible to try to heat the car up when we started out each morning. Each weekend we had to wash the soot off the inside of the windshield.
Our first child, a daughter, was born in Ithaca in late 1962, and we moved into slightly larger quarters with two bedrooms. I enjoyed my job at Laux as research director and senior writer part-time, then full-time during the summer between Cornell semesters. While I was there, working with the president, J.D. Laux, we brought in several new clients, including Schweizer Aircraft, a manufacturer of gliders in Central New York, and the hybrid seed company, Robson Quality. I worked on other local accounts including a manufacturer of snow cream shake syrup, a seafood distributor in Elmira, an optical service, and even something called Unique Products Manufacturing Company. On the environmental side, Robson Quality even came up with a wildlife corn that could be planted as survival food for pheasant, quail, duck, and geese when all other wild foods were inaccessible in the northern winters.
My father had given me, as well as my sister, some P&G stock a few years earlier, and I used that as collateral to borrow from a local bank. My debt was nothing like the debt piled up by student loans today, but $10,000 back then was pretty substantial. My father finally relented and told me that if I managed to graduate (unlikely, he thought, because I was married, which he felt would distract me, or even cause me to drop out), he would reimburse me for the tuition I paid. This turned out to be $10,000, although my total loan ended up being $13,000. I finished up in Ithaca in 1963, and when I graduated, I went on to start my advertising career only $3,000 in debt.
By this time, my father had added, in 1962, a television station to his two radio holdings in Greenville, NC, and in 1963, in Tennessee, a TV station in Johnson City and another TV and two more radio stations in Chattanooga. While his business was taking him in a southerly direction, mine kept me in the north—heading to New York City.