Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood…make big plans, aim high in hope and work.
—Daniel H. Burnham
I am picking up the story again at this point, and as his son, I can tell you that my father’s “Thanks a million” was hardly the simple expression it seemed to be. Interestingly enough, Pops financed his first broadcasting properties with help from a $1 million loan from an insurance company whose president he happened to know, along with loans from Society Bank.
On September 26, 1961, at age fifty-one, he founded what would become Park Broadcasting, Inc., a Delaware corporation, with the purchase of two radio stations, WNCT AM/FM, in Greenville, NC.
Early in the following year in February, driving his 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible from Ithaca to Greenville, he purchased WNCT TV, his first television station there. He said he arranged the loan thirty minutes before the deal closed by walking into a branch of Wachovia Bank and Trust Co. in Raleigh with “the country-boy approach” and asking “to borrow a few million dollars.” With Procter & Gamble stock as collateral, of course, which he said allowed him to borrow at low rates. The price tag was $2.5 million, and WNCT TV boasted that its facilities covered eastern North Carolina “from the capital to the coast.”
This was followed in rapid succession by the purchase of a television and two radio stations in Chattanooga, TN, in 1963 for $2.5 million, and a television station in Johnson City, TN, in 1964 for another $2.5 million. He never returned to the friendly insurance company for these acquisitions once he learned that banks lend up to 80 percent on such purchases, while insurance companies lend only 30 percent. Financing these purchases was not a problem, since he said he had “ample” lines of credit at Wachovia and Society Bank.
It was after the purchase of the Johnson City television station in 1964 that my father hired H.E. Babcock’s son, Johnnie, bringing his career experience in broadcast media to manage this first group of TV stations. “Food was interesting,” Pops told an interviewer about the industry he left in 1962 to start a new career at the age of fifty-two, “but media work is exciting.” Reflecting on Pops’ meteoric rise in the broadcast industry, Broadcasting Magazine, in its issue of February 3, 1964, said: “If reverse logic can be applied to the maxim that idle hands are the Devil’s tools, then Roy H. Park is one of the purest men beneath the firmament. A relentlessly energetic businessman, his every step from the North Carolina farm of his birth to his present prominence has been marked by a stubborn will to succeed and a sure instinct for dealing with his fellow man.”
Working together, my father and Babcock began to rapidly expand Park Broadcasting with the strategy of acquiring stations in the top 100 markets. Other purchases from 1965 through 1969 included a television station in Richmond, VA, for $5 million, then radio stations serving Minneapolis, MN, and Yankton, SD. The signal for WNAX, in Yankton, served four states. Paying $7 million for another TV station in Roanoke, VA, in 1969, Pops noticed that the prices were going up, so that same year he decided to build his own tower and start a UHF television station in Utica, NY.
It is interesting to note that his Utica start-up took far longer for payback on the investment than the acquisitions he made. It goes to show that it’s a lot easier to buy an ongoing business than it is to start one successfully. Contrary to the old farmer’s advice, sometimes life is not easier when you try to plow around the stump. Trying to save money on another acquisition, my father put a stump in the ground.
At some point, also, during the period between 1966 and 1969, when the word was out in the general community that my father was acquiring things, Pops received a call from the visionary Robert Arthur Moog, the inventor of the first modular synthesizer, who lived in nearby Trumansburg, NY, at the time. Mr. Moog received a PhD in engineering physics from Cornell in Ithaca, and his musical invention, which received a patent in 1969, was ready for expansion and he offered my father the opportunity to invest in his venture.
There are opportunities that come along during every person’s lifetime, and this may have been a big one. I was working at J. Walter Thompson when my father told me about it, and although I had a short run with piano lessons as a kid and at my fraternity took a crack at drums, I could hardly qualify as a musician. I could not envision the breakthrough role the Moog synthesizer would play in the music world in the future. My father was not a musical guy, either, so we passed on what could have been a truly great opportunity.
But as I was to learn later in life, maybe this missed opportunity was for the best. I remember in the far future being sidetracked from my full-time job to try to help market an environmentally friendly retail product which I thought might set the world on fire. I’ll never forget the advice I received at the time from a client and a friend, John Miller, who was then the media director of Y&R in New York. He simply said, “Stick with what you know.” As tempting as it has been to disregard over the years, as so many of us know, it was good advice, and I took it. I’m glad that I did.
It is interesting to note that in 1978 when Mr. Moog moved his entire family to our home state of North Carolina, one of his daughters, Michelle Moog-Koussa, who was born in the Ithaca area, was about the same age I was when my family took me out of North Carolina to move to Ithaca. The Moog family recently founded the Bob Moog Memorial Foundation for Electronic Music to honor their father’s legacy, and we also have that in common.
In any event, after a short pause, my father’s acquisitions continued in 1973 and 1974 with the purchase of radio stations in Portland, OR, Eden Prairie, MN, and a TV station in Birmingham, AL. In a special feature, NBC Radio’s Monitor program reported that Park Broadcasting, Inc., “operates eighteen radio and television stations, the largest broadcast group wholly owned by one man.” The group covered nine cities in six different states. In 1975 and 1976, he bought more radio stations in Seattle, WA, and Syracuse, NY.
Through all of these purchases, my father had a nose for profitable properties. As reported in the July 25, 1977 issue of Business Week, His country music radio station in Yankton, South Dakota, for example, might seem too small for the owner of seven costly TV stations to bother with, but it reaches five populous farm states with radio’s strongest daytime signal. Park recalls adding his first FM stations in the mid-1960’s even though profits then were almost nonexistent. “I carried them along because I knew they were going to make it sooner or later,” he said.3 Cecil L. Richards, a broker in Falls Church, VA, confirmed that the two Virginia TV stations my father bought at an average of $6 million were each worth in excess of $10 million by 1977.
Along the way, my father was also asked if he thought about investing in cable. He said cable was not his style. “It’s highly capital-intensive, and it’s going to wind up in the hands of a few large companies,” he said. He was right. At the time he also said the problem with the cable networks and the independent stations was that they failed to cover local news. His stations took pains to cover things such as the local Rotary Club and high school football games. “It may not be CBS Sports,” he said, “but if your kid is playing, you’re going to watch it.”
As Pops was nearing his legal ownership limit of twenty-one broadcasting stations, seven each of television, AM and FM radio stations, he realized that at this time, in order to continue to grow, he would have to move to other media acquisitions. As reported in the Winston-Salem Journal, “Like Alexander the Great, he had run out of worlds to conquer. But instead of sitting down to weep, he did what he said he had wanted to do at the beginning.
He bought his first newspaper at the age of 62—41 years after his college paper and AP days.” While he was still buying broadcasting stations, he entered the newspaper field in 1972, and by 1977, he owned forty newspapers in nine states. They comprised one-third of his wealth. His media acquisitions through the years are far too complex to follow in the pages of this book. He moved through radio, television, outdoor advertising, and, finally, newspapers. His holdings are summarized in Appendix B, Building a Media Empire.
In an interview with Virgil Gaither in the August 22, 1979, is
sue of the Tulsa Tribune, my father expressed his desire to get into the newspaper business, and why he started with broadcasting: I developed some trade publications [right after leaving the Associated Press], and always wanted to get into the [newspaper] business. When I could, I got the television business because at the time—back in the 1960s—I thought the newspaper business was a dying business.
I picked a market area and over a period of time bought television stations in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama. I also built a station in Utica, New York, but it is helpful if you can buy in one general area because you keep up with the economics and politics of the region. When I got into radio, I had to buy where stations were available. I have stations in Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Syracuse, South Dakota, Greenville, Chattanooga and Richmond.
After we generated some cash, I moved over to my first love and bought newspapers.4 That is the subject of a later chapter.