As his son living in Ithaca, a lot of people have asked me over the years why my father continued to headquarter in this small town. While I was mobile and moving around, I wondered, too. I know why he originally moved to Ithaca, and how he went through his earlier careers there. But when he started building a media empire, access to financial institutions and ease of travel for prospects, employees and others with whom his business was involved would have been better situated in a place like New York City.
After he concluded the sale of the Duncan Hines Institute to Procter & Gamble, my father could afford better housing. Once his business was sold, he was free to go anywhere, and I suspect my mother may have been having some thoughts about returning to the South. At the time, both my sister and I were away at school so the extra room wasn’t needed, but the purchase of a larger home was an incentive for my mother to stay in Ithaca where my father already had investments in real estate.
As was his style, Pops had already started exploring the possible purchase of an estate in the Ithaca area, regardless of the fact that none were for sale at the time. He had approached people and families that owned the kind of property he was looking for, and, in particular, became friends with one older gentleman which assured, when the gentleman died in the mid-1950s, that a first right of refusal had been made part of his will.
The house, situated on seven acres in the Village of Cayuga Heights, was a stone mansion built by stonemasons brought over from Italy, many of whom remained in Ithaca after the project was completed. I am sure it wasn’t the weather that kept my father here, since he wouldn’t know a snow shovel from a walking cane, but with the nature of this commitment, it was difficult for my mother to push for a move elsewhere. At any rate, to keep her happy, Pops gave my mother carte blanche with interior decorators and furnishings. Not only was the house splendidly fitted out, it also served as a refuge and fortification in which my father could retreat from what in many ways for him was a hostile world out there.
As you know from my childhood, my mother loved animals, and my father’s estate provided ample room for dogs and peacocks. The original peacocks were loud, but eventually, to keep peace in the neighborhood, another species of peacock was found with a quieter call.
But despite this settling in, it is interesting that over the years my parents did little shopping in Ithaca, preferring New York City for purchases and medical care. But the Ithaca trap had firmly snapped shut on my mother, and to an extent on my sister and me. It also afforded an excellent snare for my father’s headquarter employees.
I learned over the years Ithaca was the ideal environment from which my father could run his company. First, its location is “centrally isolated,” which gives Cornell University fits when it comes to attracting recruiters, even from New York City, for its graduating students. Rail service ended forty years ago. The airline schedules are abysmal, and getting worse. No recruiter can get in to conduct a meaningful interview schedule and back out in a day. And no disgruntled Park employee could go across the street to find a new job, with no other jobs in their specialized categories of expertise available in Ithaca, NY.
Other escape routes were also sealed. My father told me he did not believe in sending his executives to association meetings or business conventions, feeling it too easy to have employees recruited away at these affairs. He belonged to all the right associations, but if anyone from headquarters attended the meetings, it was usually my father and Johnnie Babcock.
The other part of the trap was that Ithaca offered readily available housing in a country setting, ideal for enticing people from higher-cost-of-living areas around big cities. My father made a point of meeting the wives of prospective employees, hiring those with the most aggressive wives. He knew when a wife was ensconced in an expensive house, and had a liking for expensive trappings and a high style of living, they would encourage their husbands to make more money. And they would tolerate the extensive travel necessary to their husbands’ job.
The only exception to this rule was me. When I moved to Ithaca, Pops insisted I rent a house for a year, even though by that time I had enough money to buy one from the proceeds of my first house. Before I made a commitment, he made sure it was my toe that was put in the water, not his. At that time, Ithaca did not offer many houses to rent, but with a dog and two kids we could not have existed again in a condo or an apartment. The only house for rent I was able to find was so small that we used the dining room for a third bedroom and ate in the kitchen. Shades of my sister and me growing up. The yard was so small that our dog didn’t like it either. The Malamute ran away every chance he got.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ithaca was not yet a gleam in my eye. While the Upstate New York atmosphere was working for my father, the bright Big Apple lights I commuted to from cramped quarters in Westchester County were beginning to dim.