Lemme down, There’s a lot of us been pushed around, Red, yellow, black, white and brown, With a tear their own. Oh, can’t you see, While you’re picking on society, That the leaves on your family tree Are calling you to come home? In your head, You don’t believe what the Good Book said, You’re gonna strike out now instead. ’Cause the world’s been unkind, But through thick and thin, Whatever shape your heart is in, You only have one next of kin. Better keep ’em in mind.
—From the song “Keeper of the Castle” by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter
“Better keep ‘em in mind” came to mind from The Four Tops again in this song a year after I moved to Charlotte. My earlier premonition that my mother’s role behind the scenes of my father’s offer was confirmed when a letter came from her saying that if I did not take the offer, I would be passing up a great opportunity to return to the family.
I was thirty-two going into the 1970s and I joined my father the following year. The music of the ’70s, still popular today, will always be in my blood, and as the song said, family is family, and kin are kin. Considering my mother’s veiled invitation, the leaves of my family tree were calling me to come home.
There were several reasons I changed my mind and decided to make the move, among which was knowing it looked like Kincaid agency would be losing our creative director. I also wanted to see if I could try bringing the now three generations of our Park family together. And, I also was determined to prove to my father that I had enough practical business sense to handle anything that was thrown at me. I never anticipated what he would throw at me to make the job almost impossible, and to say my wife was apprehensive about the move was an understatement. Tetlow’s premonitions would prove to be correct.
But after long days of agonizing, and to the chagrin of my family, I decided to give it a try. Some anonymous person wrote “What happens first is easy. It’s what comes later that’s much harder.” Amen to that observation.
When I came back to Ithaca at age thirty-three, I had already lived in sixteen different houses, apartments, boarding rooms, inns, hotels, and dorms up and down the East Coast. Four in Chapel Hill, two in Raleigh, and one in Charlotte, NC, one each in Queens, White Plains and Port Chester, NY, along with Perrine, FL, Lawrenceville, NJ, and four earlier in Ithaca before my final return. This did not include another three moves to be made in Ithaca after my return, but it was good to think about settling in one place for a while.
Now I was about to take on a significant position in one of my father’s core businesses. In 1963, in the midst of his broadcasting expansion, my father’s real estate division, RHP Incorporated, began the acquisition of some 3,000 outdoor billboards, under companies he named Park Outdoor Advertising and Park Displays. He felt outdoor, being an out-of-home medium, reinforced and served as a perfect complement to television, and outdoor was an attractive investment due to its depreciation contribution to cash flow.
Park Outdoor Advertising, Inc., owned outdoor posters and painted boards in dozens of cities in New York and Pennsylvania; Park Displays also owned outdoor posters and painted boards in other New York and Pennsylvania counties. In 1969 he bought more billboards and formed Park Outdoor Advertising, Inc. of Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, Inc., based in Scranton, PA. These were the earlier three companies Pops brought me back to Ithaca to manage, the survivors of which I own today.
When I came back to Ithaca to take over the outdoor division, with 3,000 billboards it was among the top twenty in the United States. I never had to ask the question that our friend, Sam Johnson, found most difficult to ask in Carnauba, his brilliant and moving movie tribute to his father: “Does my father love his business more than he loves me?” I knew that answer from the get-go, and it didn’t bother me. I knew very little about managing an outdoor business but just wanted to work hard and do a good job to continue the success I had in the jobs I held during my advertising career. With the kind of work ethic ingrained in me after seven years in advertising, I figured that handling a new challenge would be a piece of cake.
Among other things, I was buoyed up by a letter my father shared with me from then North Carolina Senator Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles, Jr. dated November 1, 1971, which read, “My good friend, Dan Cameron, told me about seeing you in New York. He also gave me the news about Roy, Jr., having joined your firm in the outdoor advertising division. I had the opportunity to see Roy, Jr., when he worked for Kincaid and the quality was evident. He was the best thing in the agency…I know it makes you mighty proud he was successful on his own and has now decided to join your organization.”
But again, I had no idea of what I was getting into. Johnnie Babcock’s following account about life with my father is, if anything, more objective than mine: TASKMASTER “Roy Park was a tireless worker who drove his executives hard. He was a very tough man to work for. “Proceedings at a typical Monday morning management meeting at the height of his business career describe how he directed his men and illuminate facets of Park’s complex personal profile.
To neighbors and casual acquaintances, he was simply Ithaca’s wealthiest and most enigmatic citizen. To those who worked for him, he was a hard-driving taskmaster. Described by the local newspaper at this stage of his career as a media mogul, this owner and chief executive was in absolute control. No operating detail escaped him. Nor was there any doubt as to who was in charge. The weekly 8 AM management meeting got his key people to the big board table in his office a half-hour before normal business hours. A printed agenda covered reports to be made and left plenty of room for Park’s directives and criticism. Earlier, each person attending the meeting had received detailed minutes of the last management meeting detailing various accomplishments, failures and statistics about a TV or radio station, a newspaper or an outdoor billboard location.
“The atmosphere in the room? Uneasy apprehension by some, tension for all. Monday meetings took place during the height of Park’s media-acquisition drive. To put to rest any hopes that his quest for more wealth might dilute his ardor for micromanagement, he preceded the agenda with pointed personal remarks.
“While his staff indulged in family life over the weekend, Roy spent his time hard at work in his sequestered office in his Cayuga Heights home. On Saturday his administrative assistant, Ben Williams, watched him open the mail carried to his house from the company post office box by staff aide Oscar Harrell. Ben took notes for Park’s use during the upcoming week. On Sundays, Park emptied the box himself, making it risky for company employees to use the mail for personal correspondence between them, or company postage. He opened every envelope, marked personal or not. He savored letters of complaint, sensing that they might never have come to light had he not intercepted them.
“Roy would take up a letter to one of his department heads who had yet to see the new mail, and if it was a complaint, read it aloud to the group. More often than not, the intended recipient was summarily dismissed from the meeting to go to his office and return immediately with an answer that would satisfy the writer, or him.
“Remember Park’s student partner in the magazine business at NC State? Signing his letters “Pea Vine,” he often criticized the program content of a Park TV station. Park took pains to answer him personally but not until there was an exhaustive investigation into the circumstances. This personal gesture as an entrepreneur was meant to show clearly that he was the in-charge owner-manager. His reaction nonetheless demoralized the involved department head and left him with a headache or worse.
“Now ready for the agenda, Park would address the remaining management staff: Johnnie Babcock, broadcasting division; at the time, Conrad Fink, newspapers; Bob Burns, real estate, Tommy Thomas, chief financial officer; Roger Turner, radio; Roy Park, Jr., (after he joined the company in outdoor); Dave Feldman, outdoor and real estate financial director; and his personal assistant, Ben Williams, who kept detailed minutes.
“Park should have invented the PC and the Internet, but it was way before Al Gore was around to claim that honor. Anyway, his mechanical aptitude was limited to his cigar clipper and winding watches from his antique wristwatch collection. He rarely typed anything and had such a whispery vocal delivery to his dictating machine that only his personal secretary could understand and reproduce the words on paper.
“Park wanted, demanded, and received hard-copy information about each of his properties. Many of the reports now available through sophisticated electronic gear were gathered the old-fashioned way for the boss. Park’s accountability device: the teletype that Park had familiarized himself with during his early newspaper and publishing experiences. The home office machine chattered day and night, feeding the owner concise data from each of his far-flung businesses. Unless attended to hourly, the scroll of paper cranked out would flood the entire hallway off the elevator to his fourth floor office.
“Over the noon hour was an especially busy time in the teletype room. Park wanted reports by midday to assure him that the key people were hard at work at each place of business. Bank deposits for the day were included, as were disbursements. The bank balance was compared to the day before. As cash built up at a location, Tommy Thomas swept the account and transferred balances judged beyond immediate need to the corporate account at Wachovia Bank in Raleigh. Park’s ambitious purchase of broadcast stations and newspapers was accomplished with what proved to be a very acceptable asset: cash. As explained earlier, when Park merged his Duncan Hines business with Procter & Gamble on a tax-free exchange of stock, he became a very large holder of the company’s stock. Those shares were the leverage to secure large cash commitments from big banks to make his cash acquisitions. Large loan balances were whittled away by the positive cash flow from owned properties.
“After summarizing daily the teletype cash reports, Ben Williams gathered each location’s sales report. The various sources of revenue were reported and compared to budget for like categories. As the month advanced, sales booked were expressed as a percentage of the budget for the current and two advanced months, and same period a year earlier. If on the twentieth, sales were 60 percent of budget for the current month, Park demanded to know why and to challenge whether the shortfall could be sold in the few remaining days. Many of my station visits were to address and help repair such shortfalls. The target percentage of operating profit in television before amortization, depreciation and interest was 45 percent. Some of his larger network affiliated TV stations returned more than 50 percent of their net sales as operating profit.
“After cash and sales, Park placed great reliance on his own invention, the head count report. It was summarized for him from each property compared to budget. If raises had been granted since the last report, they were individually reviewed and usually roundly criticized even though listed as budget-approved actions.
As he repeatedly admonished, even a five-dollar weekly increase adds up to a $520 additional cost after two years. An unauthorized raise, perhaps to save a resignation of a popular newscaster, resulted in an order for the Ithaca supervisor to travel to the location immediately to upbraid the general manager and possibly reverse that action. There was little wiggle room when it came to employee compensation. Park rarely examined in detail the professional credentials of a station supervisor. His evaluation relied on two prime conditions: that the prospect was available and affordable. That left plenty of room to let some bums and thieves slip in.
“A strict lecture closed most management meetings, with advice to respond quickly and positively to the various actions agreed on by him at the meeting. Minutes circulated that same day underscored commitments for action that would be grist for the next regular meeting. Monday was not a happy day at Park Broadcasting.”