I knew outdoor was a time-tested, powerful, strong and creative advertising medium. I wrote plenty of outdoor copy for Ford and Pan Am at JWT, and we bought it as well for First Union at Kincaid. But I knew nothing about the technicalities of how the boards got there in the first place: the aspects of leasing and zoning approvals, state licensing, construction, maintenance, production, etc. The closest I’d been to that was the Burma Shave signs of my youth spaced evenly along a farm roadside or highway, for which the owner probably picked up a couple of bills a year, and at a time zoning and DOT restrictions didn’t exist.
Even back then, Burma Shave conveyed traffic safety and DWI messages, to wit: “At Intersections/Look Each Way/A Harp Sounds Nice/But Is Hard to Play.” I also remember, “The Midnight Ride/Of Paul For Beer/Led To A Warmer/Hemisphere” and “Car In Ditch/Driver In Tree/The Moon Was Full/And So Was He.” Burma Shave even snuck in a little self-promotion along with their safety messages as in: “Passing School Zone/Take It Slow/ Let Your Little/Shavers Grow.”
I soon learned there are a lot of easier things to do than to run an outdoor advertising company in New York Sate. Despite the fact that tourism is one of the state’s key industries, and billboards are essential for travelers to find where to eat, sleep, shop and look, government regulations and zoning in New York were, and still are, extraordinarily strict.
At the time I took over, the outdoor division had lost or was on the verge of losing some 600 boards to neglect, competitive lease jumping, zoning changes, and government condemnation. The federal government still had funding under the 1965 Highway Beautification Act known as Lady Bird’s Bill to pay for the removal of billboards, so condemnation proceedings were taking boards left and right. It was almost impossible to replace units that were removed because of the strict zoning in most of the territories where we operated, and the state of New York was loaded with environmentalists who were pushing for even stricter zoning against billboards. We had our problems with college and activist environmental vandalism as well.
At the time, there was adequate Department of Transportation funding to build new roads, and this continued over the next twenty years. The board takedowns caused by road construction created further losses, and changing traffic patterns made delivering accurate traffic counts more difficult. Upstate New York’s five months of severe weather is hardly conducive to maintaining and servicing the units, inflicting wind and storm damage to the boards along with freezing temperatures on the men. Other natural disasters had contributed to the condition with the floods in Wilkes-Barre, Binghamton, and Elmira, which put much of our inventory under water. The managers informed me that six more boards had just fallen down from neglect the month before I joined the company. In addition, under New York State law, a nonconforming board, which most of our inventory was, could not be repaired or refurbished for more than 15% of the value of the board. Since the value of these old boards was so low, repairing or upgrading anything became a difficult logistical problem.
These were some of the long-term uncontrollable problems when I took over, on top of the entire outdoor division being in poor shape to begin with, having been assembled mainly through the acquisition of antique billboards from a variety of companies and had never been upgraded or repaired. The age of the boards was a major problem. When I took over, the Park Outdoor plant consisted of boards purchased at various times by my father from Donnelly, General Outdoor, and Max Andrews. The Max Andrews boards were more than forty years old when we bought them, and the others weren’t much younger.
Except for the Elmira division, where some minimum maintenance had taken place over the past few years, hardly anything had been done, and most of the boards were built on telephone poles with green latticework underneath. In addition, I inherited untrained manpower and was faced with no reserve of professional billposters, construction people, or painters. New production, sales, and management people had to be hired, and they all had to be trained.
I remember riding the boards (in outdoor lingo, the “plant”) in what we called our Western Division, headquartered in Jamestown. I saw flagging paper, rusted panels, and leaning billboards. I saw that even if the space on these old structures could be sold to advertisers, many couldn’t be posted with paper since they were in such bad shape.
One board I photographed during that trip foreshadowed doom. It was back from the highway behind a rise in the ground, and it had begun to sink behind the edge of the ravine. It bore a Ford advertising message with a doomsday bearded messenger holding a sign reading the end is here.
The condition of the plant still wasn’t the worst of it. When I began looking into the management of the company, I found there were uncollectibles on the books, in addition to receivables that were three to four years old that had not been written off. The inventories of existing signs had also been understated, with only one inventory report that had been spot-checked in recent months.
The shape of our inventory had caused business from national advertisers to plummet, with all of the major liquor and tobacco companies abandoning Park. We also had no demographic information or traffic audit verification for the boards. At that time, we didn’t belong to the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) and, in fact, had no association memberships at all. I urged that we hire KLAD, key sales rep firm at the time for outdoor located in New York City, but the decision was pushed off for three months. I also found that the past managers had not reported boards that had come down. One of my first projects was to see how many we had lost in the past year. In addition, many of the old land leases, which had not been properly negotiated or monitored, were expiring or coming up for renewal. We discovered also that some former managers had given away our boards to property owners, although we couldn’t prove it because the leasing and inventory records were so inaccurate. They also were selling by making deals, some of the trades benefiting them personally, misusing petty cash and postponing maintenance and repair.
The decline in national business had also resulted in manpower cuts, which had an immediate effect on the condition of the billboards. All of this added up to a steady decline in our capacity, the number of outdoor units we had left to sell.
Riding the markets took several days, from one end to the other. While riding, I realized how labor-intensive the division was going to be to run. The same inventory concentrated in one market, or in a smaller geographic area, would have required far less manpower and brought in much more profit.
In short, my timing for taking over the outdoor operation was just plain bad. The “beautification” money from the government that was forcing us to remove our most productive billboards should have been used to upgrade the boards. But my father was putting it into his real estate parent company below the operating profit line, while maintenance costs continued and were included as operating expenses, thereby reducing an already sparse operating profit.
The outdoor division was also being charged with “management fees” and rent, with little legitimate basis and no explanation offered on the way these amounts were calculated. It was just another way to pull money out of the outdoor division into the parent real estate company. Seeing the way it had been run, I began to realize the future for the outdoor division, squeezed as it was, was mainly a tax advantage. As a poor sister of the RHP Incorporated real estate division, it also provided active income versus the real estate’s passive income, which kept the real estate holding company from being declared a personal holding company. The passive income from the stock portfolio and real estate, which made up most of RHP Incorporated had to be offset with active income from outdoor advertising. The only other “active” income was minimal and came from my father’s orange groves and timberland.
It was evident that the job would make it difficult for me to function professionally, let alone succeed. The challenges were massive, and having worked with my father before, I knew that I would be swimming upstream. This made it easy for my father not only to keep me under his thumb but also to thwart any attempts I could make to explain the difficulty of my position to my mother. Of course, the dark picture he painted of me to her was further motivated by our differing philosophies, the natural result of my trying to run the outdoor division at more than a survival level.
Little did I expect to step into an atmosphere where what I did was nitpicked and put down. As I said, my father claimed a strong view against nepotism, which prevailed in his dealings with me, even though I made every attempt to keep a low profile and mind my own business. He deliberately went out of his way to try to make me look like something to simply be tolerated. The implication was that I couldn’t get a job anywhere else.
Worst of all, the harder I tried to do the job that needed to be done, the more we fought. And the more we fought, the easier it was for him to justify painting me to my mother with a black brush. It would have been a shock to anyone’s ego, and as the attacks continued in daily doses, I began to feel like a voodoo doll. His implication that I was a creative type lacking in financial ability gave him an excuse to use the pins. His invitation to join the company resulted in a trap that snapped shut when I lost my independence.
He interpreted attempts at rational discussion as arguing, and any disagreements were treated as rebellious. In time, I found myself subject to what I despised as much as anyone—short emotional outbursts—which only reinforced his subjective judgment of me. This did not happen all at once, but slowly, over time. Since my father despised nepotism so much, I wondered, why had he brought me into his business? It may have been my mother’s influence, but it was a debilitating change in the career path on which I had started. While my father’s nightmares during my youth woke him up, I couldn’t awaken from mine. My nightmares continued sporadically throughout the next seventeen years.