Aside from the thoughts my father put in his letter to me on my twenty-first birthday, he established early in his career some specific guidelines and work habits, many of which serve me well today.
Right up to the end, my father worked ten- and twelve-hour days for seven days a week. But he felt he really never worked a day in his life. Work to him was a pleasure, a joy, a bold adventure, a vacation. Every day was a holiday. As former U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin, when he was a director of Pops’ paper in Morganton, NC, said, “Work is his recreation, not just his job.” And Pops summed up his passion for work, the only one he had, by saying, “You have to give to get…and whatever the job takes you give.” He said, “When things are running smoothly, I get bored.”
My father said he had never been in a business he didn’t like. That might have been one of the things that helped build his empire. He never did anything or got involved in any field that he didn’t find interesting. “I don’t think I ever sat down and said I want to get into this business because I can make a lot of money,” he said. “You plan ahead, but you travel mile by mile to get there.” On his seventy-first birthday, he said, “If you’re looking backward, you’re not looking forward,” and he was still going strong.
One of his two most important rules was never to touch the same piece of paper twice, or move anything to the bottom of the pile that you face each morning. He maintained that nothing should ever be put in a desk drawer, or be filed before it’s resolved, because it will slip through the cracks. The one exception to this, however, was the drawer full of talk sheets that he kept on each of his key employees. He added to the stack of sheets on each person periodically in anticipation of performance reviews, which were tied in with budgeted payroll raises. If anyone wanted to know his true misgivings about employees, his notes were all there.
His other discipline was to carry home unfinished work from the office, and complete it so he could start with a relatively clean in-box the next day before the mail and memos arrived. When it came to taking work home, one of the two managers who ran the outdoor division when I transferred into broadcasting for five years had his own rule, which ran counter to my father’s. He told his associates that he might carry a briefcase out of the office, but he always left it on the front step until Monday morning. He lasted about three years before he resigned.
The business side of my father was methodical and organized.
Since he personally opened each communication or piece of mail, made a decision on its contents and disposed of it, his desk was always clear. A mail drop twice a day from his home office to wherever he was when he was traveling kept him up to date and well informed. He would open each piece of mail, or read each memo as it came through, and immediately dictate his response to be attached to the material and sent to the appropriate employee before moving to the next item in the pile.
In an interview with my father, staff writer Jim Dumbell of the Charlotte Observer reported in 1982: “He takes telephone-equipped Lear jets on frequent visits to his properties. His punctuality is assured by the two or three wristwatches he wears, ‘to exercise them.’In his pockets are two small tape recorders which he uses in car, plane, or wherever, so no fleeting thought will escape, no waking moment be wasted.” It should be noted that once he concluded an acquisition, after one first-time trip to the property, he seldom returned to the so-to-speak, “scene of the crime.” As Dumbell reported, “In fact, Park is better known in the executive offices of many banks and national corporations than in the newsrooms of his own papers in the communities they serve.”8 But when he was away from the office visiting any of his properties, or negotiating to buy more, he always carried his Dictaphone. He had a rule that the sun doesn’t set on an unanswered piece of correspondence. He was fanatical about it. One of his managers recalled that once my father’s secretary was typing letters from his tapes, when suddenly a pause interrupted the dictation and there was someone else’s voice: “Pass the cranberry sauce, please.” Apparently someone at the Thanksgiving table passed the sauce, and he resumed his dictation. That must have been a Thanksgiving I missed, but my father liked the story.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, I’ve already pointed out how dif
ficult it was for employees to take allotted vacations. My father’s deliberate scheduling prevented taking long weekends, too, especially if they were adjacent to paid holidays. Since Thanksgiving always falls on Thursday, he made sure he scheduled a management meeting on Friday morning beginning at 7:30 to prevent anyone in Ithaca from taking a long weekend to be with family or friends.
Another thing I learned working with my father was to tackle the toughest, most apparently unsolvable problems first. I now firmly believe that for every problem there is always a solution. The fortune cookie prediction that “nothing is impossible” turned out to be right. It may take time to find it, but if you keep it gnawing at the back of your mind, different ideas emerge in your head over time. If you track them, they begin to fit together. The pieces eventually fall into place until the puzzle is solved. My father often said, “I enjoy solving a problem. I view each problem as a great opportunity. Meeting a challenge and resolving it is to me the best part of a good day’s work.” I learned never to postpone, bury or put any problem back in the closet. It will always stay there to fall out on your head, sooner rather than later.
Johnnie Babcock, who supervised hundreds of Park employees, put up with managers contacting him each day with problems they would try to lay on his desk. His standard response was to ask how they propose to resolve it, and if they didn’t have a resolution, he would say, “You don’t have a problem. You have given your problem to me. Therefore, how can you ask me to resolve a problem that you no longer have?” My father had strict rules for running a successful business. As already pointed out, he believed in doing things on time. Answering mail the same day it’s received it, taking work home, starting the next day with a clean agenda. An extension of this was taking action to quickly resolve problems that come up. If you have the facts and common sense, you move. You have, he claimed, better than a 50 percent chance of being right.
My father also claimed he believed in delegating responsibility. But only, he added, to the degree that he felt that someone could handle something as well, or better, than he could. But of course, no one could, so he always kept his finger in every pie and maintained his authority to change the rules on a whim despite his delegation. Though he theoretically had a chain of command, he never made an apology for overriding it. He would upbraid or direct anyone regardless of whom the person reported to, and he had the urge to do this often. As Johnnie Babcock can attest, although Pops had great confidence in Johnnie’s management skills, Pops never hesitated a minute to overreach him, intervene and take control of my supervising functions. After all, I was family! He also believed in paying attention to details, and most of the people to whom he “delegated” authority found out in a hurry what he meant. He second-guessed them frequently on details, and in some cases they personally became the detail he paid attention to.
Another one of his principles was to reinvest cash flow and always keep a liquid position. It was always Pops’ policy to promote growth by reinvesting the company earnings back into the company. Park Broadcasting and later Park Communications never paid cash dividends on its stock, to him or any other shareholders. Instead, profits were used to fund new acquisitions. He always maintained that “we use the money to improve the properties, acquire additional properties and retire bank debt.”
Although consistently listed year after year in the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, my father never talked about his wealth. He said the money wasn’t what mattered. He took little out in salary considering the size of his company; his salary never exceeded $600,000 per year. Of course, since practically everything he did involved business, most of his expenses were paid for, anyway.
He would advise people to “mortgage the limbs but never the trunk.” Personal guarantees on loans were taboo, and he always used only a portion of his business or stock to secure and guarantee a loan.
My father was smart enough to listen and learn from his elders. “I feel that successful older people always have time for ambitious younger people who are willing to work,” he told Jim Dumbell, staff writer with the Charlotte Observer. “You’ve got to learn. I want to learn from somebody else without having to discover it all myself. I found I could save time if I got advice from someone older. It was not mandatory that I take it all.”9 My father, of course, firmly believed in showmanship, and his sales ability was legend. If he had stayed on the farm and was told by his father to haul away a dead mule, he would have auctioned it off to 100 people at $5 each. When the winner took delivery of a dead mule and asked what he was going to do with it, my father would have said, “You’re right, here is your money back,” and he would come out $495 ahead. Of course, he wouldn’t take the dead mule back to the farm. He’d leave it along the road somewhere for someone else to clean up, along with his newspapers.
He also believed in homework, and he excelled at research and preparation. All through his advertising and promotion days, he used extensive research and analysis, and with each new area of endeavor he moved slowly at first until he had a “formula” for a successful operation. He said, “I never bought a property I didn’t study carefully, and I knew more about it than the man who owned it.”
His penchant for research found its peak and maximum use, as I mentioned earlier, in the ever-present talk sheet, my father’s principal tool of communication, which Johnnie Babcock describes in detail: “Almost every word heard on a home television set is read aloud by the performer from a screen of enlarged type that scrolls by at a comfortable speed as words are delivered. While the words are being read and delivered, the teleprompter gives the news anchor, politician or comedian the luxury of staying on track.
“Long before this performer’s crutch was invented, Roy Park carefully followed a printed memo dictated by him to guide his many phone conversations, and sometimes face-to-face situations. Just as with Park’s speeches, they were meticulously phrased, edited and reedited before they were delivered. I know. I wrote the first drafts of his speeches for him.
“In the first few days of my service as operations vice president, a detail arose about my supervisory functions. As we talked, Roy rummaged about in the generous top drawer of his desk and came up with a neatly typed page that had guided him through that final negotiation session that resulted in my being hired. Referring to what he had covered during that meeting, he made it plain that he was absolutely sure of the understanding we reached then, confirmed by his memo. So what became known as a “talk sheet” was not an innovation for my convenience, but Park’s patented, regular business discipline.
“At our typical private, early morning meeting, we talked about phone calls that Park wanted to make that day. We reviewed points to be covered that had been typed up the previous afternoon; or if that chore had not already been done, we worked up a talk sheet on the spot, dictating it to his secretary for immediate transcription. His clerical help had to be both accurate and very fast. If a stenographer was not handy, I repaired to my office and typed it up on my error-prone Underwood.
“After completion of a phone call guided by our talk sheet, Park dictated a cover memo into a recording device, urging my input as he did so. There were not many changes. That report went in the files. Very confidential or highly important talk sheets were secreted permanently in his top drawer, a practice that was to prove material to me years later. “On the credenza behind his desk, Park kept a shelf from which he could readily select a named folder. The folder names were key Ithaca staff members, his wife, each of his children, and usually one or two trusted confidants, including a banker or two.
If a talk sheet had found use for one of these people, it went in his or her folder, which also contained one-word memo reminders dropped in by Park to bring up topics important to him the next time they met.
“The talk sheets and our name on a folder invited close and persistent follow-up by Roy Park. While I traveled to a different operating venue almost every week, I could be sure that on my distant arrival, a call back to Roy was expected, and during my visit progress phone calls to his office were also expected. Infrequent vacations drove him crazy. I attempted to escape completely by going so far into nature’s preserves that I could not be reached. One such place was a fishing spot in Canada owned by a large lumber company. No electricity and no phones. No road access, either.
“I went there after recalling that Roy once took one of his very rare vacations with a friend at this remote site. No electricity, newspapers or phone, and no American radio signals. After a single day of recreation, Park extracted from a largely French-speaking fishing guide that the lumber company did have a telephone some miles down a logging road and across a stretch of lake. Roy persuaded, or possibly bribed, the guide to take him to that nearest phone. His friend reported that he returned tired and grumpy, the country phone line so bad that he couldn’t even get stock quotations from his office. Never again Canada for Roy, despite his earlier seclusion from P&G. But it did suggest an escape that worked out for me a time or two.”