In 1976 I was shifted from the outdoor division to become vice president, advertising and promotion for Park Broadcasting, Inc., which included advertising and promotion for fourteen radio and seven TV stations, plus thirty-nine newspapers, the outdoor divisions and real estate in eighteen states. But my father’s main purpose in this move was to have me create Park Communications, an eight-page monthly tabloid newspaper for our then more than 2,500 employees.
In preparation, my father asked me, at age thirty-eight, to go back to being a student taking a graduate news writing course in the Department of Communication Arts at Cornell. I was by far the oldest student in the class and sat in the back of the room. My professor was the publisher of the Ithaca Journal at the time, which put him well to the left of center. My first reports received C+’s and low Bs with a massive amount of commentary in the margins. Sometimes I thought he was writing more in the margins than I was writing in the article. His comments were all slanted toward moving what I prided as my objectivity to a more liberal viewpoint. I adapted to this without changing my philosophy, and when I finished the course, I got one of six As in the class out of thirty-six in the graduate student body. I went on to publish Park Communications and my former professor went on to become a government press secretary.
My father’s formula for the newspaper was simple: include something about every division he owned in each issue: a picture, announcement of a new employee, a birth, marriage, news or feature article. As its managing editor, I had to become involved in what was happening in every one of the roughly 100 different subsidiaries my father owned, spread from the West Coast to South Florida. Aside from our employees, the newspaper also went to network executives, outside suppliers and advisors, and potential media he targeted for purchase.
In those days we had progressed past carbon paper but were a long way away from computers. Every article, caption, and headline was hand-typed and subject to Pops’ approval. In those days before computers there were not even memory banks on our electric typewriters. To avoid every article from being completely retyped after he revised it, I made heavy use of White-Out and corrective tape. We’d patch in the changes the best we could and send it back up for final approval, only to have it come back looking like Attila the Hun had savaged it. The corrective tape would be peeled up on every page, making each sheet look like the floor after New Year’s Eve. He wanted to see what had been under the tape before he gave his approval.
Every month, like clockwork, regardless of bad weather, I drove 150 miles to Ogdensburg, NY, and worked with our general manager, Chuck Kelly, to supervise the printing and folding of the newsletters, which I took back to Ithaca the next day.
The articles were sent up as they were approved, typeset at the newspaper and sent back to me in Ithaca for paste-up. I would arrive in Ogdensburg, NY, around 11 pM, grab subs from a place that was open late, and stay up all night with the blank tabloid pages, scissors and hot wax to finalize the layout. This included juggling headlines, photos, captions, articles, announcements and artwork, if a map updating his holdings was shown. Bleary-eyed, I would drive the paste-up to the newspaper at dawn the next day for final photographing and printing.
I remember on more than one occasion Route I-81 from Syracuse to Ogdensburg was completely closed off, blocked by at least two feet of snow. I knew that if I slowed the car for a moment, I couldn’t break free, so to keep the car’s momentum, I white-knuckled the normal four-hour trip in six hours, being the only car on the road.
Then the publications had to be mailed to each employee, not to their business offices but to their homes. Keeping track of thousands of employees with constant turnover and movement with updated addresses each month was a nightmare in itself. Again, we did this without computers.
My job also included writing press releases, developing slogans and logo changes for the stations, and attending public relations events on the launching of new programming for the three networks around the country. This part of the job entailed attending the annual kick-off celebrations of the new network shows and sitcoms, and I had dinners and hobnobbed with sitcom and movie stars from Jack Lemmon to Bernadette Peters.
You may remember some of the old network programming. I met with Mary McDonough of The Waltons, Bess Armstrong of On Our Own, Christopher Norris of Trapper John, M.D., Candice Earley of All My Children, Sharon Lovejoy of Magazine, Connie Sellecca of Flying High, Tony Randall of The Tony Randall Show, and Bernadette Peters of All’s Fair.
I remember a joke I played on the former president of the Ithaca Gun Company, John Park. He had moved to Nashville, TN, to start another business after the gun company declared bankruptcy in 1979. He found out I was coming to town and he asked me to come over for dinner at his home. I approached Connie Selleca, who was staying in the same hotel for the CBS kick-off, and she agreed to help me play a joke on him.
When he came to the lobby of the hotel, I walked arm in arm with her and after introductions, told him that she would be with me for the evening. He didn’t bat an eye but simply described what we were going to have for dinner. At that point, she said it sounded great, and would rather go for a home-cooked meal with us than stay at the celebration banquet. I reminded her that the actor she was being seen with who played a diver in one of the new shows would probably not think her leaving would be a good idea. I knew she probably was putting me on anyway, and she agreed.
When we got out to the car, I said, “Good Lord, John you didn’t even bat an eye.” He said, “You had me going all right, but in case you were serious, I didn’t want to show it.”
The job also included supervising the advertising for all of our companies and I developed a corporate advertising campaign. While doing all this, I continued to attend each of my father's weekly meetings and was responsible for developing the visuals for his annual address, which covered every property with graphs and charts showing each company’s progress on national and local sales, expenses and operating profit. All these slides were hand-done, with the individual bar charts pasted up by a professional at Cornell and then photographed for slides. No PowerPoint back then.
In 1976, I was also named managing director of Ag Research, my father’s Redbook-listed advertising agency founded in 1952 that created the Duncan Hines brand. I redesigned nine company logos and came up with new call letters when radio stations changed formats. For example, when Pops changed his station in Syracuse from classical music to country, he asked me to come up with a new name. I suggested something with his initials, WRHP, telling him that sounded like country to me. He agreed.
The agency also handled all promotional advertising done by the company’s newspapers and broadcast properties. From 1976 to 1978, the agency’s operating profit increased 300 percent.
In addition, I accelerated involvement in community affairs. In 1976, I joined the public relations council of the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce. I served as the public relations director of the Tompkins County Conference and Tourist Council and as chairman of the sign ordinance committee and legislative action committee and acting chairman of the nominating committee. I also served on the Board of Directors of the Tompkins County Council of the Arts. In 1977 I was a guest publicity executive to the United Way of Tompkins County; and in 1979 on the finance committee of the Special Children’s Center. Finally, I served on the board of the Ithaca Assembly, becoming chairman in 1978 for three years.
You would think with this kind of workload I would be assigned secretarial help. But I was given only part-time help by whoever the receptionist-switchboard operator happened to be at the time. The job required her to answer all phone calls to headquarters from hundreds of employees, suppliers and related business contacts to greet people coming off the elevator, make coffee and run errands. I was dictating all of my material, and every time she would put the earphones on to type my dictation, the phone would ring.
So there I was, the person who always had full-time secretaries at the companies I worked for before joining my father, trying to keep things going with sporadic part-time help. What I had gone through earlier as general manager of the outdoor division wasn’t looking so bad.