IN THE BEGINNING
They’re tearing down the street where I grew up, Like pouring brandy in a Dixie cup. They’re paving concrete on a part of me, No trial for killing off a memory. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust Can you find the Milky Way? Long Tall Sally and Tin Pan Alley Have seen their dying day. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust It’ll never be the same. But we’re all forgiving, We’re only living, To leave the way we came.
—From the song “Ashes to Ashes” by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter
I first heard these words in the song from The Fifth Dimension in 1973. As far as I know, all the places where I lived growing up in Raleigh, Ithaca, Lawrenceville, Chapel Hill, Queens, Port Chester and Charlotte are still there. All except one. Possibly the house I rented for a year in Perrine, Florida, may have been destroyed by hurricane Hugo. But SW 184th Terrace is still there.
But now in my later years, I feel the concrete of my past beginning to pave over me, and there’s much to remember. Some of those memories may or may not be of value to others. But they are of value to me. So while I can, I remember. There are many misconceptions about my father, wrong rumors I hear to this day. So I felt the need for a son’s account, neither a tribute nor a condemnation, to set the record straight. He was a great man, though frequently hurtful to me, and it was instructive to take a journey down the hard road he took to build an estate worth close to a billion dollars—and realize his version of the American dream.
That dream probably didn’t include being ranked in the top 140 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans in 1993 when he died.
Pretty good for someone who came off a farm to put himself through college, and whose first full-time job after graduation paid $100 a month.
Though not particularly notable in today’s terms, back in 1993, only 15 percent of the Forbes 400 were billionaires, compared to some 88 percent in 2005. The October 8, 2007 25th Anniversary issue of the Forbes 400 pointed out, “One billion dollars is no longer enough. The price of admission [now] is $1.3 billion.” In my father's case, building this kind of wealth in sixty-two years from a starting salary of $1,200 a year is nothing to scoff at. And neither is a billion. A billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive, a billion hours ago our ancestors were in the Stone Age, and a billion days ago nothing walked the earth on two legs, let alone had human dreams. Like a father, or a son.
“Any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it,” Paul Kendall said, and shortly after I started writing this book about my father, I realized it was going to include a lot about me and his closest business associate, Johnnie Babcock. Because that was the only way my father’s story, with the knowledge and anecdotes we bring to it, can be told.
My father didn’t make his fortune through computer genius, promotion or ascension in a company, performance bonuses, family inheritance, an invention, the stock market or options, or through a dot-com. Instead he made it the slow, hard way, doggedly passing through four careers to achieve success. He started as a writer, editor and publisher, moved on to advertising and public relations, then into food marketing and franchising, and finally, into broadcasting media which expanded into print through newspaper publishing, taking him full circle to his beginnings.
In an article in the fall 1979 issue of Wachovia Magazine Catherine Walker observed that he possessed “a special blend of talents including business acumen, a keen perception of ideas that sell, a razor-sharp memory and the persistence and drive to make it all work. In short, he is an entrepreneur of the first order and of the old school—an all too rare individual in American business today.”
My father was an avid researcher, as am I. There were hundreds of articles written about him during his various careers, and as a journalist, and his son, I have read them all to sort out the truth. I have interviewed his remaining associates, and the research has been not only exhaustive, but exhausting. “It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say,” according to novelist Sholem Asch, and I hope I do. And to get to the truth and assemble the facts has been a long, time-consuming ordeal.
Oscar Wilde said, “Every great man has his disciples—and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” I am no Judas, but I will tell the truth about my father, even when it is painful, and praise him when praise is due.
It was not an easy task being the son of an entrepreneurial father like mine, but I managed to survive in his shadow, absorb the best lessons to be learned from the way he ran a business and directed his life, and reject the worst. I have also learned from my own experience running a business that you can still accomplish your goals by trusting your associates and employees.
In the process I learned what it should be like to be a father to your children, and although I, too, was a workaholic while my kids were growing up, I tried to take time when I could, mostly later in life, to let them know I loved them, that I cared. I have also tried hard to avoid making the same mistakes my father made with me.
My father was manipulative and controlling and he knew how to use charm to his advantage, but there was good mixed in with the bad in our relationship, and I have come away awed by my new discoveries about this straight-out-of-Horatio-Alger self-made man. The bottom line was always important to him. My bottom line is that I respect him more in death than I did in life.
Life is short, and I wish I could bring him back to tell him, for the first time, how much I miss him. But I can’t, and though there was a time for many years when I thought we might not be meeting in the hereafter, I now feel that we will be together in the same place, at some time, again.
It is said that every man has a story, and it is through that story that we can live on. If the story may also be worth something to others, then that is the premise and the promise of this book.
