Contrary to H.D. Thoreau’s philosophy, “If you give money, spend yourself with it,” my father always said, “Give of your money or your time, but never both.” Well, he mostly hung on to his money, but he sure gave of his time.
While he was still consulting with P&G in 1956, about the time I graduated from Lawrenceville to become a freshman at Cornell, he was elected a director of ConAgra in Omaha, NE, becoming chairman of the executive committee in 1975. In 1957, he became a director of Molinos de Puerto Rico, Inc., an egg-production business in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and in 1958, a director of the Fosgate Citrus Cooperative.
In his hometown, Pops became a director of the internationally famous Ithaca Gun Company in 1959, serving for eight years until it ran into business problems and was sold in 1967. Before it was sold, he was involved in making sure the Smiths, his long-term friends and members of the family that owned the company, got the best deal on the sale. He told me that without his involvement, they could have been taken to the cleaners.
It is interesting to note that the first-time buyers used Ithaca Gun as a cash cow, overextended themselves in the recreation business, and reorganized under Federal bankruptcy laws in 1979. The company that put Ithaca on the international map was brought out of bankruptcy by new owners in 1987, but financial failure again led to liquidation in 1996. After a third change of hands, facing debt, competition and different market conditions, the last owners of the 125-year-old company were forced to sell its equipment at auction and sadly closed the doors on Ithaca Gun a final time in 2005.
In 1961, Pops became a director of Atlantic Telecasting Corporation of Wilmington, NC, the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Wilmington, NC, and the South Carolina Bottling Corporation of Columbia. He also started buying orange groves through the Avalon Citrus Association, Inc., in the Orlando, FL, area, and became president and director of the association in 1962. Then he got into timberland in North Carolina, calling it great business since “You just buy it, and it grows, and after a while, you cut some, and plant some and go away, and it does the same thing all over again.”
In 1965 my father became a director of the Variable Annuity Life Insurance Company. In 1966 he became a director of the First National Bank and Trust Company in Ithaca, and then a director of Security of New York State Corporation in Rochester, NY, in 1974, when it took over the bank. He was a member of the trust committee when it became Security-Norstar until 1984, before it became Fleet Norstar Bank.
During this same period Pops became involved in the Tompkins County Area Development Corporation, the First Research Development Corporation in Ithaca, and from 1960 to 1966, was president and director of both the Upstate Small Business Investment Company and Great American Investors.
In 1966, he founded and funded the Park Foundation, Inc., based in Ithaca. In 1968 he became a director of the Occidental Life Insurance Company of Raleigh. Pops also retained his AgriculturalAdvertising & Research agency, which became a division of RHP Incorporated, and continued to create and place advertising for a few outside clients but mostly for the Park Companies. He held the position of president and director of Ag Research until he turned it over to me to run when I was named VP, Advertising and Promotion of Park Broadcasting in 1976.
In 1972, he became a director of the Raymond Corp., a manufacturer of fork lifts and other material handling equipment, and that same year, a director of Wachovia Bank and Trust Company in Raleigh, NC.
In 1984 he became a director of the Boyce Thompson Institute, a private research laboratory for agriculture and forestry that had moved from Yonkers to the Cornell Campus in Ithaca. Serving on its audit committee and the investment committee, he remained a director of the Institute until his death in 1993.
This was the tip of the iceberg. He was an officer or board member of some twenty other corporations, churches, hospitals, councils, committees and associations and a member of some forty professional, social and honorary organizations. The dozens of awards and citations during his business career are summarized in Appendix C, Memberships and Honors. But what mattered to him most was what he had struggled successfully to get for himself—education.
In 1973 he became a trustee of Ithaca College and in 1977 a trustee of his alma mater, NC State. That same year, he was named to the Advisory Council of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and in 1989 became a member of the Board of Visitors of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His responsibilities meant a lot of travel for my father, a lot of it trips to New York City. I remember one of the affairs we attended in New York when my mother and father were seated at the table with Walter Cronkite and his wife, Betsy. It happened to be both my parents’ and the Cronkites’ fiftieth anniversary. My mother remembers Cronkite asking her what Pops had given her for the special occasion. Dottie proudly replied, “$50,000! A thousand dollars for each year we’ve been married.” Cronkite said, “That’s all he gave you? That’s awful. If you figure it out, it comes to only $2.74 a day.”
When my mother asked him what his wife had given him, she remembers he said, “A stack of arrows and a bow in my front lawn, along with an effigy of me.” He said his wife explained it was so his neighbors would finally have a chance to take a shot at him.
My father also met Gen. Alexander Haig in New York City when he invited and introduced Haig at another affair. My mother and father liked the way Haig’s chauffeur handled the limousine and later got in touch with him. Matthew Miele became our family chauffeur in the City from that day on. Mr. Matty, as we call him, could declare fame in his own right. He was the steady driver for Frank Sinatra and the frequent chauffeur for Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Dolly Parton, Chicago, the Beach Boys, Burt Reynolds, the Moody Blues, Rod Serling, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, Sharon Stone, John Denver and Eric Clapton, not to mention Mr. Rogers and Alan Shepard of Apollo 14.
When my granddaughters asked him for his autograph after hearing only part of this list, Mr. Matty sent them each a letter listing his famous passengers and ending with the note, “Last But Not Least, My Favorite, THE PARK FAMILY.”