by John B. Babcock
Whether he was involved with NC State, Chapel Hill, Cornell or Ithaca College, I have always thought of Roy as the teacher of teachers and remember his growing interest and involvement in education. After the sale of the Hines operation to Procter & Gamble, while he was serving as a consultant to the corporation, he weighed Cornell’s offer to lecture and teach. That seemed too tame. He told me that if he were not busy and involved in a variety of projects, he might become just another rich drunk.
He resigned his P&G position and set out to conquer the field of communications, and I came aboard to help him.
His new-won fame and growing fortune were a natural attraction to educational institutions. They always need more money. He ignored those simply seeking a handout, but established a close relationship with North Carolina State, his alma mater, and the North Carolina University system in general. He became an advisor to Cornell’s new Graduate School of Business, and a trustee at struggling Ithaca College, where he helped with finances and expansion. For a while he also served as a trustee of Keuka College in New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Whether it was a dollar-a-holler radio station in a broadcast group, the huge P&G Corporation, a small college or a major university, Park examined and evaluated its operating statement and balance sheet with equal intensity and thoroughness. He was a master at glancing at an analysis sheet that covered most of a large table and pointing out a discrepancy, inconsistency or outright error. He had specific questions that often the chief operating officer being interviewed was unprepared to handle. The embarrassed executive would have to summon staff to come up with a satisfactory answer. Once Park found an anomaly, he often sped through the other figures in the report, sometimes deliberately dismissing the credibility of the report and the business, and always to the distress of the author.
He liked colleges and college people. At NC State, before he made any financial gifts of support, he met with officials regularly and devised campaigns to raise money from other alumni. It was said he raised so much money for State over the years that development officials there speak of him in tones of hushed reverence.
He elected the NC State president to the board of directors of his Greenville, NC, broadcast stations. To accommodate the educator’s attendance at periodic meetings, he held them right in Raleigh. He’d hole up at the Velvet Cloak Inn just off campus and entertain various university officers and state politicos. He made a point also of being seen around lunchtime in the lobby of the old downtown Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel. There he was greeted and glad-handed at noontime by the politicos and old-timers who hung out in that historic watering spot. He was their famed native son.
Park held back no details from his board of the business figures for his stations, saw that I kept accurate minutes of the meetings, which would be signed by the secretary of his companies, his wife, Dorothy. She was usually present by the end of each meeting and tickled to accept her $100 director’s fee, a check also given to the university president participant. We’d usually dine that evening with NC State officials and discuss everything from finances to the fortunes of the then-seasonal NC State athletic team, often a national contender. Roy valued the school’s CEO as a business associate and close personal friend.
If there was an important public event at Cornell or Ithaca College, Roy was near the top of the list of those invited. He retained a prominent box at the football stadium and could talk in general terms about the prowess of the Ivy League Cornell football team. If he attended part or all of a game, he schmoozed with prominent alumni or political guests. Come bitter weather in November, he’d fill the box with local social friends and neighbors and stay home, not bothering to listen to a radio account of the game.
His focus on education did not distract him from his focus on the many business operations he owned. When it came to his real estate activities, Park had his own ideas and domain. Not a slumlord, he nonetheless owned several old residences that yielded handsome returns as student off-campus rooming houses for Cornell and Ithaca College. He owned and occupied choice space in the office complex that once was headquarters for GLF (later Agway). He bought the First National Bank building, which housed his local bank.
He bargained for parcels of open land that could be developed or become sites for the billboard company he later sold to his son. His real estate manager served as the rent collector for the Ithaca domain but was also called on to inspect and report to Roy on hundreds of acres of tobacco and pulpwood acreage in North Carolina and on large holdings of orange groves in Florida.
Park earned the hard way his public label, “communications mogul,” but his interest and involvement roamed far and wide. You never knew where “Pops” would pop up next. And pop up he did in my family’s life.
