by John B. Babcock
Park Broadcasting in the late 1970s was a thriving, highly profitable cash cow, more profitable than those listed broadcast groups that publicized financial results. Park credited much of our stellar performance to my drive as chief operating officer. Our relationship had never been closer. He had my full support and complete trust.
In June 1977, my youngest daughter Jeannie was graduated from Ithaca High school with a record fully as solid as was turned in by her sisters Susan, who was finishing a tough curriculum at Smith College, and Nancy, who was headed for a fine arts degree at Cornell. Both degrees were being paid out of my own pocket. But Jeannie had lived through enough of our cold winters in the Northeast and passed up acceptance at an Ivy League school, preferring to head south, preferably to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That choice had my enthusiastic support. My associate, Roy Park, Jr., was a recent graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. He had high praise for the solid preparation at Chapel Hill that fortified him with the basic learning tools to go on and earn his MBA at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.
While his dad was a distinguished alumnus and key fund-raiser for NC State University in Raleigh, I presumed that Pops also had influence and would be given ready audience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The senior Park had funded his own son’s education at Chapel Hill and persuaded the university to accept him after he busted out of Cornell as an undergraduate.
Jeannie applied for entrance to UNC-Chapel Hill, and I asked Park to put in a good word for her. He warmly agreed. The summer wore on, and Jeannie grew anxious when no response was forthcoming. It became too late for her to apply to another institution. We relied on Roy Park to pave the way to easy acceptance. I knew about such arrangements because my dad had been chairman of the trustees at Cornell University. Jeannie, however, got the standard rejection letter from UNC-Chapel Hill.
I repeated my request for help and big Roy promised to make some calls. Time marched on, and September was at hand. Still no good news from Chapel Hill. Again, I urged Roy to give us a hand. Instead, he gave Jeannie and me the bad news.
He said he was so closely identified with NC State that his heavy support there made him less than welcome to seek a favor at Chapel Hill. He said UNC-Chapel Hill people told him they were full and unable to take more students. I expressed distinct disappointment, and Jeannie was crushed.
A few days later, while we were still trying to recover, he met with Jeannie and me and said the one thing he could do was see that she was taken as a freshman at NC State, where he was a heavy-hitter. He put in a call to Rudy Pate, his main contact for alumni fund-raising at NC State, and with Jeannie and me listening in, Rudy promised to secure immediate entrance approval, which he did. A very pleased Roy Park then elaborated at great length the virtue and quality of a degree from State, which, like Cornell, was a revered land-grant educational facility. I’m not sure that Roy really thought that girls required, or were capable of, the intensity of study that was requisite for their male peers. State had plenty of openings, and the college was eager for applicants who could pay full tuition.
Between a rock and a hard place, Jeannie gratefully packed up and reported to the Raleigh campus, where again, Rudy saw to her safe arrival and enrollment. She reported to a large freshman dormitory and got acquainted with her roommate. She signed up for the required freshman courses.
Because I supervised the Park Greenville TV and radio stations in eastern North Carolina, I had to visit Raleigh often. I would fly into Raleigh and rent a car for the two-hour drive to my stations in Greenville. I rarely stayed the night in Raleigh. Roy insisted that I spend as much time as possible on the ground, pushing the Greenville management group for sales profit.
I managed a new trip schedule such that I would have a night in Raleigh, preferably a Sunday on my way to Greenville, or a Friday after an exhaustive few days at the stations. That gave me some time to visit Jeannie on the Raleigh campus and share an evening together. It didn’t deprive Park of my full week devo
tion to his agenda. Just my weekend was sacrificed, and, after all, Roy worked as long and hard both Saturday and Sunday as he did weekdays. He despised idle weekends as much as he did vacations.
As her freshman year progressed, Jeannie tentatively revealed to me that the coursework was far too easy. She wanted to major in economics and communications. But she found scant choices in either and shyly suggested that our family money might better be spent at an institution that offered the quality of business and communication courses she had wanted to take at Chapel Hill.
Jeannie moved the next academic year, enrolling in the New-house School of Communication at Syracuse University to pursue a degree in communications and business. After her sophomore year earning all As, her professors begged her to stay and earn a dual degree of business and communications. But, as at Raleigh, there was not enough depth and choice in economic courses. So, foregoing the communications component, Jeannie satisfied her appetite for demanding coursework in economics by taking her last two years at St. Lawrence University. Where? Way north at Canton, NY, up on the frozen St. Lawrence River, almost to Canada. Weather aside, she ended up well educated, a result she felt could have been achieved at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, only a few minutes from Roy Park’s alma mater. Jeannie went on to a career in banking and professional freelance writing for high-tech companies. She is happily married and lives in Atlanta.