With money in your pocket you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well, too.
—Yiddish Proverb
My father could never carry a tune, and I inherited this inability as well. But like many self-made men, he was susceptible to flattery. He got plenty of it. Nobody ever accused him of singing off-tune. As Johnnie Babcock points out, extravagant praise and accolades were heaped on Pops over the years with seldom a negative word. “But how many of these were the expressions rooted in the hope of someday garnering a piece of his pie? How many were from celebrants who would bristle at one harsh word directed at their reputations?” Johnnie asked, pointing out, “The fraternity of wealth and power remains faithful to itself.
“Consider for a moment all these rich accolades,” Babcock said. “If all these quotes were glowing in a book from famous academic, publishing and political giants, true captains of industry, what weight would anybody give a couple of complaining serfs? They’d say those guys have problems. Look how the rest of the world worships this man.”
Despite the accolades (Appendix E, A Few Accolades), the scales have to be balanced with our personal experiences.
The Ithaca Journal did a feature on my father in May 1985. The headline was ithACA’s MediA BAron keeps his eyes on the Future, and staff reporter Joseph V. Junod interviewed a number of people who had known or worked with him. Under a subhead reading views diFFer on pArk’s styLe oF LeAdership, he reported, “Like most people in the public eye, Roy H. Park, Sr. draws both positive and negative responses from people who have dealt with him.”
There is no question that Pops treated different people in different ways and came across to individuals differently—no question about that. He was aggressive. Remember the way he courted and won my mother? To many, he was charming. But in dealing with me, he was frequently insensitive, vindictive and just plain mean-spirited. Some others were treated the same way, and he could be ruthless and grudge-bearing. He knew he had absolute control over all his employees and did not hesitate to exercise it.
Junod reported that Conrad Fink spent three years with the Park firm as executive vice president of the newspaper divisions, pointing out that he joined Park in 1977 after twenty-one years with the Associated Press, the last ten as a vice president. Junod wrote: Fink left Park in 1980 and now divides his time between Athens, GA, where he teaches journalism at The University of Georgia, and his upstate New York farm. Asked to describe his years with the Park organization, Fink, 52, said, “I found it to be a very distasteful experience. It was educational in many, many ways, but I am glad it’s over.”
Asked if he was able to fully exploit his experience and imagination during his tenure on Terrace Hill, where Park maintains corporate offices, Fink flatly replied “No.” Fink, hesitant to speak out on the record about Park, described his former boss’s operating style as “highly individualistic.” “He’s built a fine company,” Fink said. “With some adjustments, he could have built a company two or three times the size it is now.” Asked about why he left Park, Fink responded, “We agreed to disagree.”16 Another vice president of operations for Park Newspapers, Jim Harris, also parted company with my father after eighteen months. As reported by Dumbell in the Charlotte Observer in May 1982, Harris said my father was “‘brilliant and has unique management techniques. I resigned because I had differences with him over management philosophy. He’d surround himself with financial people,’ Harris said, ‘and I felt I was the only newspaper man on board. The emphasis is not on the editorial part.’ ” One of the financial candidates interviewed by Pops was told in the interview there were no “yes men” in the management group. He said my father told him he wanted people to tell him what they thought, and that they had a “free enough environment” to agree or disagree. Not many management people who worked for my father felt that way after they worked for him. Before he was hired, one of them said my father told him he wanted him “to get all the information about a situation, to make an informed and rational decision based on the facts, and then move on to the next opportunity.”
That part may be true. Decisions my father made were generally based on the facts, and usually well informed. But he made some decisions on less than rational grounds, and if you disagreed with him, God help you. The more you tried to express your thoughts, the harder he pushed back—his mind already made up. It wasn’t wise to tell, let alone convince, Roy H. Park he was wrong, especially when his decisions were based on a skewed view of certain people, and the certainty of his power.