Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
—Aldous Huxley
A year after I joined the company to run the outdoor division, my father began to expand his fourth career in media into the Fourth Estate. He had reached the legal limit allowed at the time in ownership of broadcast properties (seven AMs, seven FMs, and seven TV stations), and his lifelong dream, as projected in his college yearbook forty-one years earlier, was to become “a lord of the fourth estate.” He had to follow a long road to get there, but he finally did.
In addition, he needed new places to invest the burgeoning returns from his holdings. With $105 million cash in hand, he was ready for further acquisitions, and his love for newsprint persisted. “I’d always wanted to buy newspapers,” he said. “Ever since I wrote features for the Technician or sold them to newspapers in Raleigh and Durham and Winston-Salem while I was in college, I wanted my own newspaper. I don’t know anything that I could do that would give me more happiness than buying… newspapers.”
On November 1, 1972, at the age of sixty-two when many people start thinking about retirement, my father bought his first newspaper, the Daily Sun, in Warner Robins, GA, for cash. The following year he went on to purchase the Union-Sun & Journal in Lockport, NY, and the Journal Messenger in Manassas, VA.
These first acquisitions set the size standard that was the common bond for the rest of his acquisitions; they were small-town, mostly rural newspapers in the 10,000 to 25,000 circulation range. None of his papers had a circulation of more than 50,000. “We know how to operate in small towns,” Pops said. “We wouldn’t know how to operate in New York City, Buffalo or Oakland.” Never forgetting his rural upbringing, he would say, “I’m a real country boy. I’ve still got a little hayseed in my hair.”
In 1975 he acquired a daily in Brooksville, FL, and one in Nebraska City, NE. In northern New York State, he bought two in Ogdensburg, one in Massena and another in Potsdam. In 1977, he bought papers in Plymouth, IN, and Norwich, NY, and in 1978, one in McAlester, OK.
With these newspapers added to his broadcast properties, my father, in 1978, headed the largest individually owned communications business in the country. As for the relationship between his electronic media and his venture into print, he did not foresee newspapers being replaced by television or news transmitted on cable channels.
He maintained that there are three characteristics of newspapers that would help assure that medium’s survival: you can take it with you, you don’t have to take notes on it, and you can clip stories from it.
In 1979, acquisitions really picked up, with the purchase of a daily in Macomb, IL, and two more in Broken Arrow and Sapulpa, OK. Then seven years after buying his first newspaper, he reached another milestone. He became a newspaper owner in his native state on May 2, 1979, when he bought the Newton Observer-News-Enterprise. This was followed in the same year with papers in Morganton and Statesville, NC. The Statesville paper, which he bought for a little over $10 million, became his biggest newspaper in North Carolina with a circulation of 18,000.
In 1980, Pops purchased a newspaper in Perry, GA, one each in Concord, Davidson, and Kannapolis, NC, and another in Coldwater, MI. In 1981, he bought two more in Phillips County, AR.
More North Carolina acquisitions followed in 1982, with papers in Clinton, Marion, Lumberton and two in Aberdeen all joining the Park Group.
Within four years, my father had picked up eleven additional newspapers in the Tar Heel State. As he told a senior in the School of Journalism in an interview for the UNC Journalist, “We like North Carolina because it is a rapidly growing, progressive state. It is also becoming a center of new industry. No matter how good a paper is, if you don’t have a good and expanding market you aren’t going to grow that much.”