into such detail. He trusted no one 100 percent. He also learned in the
course of improving controls that being a Good Ole Boy was no rock-solid
guarantee of honor and honesty.
Flattery can dull the instincts of many powerful people.
Perhaps Roy’s instincts were more reliable when it came to acquisitions
and balance sheets.
CHAPTER 22: RETURN TO THE FOURTH
ESTATE
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.”
