CHAPTER 27: FORBES AND FALLOUT
When a man’s knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not
sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have attained he will
lose again.
—Confucius
And so my father lost a son.
The profile by Jeffrey Trachtenberg in the September 10, 1984, issue of
Forbes magazine was headlined every deCAde, A new CAreer, and it said,
“Don’t be deceived by his flashy jewelry and his fancy cars. Roy Park is a
serious man, a onetime newspaper reporter who became a
centimillionaire.”
The interview covered my father’s workaholic path from Duncan Hines
to Park Communications and closed with Trachtenberg reporting: Park
sold 11% of his company to the public last October. He didn’t really need
the $3.5 million cash he personally collected, rather he wanted to avoid
estate problems. By going public, he established a fixed value for the
company. That avoids a messy dispute with the IRS like the one that
plagues the estate of publisher S.I.
Newhouse. Being public also lets Park’s firm use stock for acquisitions.
Roy Park has a son and a daughter, but neither is likely to succeed him.
Roy Park, Jr. runs Park Outdoor, a family-owned billboard business, but
he will not inherit control of Park Communications. The implication is
clear: Park’s son has yet to prove himself. “You can’t treat somebody
special just because he’s your son,” says Park. “When NBC was at the
bottom, young Sarnoff was running it, and they lost a lot of good
employees.”
Park says he will name a successor someday, but even then he won’t
retire. “Twelve years ago I got a new lease on life when I started buying
newspapers,” he explains. “If we get another president, I might start
something again. We’ve already applied for 45 low-power television
licenses. I do better on new projects, where you can be creative. Every
decade or so, I need a different career.”37 I knew then I needed a new
career, too. The denigration I suffered within the company I could live
with, even being kept in the position of a second-class citizen. But as the
calls began coming in about my father’s statement to the world, from my
friends, colleagues and many of the people I had met and worked with in
my life, it was the final blow.
