trips. Roy was ill-suited for the rounded give and take of family life. “My
part-time work writing copy in Ithaca was good training.
I quit school to open an Ag Research office for Park in Richmond, VA,
to handle advertising for Southern States Cooperative, a mirror image of
the GLF organization I knew so well. The pay was low even for those
times, but sufficient for a single man living in a rented bedroom on a farm
outside Richmond. I saw little of Roy. He not only failed to visit the
Richmond office but also never asked me a question about my experiences
in the military. I never volunteered a word myself.”
Johnnie concludes that, “I realized that while Roy showed every sign of
being an even more formidable businessman than my dad, he lacked Dad’s
warmer human attributes. In any case, my path would diverge from Roy
Park’s when the Richmond experience ended with my return to Ithaca
after Dad’s first heart attack in 1949.”
CHAPTER 3: THE DUNCAN HINES
CONNECTION
As time went by, Ag Research prospered and grew. When Pops first
took over the agency, he inherited six employees on the third floor of the
Tompkins County Trust Company building in downtown Ithaca. He said
the agency was “pretty ratty” and didn’t have many accounts. He hired
some agriculture students from Cornell and said he taught them how to
write and take pictures.
They took pictures of chickens and cows, which were numerous in
upstate New York. My father told them that farmers are not interested in
pretty pictures but in pictures that tell them something about the value of
their animals. Thanks to this pragmatic approach, on such instruction the
agency prospered, and in four or five years Pops had 125 employees and
added an office in New York City to his branches in Albany, Washington,
Raleigh, and Richmond, where Johnnie was working until 1949.
Another young man my father brought into the company was a
graduate of the hotel school at Cornell University. While attending
Cornell, he was the advertising manager, and later the business manager,
of the Cornell Daily Sun. Stewart Underwood was hired as an account
executive in my father’s Raleigh, NC, Ag Research office in 1947 because
of this experience, and was destined to work for Pops for the next sixteen
years.
In the meantime, my father had moved his office to a building he
bought in Ithaca in 1945, when he founded his real estate division, RHP
Incorporated. The building also housed the printing plant for his two
magazines.
