CHAPTER 29: IN RETROSPECT
There are times when a man needs to rise above his society, his
culture, even his teachings and surroundings. He must exercise God-given
self-determination to question claims of the world around him. He must
discard the parenthesis of his life and step into the endless vistas beyond.
Often an individual is not right, a society is not right, a continent is not
right, perhaps, a world is not right. We must bend to society, but not snap
under it. Individual freedom is not easily given by others, so it must be
taken. A man must believe in himself, live his own life, carve his own
destiny. He can learn from others, but the better lesson is self-taught.
Human nature ensures that there will never be a perfect world, but there
can be a perfect dream. Our Creator has seen to it we are given the
capacity to think for ourselves. Our minds are private, but if breached, our
souls certainly are. God gave us a soul. Our duty is to give it meaning, and
He wants it back. If returned without meaning, His preference may be to
send it back from the hereafter to earth through you, to give you a second
chance, but it may be reassigned to another. I think one way or other, until
it has meaning, His intent is to re-use it.
—Roy H. Park, Jr.
I wrote that in 1958 when I got back into The University of North
Carolina. I had a lot of thinking to do, being isolated my first year there,
living alone in a room at the Carolina Inn. In going through my father’s
papers after his death, I also went through my own and came across this
passage that reminded me of him, and his philosophy on life. The way my
words defined his independent drive during his life was pretty scary.
My father was a God-fearing man. Not a Bible-thumper, but he
certainly paid his dues at the Presbyterian Church. He was raised at an
early age by the Bible, by his mother, and he believed in the hereafter. The
apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and as I delved into his life, I began to
believe more and more in, “Like father, like son.” Although I have
actively tried to avoid the things he did I didn’t like, I’m coming to believe
that I’m more like him than I ever thought.
After all those years of trying to understand and know him, Ethan
Canin comes close to describing my own realization of this through the
words the father expresses to the son in his story “The Year of Getting to
Know Us”: “[Y]ou don’t have to get to know me. You know why?...You
don’t have to get to know me… because one of these days you are going
to grow up and then you are going to be me.”42 Eight years after I
resigned from my father’s business, and then returned under the agreement
giving me the right to buy the company, which I did in 1984, I was
approached by Town & Country for an interview for a special section the
magazine was doing on sons and daughters of famous parents. I was
among five people written up: Wallis Annenberg, the daughter of
