If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do
good anyway. If you are successful you win false friends and true
enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten
tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top
dogs. Fight for some underdogs anyway. What you spend years building
may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but
may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway. Give the world the
best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best
you’ve got, anyway.
CHAPTER 30: AFTERMATH
As to his legacy, after a succession of ownerships, the Duncan Hines
Cake Mix line my father started is still going strong. It was sold by P&G
to Aurora Foods in 1998, then acquired five years later by the Pinnacle
Foods Group which in February 2007 agreed to be acquired by affiliates of
the Blackstone Group for $1.3 billion. Ironically, the 2007 price of
admission to the Forbes 400.
The media empire my father created was massive, but what’s left of it
today is pretty small. Park Outdoor is one of the few remaining family-
owned outdoor companies operating in New York State. Each year, the
Central New York Business Journal, published in Syracuse, NY, selects
fifty-two companies out of the hundreds of thousands operating in central
New York to be featured as “The Business of the Week.” In the August
24, 2001, issue, our company was featured under the heading, Billboard
Firm Profits by Staying Local. The article by Annemarie Kropf pointed
out that the “sign business has been in the Park family for more than 35
years,” and said, “By focusing its efforts on local businesses, Park
Outdoor Advertising of New York, Inc. remains a booming company
despite the economic times.”
Elaborating on the status of the only business remaining that carries my
father’s name, it reported, Though the Ithaca-based company sells
advertising space to regional and national companies, over the last 20
years, revenue from local businesses increased from 20 percent to over 97
percent….
The company currently owns approximately 1,700 billboards covering
15,000 square miles in 21 counties throughout New York State and
Pennsylvania.
Park’s father began the company in 1964 by acquiring billboards from
General Outdoor and the estate of Max Andrews. Park Outdoor
