to wait until tomorrow to put the unpleasant part of the plan into effect and
to be impatient for the benefit to descend upon us.
So ends my letter to you on your twenty-first birthday. Let me add that
you have not only our love and affection, but our sincere wish that you
may get out of your life as many of the things you want as it’s possible for
anyone to achieve. And it is our wish to help you toward this
accomplishment and toward your personal happiness in any way we can
that is sound and right and reasonable.
Twelve years later I went to work for my father and found that some of
the philosophy he expressed in this letter did not quite apply. At least
where it concerned me. When it concerned salaries and raises, there was
little local autonomy in the compa
nies he owned, and all of his business practices did not reflect the
humble, sincere and positive qualities he voiced in this beautifully crafted
letter. But many of them did, and those are the ones I learned from.
As Johnnie Babcock later put it, a public relations genius, which my
father was, clearly relishes the opportunity to crown a prince or king,
providing it is he who also is feted. In later years, my father’s relations
with the public occasionally approached what Alice Roosevelt Longworth
said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt. That he was so bent on being the
center of attention he wanted to be the bride and groom at every wedding
and the corpse at every funeral.
By an extraordinary coincidence, my mother was going through her
papers while I was writing this book and sent me a paper I had written for
a creative writing course at UNC that she kept. It’s the next chapter, and
may have been written in response to my father’s letter to me since it dealt
with my relationship with him.
After what I was to experience in my version of Life with Father in
subsequent years, it sounds rather Pollyanna-ish to me now, and its tone is
reminiscent of the plucky togetherness of a once popular television series,
The Waltons. But I can promise you we didn’t go through the “Good
night, John-Boy” or “Roy-Boy” routine in our family when we bedded
down. As an exercise, however, in that ancient Roman virtue, filial piety,
it can’t be faulted!
