My mother and father made sacrifices for us along the way, some that I
never knew about. When they sent me away to the Lawrenceville School,
they bought this old Packard. Pops had explained he got it as a collector’s
item, and they drove it for three years. When he sold it my first year of
college, I asked him why. He said he was going to get a better car and that
was all.
He later said in one of our talks that they had driven the car because it
was all they could afford and put me through an ex
pensive prep school at the same time. Pops said he had my college
education paid for through an insurance policy even before I was born.
I point all this out because an old farmer’s advice is to live a good,
honorable life so when you get older you can think back and enjoy it a
second time. Judgment doesn’t wait at the end of the line. In our
generation, in these days and times, every day is judgment day.
Overall, I had good parents, and their parenting allowed me to emerge
from childhood with plenty of hope for the future. My father’s letter to me
on my twenty-first birthday had spelled out the principles he (mostly)
lived by, and his attitude toward me.
But things were later to change when I entered his business world.
CHAPTER 8: THE GUIDEBOOKS END
In 1956, after his sale to Procter & Gamble, my father was retained for
the next three years by P&G as vice president and director of Hines-Park
Foods, Inc and for the next seven, as a consultant, without competing. But
