There are only two lasting bequests we can give to our children. One of them is roots, the other, wings.
—Hodding Carter
At this point in my life and the life of Park Communications, I had to wonder what was to be my role in this era of change and growth. In other words, why was I in Ithaca? I had my roots. The leaves of my family tree had called me back home. Back to the family. But wings were another matter. My wings had been clipped, and I lost my father the day I came back to work for him.
I know the answer to Sam Johnson’s question: “Does my father love his business more than he loves me?” I had thought I could live with that. But even with accepting that, the relationship with my father continued to go downhill. I finally began to understand why. Based on my years at J. Walter Thompson, it was natural to become close to agency people who handled our national outdoor business. We had a natural affinity for one another. A lot of them understood the struggle that was taking place in my attempts to bring Park Outdoor out of the dark ages and into the modern world. They knew it was not easy going, and one of them sent me pages 128 to 131 on father-and-son relationships from a book by Harry Levinson, entitled The Great Jackass Fallacy.35 My friend passed it along knowing the words definitely applied to me.
I tried to understand. The pages pointed out that for an entrepreneur founder, the business is an extension of himself, so he had great difficulty giving up his instrument of power. The pages made many of the same points that the articles mentioned earlier in this book had made. They pointed out that a founder’s business is his baby, almost his “mistress,” and noted the great difficulty a founder had in delegating authority to a son. While he might consciously want his son to attain his place in the sun, he unconsciously feels that yielding any portion of the business to him is like losing his masculinity, and he did not want his son to win in every area in which he was assigned.
Typically, the desire not to be replaced by a son in his summit position deals with a situation where a son eventually is expected to take over the entire business. That was hardly my case, since I only ran a small portion of what he owned. It was at the bottom of the pile in terms of importance to the company. But even my attempts to succeed with this tiny portion of his company bothered him. It seemed like he had one set of rules for me, another for everyone else.
Levinson went on to point out that these conflicting emotions cause a father to behave in an unpredictable and contradictory manner, leading those close to him to think that while on the one hand he wants the business to succeed, on the other, he is determined to make it fail. I realized (it was slow in coming, I admit) that he really never intended for outdoor to become much more than a vehicle for depreciation and a source of fees and rent payments to his company. All this put me in the tenuous position of swimming upstream. He wanted the business to be run honestly in order to maximize the bottom line but not necessarily grow into a respectable and meaningful part of the company.
A son naturally seeks increasing responsibility, Levinson wrote, given his growing maturity. The son strives for the freedom to act responsibly on his own. He is totally frustrated by his father’s intrusions and resents being kept in an infantile role, always the little boy in his father’s eyes, with the accompanying contempt, condescension and lack of confidence that characterize the father’s attitude. Characteristically, the son is terribly torn by these conflicts, and the father sees the son as ungrateful and unappreciative. The son feels both hostile to his father and guilty for feeling that hostility. While the father believes that the son will never be man enough to run the business, at the same time he tries to hide his feelings from his son.
Then Levinson made a devastating point. He said that sometimes the competition can lead to a manipulative alignment with the mother against the son and result in the mother siding with her husband whenever the battle peaks. This was also happening, and I began to realize that my father worked hard to poison my mother’s mind against me. He constantly characterized me as “creative,” argumentative, and lacking financial awareness.
Creating something that can be touched, seen or heard, and which others appreciate, can bring peace to the mind and soul. People who do physical work, paint, sculpture, write, or compose can experience the value of their work. Without positive feedback from the boss in a management job, where you are dealing with people, strategies and ideas, it is impossible to gain a feeling of self-worth. The worst stress a human can face is not having guidelines by which they can gauge their own value.
I was “creative” (not a term of praise in my father’s vocabulary), but I also knew what needed to be done to bring in the bottom line. I knew, faced with the physical wreck most of the outdoor division was in, you “had to spend money to make money.” I had come in with the goal of improving the outdoor division. I was trying to repair the billboard structures, along with the organizational weaknesses that existed, neither of which my father really wanted repaired. Things were made even more difficult when other executives in the organization running the glamorous side of my father’s businesses expressed dismissive or contemptuous opinions about my job and functions. In truth, the last thing anyone should have been was envious of my position. Under my father’s iron hand, there was nowhere to turn. Not to my mother, not my colleagues.
That left my immediate boss, Johnnie Babcock. Entrepreneurial fathers are unable to resolve their dilemma themselves, tending to be rigid and righteous and finding it difficult to understand any other point of view. Well-meaning associates, such as Johnnie, who try to help the father see the effects of his behavior, have a difficult time bringing up this thorny subject and usually find themselves ignored.
This is what could have happened to Johnnie, despite the fact that he was fully aware of the situation. He was sympathetic and frequently defended my point of view. He risked putting himself in the position of losing whatever beneficial influence he might have to help the situation. He faced this struggle the entire time I reported to him. I remembered what Rose Kennedy told me back in 1958. When I asked why Jack’s father stayed in the background during his run for president, she said, “It’s easier for a son if a famous father gives him the complete stage.” Johnnie or I could not begin to imagine my father yielding the stage.
I would abhor the complete stage, wanting only a small place on it. I needed free reign to run what I had been responsible for since 1971, but even after being hired back to clean up the mess left by the two managers who replaced me in 1976, this did not come. My feelings of disappointment, frustration and tension were mounting. When this is the case, the son thinks of leaving. Levinson’s book helped me to understand the relationship, but it did not provide any answers.
So I reread an article sent by Shelly Smith, a longtime friend and one of the sons in the Smith family that ran the Ithaca Gun Company. He had sent it to me some ten years earlier in 1974, knowing even back then what I was going through. I had thought at the time that it provided some hope.
The article was entitled, working For the oLd MAn. It was written by Richard S. Morrison for MBA magazine. Morrison, who was a graduate of the Stanford School of Business, had joined his father’s company, Molded Fiber Glass, some three years after he left college.36 I remembered I had seen some grounds for hope in that article, which asked, “Should I go to work for my father?” Morrison shared the problems he encountered in doing so to be helpful to other MBAs facing this decision. Morrison said you could do your own thing working for your father, and that if your father was smart and really wanted you to prove yourself, he would put you to work in the worst, most troublesome segment of the company. The job I took in outdoor was not only the most troublesome, it was the worst, and only a tiny part of the company. Morrison went on, however, to point out that when he took on the most troublesome part of his father’s business, his father kept his nose out of the day-to-day operation. My father didn’t.
Morrison said that most MBAs don’t get excited about walking in someone else’s footsteps. The key is whether you believe that your employer will treat you fairly and provide opportunities and promotions based on your ability and desire. Even after years of horror, this had given me some hope, but I hadn’t begun to see any light at the end of the tunnel.
It was as if I had told my father to be sure to wait until my annual review and then tell me what my goals should have been. Dwell on everything you feel I did wrong and avoid acknowledging anything I did right. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost-of-living increase. I’m not here for the money, anyway. And while you’re at it, make sure you give me enough work to keep me out of town on business during the week and in the office late and on weekends and holidays. I adore the office, have no family responsibilities, and really have nowhere to go or anything else to do. I have no life beyond work.
Morrison also pointed to the common element present with everyone, that you were foremost “the Old Man’s kid.” This identity, he warned, can serve you both well and badly. If your father is respected, you might carry part of his halo, but at the same time you can be resented because you are that “lucky kid who had it made.” This certainly didn’t apply to me. I didn’t have it made and worked in a division that was looked down upon by the rest of his employees.
The tongue-in-cheek definition of a boss’s son—a young man who is willing to start at the bottom for a few days—didn’t apply to me. Try seventeen years.
Another problem with working for a father, Morrison wrote, is that you might be thought of as wealthy. That never applied to me, nor did the other employees think so. It was clear that I was living on limited means, making far less than his other management people. In my father’s case, the business’s earnings were plowed back into the business, as actually was the case with Morrison’s father. “Your salary will be lower than you would receive on the open market,” Morrison said. Then he pointed out the worst premonition I had when I finally accepted the job: If you fail in the family firm, you are likely to be looked upon as a complete incompetent. The risk of failing is to virtually eliminate your chances to be taken seriously as a candidate for positions in other companies in the future.
As time went by, and as things got meaner, I knew that it would be tougher and tougher for me to leave for another job. And the longer I waited, the worse it would be.