If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
—John Keats
Here I am talking about my lot and my suffering, but my family suffered as well. It’s unfair to think back on how rough it was on me without remembering it was even rougher on my wife and kids. It’s not much fun to have a father who would drag himself home beat up every day but still be determined to work late into the night and on weekends to keep up with what needed to be done to satisfy the needs of the company and his own father.
In New York, my commuting ate up the hours. I left early and came home late. In Ithaca, the job pressure was much worse, and I was spending two or three nights a week out in the field. If I wasn’t traveling to my divisions, with Scranton and Utica both being two hours in opposite directions from Ithaca, and Potsdam, NY, and Erie, PA, being five hours apart, I was traveling to New York, Chicago and other cities. Then for five years it was network promotions, sales and annual meetings, four-hour drives to and from Ogdensburg and overnight stays there each month for the newsletter, and trips to the individual broadcasting properties for promotional events. In contrast to the substantial amount of travel I had done on the RCA account at J. Walter Thompson, my schedule now doubled the time I spent away from home.
As legendary CEO Jack Welch pointed out in his 2005 book Winning, his children were raised, largely alone, by their mother. In the April 14, 2005 Newsweek in a sidebar on work And FAMiLy, Welch said from his earliest days at GE, he would show up at the office on Saturday mornings. “For 41 years, my operating principle was to work hard, play hard and spend some time as a father,” he stated, and if there was ever a case of “Do as I say, not as I did, this is it.”
Sometimes my children were involved in sporting events I couldn’t attend. My wife filled in, alone. It was tough for her to see mothers and fathers of other children cheering on the crew, soccer, lacrosse or football team. Those weeks of not having time for my kids rolled into years. I had been there before, but on the other side. But my children turned out fine without a more full-time father, and my wife didn’t really complain. Her disappointment was evident. She didn’t like it, but she understood what I was going through.
My children were not sent away to private school as I had been. Both went to Ithaca High School, where their grades were good enough to get into a first-class college. They had their sights set on my alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, which accepted only a small percentage of its student body from out of state. Getting in meant getting out of Ithaca, which did not hold the happiest of memories for them. With my father being a big fish in the smallish Ithaca pond, his reputation ran from good to bad, and my children carried whatever fame, or stigma, was associated with the Park name.
It may only take a village to raise a child if that child is an orphan or if both parents just don’t care. It’s good to have two parents to raise a child, but just one caring parent can still turn out a shining young product. In our case my wife raised our children mostly on her own.
Lee Iacocca said, “No matter what you’ve done for yourself or for humanity, if you can’t look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?” How could I pay back my wife for all those silent years of suffering? Nothing with a price tag. I could only fall back on words. Only one way to try to express my understanding of what she had been through and how I felt. “Poetry, an outward expression of instinctive insight, must be summoned from the vast deeps of our mysterious selves,” said Hughes Mearns. “Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed it cannot be summoned; it may only be permitted.” I permitted my thoughts to flow in these untitled words for my wife: A wife, my darling, is something a man may seem to take for granted. Like the sun, the stars, the currents of the wind. Love may not be expressed obviously or often, For something so much a part of a man’s life. But cold is the day without the sun. How bleak the night sky without its diamonds of light. How suffocating the world without wind. And empty a man without his wife. Love is a growing thing.
At first like a child it is suddenly born.
Nourished with warmth and bursting with energy, It takes toddling steps on chubby legs with the conviction of Worlds to conquer in its brand-new heart.
It fathoms the first brightness with sparkling eyes, The darkness with irretractable persistency, The swift transition to adolescent adjustment with hope and bailing wire.
And emerges, for the very lucky, as the finest, Most precious and mature love of all. The kind that is strong enough to exist unexpressed— As endurable and lasting as the light and diamonds of the universe, And the winds through the willows of earth.
A wife, my darling, is one of those fine truths a man does take for granted, And this, simply love which can be taken for granted, Forever and ever, Is what I share with you.
Being taken for granted is asking a lot, and except for weekends during this time, I wasn’t much of a husband or a father. The one exception was that every year we packed up for one week of vacation, driving straight through for sixteen hours from Ithaca to Bogue Banks, an island off Morehead City, NC. (Remember, I had only two weeks of vacation working for my father, and one of those weeks was used, if used at all, to try to spend some time around Christmas and Thanksgiving with other family members.) The beach trip wasn’t much of a vacation for the kids when they were young, either, because with my penchant for aquariums, I had them dragging nets in the ocean and in Bogue Sound before they got too old to protest.