When a man’s knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have attained he will lose again.
—Confucius
And so my father lost a son.
The profile by Jeffrey Trachtenberg in the September 10, 1984, issue of Forbes magazine was headlined every deCAde, A new CAreer, and it said, “Don’t be deceived by his flashy jewelry and his fancy cars. Roy Park is a serious man, a onetime newspaper reporter who became a centimillionaire.”
The interview covered my father’s workaholic path from Duncan Hines to Park Communications and closed with Trachtenberg reporting: Park sold 11% of his company to the public last October. He didn’t really need the $3.5 million cash he personally collected, rather he wanted to avoid estate problems. By going public, he established a fixed value for the company. That avoids a messy dispute with the IRS like the one that plagues the estate of publisher S.I.
Newhouse. Being public also lets Park’s firm use stock for acquisitions.
Roy Park has a son and a daughter, but neither is likely to succeed him. Roy Park, Jr. runs Park Outdoor, a family-owned billboard business, but he will not inherit control of Park Communications. The implication is clear: Park’s son has yet to prove himself. “You can’t treat somebody special just because he’s your son,” says Park. “When NBC was at the bottom, young Sarnoff was running it, and they lost a lot of good employees.”
Park says he will name a successor someday, but even then he won’t retire. “Twelve years ago I got a new lease on life when I started buying newspapers,” he explains. “If we get another president, I might start something again. We’ve already applied for 45 low-power television licenses. I do better on new projects, where you can be creative. Every decade or so, I need a different career.”37 I knew then I needed a new career, too. The denigration I suffered within the company I could live with, even being kept in the position of a second-class citizen. But as the calls began coming in about my father’s statement to the world, from my friends, colleagues and many of the people I had met and worked with in my life, it was the final blow.