It didn’t take long in this small town for the Ithaca Journal to get wind of my resignation, and the same person, Helen Mundell, who frequently wrote articles on my father, contacted me. I thought about it, made some notes, and as we had learned to handle things at Park Outdoor, had asked her to put her questions in writing so I could give some thought and accurately answer each one. Just four days after I resigned, on September 4, 1984, her article at the top of the local section of the newspaper appeared under the heading pArk Quits FAther’s FirM AFter MAgAzine AppeArs: Roy H. Park, Jr., of 53 Highgate Circle, resigned Friday as vice president of Park Outdoor Advertising, in response to an “apparent vote of no confidence” of his father in Forbes magazine.
“I had no choice,” Park said today. “This was a public vote of no confidence, and it was even more distressing in the light of the success we’ve had in turning around Park Outdoor.”
Park’s father, Roy H. Park, Sr., was featured in a profile in the September 10 issue of Forbes magazine. He was quoted as saying that his son would not inherit control of Park Communications, a publicly traded corporation headed by Park Sr. The magazine said, “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.’” Young Park said his quitting has nothing to do with his father’s statement that he wouldn’t inherit the corporation, “since I’ve always known this wasn’t a possibility.” He said he has no connection with Park Communications, since Park Outdoor has never been a part of the public company.
He said his resignation was “directly in response to his implication that I had to prove myself,” the younger Park said.
He said he was asked to take over Park Outdoor three years ago, when the company was losing money. “It had been badly mismanaged, and it really had a bleak future—almost an impossible future. Right now, it’s successful, and profitable. And while I’m not solely responsible, because I’ve had the best people in the outdoor advertising business—I brought them in—I think my management over the past three years deserves some credit. But when this happened, and success is called failure, in a public, nationwide media, it’s kind of hard to work in an environment where hard work and loyalty go unrecognized.”
He said he’s had about 60 people working in two states for Park Outdoor, “and I think this is kind of an indictment of all of them, and I don’t like it.”
Park said he’s worked for his father for the last 13 years.
After graduating from Cornell University with an MBA degree in marketing, he went to work for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City, where he was a senior account executive for RCA, among other things. He also was a vice president and account manager for Kincaid Advertising Agency in Charlotte, NC, before returning to Ithaca to work for his father.
Concerning the “special treatment” his father mentioned, Park responded, “You can’t give special treatment to a son. I’m just talking about fair treatment. I think everybody deserves respect—from the clerk to the owner’s son.” He said he didn’t think that “to call the success of our division a failure” was showing respect.
He said his father’s “values and priorities are different from mine.”
Park said there has been virtually no turnover at Park Outdoor, since he took the division over at his father’s request. When he took it over, he said, “The turnover is a big problem. We didn’t even have a manager in six different divisions in two states, when I came back. And I think that’s important.”
Park said he was also upset that his father “didn’t feel the need to tell me the way he felt, man to man. It had to come out in a nationwide business media.”
He said that in the past year, his father “hasn’t had anything to say except everything is going well.”
Roy H. Park Sr. could not be reached for comment.38 Despite the fact that my father couldn’t be reached for com
ment, it didn’t take long for him to respond. The very next day, on September 5, a boxed commentary from him, reported by Mundell, appeared on the Local page of the Ithaca Journal under the heading pArk sAys he regrets son’s deCision: Roy H. Park Sr. said today he regrets the decision of his son, Roy H. Park, Jr., to resign as vice president of Park Outdoor Advertising.
The younger Park resigned Friday after what he called an “apparent vote of no confidence” of his father printed in the September 10 issue of Forbes magazine.
The article indicated that Park Sr. had said his son would have to prove himself if he were to inherit control of Park Communications, a publicly traded corporation headed by Park Sr.
The younger Park, 46, indicated he thought he had proved himself by returning Park Outdoor to profitability in the three years he has run the company, which is owned by the Park family.
Park Sr. said today that Park Outdoor “has shown marked improvement under his direction in the past three years.” He declined further comment.39 I later was told that my mother had hung a sign over my father’s office toilet at home, tiMe wounds ALL heeLs. She appeared to have been unaware of the quote my father made in the Forbes article after my (what proved to be unlucky) thirteen years of hard work for him, that I had “yet to prove myself.” Or his implication that turnover during my years was rampant, when in fact, it had been rampant all through his reign and that of his other managers, and had stabilized considerably under mine. Needless to say, my mother was shocked when I resigned, and she let him know it. We spoke a few times on the phone, and she indicated that she was urging my father in every way possible to work things out.