There are times when a man needs to rise above his society, his culture, even his teachings and surroundings. He must exercise God-given self-determination to question claims of the world around him. He must discard the parenthesis of his life and step into the endless vistas beyond. Often an individual is not right, a society is not right, a continent is not right, perhaps, a world is not right. We must bend to society, but not snap under it. Individual freedom is not easily given by others, so it must be taken. A man must believe in himself, live his own life, carve his own destiny. He can learn from others, but the better lesson is self-taught. Human nature ensures that there will never be a perfect world, but there can be a perfect dream. Our Creator has seen to it we are given the capacity to think for ourselves. Our minds are private, but if breached, our souls certainly are. God gave us a soul. Our duty is to give it meaning, and He wants it back. If returned without meaning, His preference may be to send it back from the hereafter to earth through you, to give you a second chance, but it may be reassigned to another. I think one way or other, until it has meaning, His intent is to re-use it.
—Roy H. Park, Jr.
I wrote that in 1958 when I got back into The University of North Carolina. I had a lot of thinking to do, being isolated my first year there, living alone in a room at the Carolina Inn. In going through my father’s papers after his death, I also went through my own and came across this passage that reminded me of him, and his philosophy on life. The way my words defined his independent drive during his life was pretty scary.
My father was a God-fearing man. Not a Bible-thumper, but he certainly paid his dues at the Presbyterian Church. He was raised at an early age by the Bible, by his mother, and he believed in the hereafter. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and as I delved into his life, I began to believe more and more in, “Like father, like son.” Although I have actively tried to avoid the things he did I didn’t like, I’m coming to believe that I’m more like him than I ever thought.
After all those years of trying to understand and know him, Ethan Canin comes close to describing my own realization of this through the words the father expresses to the son in his story “The Year of Getting to Know Us”: “[Y]ou don’t have to get to know me. You know why?...You don’t have to get to know me… because one of these days you are going to grow up and then you are going to be me.”42 Eight years after I resigned from my father’s business, and then returned under the agreement giving me the right to buy the company, which I did in 1984, I was approached by Town & Country for an interview for a special section the magazine was doing on sons and daughters of famous parents. I was among five people written up: Wallis Annenberg, the daughter of billionaire publisher Walter Annenberg; Phillip Fisher, the son of oil investor Max Fisher; Bernard Petrie, the son of Milton Petrie, the clothing store czar; and John Lennon, whose father manufactured specialized instruments for everything from power plants to NASA rockets.
They wanted to know how I felt being passed over to head my father’s company. Not aware that I had purchased the company, they had seen a second article in Forbes about fathers and sons and wanted to know what had happened. I was hesitant to speak out and put off the interview as long as possible. When I finally decided to give the interview, I told my parents I had been interviewed for an article by Evan McGlinn called “5 of the Fortunate,” and they waited with trepidation for its publication, as did I. I tried to be discreet, but also honest, and my father was relieved and somewhat pleased at the way it came out. The article appeared in October 1992. Here is the pertinent part: Fifty-four-year-old Roy Park Jr. decided he would follow in his father’s footsteps and join the world of advertising and media. After seven years of working at J. Walter Thompson on such accounts as Ford and Pan Am, Park was asked in 1971 to run one of his father’s companies. But son and father found that they couldn’t work together.
His father wanted to see if Park could turn a profit for Park Outdoor Advertising. He did, but was soon replaced by experienced outdoor-advertising managers and shuffled off to the Park Communications broadcasting division. Within a few years, the billboard division was again losing money, and, according to Park, his father basically said, “Look, either you take the billboard division back over, or look for another job.”
The pair’s problems were not confined to working hours, either. “There would be some blowout at the office,” said Park, “and then we would be sitting at the dinner table, and I would be chewing my tongue ragged because I was still furious at the end of the day, trying to act like nothing happened.”
The real blowout came while Roy, Jr. was again making the billboard division profitable. His father second-guessed him until, as Park says, “I had to make a decision, either leave the company, again, or buy it for my own sanity.”
So in 1988 he borrowed the money and bought the billboard business. It now controls some 3,000 billboards in New York and Pennsylvania and has revenues of nearly $7 million, a 60 percent increase over what it was when his father owned it.
Even though his father is estimated to sit on a fortune worth some $515 million, Park says he received only a nominal gift from his dad. “He paid for my college education, except for $3,000, and that was it. I see fathers who spoil their kids, and then the kids really aren’t worth a hell of a lot. I certainly wasn’t spoiled, I’m glad I wasn’t. Our relationship is excellent now.”