In July of 1991, my father was interviewed and given a large spread in the Ithaca Journal headlined: At 80, the Lion of Park still runs this show. His health had been failing a bit, but he had no intention of thinking about retiring. On the front page of the business section, Helen Mundell reported: Retirement does not figure in 80-year-old Roy Park’s future. At an age when most of the Ithaca-based media mogul’s contemporaries have been retired for 15 years or more, the chairman and chief executive officer of Park Communications, Inc. works 70-hour weeks. And that’s after Park cut back on his workload—on doctor’s orders.
This spring, a bout with illness briefly hospitalized the workaholic multimillionaire, who counts among his close friends the cream of Ithaca’s business community as well as national media luminaries such as Katherine Graham and Al Neuharth, both now retired from their respective journalism empires, The Washington Post and Gannett Co., Inc.
The octogenarian’s illness, from which he now says he’s fully recovered, focused media industry attention both near and far on Park Communications.
The article reported that Some industry watchers suggest that top Park managers have been running the fiscally sound company for perhaps several years, leaving Roy Park free to pursue other interests. “Somehow, I’ve got the info that…the president has been effectively running the show for the last two years or so,” said J. Kendrick Noble, Jr., a former analyst at Payne Webber who left that firm in January to found Noble Consultants Inc. of Bronxville, NY. Park President Wright M. (Tommy) Thomas flatly denied that scenario, saying his boss is still firmly in command.
“If I was going to retire, I’d like to retire like Al Neuharth,” Park said, with a smile. Neuharth, retired chief executive officer of media giant Gannett, now is part-time head of the Freedom Foundation—formerly the Gannett Foundation. “I don’t think [Park’s] the retiring kind,” Neuharth said last week in a telephone interview from Washington, DC. “There’s no reason why he should retire. He gets better and stronger as the years go on.”44 In a front-page insert headed pArk sets FAst pACe, Mundell reported that Pops’s friend, former U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr., of Virginia, said he never heard Park mention retirement. “ ‘ If you have, let me know,’ Byrd said with a hearty laugh.”
During the interview, Mundell reported my father said he was feeling fine again.
“There was no cancer, or anything like cancer,” he said, responding to rumors in the community at the time of his illness. Park, who had recently spent three days at a CBS network affiliates’ meeting in New York City, wouldn’t say how many hours a week he put in before his illness. He said his company, which has grown steadily since he bought his first paper in 1972, is “in the market for more” newspapers, particularly in states where the company already has papers. “I’m still interested in our newspapers and scan them,” said Park, a newspaperman since he was 12. In fact, if he sees a dull headline in a Park paper, the editor who wrote it is likely to get it back in the mail, more colorfully rewritten by Park or his top managers.
In the article, she also asked, “Is there life after Roy Park for the tightly run newspaper and television chain?” My father indicated he had several good people who could take over the helm, but made it plain that “he is not budging.” It was clear that Pops didn’t intend to turn his company over to any family member, and Mundell reported that “Park’s future doesn’t include turning the company over to anyone else to run, at least in the foreseeable future.”45 Knowing my father as well as I did, I just knew it wasn’t in him to turn over to anyone what he had taken a lifetime to build. He had already made up his mind on how it was going to end, but during the interview he continued to play the game. He said that if something were to take him out of the picture, the company has several good people available to take over, and in Mundell’s article, started by naming Wright Thomas, who my father said was: [N]ot only president, but also chief operating officer, treasurer, assistant secretary and director. “Tommy is not only a good manager, but a CPA and a good organizer,” Park said, smiling affectionately at Thomas, who was ensconced in Park’s office with other top company managers during a recent interview.
Jack E. Claiborne, 59, vice president and assistant to the chairman. “Jack we selected from a number of people. He works with me on overall publicity and news,” Park said, turning to Claiborne.
Robert J. Rossi, 63, vice president, newspapers.
W. Randall Odil, 48, vice president, television. Randal N. Stair, 40, vice president, controller and assistant secretary.
Park, Claiborne, Wright and Bob Burns, vice president of RHP, Inc., Park’s real estate company, talk comfortably together about the future of the company with the camaraderie that comes of long association and mutual affection.
“The key people around Roy (with the exception of Claiborne) have been together well over 10 years,” Thomas said later. “There’s a natural kind of rapport that’s built up over that period.”46 Toward the end of the interview, my father said what he really intended to have happen when he was gone. Mundell reported: Park said he plans to leave a large block of stock to the Park Foundation, which he set up to make charitable contributions in communities where the company has properties. Employees will then be able to buy the stock from the foundation at a low interest rate. “It’s the idea of giving the employees a stake,” he said. “They helped me build [the company] and I don’t want to see it sold out to some fellow who’s going to let it be run down.”47 That was in 1991, and the following year my father began to slow down. After we moved out of the building in 1990 and I was no longer working at the Park Communications headquarters, I would occasionally see my father with his business associates during lunch at the same restaurants, but was unaware of whether or not he continued to report to his office every day.
I do know the things men fear the most as we grow older began to take a toll: cataracts, high blood pressure and prostate problems that would eventually require surgery. I think his physical decline was partly the result of all of his years from Duncan Hines on, enjoying good food and drink, the lack of exercise that came with all work and no play, and the stress he appeared to be shedding like rain water which all the while may probably have been building up inside.
As I said, I’m not sure at which point he began to spend more time at home and less and less time going to the office, and I know that during this period his office personnel met with him in his study at home. And as a consequence, I was also able to see more of him, and during this time, my father and I got along well. There were no points of conflict. I was no longer working for him and finally had the time to reestablish a father-son relationship.
Then, following cataract surgery, my father suffered a series of pin strokes which slowed him down physically and to some degree affected his mental acumen. I remember my father would ask, “How’s our outdoor company doing, Son?” I would reply that it was doing just fine, never giving him any indication that he no longer owned the company. I began to drop by on weekends, to see how he was doing, and Tetlow and I would go out to dinner with my mother and father more frequently to keep him occupied and happy.
It was during this time I began to feel what Sherwood Anderson describes as having felt in “Discovery of a Father”: “It was a feeling of closeness. It was something strange. It was as though there are only two in the world. It was though I had been jerked suddenly out of myself…he had become blood of my blood.”48 I thank God for that last year and for the time we were able to spend together in a relationship that did not involve business. As writer Harriet Beecher Stowe said, “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”