Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center - Campaign for Excellence

About the Parks

Dorothy Park’s $5 million gift to her late husband’s alma mater was the latest gesture in a lifetime of support for education. It also was the much-needed down payment on a future home for NC State alumni.

With her personal gift, Park cleared the way for construction to start on the 59,000-square-foot Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center. The center will serve the university, of course, but Park hopes for more. She wants it to inspire alumni to give back and help push their alma mater to greater national prominence in teaching, research and extension.

“My husband and I always believed that the college years are just the beginning of university involvement,” she says.

Former Gov. James B. Hunt (1959, 1962 MSED), a longtime advocate for NC State, believes the Alumni Center will fulfill Park’s hopes. It will bring prestige to NC State, he says, attracting the best students and beckoning graduates with an on-campus home of their own.

“This is a place we’ll come and meet, bring our friends, bring our children, bring our grandchildren,” says Hunt, who was student body president when he met the “hard-working, hard-charging” Roy H. Park (1931). “[Park’s] spirit, his drive, his ambition I hope will be felt by all of us and will be seen in the work that we do.”

Although Dorothy Park sounds and acts the part, she isn’t an alumna of NC State. She attended Peace College, graduated from Meredith College and married into the NC State family in 1936, when she exchanged vows with Roy H. Park.

At the time of their marriage, Roy Park was just setting out in his career. Born to a Surry County farm family, he entered NC State at age 15 and distinguished himself as editor of Technician. He met his future wife at the Cotton Ball, an event he created and promoted as public-relations director for the N.C. Cotton Growers Cooperative Association from 1931 to 1942.

Park earned his fortune as an entrepreneur. A self-made man with ideas and ambition to burn, he was like a character straight out of a Horatio Alger story, according to longtime friend Rudy Pate (1943), retired vice chancellor for development and university relations.

“He worked all the time,” Pate says. “He seemed to thrive on it, to really enjoy working.”

To this day, Park is perhaps best remembered for the media empire he built over 30 years. Park Communications Inc. owned 11 television stations, 22 radio stations and 144 newspapers when its founder and chief executive officer died in 1993. But what he called the “grubstake” for that fortune was earned in cake mix—specifically Duncan Hines, the brand of packaged foods he launched through an unlikely alliance with the nation’s foremost restaurant and hotel critic. Park persuaded Duncan Hines, author of popular consumer guidebooks, to join him in forming Hines-Park Foods in 1949.

“That was the only time I ever saw his name in second place,” Pate says with a laugh.

The company went on to develop the now-famous line of food products before selling the company to Procter & Gamble.

That 1956 buyout helped finance the first of Park’s media acquisitions—WNCT-TV in Greenville—six years later. By 1984, he had built his influence and wealth to a point that Forbes magazine profiled him. He also appeared over the decades in the pages of many publications, including The New Yorker. Shortly before his death, he was ranked 175th on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people in America.

Park loved the art of making a deal, friends say. With an obsession for detail and round-the-clock work ethic, he relished his job and urged students to follow their dreams and make the most of their own lives. To the Class of 1978, whom he addressed at graduation, Park said: “Go out into the world and do the things that give you fulfillment. Above all, don’t get stuck in a job that is a bore or drudgery.”

Dorothy Park, meanwhile, was a quiet, private counterpoint to her showman-entrepreneur husband. She was counselor and confidant, always in the background. But after his death, she became keeper of his legacy as chair of the Park Foundation Inc., to which Park bequeathed 70 percent of his holdings. NC State is among the beneficiaries of the foundation, which has committed more than $40 million to the Park Scholarship Program since 1996. The success of the program’s students and alumni, in part, inspired Dorothy Park to contribute the naming gift to the center. The program is now the centerpiece of Roy Park’s lifelong relationship with NC State. But it’s only one of many ways he gave back.

In 1937, just six years out of college, Park was nominated for an Alumni Association committee. He accepted the appointment with customary zeal for service: “I will be very glad to serve and stand ready at all times to do anything possible. Please feel free to call upon me at any time you think I may contribute to the welfare of our college.”

In 1951, he created the “Nickels for Know-How” program that let farmers donate to the NC State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences 5 cents on each ton of feed and fertilizer they purchased. He also served on the Board of Trustees, presided over the Alumni Association Board of Directors and chaired the Development Council and Chancellor’s Public Relations Council. He initiated the Chancellor’s Circle of donors in 1961, making the first contribution of $1,000 himself. He won NC State’s highest honor, the Watauga Medal, in 1975 and the Centennial Award in 1992.

Perpetually busy, Park always found time to talk about issues of the day that had “commanded his interest,” says UNC President Emeritus William C. “Bill” Friday (1941), who remembers his many phone conversations with Park.

But one thing about him stood out, Friday says: “He loved this place. It gave him something that nothing else in our culture could provide. … The university recognized him with its highest awards to be sure. But what he loved was the knowledge and the understanding that what he had done was causing NC State to rise to the level of quality and performance and strength that it now occupies.

“What a wonderful thing to see achieved in one’s lifetime.”