But in the fall of 1983 I quit my job without having another one. And then my father told me exactly how he would create a job for me and assured me that everybody on staff fully expected me to step in. He meant to throw me the company as a life raft; I interpreted his offer as the exploitation of a bad situation. I said nothing -- not yes or no -- but I returned to Boston to accept a position at Inc. on January 30, 1984. The timing was scary. About three months later cousin Joe died. After purchasing the stock, my father would own the newspaper outright.
Now he felt he could create something different, something more attractive to me. For a year or so he didn't say anything negative about the Advocate. He talked about building circulation and broadening coverage, finally using the kinds of words businesspeople use: marketing, diversification, demographics. He was, I think, trying to speak my language. "If you want to come work here," he'd toss in, "you can."
I wasn't brave enough even to give him an answer. Certainly not a direct one. My response was to work hard, scrambling around Inc. like a man possessed -- or, more accurately, a man determined not to be possessed. Failure at the magazine would give my father an opening and leave me no choice but to at least confront the issue. My work received scant attention at home. "I thought you could do better [than the Advocate]," my father once said. "And you did."
What a brilliant, and surprising, defensive maneuver, I thought. He even made my frantic running from him seem like part of his plan.
* * *
At Inc. we sometimes call it "the rescue fantasy," and I'd be lying if I said I never entertained it. But let me add in my own defense that I never entertained it for long.
The rescue fantasy is usually harbored by would-be entrepreneurs who envision themselves stepping into a flagging business and turning it into a raging success. In my personal version, I would be the new generation in the family business, coming in, cleaning up, getting serious. With the help of a few very talented friends -- paid, mostly, in pizza -- I would revive the business as only new blood can. Thanks to my favorite magazine, I knew exactly what a determined heir could accomplish ("Taking the 'Family' Out of Family Business," September 1986), and I didn't see any reason I couldn't play the part.
I kept those thoughts to myself -- practically from myself. On some level, deep down, I made sure my actions never hinted at any ambivalence. If leaving issues of succession unresolved was a handicap, I just pushed myself harder to compensate. Once an entrepreneur I was interviewing astutely asked me about the most satisfying part of my job. Did I enjoy the writing most? Was there a special kick in seeing my name in print? No, I fired back, the most satisfying aspect of my job was having one. He laughed, and I smiled. But I meant it. I felt very strongly that my job was keeping me from the clutches of something bad.
I never identified that fate or what bothered me so much about it, even to myself. As I probed other people's angst and mined every irony I could from their situations, I missed the most overarching irony of all: By refusing to even confront the prospect of taking over my father's business, I let it take me over.
Feeling guilty, and not wanting to disappoint anyone involved, living or dead, I did all I could to evade the succession issue altogether. At dinner every Friday night, both while I was growing up and later, when I would visit, my father always started the meal by passing me the same question: "Good paper this week, huh?"
As straightforward as that query may sound, it got to the point where all I could do was respond with a nod so weak that anyone might have mistaken it for a body spasm. I felt there was no safe way to answer that question: If the Advocate was good, why wasn't it good enough for me? And if the paper wasn't good, why wasn't I in there using my skills to make it better? And what, exactly, was I doing anyway? Eventually, my father got so frustrated with the response to his opening question that he began recasting it as a statement: "We had a good paper this week." Silence followed, punctuated by one of my habitual cranial jiggles.
In truth, my father was improving the newspaper, running tougher stories and standing up to lots of pressures, some of which I'm sure I don't even know about. But we never discussed them, and avoidance turned into a cage of its own.
My father surely felt confined. A couple of years ago I began hearing through my mother that he was talking more and more about not having the energy to carry the Advocate forward. It needed someone younger, my 67-year-old father would say, somebody who hadn't already fought so many battles. He saw, quite clearly, that the newspaper was being assaulted on all fronts: increased competition, the need for investment in computerization, and a gruesome-looking recession. It wasn't that he thought the newspaper couldn't survive; he just wasn't up to the fight. Clearly, I wasn't going to lead the charge. "If he wanted to dive in," sources close to my father reported him as stating, "he wouldn't have waited until now."
In November 1990 my father invited me to lunch. With tuna salad dangling from his mustache, he told me he was selling the business that my family had owned since 1917.
I said -- oh go on, alert reader, take a guess -- nothing.
In his way, my father had thought this one through. Either to relieve me of any heir's remorse, or to make himself feel OK about my abandonment of the business, he made it seem as if any unexpected moves on my part would be indubitably self-destructive. If I wanted to come help him meet the new challenges, of course I could. But my career was going so well. Besides, the strongest likelihood was not that I'd succeed, but that the cost of modernizing the newspaper would force my parents to drain their savings. Having explored the evils of family financing ("The Parent Trap," No. 10900491, October 1990), I could gauge the approximate height of the stakes.
