John B. Babcock, who died in 2008, was a farm boy raised in Ithaca, NY. He graduated in 1941 from the Phillips Academy at Exeter, and after two years of Pre-Med at Cornell University, served from 1943 to 1945 in the combat Infantry in the European theater of operations during WWII, attaining the rank of First Sergeant. Returning to Cornell in 1946, he completed studies in English Literature and from 1948 through 1950 managed the Richmond, VA, office of Roy H. Park’s Agricultural Advertising and Research ad agency.

 

For the next 15 years he held executive assignments at Avco Corporation and Crosley Broadcasting Inc., establishing new TV stations and serving as the group executive, before again joining Park in 1964 this time, as COO of Park Communications, Inc. For the next 17 years, as Park’s top executive, he supervised the building of his broadcasting group which was the first in the nation to achieve the 21-station limit.

 

A professional writer, he published Farmboy in 1999, a chronicle of growing up on a working farm during the Great Depression decade of the 1930s. The book has been made into a documentary film, and in 2005 he published Taught to Kill, a book covering his WWII Infantry experience.