THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SUCCESS
Carrying
My Father’s
Torch
How the daughter of a trailblazing black
journalist followed in his footsteps and
charted her own path to success
By Suzanne Rust
“Pancakes are a Negro way of Life!”
T
his was the kind of copy my father, arthur
Rust Jr., was asked to work on when he was a young
black man starting out in merchandising during the
1950s. Those words were ridiculous and demean-
ing, of course. The proud son of immigrants—a Panamanian
mother and a Jamaican-Scottish father—my dad was raised to
know he was better than that.
His white supervisor also knew he was better than that, and
put him up for a promotion. When the higher-ups refused it,
the boss cried because he knew Dad was the best man for the
job. At home, this story was legendary. We’d laugh at that ab-
surd copy, but reflect on what it meant to be a talented person
in a world that wasn’t ready for you to shine.
As an African-American man growing up on Harlem’s Sugar
Hill, my father explained, the careers in which you could suc-
ceed were limited: civil servant, lawyer, teacher, preacher, doc-
tor, a handful of others. My paternal grandparents, Arthur Sr.,
a hardworking doorman, and Una, a seamstress, were able to
send my father and his sister Valerie to college. Dad was a pre-
med student at Long Island University—until his first encoun-
ter with a cadaver. Law school wasn’t the right fit either. The
one constant in his life had been a love of baseball and sports
in general; if only he could find a way to fit them into his life.
