hunting for a parker

[charlie cleveland]

many years ago it was a dream of mine to own a parker shotgun...as a boy i would set and read about the great hunts of years gone by and the guns that were used..in north mississippi the lc smith rained as the supreme gun to own and shoot...my dad traded guns a lot and had owned and hunted with lc smiths.. mostly these guns were field grade guns due to the fact that mississippi was a very poor state in the terms of money...
i think this is why i never seen a parker shotgun till i was in my late 30 s.i knew of the parker because of readsing about them andhearing from someone that they had seen one of these guns..i m sure there was probably a few parkers in my area but i never saw one being hunted with or at trade days which were forerunners of gun shows or at any gun shops.. but one day when a friend of mine and i had went to a gun show in tupelo miss it was the first gun show i had ever attended..we left the gunshow and on the way home we stopped at my favorite gun shop and was looking the gun inventory overand my friend says heh looky here he hands me a parker brothers 10 ga boy was i excited been looking all my life for one of these guns and here it was in my hands i handled and looked this gun over like i have never done any gun before or since..the gunwas tite as a fiddle string sure she had been hunted with a many of a time..at the time i did not know what this gun was other than it was a parkers brother double barrel hammerless 10 ga with twist steel barrels...the bores were as clean as the day she left the parker factory.. i looked at the price tag it was marked 600.00..man i might of had a hundred..the owner of the store new me well my dad had traded guns with him a many of a time..i took it over to the counter and asked what was the low dollar on this gun .red the owner said 600.00 was bottom dollar well i knew i was going to get this gun some way or another...i ask RED if he would put this gun in the corner till monday where my dad could come over with a coupla guns to try and trade in on the parker...RED agreed to do this..yes sir it was a long week end for me for sure.well monday finally arrived i gave my dad a 45 long colt six gun that was a off brand name and a 30 remington pump rifle and a hundred dollar bill..well come monday evening after work my dad came by and handed me the big parker 10 and 25.00...finally a dream come true i was the owner of a 10 ga parker..this gun became my main turkey gun for years it has killed its share of turkeys in fact it killed one last year..well as the tears went by i find out a little bit about the old gun but it was not till i found the parker collector assiation did i know completely what the old gal was and how old she was..she is a ph grade 10 ga with 32 inch twist steel barrels a pistol grip stock on a 3 frame...to most people she would be just another old gun but to me she s the apple of my eye...come turkey season she ll surely be with me at some point... charlie

[wayne goerres]

Nice story. Thanks for sharing it with us. I wasn't allowed to own a gun when I was young. My step fathers brother killed himself with a shot gun. As soon as I left home I bought my first gun. Sorry to say it wasn't a Parker. It was a pre 64 model 70 Winchester 243 bull varmiter. I saw my first parker about 20 years ago in Oregon and bought it on the spot. It was a 12ga GHE with 30" barrels. Been buying guns ever since.

[Destry L. Hoffard]

There was a man in my home town who supposedly owned a Parker, he'd been president of the bank for many years. I never saw it but that was the rumor anyway. There was a boy I went to high school with who had a 10 gauge damascus Parker that was a family gun. I did see it for about 10 seconds once when I visited his house.

I saw my first one for sale in a gun shop in Mt. Vernon Illinois when I was about 19 years old. It was a 12 gauge, VH grade I'm guessing. It was so rough it wouldn't stay closed and the guy still wanted $500 for it.

Not long after that I bought my first one, a 10 gauge (one of the oddball ones with the pigeon buttplate) that must have been on a #4 frame as it was heavy as a railroad iron. I think I paid $200 for it, it could have been $175 even. It wasn't in great shape but it was tight, somebody had blued over the barrels and action. I kept that gun for several years and shot it quite a bit with the available 3 1/2 inch shells. It loaded and extracted them just fine so somebody must have let the chambers out. I sold it at the Henry IL decoy show when I first moved up north for wayyyyy more than I paid for it to somebody who just had to have it. I wish I still had it of course, but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do.

I didn't have a Parker again for quite a few years, my go to double was an LC Smith hammer gun with steel barrels during those years. Then I met Ed Muderlak at the St. Charles Decoy Show and we became friendly. I bought a beater BH from him for wayyyy too much money when I was about 29 or 30 and it's been downhill with Parkers ever since.

No regrets, they give me a lot of pleasure and I've met a lot of great people because of them.


DLH

[charlie cleveland]

destrey that sure was a fine storey..wish you still had that old 3 1/2 inch 10 ga too.. i ve got a old parker 10 ga that the federal shell 3 1/2 inch will go into it and close fine but ive never shot one in it..but i have shot 3 1/2 inch 12 ga with chamber mates in it.and killed a few turkeys with it..but would advise no one to do what i ve done... charlie