Parker Bros. Employee Burt Becker??

[Kevin McCormack]

It's no wonder such confusion and conflicting information survives regarding the life stories of these guys; sort of revisionist history with a "Muderlakian twist", if you will. Consider this excerpt from the book "Mr. Buck", The Autobiography of Nash Buckingham edited by Dr. Dyrk Halstead and Steve Smith, who did in fact edit Nash's box of documents accumulated by him with the intention of writing his autobiography, which never happened.

I quote verbatim from p. 145: "Nash sent a series of questions to Burt Becker some time in 1956. Nash planned an article based upon Becker's answers, but no such article appeared in Gun Digest where Nash indicated he wanted to publish it. Becker's handwritten responses are nearly illegible in places, and certain questions were unanswered. Further research by Fox Gun Company expert Michael McIntosh reveals that Becker was never listed as an employee of the Fox Gun Company, and was probably an independent, doing contract work, most likely custom barrel-boring, starting in 1915."

With this kind of piecemeal and conflicting documentation, its no wonder Becker's name doesn't appear as having been listed as a Parker employee. It would be most interesting to "discover" a list of outsourced "contractors" used by Parker and Fox; a kind of "work from home" arrangement from yesteryear.