hunting for a parker

[MarketHunter]

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