Another Henry F. Tenney Parker

[Brush Buster]

. It would be cool if this third brother has a nice 20 or 28 ga.[/QUOTE]

Maybe a nice little 410 ???

[BRDHNTR]

If he has a 410, I'd eat #%#& for a mile to get it!

[charlie cleveland]

them saw briars would be rough to eat....charlie

[BRDHNTR]

Even so Charlie, a little Parker 410 find would be pretty nice don't you think. But if I get an answer from his brother, Scott, it will more likely be something far less than a 410. Probably another 'run of the mill' VH 12 or 16 (lol)

[Kevin McCormack]

Originally Posted by allen newell

Thanks Rick. I was wondering that since the trojan and vh grades were produced in such large numbers compared to the higher grade doubles, that Parker Borthers might not have been as concerned about their record keeping for these 'production' models than others. Thanks for the quick response. I wish this was a 20 ga or 28 ga he was shipping to me. I need another 12 ga likje a hole in the head.

NO, NO, NO! Parker scribes were religious about their record keeping, and did not discriminate according to grades or numbers produced. True, there were errors occasionally, but the simple truth is that a number of Stock as well as Order Books are missing - read TPS! Some books were inadvertantly destroyed, some 'borrowed' and never returned, and a very few probably stolen. It is a fact that when the basement machine room in "The Arms" was flooded, some of the Stock Books, being of much larger format than the Order Books, were actually used like flagstones for stepping stones between rooms. The had been stored there in large wooden machine parts crates and were put into service to keep employees' feet dry!

[Bill Zachow]

Just to set everyones' fears aside, the Parker Bros. records at Remington (both production books and order books) are now stored on metal shelving, above the floor. They are also covered with heavy plastic. One off my fondest memories was being able to spend days at Remington plowing through these books. Particularly exciting was to find the actual orders or production data on most of my Parkers. When you get to see the actual order placed by a private individual, and then see the production data including the names of the workers, you really appreciate the history of the fine guns. You also realize how many freedoms we have lost since the times these guns were made. I now fear that these records and the whole Remington Manufacturing Plant will be lost to New York as a result of Coumo's recent gun ban law.

[Fishtail]

"NO, NO, NO! Parker scribes were religious about their record keeping, and did not discriminate according to grades or numbers produced."

I don't know if this is true or not but it doesn't hold water just yet. For years we have heard, on this BB, that when the books were transcribed by the PGCA they only bothered copying the higher grade guns. Now you say that is not true - so which is it?

I have a hard time believing the lower grade gun records' not being available can be attributed solely to missing books. Here's why - in many cases you can go down the list of gun in the Serialization book and see blocks of 15 or 20 high grade guns, non-sequentially numbered. It stands to reason the missing serial numbers belong to lower grade guns that simply were passed over. Or does it make more sense that Parker decided to skip over various serial numbers and produced 12 D+ grade guns in a row?


In any case, I can always tell who has and has not worked in a manufacturing facility before based on their level of disbelief over lost records. Is it really hard to imagine that hand written, paper records from a firm that went out of business in the 1930's could be in less than pristine condition? The real miracle is that so many survive. Or better yet, that they bothered making any records at all in the first place.

[Big Friend Ten (BFT)]

Gentlemen,

We as collectors are very lucky that we have access to the records of Parkers that we do!.

I wish to pay a special thanks to those who took their time and worked so hard in copying and transcribing the Parker records. Also, another thanks to Misters Gunther, Mullins, Parker, Price, and Cote' for researching and writing THE PARKER STORY. A final thanks to Misters Price and Fjestad for the same for the PARKER GUN IDENTIFICATION & SERIALIZATION book, i.e. "The Book".

I agree with our Fishtail friend that maintaining records via hand written entries on paper is hard to achieve 100% accuracy and just as hard to preserve those records over the years! Just look at all the missing information for LC Smith and Lefever Arms shotguns.

Mark

[Robert Delk]

I probably should not even bring this up but I know there are some surviving records for Lefever as I once owned them. It was a bound volume made up what appeared to be remnants of records for guns produced and guns returned for repair.I advertised it in the Gun list and took it to a least 3 gun shows where it did not attract much interest.I had it for sale for $400 with no takers.I have taken a lot of flak for trading them off but no one showed any interest and this was before I was using the computer.I would not be surprised if some more Parker records show up.

[Bill Zachow]

Those who choose to believe that the missing records on various guns is due to the fact that the Parker employees chose to or inadvertently missed certain lower grade guns are flat out wrong. I have seen the books that exist, both order books and production books. All the books were numbered and it is easy to tell which ones are missing. Check out "The Parker Story" by Price, et al. It and our own "Parker Pages" tells which exist and which do not. In the ones that exist, I have seen serials covering all grades. Any guns today that cannot be documented through the Parker records are the result of missing or damaged or illegible books. PERIOD