While I was working for Mr. Parker, a carpenter from somewhere back east whose car had broken down outside of town came and asked for a job with Mr. Parker. At that time Parker was wanting to expand. He hired this old boy to build him a larger store. This is right after WW II and it was pretty hard to get materials. This carpenter would build forms maybe 6 feet high and because we didn�t have rebar, we stuck bed steads, old springs, baling wire, anything that was metal we stuck in the walls, pushed them in and then poured the concrete in. There were 11 rooms in the building. The Parkers lived in an apartment in the upper north west corner. I painted the Parkers Furniture Sign that is almost gone now. I was doing a little art work even then as a sign painter.
Parker bought up old schools that had closed, tore them down and brought the brick back to town. He would drop off the brick in front of houses that had kids. The kids would clean the old mortar off the bricks. When Parker picked the brick up he paid the kids a penny a brick. I think the house he built on 8th street is bricked with some of this brick.
Parker was a quiet man. I think he must have been part Indian. He always struck me as being part Indian. Pearl didn�t talk that much, but she was more a conversationalist than Parker. You would go in there and look at something and he never bothered you. He just stood back while you looked around. Pretty soon, you might say, "Mr. Parker, I'd like this little radio". He'd come over and look at it and give you a price and then say, "Now that radio over there is a better radio and it'll cost you less. You oughta get this one." Now that's the way Mr. Parker was. Everything he did was just as honest as can be. He had one quirk. He had kinda a feud with Darby's. Darby's was in Duke and when he would come over here with furniture that he had sold to a Hollis customer he would make it a point to drive down past our place even if he had sold to somebody on the east part of town...So what we would do when we delivered to some place like Eldorado, Olustee, Quanah we'd put the furniture on and then load the truck up with 3 or 4 more things like refrigerators, stoves, and then drive past Darby's even if it was out of the way, deliver the furniture and come up the back way and still have the other things on the truck. I also drew up some flyers and printed them on an old mimeograph machine he had and we would drop then out along the way as we drove by Darby's. This was kinda fun thing to do......A little friendly competition.
Mr. Parker would rather sell old used furniture than brand new furniture. He would rather let Pearl sell the new furniture. He wanted to get a closed in truck and hit all the auctions in the
panhandle and bring that stuff back. He would never brag about selling a new piece of furniture...that was just business, but he would brag about the time he sold a used piece of furniture the third time. He really loved it. He loved selling old furniture.
Mr. Parker opened a furniture store in Wellington. His daughter and son-in-law ran it. The reason he wanted it was because Texas didn�t have sales tax. He would sell something from here, but deliver it from Wellington so that he could sell it cheaper.
