Greg, I agree with you. I find the Dons etc that have inside dope on Parkers distastefull, to say the least. If there are other records out there, and people want to reference them, then, where are they ?
Daryl: You slander a whole bunch of good people who devoted much time and their own money to create one fine Research Letter system.
Going back to about 1991, there were just a bunch of old business records in the furnace room at Remington. Most anybody who worked there had access, and sometimes their friends. But unless one was interested in Parkers at the collector level, they were just stacks of of heavy, hard-to-decipher old business records that would take a crew of 6 at least a week to sort through. And there was a time element...
Larry Baer tried to access the records in the early 1970s and was denied. At the time photocopy machines sufficient to reproduce the records were extremely expensive, and were owned only by big businesses; going back to the late 1950s, all Peter Johnson's research was by letter-post mail, no phone calls, and his M/S was hand-written and typed with carbons by a public steno. There were no Xerox machines then.
It really wasn't till the 1980s that technology and Parker-centric manpower started to catch up with the magnitude of the work involved to mine the records. Thus there was understandable reluctance on the part of the Remington decision makers to allow just any outsider(s) in to berry pick or do uninformed casual research. The
Parker Story people established their credentials and capability to publish, and were given access. There was so much there that they had to prioritize by selecting only the serialized Stock Books and mostly omit the Order Books in their copying. These books are oversize and it took special equipment. As I recall there were over 30,000 folio-size copies.
Now I don't know this for a fact, but I am given to understand that some non-decision-making Remington employees saw the Parker records as their own private turf and perk, and lobbied against outside access, but were overruled. I am also given to understand that there are a sufficient number of present Remington employees and alums who are PGCA life/voting members (some officers), and that if they vote in concert...well, draw your own conclusions. But whatever the case, the original factory records continue to reside at Ilion, and the PGCA photocopies of Stock and Order books are effectively under control of Remington people. And why not?
Exactly what is "distasteful" about Remington having its own records, or Remington people and others being the custodians of the PGCA photocopies. The idea that there is some conspiracy of "dons that have inside dope" is just plain silly. Why wouldn't Remington employees have access to the company's business records? Why wouldn't Bill 8-Bore have special knowledge? After all, he helped copy the records for the PGCA, along with a whole crew from as far away as Missouri and Virginia and North Carolina, who camped out for a week in Ilion with their own copying machines! Same for the
Parker Story people who got access in the first place.
So, YES, there are people with "special knowledge." How could they avoid it? They are the people who did the grunt labor, hefted the books, pushed the "copy" button, checked the copies to be clear and complete, all 60,000 folio-size pages or more, and then sorted through the information so it could be computerized and useful in answering requests by collectors for information on a particular gun.
As I said in my last post, Babe allowed me some copies of the 1873 Order Book in his possession. But it is of zero value in authenticating any specific guns because there are no serial numbers. It is just a souvenir, a bit of memorabilia that really doesn't add to the verification of particular guns. The idea that information is being withheld because of all the "upgrades" that would be unmasked as frauds is just plain silly. Most all of the upgrades were proudly proclaimed by the up-graders as works of art, and poor quality work is blatant. I have seen upgrades and they stick out like sore thumbs. The presumption that there are upgrades out there as yet undiscovered as such is purely specious.
The only "upgrade" litigation that I ever heard of involved Tony G's "upgrading" an A-1-S to conform with Peter Johnson's surmise of what the Czar's gun would look like. The buyer claimed that he thought it was the real Czar's gun; Tony said it was just his interpretation (sort of a "work of art"), and the judge sided with Tony. This was maybe 30 years ago and gave rise to the "upgrade" paranoia that continues to this day among those who really don't know enough about Parker guns to validate originality based upon appearance and configuration.
Given the methodology of those who gathered and mined the Parker records, and the cross-check between the Stock and Order books, I understand that there are less than 10% of guns that can't be traced to the records. Further, most high-grade guns have ownership provenance by virtue of being family heirlooms. You can't upgrade a common twelve-bore into a scarce and valuable four-ten. What we are talking about here is the re-manufacturing of metal and wood. Anyone who knows much about Parkers today can spot an upgrade.
Anyone today looking at Tony's upgraded "Czar's Gun" sees it as "circus art." Maybe back long ago before the PGCA, the
DGJ,
SSM, the Internet Forums, a half-dozen books, and the Game Fair events like the Vintage Cup and Sanford, and the well-illustrated auction catalogs, there was a dearth of info, and people were perhaps worried about upgrades not identified as such. That was then and this is now. There is just too much information and too many informed people to perpetuate the myth among the real players; I wonder how many posters on this thread who take umbrage actually collect Parkers of grade high-enough to warrant counterfeiting? EDM
