Growing Up Parker: My Life in Pens by Geoffrey Parker

Geoffrey Parker, great grandson of George S. Parker, founder of Parker Pen Company, shares memories of discussing pen design around the dinner table in Janesville, Wisconsin. From the creative business techniques that made the company so successful worldwide to the shocking switch to colorful inks, Parker's thoughtful talk is both pen history and family history. -- May 29, 2010, National Postal Museum.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Geoffrey Parker
• George S. Parker
• Pens & the Post
• Pen Collectors of America
• Smithsonian
• Postal Museum

[dgm2006]

Part 2 - All this I could have overlooked if they wrote the same but they didn’t and still don’t. I can’t imagine ever using anything but a Parker pen, but at that point I felt the Parker pen was ruined, and I stopped using them.

[dgm2006]

Part 1 - I received several Parker jotters as gifts in the late 70s and early 80s when I was in high school and college and was very impressed with the quality of the pen and how well it wrote.  When I finally needed to buy a replacement, the pens had a number of small cost saving measures. The metal tube the point retracts into was a little shorter and more curved, the top of the button was concave, and the brass threading inside was now plastic.