Our Parker Family History Table of Contents
Life Without Father West Again; New Homes
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- Richard Samuel William
- Iowa and the Parkers and the Telephone
- Robert Lavender Parker, Telephone Pioneer
Life Without FatherWest Again; New HomesThe Farm is SoldThe family sold 160 acres of the farm in 1879, ten years after Robert died. Susanna’s name was still on the plat map of Cleona Township in Moving Near GilmanWhy Here?Another question that I have not yet solved is this: why did the family move to the area around Gilman, in Marshall County? New Generations, New ConnectionsParkers Near GilmanRichardSamuelWilliamPaulLavenderCarneyEtc.The Telephone MenThe business of telephony has been part of our family’s history for four generations. My Grandfather, Robert L. Parker, was a real telephone pioneer. He began his career building rural telephone lines in Iowa in 1901and stayed in the inde-pendent (non-Bell) telephone business until he died in 1940. He taught the phone business to my dad, Robert D. Parker. He also stayed in it throughout his career, first as an independent and then for 30 years with Illinois Bell Telephone Company. My first employer after college graduation was ITT-Kellogg, for many years known as Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, in Chicago, one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of phones and switchboards for independent companies. I remember writing the design specification for a Kellogg “Relaymatic” switchboard system for the town of Quimby, Iowa in 1959. After graduating from Iowa State University, my son Roger D. Parker was employed by the Iowa Department of Transportation in their communications operations. He is still in the communications business today with the DOT at Ames.
BeginningsAlthough today’s phones may look very different from those of 1900, their basic purpose is the same. In whatever shape or size, telephones enable personal communication between people over distances. In 1876, in Chicago, the Cubs won their first National League game, in Wyoming, George Custer was killed in the Battle of Little Big Horn, in Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first patent for a speaking telephone, and in Gilman,Iowa, Robert Lavender Parker, my Grandfather, was born. While grandfather was growing up, the telephone business was also growing. They seemed to run into each other right after Rob graduated from Iowa College in 1900. Many of us think about the telephone as beginning with the United States patents awarded to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Actually, many men had been working on “telephone” ideas for several years. In addition to Bell, Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray and several others were working on devices for speech transmission and applied for patents during 1876. We know now that Gray and Bell applied for patent protection on almost the identical device on the same day, in February of 1876. Neither of them had actually constructed that device by that day. The story of telephone invention patents reads like a minute-by-minute thriller novel. By 1900, although the telephone had been in use in many of the great cities of the United States, very few existed in Iowa. That’s because the Bell Telephone companies didn’t pay much attention to rural areas or small towns. One of the benefits that come from a U. S. patent is that the law gives exclusive use rights to holders for as long as XX years. If you don’t want to use your invention yourself, or to make and sell copies of it, you can sell those rights to others for money. The Bell Telephone companies chose to keep their rights, so no other people could make or sell or lease telephones for 17 years. If you lived in a small town, or out in the country, expensive poles and wires had to be installed to give you telephone service. The Bell companies decided to use their time and money where they brought the most income and that meant in big cities. So, while the important Bell patents were in force until 1893 and 1894, about 150,000 telephones (a lot!) were installed, but almost all of them were in big cities and most near the east coast. Rural states like Iowa had just a very few. The Bell companies set their prices for instruments and services high, to give them good profits. When the Bell patents expired after seventeen years, in 1893, thousands of small companies rushed to organize telephone service, at much lower than Bell rates, in states like Iowa. That’s when Robert L. Parker began his telephone career. One of the earliest telephone companies in Iowa was at Brooklyn, in Poweshiek County. The Web site of the Brooklyn Mutual Telephone Cooperative12 says that the first phones were installed there in 187813. Brooklyn is only a few miles from Gilman and Grinnell. Some of our Lavender relatives lived near there. In 1900, when Rob Parker graduated from Iowa College, he was working to build farm telephone lines around Brooklyn.
Yes, Rob (as his wife called him) L. Parker and the telephone were born in the same year – the Centennial year of the United States. His father, William, was of a family of 16 that came to Iowa from County Down in 1861. They bought land and farmed in Cleona Township in western Scott County. In 1873, William and two of his brothers, Richard and James, moved to the area where Marshall, Jasper, Poweshiek and Tama Counties join. They bought land and farmed in northeast Jasper and northwest Poweshiek Counties. There, William met and married Hannah Jane Lavender, whose family also came from northern Ireland. Robert Lavender was born on October 23, 1876 on the farm in Hickory Grove Township, Jasper County. Grandfather made the development of telephone service to small towns and farmers his personal business for all of his working life. He was certainly a Telephone Pioneer in Iowa and Illinois. He introduced his son, my Dad, to the telephone business and he, too, was a telephone man for all of his working life. I RememberGrandfather died when I was five years old. Here’s the way I think of him: I felt good in his lap and his arms, he helped me, and I am very proud of him.  Here is a picture of him and me on the front steps of his house, when I was less than a year old. Grandpa was still in working condition then, and was already helping me to make word sounds.
 Here is another one, taken about four years later, with Dad. By that time, Grandpa was pretty sick. This picture appeared in The Geneseo Republic on Feb. 10, 1939, in an article titled “Parker Serves as Head of Phone Company 10 Years,” and in Telephony Magazine, in an article titled “Three Generations of Telephone Men.”
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