Benjamin Henry Parkinson

  General Notes:

Sales manager for Portland Gas & Coke Company in the 1920s and into middle 1930's.
Then moved to San Francisco into the steamship business as executive until retirement 1960

My late brother described my father as one of those whom the Readers Digest regularly wrote of as the most outstanding character I have known. Reared by a widowed mother, he was selling papers in Seattle with a headline of the San Francisco earthquake. I can hardly relate in a nutshell his capability in business. In World War II his steamship company suddenly went from about four ships plying theWest Coast to around 150
ships in the Pacific theater. Telling you some of the coaching he often gave my brother and me would trivialize his know-how. He was plucky to a great extent. For example, when a desire of his steamship company for permission for an Alaskan route kept him in Washington DC for many months, his dinner was once interrupted by Senator Joe McCarthy, the great red hunter, who pronounced, "Parkinson, I understand you have been raising a lot of hell back here!" He replied, "McCarthy, what would you do if you were me?" Another time, a Washington taxi driver called him back to the cab after paying the fare and tipping, "This is a Canadian quarter your gave me! (for a tip). He examined the proferred quarter, commented, "So it is," pocketed it and walked on.
He joined the Oregon National Guard (at seventeen as a bugler or something) and spent much of WWI at Fort Stevens, Oregon with a batter of coast defense guns. He became first sergeant. He completed officer's candidate school at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, but then resigned his commission because he could not afford to pay for a uniform. He was diagnosed with metastic prostate cancer around 1960. After years of debilitation from it he died in 1965. He was born in 1898. (Note from Roger Parkinson)
BIRT: RIN MH:IF738
DEAT: RIN MH:IF739

Benjamin married Fayette Wundfred Harbaugh. (Fayette Wundfred Harbaugh died in 1983.)

  Marriage Notes:

MARR: RIN MH:FF211