B&C Member Spotlight—Jack Steele Parker

By PJ DelHomme

A mechanical engineer with a no-nonsense approach to solving problems, Jack Parker was involved in the mechanics of aviation, bringing General Electric to the forefront of jet propulsion. He was also a dedicated conservationist who helped lead the Boone and Crockett Club, ensuring it remained committed to wildlife conservation in tenuous times. 

Parker took this Alaska-Yukon moose in 1968, scoring 233-5/8 points.

Dr. Manny Chee is a retired surgeon and member of the Boone and Crockett Club. He was close friends with Jack Steele Parker, a larger-than-life member, who, for over three decades, served on nearly every committee and also served as Club president from 1980-1982. Parker was straightforward, informing other Boone and Crockett Club presidents of the direction he wanted to see the Club go, says Dr. Chee. He was serious (and opinionated) about hunting, too. “Even down to the caliber for specific species,” Chee says. “One member went to hunt a Coues’ deer with a .300 Weatherby Mag. Jack was mad because he thought he should use a .270.” His direct approach served the Club well. He was an avid hunter from Africa to Alaska and loved spending time outdoors. 

In 1915, Parker’s soon-to-be parents visited San Francisco from New Zealand for their honeymoon and never returned. They settled in Palo Alto, where Parker’s father was an engineer. When Parker was four, the family moved to India for two years. There, his father took him to hunt deer and peafowl. Once the work project was over, the family returned home to Palo Alto, where a couple of years later, Parker’s father disappeared. “I was around seven at the time,” Parker wrote in his memoir. “When I say we lost him, I mean that he left, and we never saw him or heard from him again, until after he eventually passed away. I never knew why he left, and Mother never spoke about it to me. My guess was that he just got tired of us.” 

Parker was just 11 when the markets crashed, and the country entered the Great Depression in 1929. A decade later, he graduated from Stanford University with a degree in mechanical engineering. In his memoir, Parker recalled taking any job he could find to earn tuition, a pricey $115 per quarter. He wanted to be a medical doctor but couldn’t afford it. Luckily, he also wanted to be an engineer. 

Engineering the Future 

For years, he worked at shipyards, where he was in charge of building Liberty Ships during World War II. He got married in 1944 and learned to fly. He’d take his wife, Elaine, flying in a Fairchild 24. He might fly to Lake Mead for fishing or, at low elevations, look for good quail hunting areas. 

He went to work for General Electric in 1950, where his leadership and engineering background made waves. At G.E., he served in various positions and on projects ranging from nuclear propulsion to gas turbines. He was with G.E. when they created the first jet engine produced in the U.S. 

At just 36, he was elected a company vice president in 1956, one of the youngest officers in G.E.’s history. By 1968, he was elected as a director, vice chairman of the board, and executive officer. Parker worked to build the commercial side of G.E.’s engines, getting them on DC-10s and Boeing 747s. During Parker's tenure, G.E. was also a major player in NASA’s Apollo program. Because he seemed to know everyone in the Air Force and aerospace industry, Dave Packard, Deputy Secretary of Defense, asked Parker if he was interested in being the Secretary of Defense for the Carter Administration. “Boy, I was in shock because, number one, I didn’t care much for Carter; and number two, I’m not a Democrat,” Parker wrote. “I just thought it had to be a mistake, or a joke, and I felt I’d better be careful.” Parker made a phone call, and his name was pulled from the list of four candidates three days later. 

Retirement? 

Parker may have retired from G.E. in 1969, but he didn’t slow down. He purchased property in Oregon near Prineville and turned it into a working cattle ranch. He hunted mule deer there every year but would only kill one if it was unusual—like the buck he shot with a 36-inch spread. He would have friends like Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett (HP) out to the ranch to hunt.

He served on several company boards, including Southern Pacific, Pan AM, and Strum Ruger. While serving on the board of Continental Can, a packaging company, Parker and another member would check on one of the company’s mills in Augusta, Georgia, where they also were members of Augusta National Golf Club. Parker touted a six handicap and a famous green jacket that he would wear to Boone and Crockett Club functions, Dr. Chee recalled. “He wasn’t boasting,” he says. “He was simply proud of his achievements.” 

Parker (right) with James H. Doolittle holding Parker’s Alaska brown bear scoring 29 inches. The two were hunting near Cold Bay, Alaska, in 1964. “I had the privilege of knowing a lot of people who were outstanding, but I think that Jimmy Doolittle is, in many ways, the finest person I ever knew.” For 30 years, they fished and hunted together. Parker was a pallbearer when they buried Doolittle at Arlington.

The Great Outdoors

When Parker was 10, he met an archery enthusiast who made bows and arrows. Parker made a bow out of Osage Orange and hunted rabbits. Then, he discovered Boy Scouts. He would backpack for weeks in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. As he got older and work transferred him across the country, he always found a place to shoot skeet. After World War II, like many of his generation, he embraced big game hunting, from pronghorn to caribou to bighorn sheep. In fact, his first “encounter” with the Boone and Crockett Club was on a sheep hunt outside of Jasper National Park. The guide was a neighbor of Club member Belmore Brown, and Parker asked Brown’s son to measure and ram for him. Over the years, Parker entered three animals in the records, including a giant Alaska brown bear he killed with Jimmy Doolittle. 

In 1965, he took his first safari to Africa and was hooked. On safari in Kenya, he was filming two elephants with a 16mm camera when a massive bull came running past him. He dropped the camera and grabbed his gun. After two shots, the bull was dead. Each tusk is over nine feet long and weighs over 100 pounds. Today, they reside in the library of Boone and Crockett Club headquarters.

Parker made trips back to India. Instead of hunting peacocks, he was there for tigers. In 1976, he traveled to Mongolia for Ibex and Argali. There were trips to Scotland and Spain for birds. In his memoir, Parker recalled his attempts to bring home a polar bear, which he never did, but it wasn’t for lack of effort. “Instead of taking the dogsled approach on the trip, I could have taken an airplane out, and found a bear pretty quickly,” he wrote. “ When you’re flying along at 110 mph and see the tracks of a bear going three mph, you land close to the bear and have your hunt. That’s just not the way it ought to be done, and it’s not fair chase.” 

Club Heavyweight 

Parker’s friend and fellow Boone and Crockett Club member Jimmy Doolittle was one of the men who introduced Parker to the Boone and Crockett Club. When Parker retired in 1969, he became a member and quickly made an impact. During his tenure, he served on nearly a dozen committees, including the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch Donations Committee, which eventually raised enough money to purchase the Club’s ranch on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front. “The main thrust behind the ranch initially was to work through the problems that a lot of the working cattlemen at that time objected to having game on their preserves,” he wrote. “We used the ranch as a base to run cattle, to demonstrate that you could run a proper cow-calf operation and still accommodate the game that came out of the hills in the wintertime.” 

Parker described a tenuous time for the Club at a 2007 Boone and Crockett Club Annual Meeting in Arizona. The National Rifle Association had offered assistance with record-keeping, but some Club members left in protest. Then, the Museum of Natural History in New York City forced the Club to find another location for the triennial Big Game Awards. Through the ups and downs, Parker always felt that perhaps the Club’s most significant asset was its records program. “The Boone and Crockett Club’s records keeping is the gold standard and is recognized by all to the just that,” he wrote. “Whatever else we do, we must never dilute this effort and we must always be sure we don’t in any way let it tarnish.” He even made arrangements with G. E.’s computer department to computerize the Club’s trophy data.

Boone and Crockett Big Game Awards

At the 27th Big Game Awards in 2010, the Club launched its Generation Next Awards to honor hunters 16 and under who recently entered a trophy into Boone and Crockett Club's Awards Programs. Three years later, Jack Parker passed away. In 2013, Club members passed a resolution renaming the youth awards and event in honor of Jack Parker. Thanks to Parker’s generosity, attendees and trophy owners of the Jack Steele Parker Generation Next Awards could be eligible for travel stipends to the Big Game Awards. Every three years, on a Friday night at the Big Game Awards, the Club pays tribute to a room full of young hunters and the man who believed in hard work and conservation to benefit the next generation. 

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Member Spotlights

Boone and Crockett Club members have come from a cross-section of famous accomplished people whose lives and careers have written and recorded the history of this country since the late 19th Century. They have been naturalists, scientists, explorers and sportsmen, writers and academicians, artists, statesmen and politicians, generals, bankers, financiers, philanthropists, and industrialists. Their diversity of ideas and activities during their careers have made the Boone and Crockett Club rich in its fellowship and achievements. To read more member spotlights, just click here. 

PJ DelHomme writes and edits content from his home in western Montana. He runs Crazy Canyon Media and Crazy Canyon Journal.