Up and Out

"I have persisted in being what I am," says Baltimore's Henry G. Parks Jr. That is why Parks years ago rejected the advice of a counselor at Ohio State's College of Commerce, who urged him: "Go to South America, where you will have a real chance." Parks, a strapping 6-ft. 3-in. man, felt that he could better make his way in U.S. business--even though he is a Negro. Parks was right; he went on to found H. G. Parks Inc., a sausagemaking firm that had 1968 sales of $6,128,481 and profits of $243,812. Last week H. G. Parks offered its shares to the public for the first time, overnight becoming one of the largest publicly-owned black firms in the U.S.

The offering of 220,000 shares at $8 each was quickly oversubscribed, and shares rose to about $12.50 by week's end. New capital will enable Parks to expand his model sausage factory in Baltimore and to fatten his rather limited product line. About 12,000 stores on the East Coast from Virginia northward market Parks pork sausages and scrapple. Soon to come are quick-cooking sausages, beef sausages, and what Parks calls "the whole line of Southern foods, such as barbecued anything."

Cold Shoulder. Atlanta-born Parks grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a wine steward, his mother a some time domestic servant. After working his way through Ohio State ('39); he joined the Pabst Brewing Co. and later headed a small group of Negro salesmen who cultivated ghetto markets for the firm. After settling in Baltimore in 1944, he started the sausage firm in 1951. Just what he did during the years between is a bit vague.

Parks has long been a friend of William L. Adams, sometimes known as Little Willie, whom the Senate Crime Investigating Committee in 1951 named as Baltimore's top operator of the numbers games. Little Willie is a director of the sausage company, and until last week he and Parks each owned 44% of its shares; now each has 26%--a controlling majority between them. If Parks had some rather unusual financing in his earlier years, that was possibly due to the fact that he was cold-shouldered by white bankers.

Spicy Enough. In the beginning, Parks and two employees started grinding out sausages in an old Baltimore dairy. Word quickly spread through the ghetto grapevine that the manufacturer was a black man, and Negroes supported him at the supermarket counters. At present, Parks sells mostly to white people, and about 15% of his employees are white. "I work very hard to run a business, and not a Negro business," says Parks, who has been elected to a second term as a city councilman from a Baltimore Negro district.

Parks believes that he will benefit from the tendency of people to "buy up, and buy out." By "up" he means higher quality, and by "out" foreign foods like Mexican and Chinese. Parks feels that his products are spicy enough to ride the fringes of the foreign trend. To insure their quality, the boss himself acts as an official taster. Recently he solved one executive problem by making a rather deft change. Parents and even schoolchildren had written in to complain about the company's shrill radio spot ads, in which a child cries, "More Parks Sausages, Mom!" That has since been modified to "More Parks Sausages, Mom--please!"

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