Richard Parker

George, Charles and Edward Parker are famous today as the Parker Brothers, producers of multi-million selling board games Monopoly, Cluedo, and even the Ouija board. Less famous is the youngest Parker brother, Richard.

Richard was born on September 28th, 1876, to parents George and Sarah (née Hegeman) after an unexpected pregnancy when Sarah was already in her forties. While Richard was still a boy, his brother George, senior by ten years, had already established a board game company which he ran first on his own, and subsequently with the two other Parker Brothers, Charles and Edward. They would test the puzzles and board games they produced by playing them as a family, and young Richard became the standard by which all the Parker Brothers games were tested.

During these board game sessions, Richard would often improvise rules that subsequently became adopted when the games reached publication, a practice that his brothers, playing on the family surname, would refer to as ‘Parking’. When Monopoly was created in 1935, the second corner square, where no rent is payable, was named as a nod to this family tradition.

Richard Parker, meanwhile, did not show much flair for the board games business. He took a job at a state automotive PAC, representing a fledgling lobby of car drivers who had nowhere to leave their vehicles other than the side of the roadway. Accidents were commonplace, and as motorists became an increasingly vocal minority, so liability for damage became an increasingly serious financial problem for city authorities. Parker headed a subcommittee that demanded certain areas in cities be given over to stationary motor vehicles. Remembering his childhood, he referred to these in internal communications as Parking zones. The influence of the PAC grew over the course of the 1920s and 30s, and though Parker himself died in 1932, the term he created survived.

The origin of the term, though, in the name of a relatively junior policy lobbying clerk, was soon forgotten. Post-war houses were advertised as having ‘Off-Street Parking’, and the stationary gear in automatic cars was abbreviated to ‘Park’. Today, Richard’s contribution to the world of motoring is only recalled in the addition of a stylised image of a car to that famous Monopoly corner square.