BY TERI R. WILLIAMS | PHOTOS BY LOGIC4DESIGN
Hold dear
the moments
Entrepreneur, adventurer, poet, father, husband, lover of life–Jack
Parson has been them all. Though there were good times and bad,
Jack embraces each of life's moments as a growing experience.
The notebooks on the small kitchen table were filled with handwritten lines of
poetry. Eighty-seven -year-old Jack Parson, the original owner of Captain’s
Corner, The Seawinder, and The Tree House, flipped through pages in search of
a recent poem he had written about his father. For the entrepreneur, poetry had
become his way of processing the weight of grief after losing his wife of fifty-five
years. He held the notebook open and slid it across the table to me. After a brief pause, Jack
said, “I’ve come to understand that I lived a charmed life. Even disaster turned out good.”
But the beginning of the story I found myself swept into was far from charmed.
Jack doesn’t know to this day if his mother and his father were ever married. “My
father’s name was E. Harris Parson. It was never mentioned in our house, but I found it in
a scrapbook that belonged to my mother.” Jack’s mother’s
name was Frances Gibson.
What Jack did know came from bits and pieces of
conversations he gathered from his mother’s family. “My
father was a good bit older than my mother and making
plenty of money,” said Jack. “It was during prohibition.
My father’s life was very different from the way my
mother was raised. She was the baby, the youngest of five.
She probably thought his life was something she wanted
when they first met.” As far as Jack knew, his father was
running liquor from South America, playing the slots, and
living the ‘fast life.’ “Eventually, he was caught by the Feds
and his boat confiscated,” said Jack. “I think everything
fell apart for him at the same time. I think they were both
victims, in a way, of their times.”
In 1932, Jack’s grandfather and his uncles went down
to St. Augustine, Florida, and brought his mother home to
Nicholls, Georgia–a small community with a population of
about 100. She was obviously pregnant because that was
also the year Jack was born. “My mother went to work,
and my grandmother raised me. Her name was Harriet B.
Gibson, but everyone called her Hattie.” Except Jack. “I
called her Mama, and she was my mother.”
When Jack was three-years-old, his real mother was
killed in a car accident. “She was going around some
cars and hit a truck head on.” Tragedy hit again only two
years later with the death of Jack’s grandfather Clarance
Gibson.
By the age of eight, Jack was making enough money
to buy himself an RC Cola and a bag of Tom’s peanuts
HOMETOWN LIVING AT I TS BEST 45