By the time he had worked five years in a local manufacturing plant Tony Parson knew he wanted out. But there was the usual ballast of house payments, health insurance, groceries, children, more insurance. He would endure the plant for 17 more years, until 2006.
“He would be crying on Sunday night about having to go back to work the next day,” his wife, Marian, said.
Faced with similar circumstances, other men have sought refuge in all manner of self-destructive pastimes. In his time off Parson started working with his father, repairing boats.
Tony Parson, 55, grew up on Highway 50 not far from its intersection with Gun Shoot Road. He lives in a brick house he largely built about 200 yards behind his parents’ home — his dad died in 2010.
He now spends his workdays making whole fiberglass boats that have had bruising encounters with rocky river bottoms, stumps and concrete boat ramps. He calls his business The Fiberglass Shop.
Parson’s journey from factory worker to a skilled craftsman and business owner was fueled by a dogged persistence, and, as those whose boats he has revived will tell you, an insistence on perfection.
Words flow from Parson like molasses on a cold day. He is a bear of a man, usually with cigarette in hand. The syrup-like cadence of the voice seems well suited to his exacting, dusty work, which often requires long counseling sessions with fishermen about their busted boats.
As a fisherman himself, he is well suited for the task. “I always fished,” he said. “My dad brought me up fishing.”
About eight years before he gave notice at his factory job, Parson put up next to his home the metal building that serves as his shop. His father retired from Red’s Body Shop where he was doing some boat repair, and father and son started taking in work.
The two had different approaches. The father, says Parson, had a get-the-job-done mindset. The son was a perfectionist.
“They would butt heads,” Marian said.
The business was growing, but something nagged at Tony. “I still knew it wasn’t right,” he said.
He enrolled in a four-day workshop in Orlando, Florida. For Parson, the experience was revelatory. After the first day, he told his instructor he had learned enough, that he would be happy to pay for the entire course and go home.
The instructor assured his student there was much more to learn, so Parson stayed on.
An insistence on perfection? You don’t learn that in a workshop. Where did it come from?
“I really couldn’t tell you,” Parson said, who has been working since he was 14 or 15.
When pressed for an answer, Parson offers up the Millport, Alabama, builder Gary McManus for whom he worked as a teen. When he builds it, it’s gonna be right, Parson said.
He’s unapologetic about his insistence on perfection and says his shop isn’t the only place it manifests itself. “If I’m cutting grass and start at an angle, I want the whole yard (to be cut) at that angle.”
“It’s a little bit irritating,” Marian says.
Too, it can be difficult on employees, six of whom have come and gone over the years.
“I tell them I don’t care how hard you work, I want perfection,” Parson said. “My wife says you can’t find that anymore.”
His stepson Jeffery Davis, who works with him now, appears to be an exception. “He’s starting to get it,” Parson said.
Pro fisherman get it, too. Bass pro heavyweights like Paul Elais, Brent Chapman and New Hope native Justin Atkins bring their boats to Parson’s shop in the off-season.
At the time of this writing Parson has in his shop an old, faded outboard in which he’s replacing the floor. He thought the boat not worth the expense it would take to repair it and tried to talk the owner out of having the work done.
The boat owner told him to fix the boat. Parson then prevailed on a friend of the boat owner to persuade the owner to forgo the repairs. The friend called back. “Fix the boat,” he told Parson.
“They get liking the boat and they don’t want to get rid of it,” says Parson, who will pour his energies into the old boat and make it as close to perfect as he possibly can.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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