David Parker

I left Chattanooga on Tuesday, September 22, 1959, to attend David Libscomb College in Nashville, from which I graduated on June 1, 1963.

I entered the law school at Vanderbilt
in August, 1963, from which I graduated on June 5, 1966.

I passed the bar exam that summer and started practicing law in Chattanooga on August 1, 1966, but was fired from my first law job in March, 1967 because they said that I did not work fast enough, that I would never make anything out of myself, and that I needed to find another line of work.

My first criminal case, however, went to the Tennessee Supreme Court and is reported at
West vs. State, 425 SW 2d 602 (1968). My dad told me that I needed to get more aggressive. An old man who worked in a yard down the street from where I grew up said that I would have made a better preacher than a lawyer.

I spent the next 18 months closing mortgage loans for the Provident Life & Accident Insurance Company in Chattanooga. I did not realize it at the time, but I was learning to handle large sums of money.

In October, 1968, I went to work for the State of Tennessee trying child abuse cases and sexual molestation cases. In that I felt I had to prove myself, I volunteered for the most dangerous cases, one of which was against the Ku Klux Klan in Sevier County in July, 1969. During that case, every time I turned on the ignition to my car, I would first count three, expecting it to blow up. None of the cases were easy, however, each one drawing hostile opposition. You had to come back carrying your shield or on top of it. Three years of that kind of work was two years beyond the norm, so I left the state in September, 1971 a toughened lawyer.

In September, 1971, GENESCO sent me to New York City, where, among other things, for the next four years I collected money from businesses that were fronts for organized crime in the Garment District in Manhatten and across the river in North Caldwell, New Jersey. In the Garment District, it was not whether you won or lost, but whether or not you survived and the first thing those of us who survived learned was to show respect. Over the years since, I have encountered a few wannabes, for whom there was not enough mustard to cover, and I always wanted to tell them that with their behavior, their life expectancy in the Garment District would be about one day.

Once I learned to lay my life on the line for what I was doing, I learned true courage,and fear no longer restrained me. One day in the Garment District, a man told me, "Parker, you fight like a madman. What does it take to stop you?" "Kill me, " I replied. "I am not leaving here without what I came for." I would go anywhere and felt that I could handle anything. I became mean, street smart and street tough in New York City, a far cry from the unseasoned young lawyer who left Chattanooga seven years earlier.

I joined a private practice in Lafayette, Tennessee, in June, 1975 and spent over two years in a rough and tumble country practice, learning how to practice law.

I opened my own office for the practice of law in Nashville in March, 1978, which I continue to do.

As a result of my years in New York City, many companies became clients of mine, and their work has taken me all over the United States in many different areas. I became a 'ramrod' for businesses needing legal representation in difficult places. One of the principal areas of my law practice today continues to be the collection of commercial debt.

I have two children, a son 42 and a daughter 40 and six grandchildren.

My wife Sandra and I live in a four story, 131-year-old Victorian house on 3/4's of an acre in the heart of downtown Nashville.

We will be at the Reunion in May.