Roy Parker

Charles LeRoy Parker
“Pinball Art Pioneer” By Larry Bieza & the Parker Estate

What could be better than to have a lifelong Chicago resident create the art that helped make Chicago the coin-op capital of the world? Charles Leroy (Roy) Parker was born on November 27, 1899. His childhood love of the circus would carry into his later life on innumerable pinball backglasses. After high school his interest in art took him to study fine art at Chicago Art Institute. After graduation from the Institute he obtained a job with the General Outdoor Advertising Company. He worked with them for a number of years painting billboards. He was doing well enough to buy a house, which he did in 1923, on North Kelso Avenue. On the second floor of the house he set up a studio, which he would move to the basement in the heat of summer. With Roy doing billboards, and his wife working as a teacher, the family (two sons) lived relatively well during the depression years. In the mid 1930’s he started working for *Reproduction Graphics. They were silk screeners who had the Gottlieb account. After 2 fires finally put them out of business Roy moved over to Advertising Posters * Owned by Tom Grant. Advertising Posters was the main producer of backglasses for the pinball industry. The art director was George Molentin, famous for doing most of the Williams pinball artwork in the 1940’s to 1960’s.___

As backglasses on pinball games became more popular in the mid 1930’s, Roy handled the art for this “new thing”. Many of these early pinballs were payout games that fell into disfavor as evil gambling devices. Because of this, pinball had gained a bad reputation as a backroom type game. This negativity didn’t affect Roy however, he was a positive sort and happy to be associated with the industry. He even owned and kept games that he had done the artwork on at home. Roy not only did the line art for the glasses he worked on, but did all the coloring on them as well. Roy handled artwork away from pinballs. In the late 30’s-early 40’s, Roy did the artwork on all the Bally console-type slot machines. During the war years, 1942-1946, the coin-op industry came to a virtual halt, as the factories geared up for war production.

During this period Roy shifted his labors to war posters, some of which won awards from the government. As the war rolled on, Roy also spent time on the artistic reproduction of restaurant images, which were then put on Chromolitho postcards.

After the war, with his sons grown and out of the house, Roy and his wife moved to the fashionable town of Lincolnwood, outside of Chicago. Roy again had a studio at the new house but did most of this work at the company offices. Dave Gottlieb greatly appreciated Roy’s abilities and requested his artwork be on all Gottlieb games. Roy’s work wasn’t only on Gottlieb games however, he produced artwork for many other companies including Chicago Coin, Genco, Keeney, and Marvel. Roy was in his heyday in the 1950’s, developing the classic “Parker Girl” look. Since it was mainly men playing pinball, they might as well have beautiful women to look at, right? Well Roy took care of that, in spades. Roy had a great sense of humor also, as there was almost always something funny happening on a Parker backglass. Sadly, after a reduced artwork output in 1963-64, Roy succumbed to cancer on December 18, 1965. But in creating artwork for many hundreds of games, he was one of the pioneers in the industry, blazing the trail for pinball artwork that still carries on to this day.