Peso Pay-Off

Kenneth Safford Parker, 52, president of the Parker Pen Co., is an internationalist-minded businessman. His father, the late George Safford Parker, an old-fashioned drummer who started the company in 1891, wanted young Kenneth to have the best of everything, sent him to Paris and Stuttgart for his prep-schooling. But Kenneth Parker has a much bigger reason for being an internationalist--Parker Pen does 40% of its business (last year's gross sales: $18.9 million) outside the U.S. market.

Parker's company is based in Janesville, Wis., a thriving small town (pop. 22,992) in the Chicago Tribune's isolationist heartland. Last week, Parker decided that it was about time his 2,300 employees and the other citizens of Janesville learned how important foreign trade is to them. In an ad in the Janesville Gazette, Parker announced that 40% of the Sept. 19 weekly payroll (total: $125,000) would be paid in Mexican pesos. Although Mexico represents only one-fourteenth of the company's foreign business, he chose pesos because they were easily obtained and stable in value.

Parker then got Janesville's merchants to agree to accept each peso at a fixed value of 20-c- (current exchange: 4.83 to the dollar), got the banks to agree to take them from the merchants at the same rate.

Since 250,000 pesos would circulate in Janesville, Parker figured that every man, woman & child would have some pass through his hands.

Parker warned his fellow townsmen that U.S. exports are 2 1/2 times greater than imports, that the rest of the world is running short of dollars with which to buy U.S. goods, that this "may well cause a serious recession in the U.S. economy." He hoped that his "Peso Pay-Off Day" would impress upon Janesville that "your Congressmen and Senators can go a long way toward averting this danger by reducing [import] barriers."

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