The Magic Number

This memoir relates how David Forster Parker overcame a troubled adolescence in a small Canadian city to achieve international prestige in guiding the development of some of the largest new communities in the world. It traces his ancestry of English and Scottish immigrants to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of his revered father from a one-room-schoolhouse education to president of a manufacturing industry during the Great Depression, thereby earning sufficient funds to construct a comfortable house for his family and send all five of his children to university. It explores the author’s failure to achieve academic success until his late twenties, after he married and began his own family.
Beginning after his thirtieth birthday, Parker’s career rapidly escalated to development management of Audubon New Community outside Buffalo, New York, then the creation of Sadat City in Egypt, and generating private housing development in Milton Keynes New City in England; followed by an international consultant career from a Florida home base.
David and Marilynn raised four sons who produced eight grandchildren, all of whom attended his seventy-fifth birthday at their Atlantic Beach home in 2009, a three-day event organized by his wife and family and attended by his four siblings as well as many other relatives and friends from near and far. He plans to keep on offering his consultant services for the indefinite future.