ROBERT R. ‘BOB’ BUSHMAN
Owner of Mann & Parker Lumber Co., 93
Robert R. “Bob” Bushman, owner of Mann & Parker Lumber Co., an importer and distributor of hardwoods, who was also the quintessential Orioles, Colts and golf fan, died Sunday of the coronavirus at his Fairhaven retirement community home in Sykesville. The former Towson and Monkton resident was 93.
“Robert R. Bushman Sr. was known affectionately as ‘ Mr. B,’ not just as employer, company owner or the boss. He was far more to so many,” wrote Calvin D. Huntzinger, of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, a forester, who has been a sales representative since 1983, in an email.
“A leader, mentor, friend, father figure, devoted husband and father. He didn’t demand respect, he earned it,” Mr. Huntzinger wrote. “He instilled the merits of hard work and dedication to the tasks at hand, professionally and personally. A true professional is a lover of the work. That was Mr. B.”
Robert Roy Bushman, son of Herman Bushman, a dairy industry worker, and his wife, Barbara Bushman, a homemaker, was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin.
An accomplished athlete in his youth, Mr. Bushman was a skier and ski jumper and winner of many competitions and distance titles. His leadership abilities became apparent early in his life when he was elected president in 1944 of the Appleton Junior Ski Club.
Mr. Bushman became a lifelong skier and enjoyed family skiing vacations to Mount Snow in Vermont and Ski Roundtop in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, family members said.
After graduating in 1945 from St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Neenah, Wisconsin, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin where he studied forestry until 1947, when he transferred to Michigan State College, now Michigan State University, in East Lansing, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1949 in the discipline. Family members said he was “exceptionally proud of his Spartan heritage,” which is the nickname for MSU’s athletic teams.
From 1949 to 1952, Mr. Bushman was a forester with the Maryland Department of Forests, Parks and Wildlife, and from 1952 was the assistant manager of a small forest products company in Baltimore, while at the time serving as a consulting forester to landowners throughout the state.
In 1956, Mr. Bushman went to work as general manager of Mann and Parker Lumber Co., also known as M& P, which was founded in 1902 by Stephen S. Mann and Frank A. Parker and located downtown on the waterfront. A casualty of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, the firm later relocated to a site at Eden and Aliceanna streets in Fells Point.
Mr. Bushman purchased the business later in 1956 from the widows of its founders.
The firm specialized in such woods as “aformosia, alerce, andiroba, angelique, apitong, avodire, banak, benge, bubinga, cocobolla, emeri, iroko, keruing, lignum vitae, limba, mansonia, meranti, obeche, oleo, paldao, paumarfim, prima vera, ramin, sajo, sande, virola wawa.
“The words are not part of some ritual incantation. They are merely product names from the catalog of the Mann and Parker Lumber Company, importer and distributor of hardwoods,’ The Sun reported in a 1976 profile of Mr. Bushman and his business.
“Aformosia, for example, is a West African substitute for teak. Keruing, from Malaya, is used for truck floors. Lignum vitae is a green, waxy, very hard wood from the West Indies and Central America used for bearing or bushing blocks for the lining of stern tubes of steamship propeller shafts,” The Sun reported.
The company’s main customers included manufacturers of all sizes such as cabinetmakers, architectural millwork firms and furniture factories.
Mr. Bushman met and fell in love with the former Rosa Lorine “Honey” Protzman, the daughter of one of his customers, whom he married in 1957.
“Some years later, Bob learned that