The Colonel (6 page)

The Holland America Line has no record of Andre van Kuijk, as either a crew member or a passenger. Could he have been hired on a temporary basis, which prevented his name from showing up on the
roster? Or had he embellished his plan to his uncle, claiming to work for the distinguished passenger line when he knew he would cross the ocean on a far less glamorous tramper or freighter?

Years later, after Andre had become Tom Parker, he told his friend Connie B. Gay, the country show promoter, that he had sneaked into America through Canada. And, indeed, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
was Holland America Line’s last port of call before the great ships arrived in the United States and docked at Hoboken, New Jersey.

Yet there’s another reason Andre van Kuijk’s name might not have
shown up on the Holland America Line crew roster, one the family wholeheartedly believes to be
true: Andre may have made his voyage not as a crew member, but as a stowaway.

Might a boy as large as Andre—and one who so loved to eat—really have risked life and limb, crammed in a tiny hole for a two-week crossing to America? Certainly he could have easily
found his way on to the ship if he were working for the Holland America Line. But even if he weren’t an employee, sneaking aboard wouldn’t have been difficult. The docks were not
particularly secure, and Andre would have welcomed the challenge.

Still, there was the problem of going through customs and immigration without papers, since as a minor he was not yet eligible for a Dutch passport without his guardian’s signature. But it
is possible that he simply greased the right palm, or that he got off the ship in Nova Scotia and made his way into the United States either through the Canadian mainland or directly by smaller
boat.

Or there is a third possibility, and the most plausible. If Andre had attached himself to a family on board the big passenger ship—perhaps a Dutch family who lived in America—they
could have easily vouched for a “misplaced” passport.

Whether that actually happened, Andre somehow managed to ingratiate himself into a Dutch family who lived in Hoboken, where the Holland America Line docked. He moved in with them, and seemed to
take root in their living room.

Hoboken, a working-class town on the Hudson River, was “the roughest spot in the United States” in the late ’20s and early ’30s, according to the
city’s most famous son, Frank Sinatra. That was precisely the time when Andre van Kuijk saw it as his introduction to America. But unlike Sinatra, who grew up on the hard side of a tough
town, Andre had the good fortune to be bunking with well-to-do folks.

His new family took a shine to the big Dutch kid who knew little English and almost never left the house. In many ways the arrangement was precisely as it had been with his uncle in Rotterdam.
The New Jersey family even had a daughter, although unlike Andre’s cousin, she was still a child, only ten. As he had done with the Ponsies, he spent an inordinate amount of time with them
because he didn’t know the territory, and because he could count on them for regular meals. The teen was perfecting the rudiments of sponging—a skill he would raise to a fine art.

But where before he had kept at least some of his ties to his Breda family, he now refused to write to anyone in Holland, an odd turn of events for a boy who had carted
presents home and written frequently to his mother in the months just before his departure. It was as if he had been reborn in the womblike hold of the big passenger ship.

The family pressured Andre to let everyone know that he was all right. But he had no interest in that, and finally just gave them the Ponsies’ address, rather than his mother’s, so
they could do the job for him. The mothers of his adopted families began a spirited correspondence, and while the letters disappeared in the shuffle of time, Marie Ponsie remembered some of their
contents.

“Dries must have been talking about me, because the woman wrote, ‘I hear you have a nice daughter; could she come to America, too?’ I guess the woman was homesick and missed
Holland. That must have been why she let Dries in.”

But before any plans for Marie’s visit could be arranged, Andre simply vanished. One day he had been the family’s adored surrogate son, and the next day, it was as if he had never
existed. Whether Andre felt they were becoming too attached and dependent on him, or if it was simply time to go and he didn’t know how to end the relationship, he disappeared. The New Jersey
family was more concerned about his welfare than angry that they had been forsaken.

The woman sent passionate letters across the seas to the Ponsies. “Have you heard from him? Do you know where he might have gone?” She herself suspected the U.S. Army, because he has
occasionally talked of that. But back in Holland, they thought it more likely that he might have tried to join a circus.

Andre had not joined a circus, but he had hooked up with a different kind of traveling show—Chautauqua, at the time a phenomenally popular movement for education, culture, and
entertainment. By 1926, when he went to work for the Des Moines, Iowa–based booking agency - Traver’s Chautauqua Shows, the Chautauqua phenomenon was fading—so much so that the
previous year, George W. Traver’s partner Ray Newton left the company to try to bond with the remaining outfits as United Chautauquas. Traver, meanwhile, continued to call his outfit a
Chautauqua, but his three-railroad-car operation was more like a carnival, replete with midway. Since carnivals were banned in many towns and considered a corruptive plague on the morals of the
young, he made
sure to hang on to enough of the old Chautauqua staples to stay in business.

At its height, Chautauqua offered escape in every dramatic style from Shakespeare to Broadway, and featured a staggering variety of talent: teachers, preachers, scientists, explorers,
politicians, singers, yodelers, whistlers, dancers, pianists, accordionists, humorists, jugglers, magicians, opera stars, and Hawaiian vocal groups. On the Traver’s show, however, the
“Hawaiians” were thoroughly bogus. The show’s general agent, L. Harvey “Doc” Cann, called it a Hawaiian show because the banners for such an act were the only ones not
in use, and achieved his effect by throwing together a Salvation Army bass drum, a couple of dark-skinned Caucasians, and a palm frond.

On the legitimate side of the operation, two programs in particular reminded Andre of home. The first was “chalk talks,” given by artists who used large blackboards to explain how
they created sculpture or other visual art. While this was similar to “movies” Andre had put on for his brothers and sisters, the animal acts pleased him more, since they featured
performing canines like Wonder Dog, a German shepherd who demonstrated feats of mathematical genius.

Just exactly what position Andre filled on Traver’s Chautauqua is anyone’s guess. At the start, he may have simply worked with the tent crew, helping to raise the huge brown canvas
as he had back in Breda, perhaps later migrating into food concessions, or distributing advertising cards while gleaning more about the marketing side of the business.

Whatever he did, the Chautauqua experience was a wonderful introduction to small-town America, especially for a lad who was just learning English and too often answered “Ja, ja” when
asked a question.

For Andre, the only trouble with Chautauqua was that it was strictly a summer event. In the winter, he hoboed around the country, getting to know the various hobo jungles and the crusty old
vagabond characters. He learned their lingo and their habit of carving the face of a smiling cat on the fence post outside a home where they found kindness and nourishment, alerting fellow
travelers that a generous and compassionate “touch” lived within. And he loved their wild freedom, later bragging to his family that he’d hung under trains, risking all for a free
ride and a chance to see the whole of America.

Andre’s hobo experience ultimately left two indelible imprints: a romantic fondness for slumgullion, a boiled meat stew that hobos prepared in a large pot on an open fire, and a respect
and sentimentality for hobos. In the 1950s, when Elvis Presley was a rising Hollywood star, Parker cajoled
the studio commissary to make up dozens of sandwiches, which he took
to the hobo hangouts at the Los Angeles train stops.

But on this, his first trip to the United States, he was on the receiving end of charity more often than not. When he reached Los Angeles, he had no compunction about taking sustenance at the
Midnight Mission. There, after vowing to welcome Christ into his life, he would repeat a religious mantra and be rewarded with a hot meal and a hard bed.

Years later, he would tell the story and end it with a funny punch line: “If you’re going to stay at the Midnight Mission, be sure you get there by seven o’clock.” It was
true—the dinner hour was from five-thirty to six, and the beds were likely filled by seven. But the statement also served as a metaphor for his deeper beliefs—that to succeed, you had
to stay one step ahead of everybody else, know how to manipulate the system, and dig for everything you got.

Nonetheless, to everyone’s surprise, Andre showed up back in Holland on his mother’s birthday, September 2, 1927, after being gone nearly a year and a half. Had he saved his second
summer’s wages from Chautauqua and bought a third-class ticket home, as his sister Nel believes? Or had he simply been caught and deported, even though the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service has no record of it?

However he made passage back, he timed his arrival in Breda for nine - o’clock in the evening, when the family had gathered for Maria’s celebration. Stylishly dressed in an American
suit and long, striped tie, his arms full of presents for all, he knocked on the door of the little Boschstraat house. At eighteen, Andre seemed every inch the successful prodigal son. But no
matter how hard the family begged and pleaded, there was one thing he wouldn’t talk about: exactly what he had been doing in America.

For the next two weeks, he seemed happy to be home. When his eldest sister, Adriana, married a mechanic named Antonius H. W. “Toon” van Gurp on September 15, Andre was the life of
the party.

Demonstrating both the spirit and the theatrics of Chautauqua, he jumped up on a table, threw his arms out like an experienced orator, and launched into a poem about a smart but lazy lad who
squandered his future and ended up as a bellhop. From there, he danced a funny, one-legged jig. And then he finished entertaining the crowd with a short concert of songs, including one that was so
risqué that members of the family stole a sideways glance at Maria.

But within a month his mood had darkened again. Breda was no longer the place of his youth. Many of his favorite haunts had been torn
down. He kept to himself, rarely
looking up his old friends Cees Frijters and Karel Freijssen. For a young man who had tasted the excitement of New York, tent Chautauqua, and hanging under trains, Breda was sorely lacking.

And as Europe was sliding toward a depression, the odd jobs were more difficult to come by. According to his sister Nel, he served a short stint with the river police during this time.

Finally, he took a job with a shipping company called Huysers on the Prinsenkade, loading and unloading barges on the waterfront. Huysers, later the maker of Jansen boats and automobiles, was an
old customer of van Gend en Loos, and Andre probably got his job by reminding the owner of the days when he and his father had delivered the company’s packages. Now he would be doing the same
thing, only carrying heavier packing cases and parcels on and off the boats in numbing repetition—and he had to be at work at 6:00
A.M
.

Andre wouldn’t have tolerated such a job before his trip to America, but now he saw it as a means to an end. Huysers also owned the
Stad Breda,
which made a daily run between
Breda and Rotterdam, and as soon as the ship needed a deckhand, Andre would arrange for the transfer.

When the day came, he moved back to the port city, but instead of living with his uncle, he opted for a bunk at Huysers’s rough-and-tumble employee hostel on the top floor of the office.
He stored his good clothes and a few personal belongings in a locked trunk, which he positioned near his cot.

Andre had no trust for the sailors, who knew better than to invite him for a night of drinking, or offer to introduce him to a girl. Now, at nearly twenty, he had turned into a good-looking,
bright-eyed lad with a slim face and an impish smile. At times, he could look almost sensual, like a dreamy young poet. The fact that he’d rather take long walks by himself than spend the
evening in the company of a pretty girl was the subject of comment among the others.

Then one day in May 1929, Andre failed to show up for work. His fellow crewmen thought he was just late, or maybe sick. But Andre would never step foot on the boat again. Somehow, at some time,
he had quietly slipped away. No one seemed to know why, or where he had gone.

Two months later, in July, Huysers returned Andre’s trunk to Maria van Kuijk’s house on Boschstraat. The family opened it to find three of his treasured suits, a rosary, a Bible, his
identification papers, and a small purse containing what appeared to be his savings. He had taken nothing
with him but two shirts and two pairs of undershorts. Why had the boy
who so adored dressing up left behind his expensive clothes? Even more perplexing, why had someone who so valued money abandoned his hard-earned gains, especially if he was planning to move halfway
around the world? He had even left behind his unopened birthday presents, which the family had sent for his special day in June.

On one of his last trips home to Breda, he had dropped by Adriana and Toon’s upstairs apartment on the Haagdijk. “I remember it like yesterday,” Adriana said nearly fifty years
later. “We were standing in the kitchen. He gave my little son, who was just born, a hand, and then left for Rotterdam.”

It was a long time before the family heard from him again.

Finally, a missive arrived, written in English, simply saying their brother had gone away. The family was bewildered. And he had signed it with the most quizzical name: Andre/Tom Parker.