TO a first-time visitor, the town of Breda, Holland, is a picture postcard of European charm and character. The prettiest metropolis in Noord-Brabant, Holland’s largest province, which stretches from Zeeland, a large Delta area opening on the North Sea, to within three miles of the German border, Breda was originally built as a strategic fortress at the convergence of the Mark and the Aa Rivers. The town now boasts all the ultramodern facilities as a commercial and industrial center, but the remnants of the wall that surrounded the city at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the glassy canals that run all through the town, and the old, ornate architectural façades serve as reminders of its past.
Today, the van Gend en Loos building at Veemarktstraat 66, for example, houses an upscale menswear shop, Joep Krusemeyer Herenmode. In the late 1980s, the structure was targeted for demolition, but saved because of its historic significance. Having survived some three hundred years, the building remains one of the six oldest in Breda. It was here that the man who would later call himself Colonel Tom Parker was born.
Like so much of Breda, the row-house neighborhood is a mix of old and new. Five shops down from the former van Gend en Loos building, at Veemarktstraat 52/54, there’s the Spronk Muziekhandel, a record shop whose window front features a sticker with a likeness of Elvis Presley and the dates 1977–1997, a reference to the twentieth anniversary of the - singer’s death.
Little has actually changed here for centuries. On the Grote Markt, the the cobblestone square that serves as the vibrant focus of life in this easygoing town of some 130,000, the handsome old buildings that have housed everything from hay markets to municipal offices since Breda was granted its city charter in 1252 are still in use, as is the Grote Kerk, the impressive Gothic church with its openwork gables, crocket spires, and a baroque onion-shaped dome ornamenting its tower.
The church, which took 125 years to build and dominates the town, has stood above the Grote Markt since the thirteenth century, a silent witness to Breda’s succession of feudal rulers from 1250, its Spanish conquest in 1591 and 1625, and its French domination from 1793 to 1813. Not far away, atop the Kasteelplein, where Catholics once tortured the Protestants and then burned them at the stake, looms the Kasteel, Breda’s citadel, built in 1536. Today, it houses the Koninklijke Militaire Academie, or Royal Military Academy.
The military tradition of Breda, an army city where the Royal Dutch Indian Army, or Koninklijk Nederlands-Indies Leger, established their headquarters—and where, as a soldier, René Descartes first became interested in math—has long been a strong and honorable source of pride. And so, in 1887, when Adam van Kuijk was drafted into the Dutch army as a private in the 3rd Regiment of the Field Artillery, and stationed at the Seelig Barracks in Breda, the twenty-one-year-old was joining a noble and historic tradition.
The son of a working man—probably a fisherman—named Andreas van Kuijk, who hailed from Enkhuizen, about forty miles north of Amsterdam, Adam, born May 7, 1866, had grown up in the village of Raamsdonksveer, twelve miles north of Breda.
This particular branch of the van Kuijks (or van Kuyks) could perhaps trace their ancestors back to the Middle Ages, when they were a wealthy, aristocratic, ruling-class family, for more than a hundred years (from 1295 to 1428), governing the small town of Hoogstraten.
Later, when the region split in two, the southern part was assimilated into Belgium. The van Kuijks could not sustain their rule in the new political geography, and fled fifteen miles due north to the town of Breda. Their ancestors forever claimed to be related to the lords of Hoogstraten, and never forgot their sense of loss, or their sense of entitlement—no matter how tenuous it might have been.
Adam van Kuijk had joined the army for a twelve-year term. His artillery unit relied upon horse-drawn gun carriages, and Adam found he had a natural affinity for tending horses. When he was discharged in 1899, he stayed in Breda and took a job as livery man for the freight and package handling firm van Gend en Loos, the UPS of Holland. Although he had just spent a dozen years in army attire, Adam was happy to don the heavy, dark, double-breasted van Gend en Loos uniform, with its shiny brass buttons and regulation cap.
Van Gend en Loos had established their offices at 66 Veemarkstraat, a prestigious main thoroughfare in town. The company used the rear of the building to stable its ten draft horses and offered an apartment above the stables for the livery man and family.
As it happened, Adam van Kuijk did, indeed, have a family on the way. The mustachioed army man was not especially comely. He wore a perpetually stern, if not sour expression, his cheeks sunk in, his dark eyes seemed drilled in his head, and he carried the gene for the van Kuijk ear (the left one stuck out almost at a right angle), which he was destined to pass on to his first two children. His personality—rigid, disciplined, and unyielding—was also not the type to turn the head of the opposite sex, nor was his stiff, humorless voice. But while still in the service, he had begun dating Maria Elisabeth Ponsie, a woman ten years his junior. The youngest of eight children, she was also from Raamdonksveer, born September 2, 1876, the daughter of freewheeling merchants.
Whether the couple got caught up in the Christmas spirit, or in ringing in the twentieth century, sometime in December 1899, Maria conceived a child. Adam and Maria were Catholic, as were most people in southern Holland, and allowing few outlets beyond the pale of the church, their Catholicism was far more strict than the Catholicism practiced in America. With the attending guilt and sense of propriety, especially as Maria was beginning to show by springtime, the couple married on May 10, 1900. Their son, Josephus Andreas Johannes, also called Joseph, or Sjef, was born four months after the wedding, on September 19.
By the time of Sjef’s birth, Adam and Maria had taken up residence in the bovenhuis, or living quarters above the stables, and as part of the marriage agreement, her parents, Johannes and Maria Reinenberg Ponsie, had moved in with them. The accommodations were snug: the area had a living room and a great room—the newlyweds slept in one, and the Ponsies in the other—with a loft that would double as the children’s bedroom.
Maria’s parents, Johannes and Maria, could not have been more different from Adam van Kuijk, except for their shared Catholicism. The Ponsies were parlevinkers, floating peddlers who traveled Holland’s intricate river and canal system, selling and trading household goods from their barge to other travelers on the water.
Today, the family recalls that the Ponsies also owned a small store in Raamsdonksveer with the colorful name of A Thousand and One Things Bazaar. It offered both new and used items, even new Bible covers and special funeral mass fronts, which the Ponsies fashioned out of black crepe paper.
The tinker and his wife peddled these to the area churches, many of which never guessed that the books inside were the very ones they had earlier discarded. But the store generated only a struggling income, so when the weather kept the Ponsies off the waterways, Johannes loaded up a horse and wagon and took his wares to the farmers of the surrounding regions.
But the Ponsies couldn’t ignore their greater wanderlust, preferring the itinerant life, drifting from village market to town fair, assimilating themselves into the merry hubhub of organ grinders and jugglers.
By the time Adam and Maria married, Johannes Ponsie was seventy years old and in poor health. The newlyweds welcomed him to their home with the understanding that Johannes and his wife would help with baby Sjef and the other children as they came along.
The van Kuijk family would expand rapidly. On March 31, 1902, Adriana Maria, also called Sjaan, was born. As the eldest girl, she would always be a “second mother” to her siblings. The following year, the van Kuijks welcomed Johannes Wilhelmus, but the boy would not live four months.
Adam and Maria planned quickly for another child, and Maria Wilhelmina, known as Marie, arrived before the year was out, on November 12, 1904. But tragedy befell the couple again with the birth of Johanna Huberdina, called Anneke, on July 22, 1906. She, too, would die in infancy. As before, the van Kuijks rushed to produce another baby, and Petronella Johanna, known as Nel, was born September 23, 1907.
Given their recent pattern of infant deaths, the family was anxious about the health of their seventh child, whom they would name Andreas Cornelis, after Adam’s father and his friend Cornelis Roovers, a cobbler who accompanied Adam to register the birth at the Burgerlijke Stand in the town hall.
In the year 1909, the 28th of June, has appeared before us, civil servant of the county of Breda: Adam van Kuijk, age 33, profession: deliveryman, residing in Breda, who gave notice of the fact that Maria Elisabeth Ponsie, without profession, residing in Breda, his wife, on the 26th of June of this year, at 11 hours in the afternoon in this country has given birth to a child of the male sex, which child will have the names of Andreas Cornelis. This notice has been given in the presence of Hendrikus Rogiers, age 26, profession: smith, and of Cornelis Roovers, age 22, profession: shoemaker, both residing within this county.
Dries, as the family nicknamed their fifth living child, had his mother’s clear blue eyes and was robust and energetic almost from birth. Much to the van Kuijks’ relief, his delivery, at home above the stables, was unremarkable.
As the first surviving male child in nine years, Dries was doted on by his three older sisters. They dressed the infant like a doll and delighted in taking him for carriage strolls in nearby Valkenburg Park, and around the Begijnhof, a cheerful group of sixteenth-century convent houses occupied by the lay order of Begijnen nuns.
As he grew to a toddler, Dries appeared to be a normal and even gregarious boy in every way. But as he got older, he displayed an unusual characteristic: he slept with his eyes open and was known as the family sleepwalker. The family had to lock the doors to keep him from venturing outside in the small hours of the morning, but even that did not always deter him. One day, a neighbor, Mrs. van Overbeek, came to inform his mother that Dries had been standing in the street in the middle of the night, apparently asleep.
From the beginning, Dries was more a Ponsie than a van Kuijk. He had the Ponsie sense of humor, playfulness, and appreciation of fun, and their optimism, imagination, and daring. And in addition to his mother’s eyes, he possessed her small, taut mouth (if his father’s thick bottom lip), the set of her nose, her soft chin line, and her tendency toward a general fleshiness, a characteristic of the robust Ponsie family. His genetic coding dictated that by the time he reached his teens, Dries would thicken in the hips and waist in an almost womanly fashion.
Since the child spent so much time in the company of women, he looked forward to his visits at the gasthuis with Grandfather Ponsie. The old man was always quick with a funny story of one kind or another, especially about the gypsy life, the hustle, bustle, and magic of the little fairs, and the thrill of closing a sale to people who didn’t want, and - couldn’t use, a wooden puppet with carved hands, or another piece of chipped crockery or tin jewelry. It was all in the presentation, Grandfather Ponsie made clear. And if you had to be just a little cunning—if you sometimes had to trick people into thinking they needed something they - didn’t—well, everyone was the better for it.
And despite the grandfather’s rootlessness, the ancestral Ponsies, like the van Kuijks in the Middle Ages, had been people of means, he told the boy. Originally from France, they had lost their status and bearing when they fled to Holland during the Revolution. But they were well-mannered people, elitists who appreciated the best of everything and dressed in finery—even gloves!
The latter story had a profound effect on the child, for as Marie Gort–van Kuijk, Dries’s sister, remembers, “Dries was very keen on his looks, and he paid a lot of attention to his clothes. When he got a little older, he would really dress up. He was a gentleman, but he could look down on people a little bit. He thought he was just better.”
All this talk about traveling and freedom and fine clothes—and most of all being somebody—swirled around in the boy’s head. He would come home from visiting his grandfather and soon find himself stuck between his dreams of the Ponsies’ independence and nomadic lifestyle, and his father’s stern sense of order, discipline, and obligation.
Adam, who performed his professional duties with military precision, hoped Dries might become a soldier like him, if for no other reason than the guarantee of work in the city. But Dries, who had a difficult time taking orders from anyone, showed little interest in soldiering.
In Adam’s time, the father and the priest were law in Holland, and a clash between this particular father and son was inevitable, especially since Adam van Kuijk, who considered humility a virtue, was not one to indulge his children. He went to church daily, and saw to it that Dries, who rankled against regular church attendance, became a mass server. The van Kuijks worshiped at various churches in the area, primarily at the St. Josefkerk, situated next to the town brewery, and the Antoniuskerk, in the St. Janstraat.
According to the Wijkregister, or the neighborhood register kept by their priest, the van Kuijk children “performed their religious duties as they should in the period 1916–1924—all of them received the Holy Communion and were confirmed.”
But Adam van Kuijk stayed close to his God for reasons other than strict Catholic obeisance. When Dries was about six, Adam was diagnosed with diabetes, and his kidneys had begun to fail. A frequent patient at the Catholic St. Ignatius Hospital, Adam feared he would not live long, but if Dries helped him with the horses and package delivery, the father might be able to conserve his strength.
Yet while Dries shared Adam’s love of animals, he hadn’t his father’s sense of regimented order. Once the boy took several of the horses to Hendrikus Rogiers’s blacksmith shop and on the return trip let them go to see if they could find their way home. Such boyish pranks did little to bolster Adam’s waning health.
Still, Adam did not let his illness get in the way of duty. He rose each morning at five o’clock, readied the horses, and delivered packages until 7:00 or 8:00 A.M., when he returned home for breakfast. If he found the boys still in bed at that late hour—and Dries often was—he reddened in the face, yanked the child from his sleep, and beat him with a stick for bad children that he kept behind the door.
“When they had done serious wrong,” remembers Marie, her father’s favorite child, “they got serious punishment. Our parents wanted the boys to have a better job than our father had, to make easier money and not have to work so hard.”
The family was poor, but it was not by any means considered low-class. Maria van Kuijk took great pride in the fact that once the girls reached age twelve and finished primary school, they went to work as live-in maid servants and nannies to some of the finest families in Breda. A young girl who served with such a respectable family was recognized as good lineage herself. And if it was an irony that the van Kuijks themselves had a maid, Maria reconciled the expense by remembering that both the van Kuijks and the Ponsies had once been aristocracy.
In recent years, accusations have arisen that Maria, to put on airs and earn more money for luxuries for herself and parochial schooling for her children, forced her husband to work long overtime hours for van Gend en Loos and to moonlight at a variety of jobs—shining the boots and belts of Breda’s police force, peddling postcards to the soldiers at their barracks, and dealing in secondhand furniture and household items.
It was precisely the way her father and brothers had always made a living, so why shouldn’t it be a supplemental form of income for Adam? Besides, now there were other children in the fold. Engelina Francina, called Lien, was born November 13, 1910, followed by Adam Franciscus, or Ad, on September 21, 1913. Two more children would round out the family to eleven, or nine surviving, the last two named in honor of those who died: Johanna, born May 8, 1916, and Johannes, or Jan, on October 1, 1918. Maria managed to find a pillow and blanket for all, and Adam provided an extra place to sleep by sweeping up at a small auction house and taking a bed that hadn’t been sold as payment for his work.
As the children were growing up, their mother, who practiced as much religious discrimination as others in Holland of the time, restricted their playmates—no Protestants or low-class families—and strictly forbade them to go into the music hall next door.
Whether her mother thought Marie was too drawn to the sound of music and laughter, in later years she convinced the girl to join the St. Josef convent in Etten en Leur for Franciscan nuns, a move that was perhaps a comment on married life from a woman who was forced to marry. “I was never happy at the convent,” says Marie, who spent eighteen years in servitude, “and I told my mother I wanted to leave there. But she said it was probably best that I stay.”
Maria would expect much of Dries, too, when he grew older. For now, she was content to let him be a child, and argued with her husband when Adam required too much of his time in the stables. By age seven, Dries had already been slipping away by himself to explore Breda’s streets and alleyways with his best friend, Cees Frijters, and schoolmate Karel Freijssen, and to visit Grandfather Ponsie and absorb himself in fantasy.
The stories about the small fairs and village markets only heightened the child’s anticipation of kermis, or the large fair, which came to Breda on the third Sunday in October after the last mass. Situated at the Grote Markt, its tents and brightly colored awnings spread out through the neighborhood, down Halstraat, then across Oude Vest to the Kloosterplein, and up Dries’s own street, Vlaszak. Kermis was a major event in Breda, a week of renewed good spirit, laughter, and optimism, when the adults drank too much and threw caution and Catholic reserve to the wind, and the children finagled ways of earning money for exotic treats, mechanical attractions, and games of chance.
Dries was no exception, and using the techniques his grandfather taught him, he hustled a few guilders whenever the opportunity arose, mostly trading or running errands.
To Dries, kermis was a nearly delirious escape from the glum world of his father and the nonsense of school. Apart from the circus—which brought the clowns and larger animals, like elephants, to the Gasthuisvelden—kermis was the child’s favorite thing in all the world. When either was in town, the boy would vanish before daylight and not come home until the moon shone bright in the sky.
When his parents figured out that his fascination had turned into something of an obsession, they strongly suggested that the boy spend more time on his studies and less on dreaming of fly-by-night pleasure. However, it is doubtful that their words carried any weight. Dries - didn’t tell his mother that when kermis rolled around, he regularly cut school to be at the head of the line to ride the merry-go-round, since the first round was free. Getting something for nothing seemed to thrill the child, and when Dries realized that being paid to be part of the fair was more fun than simply watching it, at nine, the enterprising boy became what Americans would call “a carny”—literally, someone who works in a carnival, a term considered pejorative by some.
It started out small—an offer to help a vendor nail the boards together for his booth in exchange for a candied apple. From there, he was promised free admission for helping the roustabouts raise the tents. His mother somehow found out that he intended to aid in the building of the viewing stands and thwarted his plans. But she couldn’t stop him from hiring out as an advance man, bumping along the cobblestone streets of Breda on a high, old-fashioned bicycle with a sandwich board hung over his shoulders.
Before long, he was working shoulder to shoulder with the principals, first as a circus water boy—following along after the clowns and smoking the butts of the cigars they threw on the ground—then as a feeder and caretaker of animals. And when he got a little older, as a barker.
“I worked for a gypsy and stood in front of her tent,” he once said. “I waved my cane and called to people who passed by, ‘Have your fortunes told for fifty cents.’ I would get to keep twenty-five cents.” Then came the day when he told a fortune himself and “got to keep the whole fifty cents.”
With that marriage of commerce and con, and the promotional, marketing, and image-making tricks he was starting to pick up about how to sell a show, the spirit of Tom Parker was beginning to take form in the body of young Dries van Kuijk. Everything that he would ever be would have its genesis in Breda, in the swirl of noise and color and excitement of the fairgrounds and the circus, and in his search for the biggest attraction of all. That quest would ultimately end with a kid from South Memphis, in Tennessee, in another land, far across the ocean.
As an individual whose entire life was built on lies and fabrications, two key features of Dries van Kuijk’s personality were starting to emerge: his need to hustle as opposed to earn honestly or by merit, and his delight in the con as the highest form of creative achievement.
Although that is not to say that Dries ever lost his generous streak, which could show itself when least expected—but almost never when called upon by others. As an adult, his largesse had to be spontaneous and self-generated—he intensely disliked being asked for charity—and if possible, involve somebody else’s money. If that proved impossible, the next best thing was to ask a company for free goods, which he would then pass on to promote a good image for himself and to reap the glory of magnanimity. That pattern—which culminated in his frequent donning of a Santa Claus suit, Christmas or not, and dispensing candy to children—apparently began in Holland.
Each Friday a farmer from the northern village of Teteringen would come to the van Kuijks’ to collect some horse manure and bring fresh straw and hay. He would leave his bicycle parked near the front of the stables. One Friday, he returned to his bicycle, hoping to be home for his noon meal, only to find his transportation missing. Dries had taken the bike to ride to the home of his friend Cees Frijters, who lived on the Ginnikenstraat.
On the way over, the boy began thinking about the Teteringen farmer and concocted an intricate ruse. Dries and Cees would ride the bike in tandem back to Teteringen, but to visit yet another farmer, one who was unknown to them, who sold fruits and vegetables. Once there, Dries would pretend that he was from England—making up a foreign language out of English and French—so the farmer would give the boys bags full of apples as a token of hospitality.
The trick worked, and loaded with booty, the boys rode to the Teteringen orphanage. There, according to Engelina, “the orphans stood in a row of twelve, and Dries gave them each an apple.” The rest he took home to his mother.
Adam van Kuijk was so angry at his son that when the boy finally arrived at the stables that evening, his father sent him straight to bed without any supper, giving the farmer his dinner instead. Later on, Maria, grateful for the fruit for her family, slipped her errant son a sandwich, as she almost always did when Adam sent him upstairs without supper.
“He would scheme, but always in a good way,” says Mieke Dons-Maas, Engelina’s daughter. “Some people might have thought he was a terrible guy. But others had to laugh because they had fun with him.”
Through childhood and adulthood, “fun” was uppermost in Dries’s mind. From as long as anyone can remember, the quick-witted boy used his imagination to entertain his younger siblings, making a dull, dreary morning an event to remember.
The child was so accomplished at storytelling, in fact, that the van Kuijk children began looking forward to bedtime. “They all slept in the loft, the boys on one side and the girls on the other, with a door and some curtains separating them,” Mieke Dons-Maas remembers her mother saying. “They’d get ready for sleep, and lay in their beds, and the girls would call out, Okay, Dries, . . . tell.’ And Dries would open the door and tell his stories. He was unique in all the family.”
Indeed, he seemed to be driven by something that the others weren’t. “He never hurt anyone, but he was always up to something,” remembers sister Nel. “He did everything that the others didn’t dare.”
And seemed to relish it. When his father was away delivering packages, he even risked leading the other children in play in the stables—an area off limits for such antics—and always assumed the starring role. On rainy days, he began by closing the big stable door and pulling out the spare carts and the karos, or horse-drawn coach, and letting the children jump gleefully among them. When they tired of that, he climbed to the top of the silos where the hay was dropped down to the horses, and repeatedly slid down the big copper pipe.
For his big finale, the young performer would walk on the backs of the horses, doing tricks and balancing acts as he jumped from one to the other—“even on the back of the meanest horse,” says Mieke Dons-Maas; “the stallion who stood apart from all the others in another box.”
Dries had no fear of the stallion, nor of most creatures. From the age of seven, he had begun putting on little tent shows and charging admission, and he was prone to take all sorts of animals into the living quarters and let them run free. But when he impetuously sold the goat to the circus for one guilder and the promise of free tickets for all the van Kuijks the week the big top was in town, the boy got a beating.
Dries’s clashes with his father became more routine as he grew older, more independent, and headstrong. As the instigator of the children’s more outlandish games, he was considered mutinous, and his father began to punish him in ways that seemed overly severe.
The breaking point came shortly after Dries began working for a small local circus on the Kloosterplein, run by a family named van Bever. The van Bevers couldn’t compete with the big European outfits; all they had to offer was a trumpet-playing clown, a dancing midget, and a wild donkey that bucked like a bronco (“Stay on his back five minutes and win five guilders!”). But Dries was guaranteed work there every season, and the little circus had something that stimulated his drive and imagination: Madam van Bever was a skilled and accomplished horse trainer, with a desire to work a string of elegant Lipizzaner stallions into the act.
Each day as Dries helped Madam van Bever with these horses, he was struck by how graceful and romantic they were in comparison to his - father’s plodding work animals. And then it hit him: Why couldn’t he train his father’s horses to do some of the same tricks?
On Sundays, Dries was appointed to mind the stables. With no deliveries scheduled that day, there wasn’t much for him to do except sit and nod off to the occasional sound of a swishing horse tail. On these Sunday afternoons, the story goes, Dries would spread the children’s blankets on the stable floor to muffle the sound of hoofbeats, so that his mother wouldn’t hear upstairs. Promising his siblings that he would have a big surprise for them in a few weeks if they simply left him alone, he would lead two horses from their stalls and train them to trot in a circle while he stood on their backs. After several sessions, he could straddle the two in an act as precise as any he had admired at the circus.
Finally, the Sunday came when Dries was ready to share his secret. He called for his brothers and sisters, invited a few neighborhood children, and showed them where to stand along the stable walls. Then he moved easily among the big horses, untying first two, then two more, and leading them out of their stalls.
Now Dries positioned the horses around him in a ring. Drawing himself up with the bearing of a ringmaster, he cracked his father’s long, thin wagoner’s whip, and as if by magic, the tired, old workhorses snapped to attention, rearing on their hind legs, pawing the air, and then prancing around the stables as if they’d been grand and glorious show animals all their lives.
Just as Dries was bringing the beasts to a kneel-and-curtsy farewell, his father burst through the big double doors with a force that froze every child in his place. He stood with his hands behind him on the latch, his face twisted in anger. Dries’s antics not only endangered the valuable animals—what if they’d injured their backs?—but threatened the family’s very livelihood. If the firm were to hear of this, Adam could lose his job and be tossed out on the street with nowhere to live, his reputation forever sullied.
“Andreas van Kuijk!” he bellowed. “You will never amount to anything!”
With all the children looking on, Adam methodically unbuckled and removed his thick harness belt, then commanded his wayward son to bend over a chair. Dries van Kuijk would get the whipping of his life—one that would surely knock this circus folly out of him for good.
The story of Adam’s beating the boy while the others watched would go a long way to explain the origin of a third key trait that showed up in - Dries’s personality in adulthood: his need to humiliate others around him, especially those in subordinate positions.
Whether the story of the horses is rooted in truth—some of the siblings believe it to be a fabrication—certainly the boy’s relationship with his stern, authoritarian father left a scar on his psychological make-up. With his mother, who nurtured and forgave him, he could be himself. But his father made him feel only like an unlovable failure.
And so, until the boy could physically get away from the grim side of his home life, he would begin to learn how to suspend his tender and affectionate feelings, to be resilient and strong in the face of adversity, while acting as if nothing were wrong. He also began to retreat more into himself, to compartmentalize his life, and to live several lives at once, one at home, and another while he was away. Finally, he learned to show the people in each life only what he wanted them to see. In some ways, he grew to be as inscrutable, obdurate, and obstinate as his father.
Secrecy had been part of Dries’s personality since the age of five, but now the pattern became more pervasive, even with his mother. For example, Engelina remembered that Maria had given each of her children a drawer—a place for himself—in a big hutch, where they kept small treasures.
“You could close the drawer, but my brother’s had a lock on it so that nobody could get into it,” she said. But as Marie remembers, “our mother was clever. She drew out all the drawers so that she could get in and discover all our secrets.” The result was that Dries began to feel as if no one could be trusted.
If ten-year-old Dries could not get the attention and respect he craved at home, he found it in actions that were valued by his peers, winning approval and admiration from his fellow students by acting out.
Maria van Kuijk could have placed her son in a free school for the children of the poor. But her pride and Catholic propriety directed that she pay the equivalent of fifty cents a week for Dries to go to the all-boys St. Antoniusschool, run by the friars of the order of Huijbergen, and located on the Karrestraat.
From the beginning, Dries chafed against the rigid rules of the Huijbergen brothers, who corrected wayward students with harsh, punitive, and often sadistic methods, including the smart sting of a strap.
As the class clown, the boy was often in trouble, making jokes about the teachers or the subjects of their lessons, proving himself someone to be contended with, and trying the friars’ mercy. Then came the day when he scored a 3 out of 10 on an exam, and was ordered to take the paper home and get his father’s signature. But Dries was either too ashamed or too afraid to show it, and so he forged his father’s handwriting. He was found out, and the brothers doled out a distinctly Dutch punishment, making him kneel with his knees shoved into a pair of wooden shoes until he could no longer tolerate the pain.
Yet even that did not deter his mischief, and so the van Kuijks enrolled him in the public elementary school, the Openbare Lagere School, on the Boschstraat, near their home. Dries didn’t settle in to the new school any more easily than the first, and was often truant, leaving school anytime he took a notion. He spent such afternoons rambling around, looking for adventure down at the Prinsenkade, where he watched the ships, visiting an uncle on his boat at the inland harbor of Oosterhout, hanging out at the abandoned World War I defenses at the Nonnenveld, and hitchhiking to any nearby village when a circus or fair was in town.
The child thought he wanted to escape Breda and his family altogether. But at eleven, that was impossible. Still, he made a halfhearted attempt at running away from home, sneaking aboard the passenger train to Rotterdam, where he was caught and turned over to his father.
His schooling came to an end in the fifth grade, after a typical adolescent prank on the birthday of one of his teachers. The man had been cursed with a generous and unfortunate nose, the object of much ridicule among his students. This day, when the teacher was called out of the classroom, Dries rose from his seat, walked to the front of the class, and wrote, “Long live the nose!” on the blackboard. His classmates jeered and giggled, but on returning, the infuriated teacher expelled the boy on the spot. It was just as well—Dries no doubt would have quit the following year, at the end of primary school.
For a while, he spent his days helping his father. In the last ten years, - Adam’s health had steadily declined. Now, in addition to his diabetes, he suffered lung problems, rheumatism, and a swelling in his feet that sometimes made it difficult for him to make his rounds.
But after Dries injured his hand—one of the heavy coaches slipped while he was greasing a wheel, and his mother had to rush him to the doctor—the teen began looking for someone else to assist his father.
Away from the stables, Dries’s first jobs were menial, at best. For a while, he went down to the train station each day and carried luggage for busy travelers. Then he got a job as a delivery boy for a grocery store, but was soon let go, and from there went to the same jam factory where his brother Sjef had once worked. Both jobs should have pleased him, since food was like gold to him. But he found these tasks boring.
He much preferred the kind of pickup work he got when the dog show booked several days at Breda’s Concordia Theatre. Unlike a thoroughbred kennel show, this was an exhibition of performing dogs who did tricks on command—hounds who hopped like rabbits, poodles who danced the cancan line on two legs—much like a canine circus. There he would feed and groom the animals, and receive the handsome sum of five guilders for his trouble. Better still, he would learn more about the training of dogs.
The lad found regular employment again selling and checking tickets on a trolley that ran between Breda and Oosterhout. But the bitter wind whipped through the trolley, and after a while, he decided he’d had enough.
Finally, at fifteen, things began to look up when he went to work for a barber and his wife who ran a shop on the Oude Vest. The couple, who had no children, pampered the boy as their own, paying him ten cents a day. They made excuses for their young assistant if he left customers with soap in their hair when he heard music out in the street or, for a lark, shaved half a man’s face and let him walk out with the other half still covered with stubble.
Despite such behavior, the barber and his wife wanted to adopt the teenager and bring him into the business full-time. Maria didn’t like the idea of her son living elsewhere, but with Dries’s combative attitude toward his father, she advised him to take advantage of his opportunity. In the end, however, Dries wasn’t interested. He wanted only to be his own boss, to make his money on his own time, in his own way. And he harbored resentment toward those who had “made it.”
“Possessing money was very important for him,” remembers Marie. The family knew one thing for certain: “Don’t touch his wallet.”
One of the reasons Dries wanted money was to buy fine clothes. Engelina recalled that “he was very conscious about how he looked,” and Marie remembers that “if Mother didn’t iron his collar properly, he would throw it away and not wear it.”
At sixteen, the boy was growing up and now requested that he no longer be addressed by the diminutive name of Dries, but by the more proper sounding Andre. Still, he didn’t seem to be concerned with much of a social life. Other than his friendship with Cees Frijters, he almost insisted on a kind of apartness from the rest of the world. Even the idea of getting together in a crowd and sharing a few brews didn’t appeal to him, after he experimented with beer early on and found that it made him a violent drunk. Later, in middle age, he would drink perhaps half a bottled beer in social situations, but no more.
“He would never drink a complete beer,” remembers Joe Esposito, foreman of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia. “He told me, ‘I can’t drink. I completely change when I drink, my personality does. I get very mean.’ ”
Above all in his teen years, he seemed completely disinterested in any attachment to the opposite sex. “I’m sure that by the time he was seventeen, he still had not been with a girl,” says Marie. “He had no sexual interests whatsoever.” While that may have been normal for the culture of the times, the boy may have also felt trapped by the dangers of dependency. But whether he was truly asexual, or if there was perhaps some sexual squeamishness among several of the van Kuijk children—Marie volunteers that she and her husband lived as brother and sister for fifty-three years—Marie says she can’t imagine why her brother eventually married, unless it was to be cared for.
For now, Andre van Kuijk had other, more important things on his mind. In his work with the circus and the dog show, he had met people who whetted his appetite for adventure beyond the walls of Breda. He was also desperate to leave the confines of his immediate family unit and to break free of all the rules and ties that led back to the church. He began to tell his siblings that he would move to the big city of Rotterdam. There he would work on the harbor and hear the stories of the sailors who had traveled the world and seen the things he had only imagined. He could live with the family of his uncle Jan Ponsie, his mother’s brother.
Rotterdam, while only a distance of some twenty-five or thirty miles, would separate mother and son, and Maria was heartsick. She was the sort of woman easily terrified—by thunder, which sent her scurrying to hide under a blanket and make the sign of the cross; by anything that suggested the work of the devil; and by the predictions of fortunetellers. Only recently, a “naturopath,” or paragnost, from Heberle had told her that her husband would die within the year. And now, late in the spring of 1925, Adam was white as an angel and confined to St. Ignatius Hospital. With two of the younger children away in Catholic boarding school, to lose Dries to Rotterdam just now would be difficult.
But once Dries had his mind set on something, Maria might as well have tried to change the flow of the tides. She asked only that he go to the hospital and seek his father’s permission. Adam, too, saw the staunch determination in his son’s eyes and, too weak to protest, realized that there was nothing he could do.
From the hospital, Andre traveled to the town of Etten en Leur to visit his sister Marie, who was by now living in the convent. He told her that their uncle in Rotterdam had a good job in the shipping office in a large boat company and that he was planning to move in with him and start a new life.
“He came to say hello and good-bye,” she remembers, “not just to me, but also to a rector in the convent. Dries had been a mass server with this priest when he was little.”
When Marie had her formal admission ceremony that August—a very proud day for a family in a country where everyone does his best to honor birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and graduations—Dries was the only one not to attend.
By that time, Andre was a regular on the foggy docks of Rotterdam, watching the great ships pull out to exotic ports and searching for his destiny.