AT nearly sixteen, Andre van Kuijk did not appear to be a happy lad. In a photograph from the time, his pouty mouth sets firm on a sullen countenance, refusing to smile for the camera. His eyes, eerily cold and blank for one so young, stare out from beneath heavy brows, and his round face tends toward puffiness in the jowls.
Given his demeanor, it is unlikely that anyone told the boy he was handsome, even though he is well dressed in a suit, with a perky bow tie adorning a starched collar, his dark hair slicked down and parted just off-center to the left. Big for his age, he is stuck in the gawky years of his teens, neither child nor man.
The source of his petulance could well have been his move to Rotterdam. He had come to the world’s largest port city full of excitement about his new life only to find that while his surroundings were different, some of the more irritating aspects of his home life were no better here. Uncle Jan did not berate him in the stentorian tones of his father, but there were rules and regulations in the house that he was expected to follow. As before, he was pinned under the thumb of an elder.
Jan Ponsie and his wife lived on Spanjaardstraat, situated on the west side of town, within easy walking distance of the Rotterdam harbor, with its large river berths for oceangoing passenger ships, tankers, and freighters, and smaller ports and docks that served the canal barges. Several small shipyards and ship repair shops dotted the area at the mouth of the Nieuwe Maas River.
Because the docks were the life of this rough, worker city, the residents of the neighborhood were considered middle class, blue collar. In Andre’s time, Spanjaardstraat comprised four-story brownstone row houses, each dwelling two windows wide and three rooms deep. The street stretched from the Hudsonplein to the Schiedamseweg, a shopping district. Several small parks offered respite from the cobblestone hardness and the noise from the streetcar that ran through the middle of the thoroughfare. Where the road ended at the Hudsonplein sat the Café Hudson. All the seamen knew the little bar, says one, since they considered it a point of honor to frequent every waterfront saloon in the city.
Andre still demonstrated little interest in socializing at such places, preferring at first to spend his evenings with the Ponsies. After dinner, the family sat in the living room, and Andre usually turned to his cousin, Marie, for a game of checkers or other benign amusement. Slightly older than Andre, Marie thought he viewed her as something of a big sister. She, on the other hand, saw him only as a dreamer. “He never told me what he wanted out of life,” she remarked years later, “but I knew he was busy making plans all the time. He wanted adventure.”
Rotterdam is Holland’s second largest city, and for a time, Andre seemed lost, both geographically and emotionally. He hadn’t yet learned his way around the streets—how the sprawling city was linked by tunnels, bridges, and public transportation—and with poverty more rampant in Rotterdam than in Breda, he hadn’t found the locales to hustle the pocket change and pickup work that had sustained him at home.
For a time, Andre tried the usual assortment of odd jobs but discovered that steady work was difficult to find, other than in retail or on the docks. His uncle put in a word for him at Spido, a maritime freighting company where he worked in the shipping office.
Spido, which was already in operation before the big bridges were built, made package deliveries to ships. It also operated a river taxi, or ferryboat, for passengers, mostly laborers, who needed to move handily back and forth across the Nieuwe Maas.
Andre apparently worked on both the river taxi and the delivery boat, although presumably at different times of his Rotterdam stay. Given the choice between jobs, he probably would have opted for the delivery boat, since he would have gone on board other ships and engaged the crewmen in conversation, however perfunctory.
On the ferry boat, however, the endless repetition would have been deadly dull. The only saving grace: financial reward. Aside from nice things for himself—he enjoyed such treats as eating in cafés, where he especially liked the Indonesian fare, with its hot pepper sauces, and the rijsttafel, the huge rice table meal with up to forty or more dishes—he wanted to send money home to his mother.
Maria van Kuijk was in dreadful straits. On July 6, 1925, Adam van Kuijk died at the age of 59. Death, which had quietly hidden in the sheets and blankets of his life for so many years, finally made a hushed leap and filled the room with silence. Six months later, in January 1926, Jan Ponsie became guardian of the six minor van Kuijk children, including sixteen-year-old Andre. With its livery man gone, the van Gend en Loos firm had almost immediately evicted Maria, then forty-eight years old, and the children. She had been forced to move to a smaller house, one without many comforts, on the Boschstraat, around the corner from Vlaszak.
But without Adam, Maria was neither emotionally nor financially equipped to care for her children. She had lost her husband, her status, her income, and as far as she was concerned, her life. There was nothing left. Eventually, the family would fragment. In a few years, she, Engelina, and Johanna would live together in another house in town, and later she would move to Eindhoven with Nel. As she had cared for her children, her children would care for her.
Andre, whose father’s death made him ineligible for the draft, was now expected to show some responsibility for his mother and the other children—a frightening prospect for a boy who shied away from serious threats to his independence.
Nonetheless, he returned to Breda on holidays and the occasional family birthdays, sometimes coming by boat, other times hitchhiking or taking the train. Holidays or not, his visits were cause for celebration. He sometimes got up and sang with a Rotterdam accent, and he never came home without presents for the others.
The family was proud that Andre worked at the same fine company as Uncle Jan, but he soon left Spido and hired out to a skipper who sailed to Raamsdonksveer.
He was always thinking, scheming, of other ways to make money, either for himself or for Maria. For a time, he worked on a ship that moved from port to port on a twenty-four-hour schedule and rotated the lower ranks on day and night shifts.
Once he knew everyone on board, he hustled the crew with the idea of affordable laundry service, which he chartered out to his mother. The proposition paid double dividends: Maria made money, and Andre got his washing done free. His letters home referenced his fine new clothes.
Back in port, Andre had a habit of disappearing overnight, much to the worry of Jan Ponsie. When his uncle questioned him about it, Andre explained that he was moonlighting on the docks. But when Andre began to stay away for days, Ponsie grew angry and reminded him that he was still a minor and legally in his care. As long as he lived in the Ponsie house, he had to abide by the curfew.
With that, seventeen-year-old Andre van Kuijk announced that he was now a sailor for the Holland America Line. After a year, he no longer had need of the Ponsie hospitality. He was setting off to seek his fortune, leaving Holland far behind, perhaps even going to America.
Jan Ponsie was completely taken aback. Andre had not talked about leaving Holland—not to him, and not to his daughter, Marie. Nor had Andre said anything to his siblings, and certainly not to his mother.
Whether his sense of adventure or his uncle’s code of conduct figured into his decision, he certainly would have realized that his chances of making a living were slim in the poor southern provinces of Holland, especially with the things that stirred his imagination. And now he had the additional burden of contributing to his mother’s upkeep.
Mieke Dons-Maas believes her uncle’s motivation was more personal than that. “He wanted to be somebody,” she says. And he wanted his family to know of his quest. In the spring of 1926, he sent word to his sister Marie in the convent, saying he was going to another country.
However, he did not say which one, perhaps because being seventeen, with little education, no papers (the family is uncertain if he had a passport), and not the slightest command of the English language, it would have made more sense for him to go to Italy or to France than to America. Or maybe he kept quiet because he knew that the Holland America Line sailed to the United States with stops in Boulogne, France; Southampton, England; and once across the Atlantic, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He might have signed on board to swab the decks and then jumped ship in any one of those ports.
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.
“He just changed identity,” says Marie, who believes he chose the name Tom Parker in homage to a stowaway who was thrown overboard. “He wanted to remain unknown.” There would be more sporadic letters, and after awhile, he would sign them solely with his new moniker.
Usually, he gave no return address, offering just enough information to let the family know he was all right. The letters were carefully worded, teasing almost, more for what they didn’t say than for the news they conveyed. Sometimes he sent photographs that suggested he was having a ball—a small black-and-white snapshot in which he stood next to a large American car in some tropical setting, and another one of himself by a swimming pool. The family thought he must be a chauffeur for a very rich man.
Then came a third, provocative photograph that placed him between two other men, sitting on a beach in an old-fashioned one-piece bathing suit, his legs drawn up and his knees together, his hands crossed in front of him in an almost feminine pose.
Just where was Andre, and what was he doing? And who in the world was this Tom Parker, who had such a strong hold over him?
Thirty-one years would pass before the family would learn that answer.