Early Life
Parker was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, the Netherlands, the seventh of eleven children. As a boy, he worked as a barker at carnivals in his home town, learning many of the attributes that he would require in later life working in the entertainment industry.
At the age of 15 Parker moved to Rotterdam, gaining employment on the boats in the port town. At age 17 he first displayed signs of wanting to run away to America to "make his fortune," and a year later, with enough money to sustain him for a short period, he entered America illegally by jumping ship from his employer's vessel. During his first visit there, he traveled with a Chautauqua educative tent show, before returning briefly to the Netherlands.
Alanna Nash would later write in The Colonel, her biography of him, that there were questions about a murder in Breda in which Van Kuijk, as he was then still known, might have been a suspect or a person of interest at least. This might have motivated Parker to avoid seeking a passport, as the Netherlands has an active extradition treaty with the United States, and Parker might have wanted to avoid criminal arrest by Dutch authorities in that case.
Read more about this topic: Colonel Tom Parker
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“One perceives that again and again she has destroyed her life when it was forming into shapes of happiness because of her loyalty to the early misery, her conviction that that has the sanction of ultimate reality, and that beside it all other things are trivial.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)