The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  After I left the Netherlands and emigrated to the United States, I enlisted in the United States Army in or about 1929, in which I served until I was discharged in 1933 or 1934.

  In connection with my enlistment, I was required to and did willingly swear allegiance to the government of the United States of America. I did not seek or obtain the permission of the Dutch government to serve in the United States Army either prior to or after my service. As I am now informed, my failure to seek and receive such permission effected an automatic forfeiture of my Dutch citizenship. I am not a citizen of the United States, having never become a naturalized citizen of this country, or of any other country.

  He later told the lawyers for the estate of Elvis Presley that he enlisted in the army while a minor, and reenlisted after he attained his majority.

  Did Parker truly serve in the U.S. Army? There are several reasons to believe that he did. To begin with, he occasionally sent a brief note home with a photograph of himself in what appeared to be an army fatigue uniform. Certainly he could have lied about his military service and, as the illusionist he was, merely posed in a borrowed uniform to fake the images.

  But that explanation seems too easy, especially in light of a second set of supporting evidence. From January 1930 through February 1932, Maria van Kuijk received monthly allotment checks sent directly to her bank in Breda from a military finance office in either Washington, D.C., or New York. Because the death of her husband rendered Maria nearly helpless in some situations, Engelina went to the bank to collect the money. The seventeen receipts she saved through the years from Frans Laurijssen, Bankier, in Breda, show that at first, Andre, who voluntarily had the money deducted from his pay, sent home $5 each month, later increased to $7—a generous sum at the time.

  Another reason to believe Andre served in the U.S. Army is that he regularly exchanged letters and photos with his old school friend Cees Frijters, who was then stationed on Java, in Indonesia, with the Dutch army. Unlike the van Kuijk family, Cees had an army postal address for Andre, whom he still called Dries.

  “I had ten or twelve pictures he sent me in those days,” Frijters said in the 1980s. “Dries was in the U.S. Army; he was in Hawaii.”

  And from the photographs, the story checks out. In one, he wears tall army boots and a Smokey the Bear–style ranger hat, and appears to be in a rocky location, such as the foothills of the Koolau Mountains. In another, he poses in front of an American army tent. In two others, he seems to be in a tropical area and wears a work uniform and tie that match the uniforms in archival photographs of other army personnel stationed in the territory of Hawaii at that time.

  Perhaps the most clinching of the photographs is one in which Andre stands next to a large number 6, with the rest of the photo cut off, and another in which he appears smiling, sitting in front of a wooden structure with his hand on a fire bucket. The bucket is the clue, for there, painted on the side is the code “A-64,” which would indicate that Dries was part of Battery A of the 64th Coast Artillery Brigade Regiment, an antiaircraft unit stationed at Fort Shafter near Honolulu.

  This, then, would seem to settle things. Except for one nagging problem: the name Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk does not show up in the mainframe records of the U.S. Army, nor do nearly twenty variations and spellings of that name. While a Captain Thomas Parker appears to have been a staff officer in the Coast Artillery stationed in Hawaii in 1930, the forty-two-year-old captain was Thomas R. Parker, from Nebraska, who died in an accident at Fort Hood, Texas, in 1945.

  Might the captain have been the man who interviewed the young Dutchman when he first arrived in Hawaii? Dirk Vellenga thinks he was. If so, Andre simply appropriated his name and changed the R of his middle name to A, for Andrew, the American version of Andre. But Thomas A. Parker, and even the more generic Thomas Parker fails to show up in several checks of computerized army files and databases.

  Complicating the mystery is the fact that Andre wrote to Cees saying that he was part of the Mountain Guard, and sent along a photo of himself with a hiking stick against a hilly background. But Thomas M. Fairfull, chief of the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii, which maintains an archive on the Hawaiian Coast Artillery, says that Hawaii had no Mountain Guard at any time in its history.

  Just as strange is the fact that as the manager of Elvis Presley, Parker never reminisced about his army days. While he lined the walls of his offices with pictures of himself with movie stars and carnival pals, he displayed no such photographs of himself from that era.

  Even more perplexing is the fact that the music publisher Freddy Bienstock is certain Parker said he was in the U.S. Navy, not the army, and that Parker told his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, that he was in the merchant marine: “He used to tell me some of the stories and the places he would go. You can name almost every country there is, and he hit the port.”

  If Parker had been in the merchant marine, why would he have told the lawyers for RCA that he had served in the U.S. Army? And why would he have been so secretive about this period of his life at all?

  Perhaps Andre did not use his own name for two obvious reasons: his underage status and his illegal entry into the United States. And the reason he failed to ever become an American citizen is as easily explained. A requirement of foreign nationals serving in the U.S. armed forces was a legal declaration of their intention to become a citizen. Such citizenship was not automatic, however, and Andre never followed through with the official naturalization process, perhaps for a more unsavory reason.

  By forfeiting his Dutch citizenship and by never becoming a naturalized American, Andre could argue, if pressed, that he was not subject to the laws of either country, especially any laws that governed the extradition process. In fact, perhaps that is the very reason Andre enlisted in the army—to lose his Dutch citizenship. That position might have worked well for a man suspected of wrongdoing at home, especially of anything as heinous as the bludgeoning death of a greengrocer’s wife. And if such a thing did occur, it could certainly explain why Andre suddenly changed his name in America, even in the U.S. Army, where foreign nationals served with regularity.

  “Looking back from 1982, when he declared in legal proceedings that he wasn’t a citizen,” says Constant Meijers, a Dutch journalist who produced a documentary film about Parker, “you would almost think that he had figured it out by 1932. Because he had already changed his name to Tom Parker. Why would he do that in the first place? Unless he understood that one day when he had to deal with the law, it would come in handy if he were not naturalized.”

  In 1973, a fire destroyed many of the U.S. Army files stored in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, the primary repository of individual military histories. But ancillary records scattered in archives throughout the country show that during his interview at Fort McPherson, Andre claimed to be one Thomas Parker (no middle initial), and was issued the service number of 6363948. He reported that he was both a sailor and an orphan (and hence got around the question of why the recipient of his allotment had a different name from his own), and he volunteered to serve in the territory of Hawaii, then a little-known locale in a forgotten part of the world.

  But if America was halfway around the globe and almost inaccessibly remote to a Dutchman of the 1920s, Hawaii must have seemed even more impossibly isolated. A recruit could choose a tour of duty of either twenty-four or thirty-six months, and Andre opted for the longer stay, signing up for a three-year hitch. After thirty days aboard ship—departing from the Brooklyn Naval Yard, traveling through the Panama Canal, stopping in San Francisco to replenish the boat, and then sailing the waters of the Pacific Ocean—he arrived at Honolulu, and finally at Fort De Russy in the heart of Waikiki on October 19, 1929. There, among a boatload of others, he received a week of instruction before being transferred to Fort Shafter, three miles northwest of Honolulu at the base of the Koolau Mountains.

  As part of Battery A of the 64th Coast Artillery (AA) Regiment, Private Parker a
nd his fellow recruits were expected with numbing repetition to man the three giant, sixty-inch searchlights in defense against attack by sea.

  “We didn’t have much to do,” remembers ninety-two-year-old Earl Kilgus, a Pennsylvanian who served along with Thomas Parker as one of the unit’s forty-five privates. “It was mostly drilling, training, listening to speeches—what to do in emergencies or whatever. We wore our fatigues instead of our uniforms almost every day. But you’re not talking about anybody working too hard.”

  The initial months of Parker’s military service appeared to have a profound effect on his development. According to photographs, he was in the best physical shape of his life. While most of his letters home perished during the German occupation of Holland during World War II, in one that survived, his handwriting and grammar had obviously improved, although he continued to write without regard to a flow of information. The family remembers he was still signing his letters “Andre,” but often just “Tom Parker.”

  As he ended his two years in Hawaii with a transfer back to the mainland in the fall of 1931, Andre seemed to be thinking more of home and informed the family of his change of post. He was now part of Headquarters Battery of the 13th Coast Artillery, stationed at Fort Barrancas, just outside Pensacola, Florida, only fifty-five miles from where he had come ashore at Mobile. As proof, he sent along a photo of himself in a Florida setting, dressed in the civilian attire of a baggy suit and bow tie. His sister Marie recalls that their mother sent him clothes occasionally, for which she received a brief thank-you note after a long silence.

  Sometime in the following months, Andre would say, he injured his right foot in an accident while on duty, and supporting records show that he, indeed, spent $1.50 at the post cobbler. Whether his injury contributed to the painful gout he suffered in his later years, the immediate result, he told his brother Ad in 1961, was an early discharge from the service and a small pension for life.

  Yet Jerry Goodson of the Reno, Nevada, office of the Department of Veterans Affairs says there is no record of Andre van Kuijk or Thomas Parker ever collecting such a pension in any of the four states—Florida, Tennessee, California, or Nevada—where he lived.

  How is it that a man who routinely drove miles out of his way to promote a free meal in years to come failed to take advantage of a lifelong military pension?

  In 1982, Colonel Tom Parker came as close as he ever would to offering up his secrets, when the Nevada federal court, in connection with the RCA Records suit, ordered him to submit to a deposition on the issue of his claim as a stateless citizen. On October 25 of that year, lawyers planned to question him concerning all of the events that caused him to leave the Netherlands and take up residence in the United States. And, they wrote, “We should also be entitled to question him about his enlisting and re-enlisting in the United States Armed Forces.”

  Yet in the end, the old Dutchman decided the truth was too great a price to pay. As a lifelong carny, Parker took pride in being able to talk his way out of a tight place, and even enjoyed the challenge. But now he realized he was in a spot from which not even the great Harry Houdini could escape, and so he settled the case before he could ever be deposed.

  “We were never successful in finding his army records,” reports Blanchard E. Tual, the former guardian ad litem for Lisa Marie Presley, who set the lawsuit in motion. The answers to the puzzling questions about Parker’s military life would sleep silently with him in the grave.

  But a nearly two-year search for Parker’s army records, aided by the Freedom of Information Act, finally yielded a glimmer of what Parker feared would be known. While the information is incomplete, at best it offers a vital key to understanding not only his army experience, but also the psyche of Tom Parker himself.

  Parker’s principal personnel file no longer exists, having either been destroyed in the 1973 fire or otherwise “lost.” But in June 1982, when he needed to prove his military service in the RCA court proceedings, his lawyer, Jack Magids of the Memphis firm Krivcher & Magids, contacted W. G. Seibert of the National Personnel Records Center.

  At Magids’s request, and based on details supplied in the lawyer’s written communication and in a supporting letter from Parker himself, Seibert began compiling a reconstructed file of Parker’s military service. The discharge document and final pay vouchers contained in that file, combined with ancillary records (such as morning reports and unit rosters found elsewhere) begin to frame a far clearer picture of Tom Parker than anyone has ever seen. And also far darker.

  Judging from the morning reports and rosters from Fort Shafter, Parker fulfilled his tour of duty in Hawaii without incident. And for nearly a year after he arrived at Fort Barrancas on October 24, 1931, things seemed to go fine. He enjoyed a sixty-day furlough beginning in March 1932, and when his three-year hitch was up on June 19, he collected $95.51 in wages, travel, and clothing pay, and re-enlisted the next day. Then on July 18 of that year, he enjoyed a promotion to Private First Class, an honor that certainly would have pleased his military-minded father.

  Parker, like most recruits, had every reason to be content. Fort Barrancas, located on Pensacola Bay, was regarded as one of the prettiest bases in the country. “The men who served here in the thirties loved it,” says Coast Artillery expert David Ogden, a park ranger at Gulf Island National Seashore.

  But Private First Class Parker did not love it. Behind his controlled army demeanor, Parker was deeply restless. He had stuck with the military—an institution directly at odds with his willful and autonomous personality—longer than he had committed himself to anything else in his twenty-three years. And perhaps he had followed orders until the thought of one more command—one more deafening, bone-rattling blast of the big guns that guarded the mouth of the harbor—made him want to run screaming into the night.

  Precisely what drove Private First Class Parker to desperate straits is lost to the blur of time. But Tuesday, September 27, 1932, a day after seven of his fellow soldiers had departed the base on furlough, the perfect soldier calmly and quietly walked out of Fort Barrancas. Whether he had been denied furlough and refused to accept the ruling isn’t known, but that evening the army marked him AWOL, or “absent without leave.” A week later, on October 4, he was reduced in rank to private, and after thirty days, on Halloween, Private Parker was officially classified a deserter. If he did not return within six months, the Department of Defense would refer the matter to the FBI.

  Desertion! It was the one offense that overshadowed all others. In the army, Andre, crisp in his uniform, had played a grown-up, the child imitating the father, the son becoming the father—the two were interchangeable in his mind. But he could never really be the father any more than he could ever really be a soldier. And when the stresses of that conflict mounted with those that only he knew for certain, the little boy that was still Andre fought to escape.

  But where did Private Parker go when he left the serenity of Fort Barrancas? Almost certainly back to a fantasy world where he finally felt superior—if only to the marks he outsmarted. For a check of the local newspaper turns up the fascinating fact that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, with its “50 big and little elephants, 700 horses . . . 100 hilarious clowns . . . and a whole congress of freaks,” arrived in Pensacola for two performances only on September 27—the very day Private Parker went AWOL. Was this what Parker had alluded to later in life, bragging about the days when he “floated on top of an elephant”? There, under the “big top,” in the lights and the noise, it didn’t matter what you’d done on a nearby army base, or halfway around the world, or even if you lied every time you spoke your name. For the next day would bring a new identity and a new town. In this case, Tallahassee.

  Parker arrived at Fort Barrancas in the fall of 1931 as one of two privates transferred from Fort Shafter. Had he brownnosed his senior officer in Hawaii specifically to be transferred to the Coast Artillery in Florida, just to be close to the headquarters of the biggest trave
ling shows? Is that why the allotment checks stopped going to Holland? Had Parker been hoarding his money for escape?

  Whether law enforcement or the military found him there, or whether he turned himself in, when he returned to the base on February 17, 1933, he had been missing for 140 days—nearly five months. Desertion was an offense punishable by court martial, and Parker pleaded for leniency, officially rejoining his unit the next morning.

  But to a man with wanderlust in his blood, the punishment ultimately meted out was worse than any dishonor a court martial could have delivered. Records show that his commanding officer marked his 140-day AWOL as lost time without wages. Then he added sixty days more: for two months, Private Parker would be placed in solitary confinement in the guardhouse jail on the post. There, he would ponder his actions until he could be rehabilitated and restored to duty.

  By the time Parker was taken from confinement on April 18, his speech was an incoherent rush of sound, punctuated by terrifying bursts of paranoia and rage. The army doctor had seen this kind of psychotic breakdown before and, suspecting schizophrenia, had Private Parker moved to the guarded lockup ward at the base hospital for observation and treatment. Two months later, after the patient showed no improvement, the doctor knew only one thing for certain—he could do nothing to help this soldier.

  On June 19, 1933, Private Thomas Parker, having taken leave of his senses, was removed from the guarded lockup ward and sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The hospital had no locked psychiatric ward, or even a mental health facility—neuropsychiatry became a board-certified specialty only that year. But Walter Reed did reserve a wing for solders whose behavior was unpredictable, and Parker may have been kept there if the doctors thought he was no real danger to himself. The likelihood, say army historians, is that he was transferred to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a “government hospital for the insane,” as it billed itself, or transported there daily as one of Walter Reed’s pseudo-psych patients.