The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  No longer a federal institution, St. Elizabeth’s is now run by the District of Columbia and houses such patients as John Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan. However, no records exist to support treatment for Parker other than at the army medical center, where the staff guessed that it was not confinement that caused this state, but rather a long-standing, pervasive psychotic process. Before his breakdown, Private Parker had likely suffered a persistent personality problem, marked by impulsive acts and disregard for the rights and feelings of others.

  The army doctor wrote out a vague but serious diagnosis: “Psychosis, Psychogenic Depression, acute, on basis of Constitutional Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability.”

  On August 11, 1933, after two months of treatment, a medical board consisting of three army surgeons decided that Private Parker was ready to rejoin society. However, he would never again be fit for military duty. They prepared his certificate of disability, repeating the diagnosis—“Constitutional Psychopathic State”—that would forever stigmatize him as a mental patient.

  Eight days later, Private Parker received his separation papers. The Walter Reed personnel concluded that since his desertion had been brought about by illness, his discharge would be honorable.

  On August 19, 1933, twenty-four-year-old Thomas Parker, a civilian now, pushed open the doors of Walter Reed Army Hospital and walked out into the summer sun of Washington’s Georgia Avenue. In his pocket was his final paycheck of $117.57. Across town, a new president, named Roosevelt, sat in the White House.

  Just exactly where Parker went when he left the hospital corridors is unknown, but once again, a sixty-seven-year-old photograph holds a clue. One of his favorite pictures shows him as a handsome, thin young man, well dressed in a dark casual jacket and light pants, and adorned with a snappy hat and tie. He is posed with several ponies, one with a spider monkey riding its back. The group, which includes a German shepherd, stands on what appears to be hay, in front of a large movie poster for the Christmas 1935 release Home on the Range, starring Jackie Coogan, Randolph Scott, and Evelyn Brent.

  The horses suggest an explanation for an employment entry in his 1994 salute in the Showmen’s League yearbook: Silver’s Ponies. Today, no one recalls ever hearing of Silver’s Ponies. But Slover’s Ponies was a popular kiddie ride outfit in the 1933 season of the Johnny J. Jones Exposition, which enjoyed winter dates in Tampa, Florida, that year.

  Tampa, the winter quarters of several carnivals and the hub of off-season carny life, would be Andre’s new home. And it would also be the place where the newly reinvented character of Tom Parker would mold itself, starting with his early job of promoting Bert Slover’s ponies. Parker had once again allied himself with the carnival world, integrating himself into a social network that at times was as intricate and as furtive as any underground railroad.

  But an odd thing happened once Andre left the army. His letters home, which had never arrived with frequency, slowed to a trickle. He said nothing to his mother about his awful ordeal or what had so occupied his time. Finally the letters stopped coming at all. In his last missive, Andre wrote in an especially emotional tone that he had very little money, was without a job, and was struggling to eke out a living in a tough but vibrant America. As a boy he had dreamed of greatness, he said, and he expressed his belief that he could still make his dream come true—that out of nothing and with his own hands and ingenuity, he would build a career as he saw it in his imagination back in Holland.

  After that, the family heard only silence. It seemed as if Andre had been swept from the world and drowned in the vastness of America. On April 4, 1935, when a member of the Breda municipal government inquired about Andre’s whereabouts for a routine matter—taxes, or census, or the Dutch welfare pension, perhaps—Maria van Kuijk reported with a leaden heart that Andre was not coming home. Across from his name on the van Kuijk family Register of Birth, the government worker wrote “Ambtshalve,” meaning it had become apparent to him in his official capacity that this citizen had “gone to America.” Andre was now removed from the family record and, in effect, written out of their lives.

  The van Kuijks never stopped searching for answers. During World War II, Andre’s sister Johanna carried his picture, showing it to American soldiers when they reached Holland, pathetically hoping they might know him, or perhaps had seen him somewhere and could report that he was all right.

  After the war, when they had still heard nothing, Maria van Kuijk tried to remain optimistic about his return. But when another decade passed in which she waited in vain for a letter, she figured her son was dead. Still, she lit candles for him at church, prayed for his safekeeping, and whispered the secret language that exists between extraordinary mothers and extraordinary sons. When she died in 1958, the same year as the death of the mother of another famous man—a singer whose name would always be linked with that of her son—it was without the knowledge of Andre’s remarkable life in America.

  “She was for me a very kind, easygoing woman,” remembers her granddaughter Mieke Dons-Maas. “But she had a sadness pain because of Andre. And it never went away.”

  Unless Andre had, indeed, died, the family couldn’t conceive of such cruelty, especially since Andre and his mother had once been so close. But for reasons of shame, or confusion, or the continuing effects of his illness, perhaps, Andre van Kuijk had no grieving mother in Holland. For that matter, Andre van Kuijk did not exist at all. Tom Parker, an orphan from Huntington, West Virginia, had taken his place. And Tom Parker, lost and alone, grew almost frantic to find his place in America.

  5

  TURNING THE DUKE

  BY 1933, just as Tom Parker joined the Johnny J. Jones ranks, the future of “the Mighty Monarch of the Tented World” was in grave doubt. At the end of the 1930 season, with the Depression signaling a steady decline of customers, Jones, who had been regarded as a genius, found himself heavily in debt. Then on Christmas Day, he unexpectedly died of uremia at the age of fifty-six, leaving his thirty-one-year-old wife, Hody Hurd, to carry on. Now Hurd had suffered a nervous breakdown, and with her finances equally exhausted, she would sell the once-great carnival to E. Lawrence Phillips at the end of the disastrous 1933 season.

  If the majority of the Johnny J. Jones troupers were downhearted, Tom Parker couldn’t have been happier to be among them. And while showing Bert Slover’s ponies at a Tampa movie theater was a natural assignment for him, he was willing to get up at 5:30 A.M.—which became his lifelong habit to be part of the action.

  From the beginning on Johnny J. Jones (where he was an independent contractor and not a salaried member of the staff), Parker set his sights on making the most money, just as he had as a young dockhand in Rotterdam. That meant working the front end of the lot, or concessions, a broad-based term that covered food, merchandise, and gaming booths, but with one important difference: merchandise and game operators bought their booth space by the foot; food worked on a percentage basis.

  “He started out in a candy stand, making candy apples and popcorn,” says Larry Davis, owner of California’s largest outfit, Carnival Time Shows, who came to know Parker well in the early ’70s through the - Showmen’s League of America, the venerable outdoor fraternal organization. From there, Parker told Davis, he floated throughout the carnival, doing whatever he could—shaving ice for snow cones, running the merry-go-round, anything—trying to stay alive.

  “I knew him as a concessionnaire,” says Joe McKennon, a carnival historian who worked on the shows. By the time McKennon met him, Parker had several small concessions, adding a game or two to his food stand, which immediately made him suspect to the other showmen. Concessionaires who ran games were often crooks specializing in “flat stores,” or games of chance that offered no winning numbers. As “gentlemanly agents” who sold “conversation” and bragged about “turning the duke”—not just hustling the customer out of his money, but shortchanging the count with a skilled slip of the hand—they were a d
isgrace to the honest men among them.

  In those first years, the young Tom Parker kept his nose clean and stayed out of trouble. In fact, “he just didn’t make an impression,” according to McKennon. But one thing McKennon does remember about Tom Parker: he went by yet another name. “I used to know what it was, but it wasn’t Parker,” he begins. “At a showmen’s convention about fifteen years ago, he was the speaker, and I had to introduce him. I said, ‘He was just a so-so concessionaire until he found that boy from Memphis and went into the business of creating names.’ And I used that name he had on the Jones show. Afterwards, Parker came up and said, ‘I didn’t know you knew that, Joe.’ ”

  Parker may have felt compelled to use another alias during the AWOL and desertion period of his military service, and perhaps carried it over to the early part of his Johnny J. Jones days. But to carnies such as Larry Davis, Parker’s decision to hide his true identity simply isn’t worth noting.

  “You could know a guy ten years in that era and not know his real name,” offers veteran concessionaire John Campi.

  Indeed, Jack Kaplan, Parker’s best friend throughout his carnival years and an associate for decades to come, never felt the need to ask his true identity. The two slept next to each other in railroad cars for months on end, but Kaplan had no idea what Parker did before the carnival, or even where he came from, although he noted that “in 1933, he was [still] talking like a Dutchman: ‘Brassa, was ist los, ja, ja, ja’ ” Parker’s refusal to elaborate on his past was considered neither mysterious nor unusual. It was simply part of the carnies’ silent understanding.

  For those who did feel a need to shield either their identity or their predilections, the carnival offered a perfect place to hide. It was also fraught with danger, a situation that tends to bend the mind-set of the fraternity.

  In the Depression years of the ’30s, especially, those who worked the carnivals trusted no one, and the strain of always having to watch their back often led to frayed nerves and sometimes tragedy. Stabbings on the lot were not uncommon, nor was a callous attitude toward death and the survival of the fittest. It was all a part of business as usual.

  Parker so identified with that lifestyle that he sought out the company of concessionaires, midway operators, and sideshow performers long after his carnival days were over.

  “When we were traveling across country,” says Byron Raphael, who frequently drove Parker in the late ’50s, “he often took me to these little carnivals that were so small they didn’t even have a big tent. He knew where they were, all through the states, and the first thing he would do was to search out the midgets and the freaks.

  “In California, between Barstow and Bakersfield, there were billboards every hundred yards, ‘See the Thing! Half Man, Half Animal!’ He took that really seriously. We’d stop and go in there, and it would be very dark, very eerie, and ‘the Thing’ would be this poor pathetic black person on his hands and knees in a low cage. He had a tail on him, and long hair, and when he would growl, it was really frightening.

  “The Colonel loved that, and at these little carnivals, he loved the fat lady, and the bearded lady, and he would sit and talk with them for hours. He was a very superstitious person. I remember him being very respectful of the Tarot reader. Every place we stopped there was always one woman who would sit in a little hut and read your fortune. He would say, ‘This woman is very good. She can read the crystal ball.’ Then he’d go spend time with the cooks who were making the hot roast beef sandwiches. They all knew him. These were people that he had worked with.”

  Until his death, Parker remained active with the Showmen’s League of America, contributing generously to their causes. “He did a lot of good work for the Showmen’s League,” remembers Campi, who first met Parker in the ’40s. “He was a beautiful guy, a good man, and a friend. Of course, he was an enemy if you were his.”

  But the code of the carnies directed that even his enemies had to concede one point: “I think that everyone in our show business world considered Colonel Parker a great man,” assesses Larry Davis. “He was just about the best there was at thinking and figuring things out. I’ve never met anyone who thought as deeply as the Colonel.”

  In the winter of 1933–34, only a few months past his awful ordeal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Parker probably still had enough of his army discharge pay, sizable for the times, to see him through the winter. But his compulsion to take to the streets to finagle money or promote a free meal had not dimmed since his childhood. The elderly locals of the area remember him from those days as someone who did what the carnies called “rough hustling”—hawking candy apples, popcorn, or whatever he could—on the streets of Tampa. Joan Buchanan West grew up in the area hearing her mother tell stories of how Parker sold potatoes and onions off the back of a pickup truck between carnivals, traveling to the little agricultural communities of Ruskin and Plant City and dickering with the farmers, saving enough beans and tomatoes to keep himself from starving along the way.

  It was during this period that Parker met Louis “Peasy” Hoffman, a special agent for Rubin & Cherry Exposition Shows. Hoffman, a short, portly man with an ever-present cigar setting off a face framed by rimless eyeglasses and a seasoned hat, was a legend in the carnies. Before moving over to Rubin & Cherry, he had carved out a solid reputation as an expert public relations, advertising, and advance man for Johnny J. Jones, Lackman Exposition Shows, and Cetlin & Wilson.

  Tom Parker may have shared much of the flair and philosophy of P. T. Barnum, but if he ever had a hands-on mentor and guide, it was Hoffman, who had started out as a well-finessed and friendly but persistent game operator. By the time Parker met him, Hoffman was a front-office man in his late forties who dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit and carefully knotted tie. What’s more, noted the young Parker, who had developed a prominent stutter in his transition from Dutchman to homegrown American, Hoffman could speak smoothly and glibly about nearly anything. One of the most crucial lessons he passed on to Parker was the importance of getting to know every influential man and woman in even the smallest of burgs in the South and Southeast, long the provincial heart of the carnival circuit. That was the way the world really worked, he told him.

  Yet if the show needed to get a carny out of jail, or if a bribe was required to set up on the grounds or to run unlawful games, another man, the “fixer”—also known as the “legal adjuster” or “patch”—would step in.

  As the promoter Oscar Davis remembered, Parker paid close attention to such ways of dealing with authority, knowing that like almost everything else he learned on the carnival, they would become useful in other negotiations in life.

  Parker understood that the real clout in the carnival lay in the front-office positions like Hoffman’s. He aspired to such a job himself, where he could be a big shot and dress in a fine tailored suit. He admired how Hoffman could handle almost any situation with grace and aplomb, certainly a prerequisite for any front-end employee. But it was Hoffman’s skill at selling advertising that Parker coveted most, and so he offered to chauffeur Hoffman on his local rounds in exchange for tutelage. At first, the lessons were slow in coming—Hoffman was still on Rubin & Cherry, and Parker on Johnny J. Jones, and so they met up in Tampa in the winter. Before long, they were teaming to work the smaller “turk,” or non-railroad shows, in the off-season.

  Soon, Parker was emulating Hoffman in almost every fashion, and from all appearances stood out as the very model of the well-dressed front-office agent. A photograph of him from the time shows an eager would-be promoter in a dark suit, white dress shirt, and dotted tie, a fedora on his head. The cigar, which not only gave him an air of grit and confidence, but took a stranger’s eye away from his weakening chin line would come soon afterward.

  “You could say he patterned himself after my father a bit,” says Hoffman’s son, Joey, also a carnival man. “But later on, he attributed all of his dirty tricks to my dad. Parker was a big, likable Dutchman and a nice fello
w, but he was really nothing but a half-assed promoter who eventually lucked into a hot property.”

  In his second winter with Hoffman, Parker bragged about several stunts he’d originated on the Jones show, such as a public wedding ceremony. In this stunt, staged on Saturday night for optimum effect, Parker and a girl off the show—allegedly two carny kids in love—“married” on top of a Ferris wheel. Soon the public wedding ceremony was a staple on carnivals across the country, and its success filled Parker with the hope that he would be rewarded with a front-office job. Instead, tough carnival owners and managers regarded him as a renegade who happened to hit with a good thing.

  “He always had quick ideas,” remembered Jack Kaplan, Parker’s chief crony of the time, “and he was quick on talking. He wanted to be a big man in this country. He always said, ‘Them dummies can do it. Why - can’t I?’ ”

  If Parker had not yet earned the respect of management, he found in Kaplan the first of a long line of flunkies who would eventually make up a sort of entourage—men who would work cheap for the privilege of being around him and his milieu, be on call twenty-four hours a day, suffer silently any form of verbal or emotional abuse, and never question his authority. Usually, like Kaplan, they were younger men and of small stature, intimidated by Parker’s size, girth, and aggressive personality. They were yes-men to the extreme, perfectly suited to his deep-seated need to control, subjugate, and bully. Parker hoped having a subservient gofer like Kaplan would boost his profile with the carnival brass and dignitaries—men who had the title of Colonel in front of their names to designate them as important figures.

  By 1934, Parker was on and off the Jones show, hopscotching from one carnival to another to make a season’s work. The smaller the show, the more corrupt, and most of the little outfits were so undercapitalized that sometimes they couldn’t afford enough tires to simultaneously move all the trucks to the next town.