Cornelius was always a very handsome man: medium height (although two of his sons, Fred and Nick, were well over 6 ft. tall), well built with massive shoulders, twinkling blue eyes, a thick mop of snow-white hair. He had an infectious grin, puckish sense of humor, and a booming hearty laugh. He remained physically active until the summer before his death. Each summer he carefully tended a large "Victory Garden," doing all the work himself, and at age 75 could still kick his foot higher than his head.

I didn't know Cornelius well until he came to live with us, in Homewood, after Gertrude's is death in 1942. Although I had seen him several times a year from my earliest days, his severe hearing loss prevented any real conversation.

We began to communicate after he was fitted with a hearing aid. (Which, with a wink at me, he always surreptitiously turned off whenever my mother came into the room!) Those earliest days in Homewood most have been very hard for him after Gertrude's death. He was surrounded by exclusively female company all day long, until my father came home the night. But he gradually developed a routine: working in the garden during the morning, listening to the White Sox games in the afternoon. One day a week he went into Chicago, visited his grandchildren, had lunch at Bergof's, and always went to the Stop and Shop to bring home a treat (usually Speccalassie). At Christmas the treat was always the largest possible Edam cheese which, scorning the use of a schnittlekase (?...cheese knife) he carefully pared into a mound of delicious, paper-thin slices.

I never tired of hearing him talk about "the old days."

• From Holland, it was the smell of herring cooking all over the village as he walked home at night. And the day they left for America: two ships at the dock in Rotterdam, one very large and one very small..."We went on the small one!" (Booming laugh).
• From the summer he was 21, during the World's Fair: ... "Little Egypt" (wink)... And the story of the train ride circling the fairground, on which he rode with his brother John, Pete Kaan, and Kramer. "We had a full bottle when we got on... empty when we got off" (chuckle!).
• From the "shop" (VanderKloot Iron Works): nicknames of some of the men ("Californey Charlie, "Whitey from Milwaukee "), and an abiding distrust of "Swedes" whom he characterized as being "mean as hell!"
• Of the little cottage (26th and Emerald) where he and Gertrude first lived, and subsequent apartments. (An aside here, from my father Matt, who remembered standing late one night at about age 5, shivering in his night, his mother at his side, as Cornelius slowly climbed the stairs toward them, professing in a very large voice to being "as sober as a judge! ")
  

Cornelius lived to see me married, gradually grew used to the unpleasant fact that I had married a Cub fan who was half-Scandinavian. I'm sorry he didn't live to know his first great grandchild, our Matt, who was born less than a year after his death.

Mary V. Colburn
10-23-79

• The Cornelius Vanderkloot in the above story was the son of Matthijs and Trijntje van der Kloot. He was born December 3, 1870 in Cocksdorp. He married Gertrude Kaan on May 27, 1893 in Chicago.
• Cornelius immigrated with his parents, younger brother John and older brother Matthijs and sister Jannetje in 886. Gertrude Kaan emigrated in 1887, most likely with her parents.
• Little Egypt was a famous stripper at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
  

• Bergoffs is a famous German restaurant in the Chicago Loop. It is still there with quick fast, reasonably priced meals.
• Stop and Shop is the name of a grocery store chain.
• Speccalassie is the name of the famous Dutch Spice Cookie that we all love. It has almonds and is sliced very thin. I hope to add the recipe to these pages in the future. I am still working on the actual translation.
• This story was transcribed with some minor spelling and grammar changes.
  

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