“Make you the world a bit more beautiful and better because you have been in it.”

EDWARD W. BOK

MERION

PENNSYLVANIA

A DUTCH BOY FIFTY YEARS AFTER

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST DAYS IN AMERICA

The leviathan of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1870, was The Queen, and when she was warped into her dock on September 20 of that year, she discharged, among her passengers, a family of four from the Netherlands who were to make an experiment of Americanization.

The father, a man bearing one of the most respected names in the Netherlands, had acquired wealth and position for himself; unwise investments, however, had swept away his fortune, and in preference to a new start in his own land, he had decided to make the new beginning in the United States, where a favorite brother-in-law had gone several years before.  But that, never a simple matter for a man who has reached forty-two, is particularly difficult for a foreigner in a strange land.  This fact he and his wife were to find out.  The wife, also carefully reared, had been accustomed to a scale of living which she had now to abandon.  Her Americanization experiment was to compel her, for the first time in her life, to become a housekeeper without domestic help.  There were two boys:  the elder, William, was eight and a half years of age; the younger, in nineteen days from his landing-date, was to celebrate his seventh birthday.

This younger boy was Edward William Bok.  He had, according to the Dutch custom, two other names, but he had decided to leave those in the Netherlands.  And the American public was, in later years, to omit for him the “William.”

Edward’s first six days in the United States were spent in New York, and then he was taken to Brooklyn, where he was destined to live for nearly twenty years.

Thanks to the linguistic sense inherent in the Dutch, and to an educational system that compels the study of languages, English was already familiar to the father and mother.  But to the two sons, who had barely learned the beginnings of their native tongue, the English language was as a closed book.  It seemed a cruel decision of the father to put his two boys into a public-school in Brooklyn, but he argued that if they were to become Americans, the sooner they became part of the life of the country and learned its language for themselves, the better.  And so, without the ability to make known the slightest want or to understand a single word, the morning after their removal to Brooklyn, the two boys were taken by their father to a public-school.

The American public-school teacher was less well equipped in those days than she is to-day to meet the needs of two Dutch boys who could not understand a word she said, and who could only wonder what it was all about.  The brothers did not even have the comfort of each other’s company, for, graded by age, they were placed in separate classes.