Move your mouse over the small pictures, they "grow" with that.

Because my mother died with my birth, I spent the first three years of my life in the farm of my uncle Willem and aunt Lena.

The farm is still existing, there lives and grandson of Uncle Willem and aunt Lena. But "farming" is over now; it's a bed and breakfast now, and the area around became a kind of national park.

In 1941 my father remarried en our family with five children was united again, the other children had been 1½ year in an orphanage. 1941 was in the beginning of WW II. The family picture is made in 1943. It were hard times then, probably therefore my family looks so severe, only my brother Bert shows a little bit of a smile.

The united family lived in Lisse. Father rented a nice house there. The houses were built in 1931, so just 10 year old. (it was the most right one of the four together).

In Lisse I went to primary school "St. Jozef", with headmaster Strik and oldfashioned strict schoolteachers and dito mistresses, they new what "discipline" meant, and sometimes practised that with an iron fist.

From my 12-th to 18-th I went to Bonaventura College in Leiden. At that time the Franciscan munk father Geurts (his nickname was "Buddha") was the rector. Most of the teachers were very kind and ordinary people, some of them perhaps a little bit eccentric, like our chemisty teacher Dr. van Woerden (nickname "Mina"), who was by the way a very good teacher!

After my military service (21 months!) I went to training college to become a schoolteacher myself

A couple of years I was a schoolteacher in Sassenheim (near Lisse, where i lived) on the "Pancratiusschool", in a very old building (1880), with in the beginning no central heating. In winter we, schoolteachers, had to come very early to school, to make fire in the stoves in all classrooms; but ... in all classrooms was a reed-organ ("psalm-pump"). After renovation of the building there was central heating, a music room with a piano, and a music teacher playing it.

While a was a schoolteacher, I studied mathmatics in my free time. In 1966 I completed the first part of the study (now called bachelor) and I became a teacher in science on a high school in Kerkdriel.
Very important: besides the job they offered a house in Kerkdriel, so, my love, Tineke, a bulbgrowers daughter, and I, we could marry. We married in august 1966, just before the beginning of the school year, and we resided in the house. In a hospital in 'sHertogenbosch (near Kerkdriel) both our sons, Bas (1967) and Merijn (1970), were born.

In 1971 completed my Masters in Mathematics. I applied with succes for a lectorship at The College for Forestry and Landreclamation in, then Arnhem, later Velp. Now it is a university of applied sciences "Larenstein"). We moved from Kerkdriel to Rheden.

About 1985 my dear wife Tineke begun suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, year after year it became more severe. When I got the offer to go with an early retirement, I accepted with both hands. I was glad to be able to care for her full time, the last four years, until she died in 1998.

A year later I met a nice danish woman, Gerda, on internet, and now, since 2000, we live together in Randers, Denmark.