Yes, this cute little boy is me! I was born in Apeldoorn on July 10 1945, not more than three month after the end of World War II. I was born in the roman catholic minor seminary. Strange place to be born, indeed, but at the end of the was a bomb was dropped in the garden of the hospital where my father worked. The hospital was then moved to the seminary. I was the first of three boys my parents got after being childless for 13 years.

I grew up in Apeldoorn with my two younger brothers and sometimes one or more foster-sisters. My primary school was St. Joseph's, at that time a school for boys. This picture shows my father on his Zündapp Bella scooter, with my brothers on the back seat and me between my father and the handle-bar. The girl is my foster-sister Paula.

After primary school I was at the MULO (a secundary school) and the HBS (high school). The picture shows me and my brother on a Sunday Morning in Oslo in 1963. I always wanted to be a teacher, but my teachers told me to go to the university. So I did, but I studied psychology in Nijmegen for not more than a year. However, studied... I spent more time to play billiards than to study :). Then I did what I wanted: I studied at St. Paul's Teachers Academy in Arnhem and became a teacher in Apeldoorn.

And that is where I met Dory, my wife. She came to the same school as I in the same year 1966. She was the teacher of the first grade (6-7 years old), I got the second grade kids (7-8 years old). It took a year to fall in love, but once that had happened we needed no more than a year to get married on November 20 1968.