Their picture appeared in The Spec 50 years ago this week. There were 11 of them disembarking from a Dutch ocean liner -- Henk and Corrie Van Amerongen and their nine children.

The caption said Population Rises.

How true that was. Here in the new land, Henk and Corrie's kids gave them 55 grandchildren and 153 great-grandchildren.

A great many of them will come together Saturday at Bissell's Hideaway near Pelham to mark the milestone.

"We want to celebrate Canada, togetherness and our parents," says Joanne Visser. "They wanted us to have a better future. And man, did we get that."

Her father was as honest as can be, but one of the stories she knows best was the time he did steal.

Food was scarce in the German-held cities of Holland during the Second World War. Milk and bread coupons were given to mothers of babies and little ones. But teens were left out and next door to the Van Amerongens was a family whose boy was slipping away from starvation.

Henk and others broke into the distribution centre, stole coupons and gave them to the neediest, including that malnourished teen.

Henk talked little of his time with the Dutch underground. He lost his brother Bert, also part of the resistance. Bert was betrayed, jailed and shot.

The war ended, but the shortages did not. Mother found a way to make a cakelike offering from tulip bulbs.

Hard times were no excuse for slovenliness. Mother made sure the windows and floors shone. And she was always polishing the copper rods that held the rug in place on the stairs.

"I can hear her today, warning us when we came in from school," Joanne says. "Schop niet tegen de roeien!" Or, don't kick the rods.

They lived on the third floor of a rented row house on a canal at the edge of The Hague. Father was a bookkeeper at the milk bureau. To feed all those kids, he also sold snacks at work, gathered firewood and sold it in bags, and soldered numbers onto milk cans.

Life was not so bad by the late '50s. They had meat every Sunday -- maybe half a pork chop each -- and pudding too.

There was no car, no TV. The children could walk through the woods to the beach but on Sundays they weren't allowed to take off their shoes.

A simple life. But a better one beckoned. Henk's youngest brother Gerrit was here and kept writing letters home about greener pastures. The decision was made to move.

"I was a teenager then and I hated the idea," Joanne says. "I had a boyfriend."

But there was no thought of defiance, of staying behind. "You respected your parents. That would have broken my mother's heart."

Homesickness was ahead for mother, who never saw her own mother again.

The Van Amerongens landed in Montreal in August, 1958, where a freelance photographer posed them coming down the stairs, oldest to youngest: father, mother, David, Joanne, Willy, John, Henk, Jenny, Bert, Diane, Anna. Then it was on to Hamilton by train and a frame house at 174 Belmont, near Cannon and Ottawa North.

The last half of summer that year was a scorcher and the kids were unused to such heat. They slept in the back yard and learned all about the Canadian mosquito. They were bitten so badly their eyes swelled shut.

To help pay the grocery bills, the kids hit the streets with wagons of gladiolas. They quickly learned enough English to shout out, "Flowers, 35 cents a bunch."

Day by day, the children made their way in the adopted land. They married, got houses, had families and prospered.

Mother and father got to see all this. They died within months of each other, 17 years ago.

Joanne wishes the two of them could see Saturday's celebration. "Father would be quiet as usual, but proud. And mother would be in her glory, shining all over."

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday

pwilson@thespec.com

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