Free The Colonel by Alanna Nash Page A

into the country, and headed out to find work with a carnival on its summer route. Occasionally when he earned money, he
managed to send some to his mother, but always without a return address—he was moving too fast.
    Throughout his carny life, Andre would hook up with some eight traveling outfits, from the lesser-known Bruce Greater Shows, Dietrich Shows, and the L. J. Heth Shows, to the prestigious Royal
American Shows. But for now, with little command of English and scant experience with American carnivals, Andre would settle for employment almost anywhere.
    “When he got off that boat,” says Gabe Tucker, a musician and talent manager who was associated with Parker on and off for some twenty-five years, beginning in 1939, “he got on
the first carnival he come to, up in West Virginia.” Carnivals were the perfect blind. In an atmosphere that attracted people on the run, nobody cared if you had a passport or not. Better
yet, the hustlers and the cons of the carnival protected one of their own if somebody came asking questions.
    The carnival that likely took Andre on was Rubin & Cherry Exposition Shows, a highly successful company that loftily referred to itself as“the Aristocrat of the
Tented World.” As for which West Virginia town Rubin & Cherry was playing at the time Andre signed on, no one knows for certain. But a good guess would be Huntington, where the carnival
pitched its tents at the end of May through early June 1929—precisely the time Andre is thought to have arrived in America. By the 1940s, the man who called himself Thomas A. Parker always
listed Huntington, West Virginia, as his birthplace, as good a town as any to be “reborn” in.
    In 1929, the American carnival was thirty years old, with some two hundred outfits plying the circuit. Each moved on as many as forty railroad cars, eager to set up their midways on the cow
pastures and fairgrounds around the United States and Canada. Many of those shows carried an elephant, the world’s largest land mammal.
    Long known as premier symbols of strength and power, elephants, which can weigh as much as seven tons and stand as tall as twelve feet, did more than simply perform in the carnival. They carried
the support poles to set the show tents and often helped the horses pull the wagons. But the elephant is also a grand arbiter of fortune. With his trunk raised, he is said to forecast good luck;
with it down, a turn of the fates. Naturally, the elephant captivated Andre’s attention.
    Indeed, his brother Ad van Kuijk said in 1961 that Andre started his career in America “working in a circus by lying on the ground in front of elephants,” a reference to that part of
an act in which the great beast demonstrates both his gentleness with humans and his control over his massive bulk.
    In 1994, Colonel Tom Parker gave a list of his career affiliations to the Showmen’s League for a tribute page in their annual yearbook. Nowhere did he mention a specific circus, only
carnivals, though he would announce at a 1988 Elvis Presley Birthday Banquet that he had worked for Ringling Brothers for “about two years when I was sixteen years old.” But he would
allude to elephants and circuses again in a 1994 letter to Pam Lewis, then the co-manager of country superstar Garth Brooks. “Please tell [Garth] . . . I enjoyed the television show on
NBC,” Parker wrote. “When I saw him on the high wire flying in the air, it reminded me of my circus days when I floated on top of an elephant.”
    In all probability, Andre joined a small, one-family circus or a carnival, and not a grand independent outfit. But whether he thought it sounded more impressive than a carny (circus performers
traditionally look down their noses at carnival workers, whom they consider merely cheap hustlers), he was far more modest in recounting his pachyderm past to Byron Raphael in the late 1950s.
    “Colonel never invited questions about his past, but he would bring it up on