NORMALLY, when you see a Dutch name in the Chicago area, it would typically have a nineteenth-century origin. Back then, hundreds of thousands of Dutch came to America, the so-called second wave of emigration. But Frans and Levijntje van der Koeck did not fall into that category. They left the Dutch town of Breskens at the end of the golden age and settled in Gansegat. A gat was a pond, and in this particular one apparently more geese were floating about than usual. The name no longer exists, it became Paardenek, horse neck – now it is Fairfield, New Jersey.
Van der Koeck inevitably soon became VanderCook, and in some cases Van Dercook. There are now more than 500 of them left in America. That’s not too many for a family that crossed the ocean so early on. What this often suggests is that subsequent generations produced healthier girls than boys in those early years. When more girls made it to adulthood than boys, marriage caused offspring to lose their surname more often than not.
BUT numerous or not, in Chicago and far beyond, VanderCook became a solid name. Robert, for instance, had brought something in his DNA that is utterly Dutch: a penchant for printing. While it is true that since the dawn of time there have been debates about exactly where movable print was invented, in China, Mainz, or Haarlem, by the time the Van der Koecks moved to America, the Netherlands was the world’s printing clearing house. Nowhere else did so many books, papers and pamphlets find themselves in print as in Holland.
Robert started building printing presses a century ago, together with his sons. Really good, sturdy presses. So sturdy that there are still a few thousand of them in running condition, even if they are no longer in production. Bob VanderCook built thirty thousand of them, at a time when America still had five thousand different newspapers, five times as many as today. Presses for printing newspapers, presses for posters and, super welcome for many printers, small presses to make proofs with, so you could see if your layout was set in type correctly before mounting it on the big printing press cylinders. Eventually, the VanderCook sons sold the business, but the product’s reputation was so good that the new owner used the name Vandersons to keep selling it.
END OF story for the name VanderCook? No way, another smart cookie turned up, this time a cornet player. Hale VanderCook was an ace trumpeter and a composer to boot. He formed his own band and took it to the circus and to theaters. That’s how many more regular folks got to hear his music than if he had limited himself to performing in concert halls, and he didn’t stop there. In the same year when Robert started to build his printing presses in Chicago, Hale elsewhere in town launched a school for music teachers. It is still there, and still flourishing. That’s why everyone in Chicago continues to see: VanderCook was here!
