“BESCHUIT” is called rusk in America, but not for many years in Indiana, not at Catholic Notre Dame University. There it was known as the Notre Dame bun, courtesy of Father Willibrord Polman from the Dutch town of Zevenaar. For a long time he was the head of the bakery at the school.
Students sometimes do weird stuff, and the Bun Run is one of them. On the Sunday night before final exams, they run around campus stark naked. Now they all think there that Bun is a reference to their butts, but that is incorrect. The Notre Dame bun is originally a Dutch rusk, and the Bun Run comes from there.
Father Polman’s real name was Gerrit, but at the Congregation of the Holy Cross they renamed him Willibrord. He was allowed to join the order on the condition that he fill a bakery vacancy in the US at Notre Dame, and so crossed the ocean at the age of 27. For years, no one among the students knew he was really a priest, for they rarely, if ever, saw him in his habit. Father Willibrord looked like a baker, in white, with flour everywhere. He baked their bread. And their rusks, every morning at breakfast.
HE WAS lonely. On the wall in his room hung pictures of the old days in Zevenaar, and one day he wrote to his family that he would like them to come to America too. There was plenty of work for them at the bakery. Cousins August and Henk Eykholt said yes, they wanted to. They didn’t speak a word of English, but they learned that as quickly as they learned to bake bread and rusks, and the end of the story was that Henk started his own bakery in the town of Goshen, nearby.
It’s still there today, Dutch Maid Bakery. The maid was his own little daughter, Harriet, whom he adored. Area neighbors have names such as Joldersma, Hoogenboom, Ozinga, Snijder. No wonder Goshen is also home to the factory where they make one of America’s most popular motorhomes, the Dutchmen.
