BEFORE the Dutch word brink meant a town square, it was a raised grassland, a meadow surrounded by ditches or canals. People lived there, it kept their feet dry, and it produced the word brinkmanship: go as far as you can if you must but don’t step over the edge, or else. It also produced one of Holland’s oldest surnames: Brink. With all kinds of variations, Brinkman, Brinker, VandeBrink, Brinkhoff, Brinkerhoff, Ten Brink, etc.
We do not know with certainty who the first Brink was that arrived in America, except that they did originally come from the Wageningen area. But what we know for sure is that they yielded 3 famous Americans.
Hans Brinker. Mary Mapes Dodge’s brainchild, and erroneously labeled as the kid with his finger in the dike. (In her book, Mary actually quoted Phoebe Cary’s poem about another made-up boy, Piet, whose finger saved Haarlem from a dam breach.) Hans was a skater, but just about every American knows only the story of the finger, popular partly because it was published immediately after the Civil War, and people were aching for something nice. But he didn’t really exist. However, Holland’s sudden popularity did. During the half century between the Civil War and World War I, America experienced what was later described as Holland Mania, a true Holland craze.
PERRY BRINK also existed, and then some. He ran a transportation company in Chicago, twelve horses with carts. In 1871, a city fire reduced 18,000 homes to ashes, including Perry’s building. But along with his wife Fidelia Holland, he managed to rescue the horses. He quickly obtained new carts, added eight horses, and within a week Brink’s City Express was ready to take on the transportation needs of a rebuilding city. Unfortunately, he didn’t grow old, so son Arthur took over the business. Therefore he didn’t live to see how Brink’s City Express in Chicago eventually grew into Brink’s Security, visible today on streets almost everywhere.
The rest is an impressive history.
DUTCH Brink number three was named Brinker, just like Hans. Norman. He had a functioning rabbit farm when he was 10, and a newspaper route that nobody wanted because the distances were too long. But it paid handsomely, and Norman used it to buy horses. He became a 1952 Olympic equestrian, and thereafter a champion pentathlete. Norman possessed an unbridled energy, plus he was a social butterfly, so no one was surprised when he ended up in the restaurant business. He took Burger King under his wing, started and won the advertising war with McDonald’s in the 1980s over who served the biggest burger. He became the inventor of the salad bar, coined the words that come out of the mouth of every waiter and waitress today, “My name is so-and-so, and I will be your server today.” And then he started Chili’s.
Brinker International owns the Chili’s restaurant chain, a success so massive that when Norman Brinker died a few years ago, the New York Times called him “the most influential person in the restaurant industry.”
The Netherlands, Nederland, has no Chili’s restaurant. But Nederland, Texas does. And 1,600 other locations, too.
