While insomnia scrolling late last night, or early this morning depending on your point of view, I chanced across this thread from Joshua Marshall on BlueSky, and it focused me for the first time really on something I’d noticed long ago, and yet didn’t really look at. That saying of Orwell’s that To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle is more truth than I would like at times.

I had no idea he was German. This guy…

The one I’ve been telling A Coming Out Story about all these years.

Back then I just assumed he was Brazilian because that was what he always emphasised to me. I just figured he was descended from Portuguese settlers since he didn’t look like a native Brazilian. Then his family moved away and I learned they have left the country and I was devastated. I figured he’d moved back to Brazil. When a fellow classmate said they’d probably moved back to Germany I was confused. Why, I asked. He’s German came the reply. Really? That classmate looked at me like I was a clueless dolt, which back then I probably was, and said His father’s name is Wolfgang!.

Oh.

Many years later I managed after much searching to reconnect with him again, and now he’s working in Epcot Germany as a waiter, and I go visit Disney World for the first time after he encouraged it…

Come on man, it’s your heritage…baseball, mom, apple pie and Mickey Mouse…what’s wrong with you…

…and I go to Epcot Germany to see him for the first time in 34 years. And there I’m immersed in Disney Germany where Epcot World Showcase brings young adults over from the host countries to work in the park. And I finally get to see him again after so long, and I notice but don’t notice how I’m hearing a lot of German accents in there…but not from him. His voice sounds like it always did back in high school and that thrills me so much I don’t ask myself why he doesn’t have that noticeable German accent the others in there do. In the back of my mind I just assume it’s because he spent most of his young adult life here in the States, and he picked up the American accent because he was immersed in it.

Which, as it turns out, is probably the case…

The BlueSky thread I was reading this morning was about Elvis Presley’s manager, the infamous Colonel Tom Parker. Parker always claimed to be a southern good ‘ole boy born in West Virginia, but it was a carefully fabricated act. He was actually Dutch, born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk and he came to the US at about the age of 20 by way of simply walking off a ship he was working for while it was docked in New York City. That age is important because it meant he had to work at disguising his Dutch accent.

Marshall notes this was probably why he claimed to be from West Virginia instead of the deep south, where his accent would have given him up. Locals know instantly who is one of them and who isn’t by how you speak the language, just ask the Ephraimites.

A Shibboleth is any custom, tradition, or way of speaking that identifies someone as a member of a particular group or marks them as an outsider.

Here in Baltimore Maryland the locals here know instantly I wasn’t raised in Baltimore the moment I start talking. That working class bawlmer accent is pretty recognisable here and elsewhere in the state. Saying he was from West Virginia gave Parker just enough distance from the deep south that his accent could be believable by the good ‘ole boys and still be accepted as one of them. Sort of. As Marshall says…

This whole issue of language acquisition has always fascinated me in itself. Your brain at 10 is not the same as your brain at 20. Certain aspects of your brain fix at different ages. And even though you can learn new languages through he ability to integrate these very subtle intonations that make up a native accent elude all but a very, very small number of people if they learn the language past that age. In any case … Tom Parker! How’d he do it? I needed to figure this out so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this afternoon and the answer, to me at least, is as interesting as the question. He kind of *didnt* hide it.

He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did was affect and give people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or some kind of speech impediment. And I suspect he said that he was born in West Virginia – despite the fact that his professional life was around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee because A) it’s a bit of distance from those states around the Mississippi River AND B) because there are all sorts of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects.

So if anyone ever thought well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, dont-he? well thats because he has some sort of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where was born and also he’s got some kind of lisp. So just let it go. So basically how he hid his accent is that he didn’t. arker apparently spoke a variety of Lower Mississippi English with the kind of mild Dutch accent you’d expect from someone who by the mid-50s had lived in the US for about 25 years. But he had this cover story of Lisp/West Virginia accent you don’t know about. And it worked.

It seems once upon a time that the cover story of the object of my teenage crush was he was from Brazil…which he was…but not to tell anyone but close friends that he was actually a German. In retrospect that was probably because he got a lot of teasing from the other kids about the war.

Fact is the first thing he did when we met again after 34 years was try to suss me out about my feelings toward Germans…

You know what Germans are famous for…right?
Beer?
That too.
Pretzels?
That too.
Gummy bears?
That too.
Complaining?
***

And when he sent me that Christmas postcard with the Christmas greeting on it in both English and German I felt a wave of shame over all the WWII German jokes my childhood friends of mine and I told each other over and over again, and for accepting Hollywood’s German stereotypes. I can barely watch one of my favorite movies, Casablanca, without cringing at the stereotypical evil German, Major Heinrich Strasser, played to the hilt by Conrad Veidt (who was himself a German refugee having fled the fascists with his Jewish wife). It’s hard for me to watch any of those movies now without thinking of the guy I once thought hung the moon and the stars, and how it must have made him feel living here since he was a kid. He would have had to endure all of it.

David Low, master of the political cartoon art form, for all his forceful anti Nazi imagery (he was put near the top of Hitler’s list of people to be hunted down and arrested after a Nazi invasion of Britain) also pretty forcefully reminded the victors not to blame all Germans for what the fascists did…

So to me, the oddball art kid who couldn’t stop gawking at him, he emphasised his Brazilian birthplace at first. Why his family lived in Brazil long enough for their youngest to be born there was something I never asked him about. I figured it would be a pretty sensitive subject. But I have never doubted that he is a good man. Had we more time together and the ability to talk to each other sincerely, with trust and no worries, I think he would have eventually shared more of himself with me. Because he kept flirting with me I like to think we could have become boyfriends, although it was 1971 and not a good time to be gay, even in liberal Montgomery county Maryland. So that’s probably a fantasy on my part. I have often wondered if mom, who loved her boy to the day she dies, I have never doubted it, would have thrown me out of the house if I ever came out to her. At least two of my senior year classmates were almost certainly boyfriends I think, because of how

That was the world gay kids lived in back then, and in some places even still. I’m pretty sure his family put a stop to his spending time with me when they found out that he was talking with queer kid from school. Bavaria was and still is a very conservative and insular part of Germany. So it never happened. Then they moved away and I was heartbroken. But it never occurred to me to question why he had no German accent, which was how I didn’t know until I was told that he was German.

I see it now. He was immersed in American English at a young age. I know this because I have all the old high school yearbooks and he is in there from what would have been age 12 at least, and he may have been here well before that…

So I’m pretty sure he speaks German correctly among other Germans, since he would have learned it from his own family who were originally from Munich. Perhaps other Germans would know as soon as he opens his mouth that he is Bavarian, just as the locals here in Baltimore know I’m not from here, and if you have the ear, that my family (mom’s side, the side I grew up with) were central Pennsylvanian. But he spoke American English among us without the German accent because he was immersed in it young enough to absorb it that way without having to work to overcome the German fricatives. When you’re a kid you pick up the manners of speech from the world around you and your voice muscles naturally adapt to it. When he was young he learned German from Germans, and American English from how that is spoken here in the Mid Atlantic states.

But not Bawlmer. Obviously. No hon…I’m not from around here…