The Americanization of Tine Van Dop

Catharina “Tine” Van Dop passed away on Saturday, July 10, after living a meaningful life in her native Netherlands, also called Holland, and her adoptive home in Morrisons Cove. She was in her mid-90s.

Her husband Abraham and she were born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the Cove in 1957. Between their births in the 1920s and the decision to move to America, some exciting, even tragic, events took place. Tine, for instance, spent the WWII war years living under harsh Nazi occupation in Holland. Abraham, who was serving his compulsory military service in the Dutch Far East colony of Indonesia, was taken captive by the Japanese and spent the war in slave labor camps in Burma.

About the only positive consequence that resulted from these experiences was that Tine, in college in Holland, learned to speak English as part of her education, and Abraham, incarcerated with other Allied American and British POWs, learned to speak their language as part of his survival routine. He was liberated in 1945.

“After the war, when Abraham was in Holland for recuperation before returning to Indonesia as part of our colonial garrison force,” Tine recalls, “we met and had a whirlwind courtship and marriage. I joined him in Indonesia and later gave birth to our first child, Cornelis (later nicknamed Neil) in the capital of Jakarta.” Eventually, the Indonesian independence movement was successful and in 1950 the Van Dops, and other Dutch colonialists, hastily returned to Holland.

“By 1957 our family had grown by three more children (second son Jack, young Catharina, her mother’s namesake, and finally Robert). We were concerned about the children’s futures in Holland so we decided to immigrate. Because we were classified as “refugees” from our abrupt departure from Indonesia, that helped our case at the American Embassy in The Hague. But, we still needed an American sponsor, and that was arranged through the Brethren Church of Woodbury.”

The journey to the Cove was by ship from Rotterdam to New York City and then train to Altoona. “We were met there and driven to a home in Curryville,” Mrs. Van Dop recounts. “It was February, and very cold and snowy, but we began our American lives there.” At home she and her husband mostly spoke English, to hasten their children’s knowledge of the language.

Tine’s sights were set on teaching. “I had a university education and was a teacher in Holland and substituted at local Cove schools, but needed citizenship and an American college diploma to work full-time. I received my BS from Indiana University of Pennsylvania the same year, 1967, that my son Neil graduated from Central High School.” She taught fourth through sixth grades at the Roaring Spring and Martin elementary schools until 1983, when she retired to care for her ill husband. He passed away in 1986.

Mrs. Van Dop returned each year to Holland to visit family and friends and to renew her “roots.” “But,” she declared, “I quickly got restless and yearned to return to ‘my home’ in the Cove.”

The Americanization of Tine Van Dop was complete.