Rain or shine, Joe Pietersz sits on the stoop outside his Queen Anne apartment building. He is a familiar sight to neighbors and passersby, and always has treats for their dogs.
If Joe isn't shooting the breeze with someone, he's reading. He especially likes books about World War II. Perhaps he's trying to better understand an event that mercilessly swept him up when he was a child.
Near the Equator
Jules Francois Pietersz was born on Apr. 9, 1933, in The Hague, the Netherlands. He was the ninth of 10 children.
When Jules was three months old, the family moved to Indonesia, which at that time was occupied by the Dutch. His father, a civil engineer who designed railroads for an agency of the Dutch government, was assigned to Palembang on the island of Sumatra. (A quick geography lesson: the nation of Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago. It includes the islands of Sumatra, Java, part of Borneo, part of New Guinea and many smaller land masses. Indonesia is on the Equator, where it is relentlessly hot and days and nights are the same length year-round.)
The family resided in Palembang for six years; then moved briefly to Surabaya, on Java; then to Jakarta, also on Java. They lived on tea, rubber and clove plantations, and vacationed on Borneo. There were many servants: nannies, cooks, housecleaners, laundresses (Jules' father had to change his crisp, white shirts twice a day), gardeners and a chauffeur.
With so much help, Jules' mother was not bogged down by her many children, and spent a lot of time being chauffeured around with her Dutch women friends.
All that came to a halt when World War II broke out. The family was herded by the Japanese to a concentrated Dutch community surrounded by barbed wire - temporary imprisonment until camps could be built. Once interned, in 1943, the family was dispersed. Jules' mother and sisters were sent to Ambarawa, a women's camp. His father was sent to the "Burma Railroad," where many men died. All Jules' brothers except one were sent to different camps, and he and his brother Jack were sent to Malang, Java.
Jules was 9 years old.
Malang was a jail before it was a concentration camp. The Japanese freed the Indonesian prisoners, all criminals of some sort, and replaced them with Dutchmen.
The Indonesians were pro-Japanese because the Japanese promised them liberation from the Dutch when the war ended. In camp, boys were often beaten and men tortured by the Japanese - but never killed, as the Indonesians would have liked. In a convoluted way, the Japanese protected the Dutch.
For three years the two brothers didn't know the fates of the rest of their family.
Boys in the camp had several duties. One was to pick the pits of djarak, a black bean that produces oil used by the Japanese to lubricate machinery. Once, Jules used this activity as cover to secretly pick chili peppers for the kitchen, to spice up the otherwise bland food. He crammed them in his pockets, but before he could get them back to the kitchen, the heat of the day released the peppers' juices and they trickled down his legs, burning all the way.
Boys also were sent outside the camp in work gangs to pick up cigarette butts and other litter. Unbeknownst to their captors, they smuggled cigarette butts back into camp, re-harvested the tobacco, rolled new cigarettes with pages from a Bible and traded them for food.
At Malang, "some of the guards were OK" toward young Jules: "They taught me about ancient Japanese culture, the samurai and shoguns - and they taught me to cuss."
Jules learned to cuss in Japanese, of course; he counts that among the languages he speaks, along with English, Dutch, German and Indonesian.
When the war ended, Jules and Jack remained in Malang while the Red Cross searched for their family. A case worker came to the camp every few days and read the names of boys whose families had been found. It was six months before Jules' and Jack's names were read.
Miraculously, every member of their family had survived the war, and they were reunited in Jakarta in 1946.
The Pieterszes remained in Indonesia for three more years, living in Bandung, Java. School was difficult for Jules; because there had been no schooling in Malang, he had to pick up where he left off years before, in a much lower grade. But he was not alone. Accommodating children like him, schools "over-bridged," providing each grade's studies in an intense six months. Eventually, Jules caught up.
Indonesia finally gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949, and the family returned to their homeland.
Initially they lived in Woudenberg, in a large villa with other displaced families. It was there that Jules first saw snow, a strange sight indeed after years in the tropics. Everyone had a gleeful snowball fight, then gathered around big stoves to warm their hands.
Jules graduated from high school in 1951, then attended machinist school at night in Utrecht. Though he attended for only 18 months and didn't finish, he learned mechanical engineering, specializing in diesel engines, particularly ship engines.
In 1960 he married a nurse named Henrietta. Their first daughter, Evita, was born within the year.
Because Holland was crowded with millions of people who had returned from Indonesia, legislation was passed that made it easy for many of them to emigrate. Jules and Henrietta decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Henrietta's brother lived in Boston, so they chose to emigrate to the United States.
They were first sponsored by a group of Quakers, but the sponsorship was withdrawn. The couple chose to ship out anyway, under the dubious-sounding category "open placement." In mid-Atlantic they received a telegram notifying them that Foss Tug in Seattle would sponsor them. Never having heard of Seattle, they had to go to the ship's library to look it up.
The young family landed in America on May 2, 1961, and made their way to Seattle. Foss Tug not only sponsored them, they offered Jules a job and found them an apartment on Queen Anne. Jules went to work. He is proud that he started as a journeyman.
After they arrived in Seattle, the couple's second daughter, Patty, was born, and Jules started to go by the name Joe.
The secret to longevity
Joe would stay at the Foss shipyard, as a pipefitter, for five years. He quit to become a steamfitter (the money was better). Jobs took him all over the state and country, from a dam near Wenatchee, to an oil refinery in Michigan, to shipyards in Alabama and Alaska. "I loved my trade," says Joe. "I wanted to go to work every day."
His job-related travels prevented him from ever becoming a U.S. citizen. "I never had time for the schooling required," he explains. Now that he is retired, he feels that he wouldn't gain anything by applying for citizenship at this point. He cannot vote or serve on a jury, and he doesn't feel entitled to express his political opinions, but he "feels American" and will stay in America as a permanent resident.
He and Henrietta divorced after five years of marriage. Henrietta, Evita and Patty all still live in Seattle. Joe has four grandchildren now.
Shortly after his divorce, in 1965, Joe visited Holland. He didn't like it: "Too small." He has not been back since. His parents and all his brothers are deceased, and most of his sisters live in other countries. Only one sister still lives in Holland, as well as nieces and nephews too numerous to keep track of.
Following his divorce, Joe became a ladies' man. When asked who was the greatest influence in his life, he replied: "Old girlfriends" (plural). Asked for an old photo, he was hard put to find one in which his face wasn't obscured: he was either wearing sunglasses, guzzling a beer, puffing on a cigarette or kissing a girl.
When asked if he had any secret to longevity, he replied: "Sex."
Joe had heart surgery a year ago and "feels fantastic" now. He still drinks and smokes, but, he claims, not excessively. "I follow the rules of life," he says. "I know when to stop things that are no good for life."
Joe has lived in his current apartment on Queen Anne for 15 years. Taped on his walls are magazine photos of elephants, his fetish. "So smart and mighty," he says, "and their plight is so tragic, almost driven to extinction by ivory poachers."
Since his retirement in 1994 he has been encouraged to travel, but he has no desire to do so. He is content to sit on his stoop and visit with his friends, canine and human. Especially the women.
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