Col. Tom Parker: Illegal Immigrant

Probably most everyone over a certain age knows who Parker was, but what I did NOT appreciate until this piece over at Talking Points Memo is his backstory. My title here is deliberately inflammatory, but apparently Parker was born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, and jumped ship in New York as a young man well before the War. And here he stayed. And until about 1981, nobody even knew his background (beyond, perhaps, Elvis himself). This part is fascinating: So how is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona? He had a Dutch accent, albeit a relatively mild one. One side note here: as far as we know, Parker never left the United States during the entire time he represented Elvis, from 1955 to 1977. He couldn’t. He didn’t have a passport and couldn’t get one. And it’s often suggested that this is why Elvis,…