The maroon color remained.

When I was eight or thereabouts I was allowed to ride my bike unaccompanied by my parents and from then on I drove all about town alone, mostly to check out motorcycle dealers and automobile showrooms. On Saturday's I went to my father's office so I could pick him up at 12:35 and we could ride home together. On Wednesdays I sometimes went down half an hour earlier than closing time so I could hang around the expedition people. The men in the cellar were friendly, today they would be called logistics employees, as my father nowadays would be called financial supervisor. The logistics guys were dedicated hard working, and nice men, one of them was somewhat smaller than the others and was called Joop, a quiet man who combined his work in the expedition department with chauffeuring the "directeur" who would presently be called president. Joop picked up the boss from his villa at half an hour's distance from the office which was located in the centre of the city, and dropped him off a long time before the office hours began, still early enough to pick up the vice-president who lived in the swell Southern part of Amsterdam, in a house opposite the house where in later years the family lived which by the turn of the century attracted more attention than any of us could dream of to deal with. When I was early enough in the expedition department Joop occasionally would ask me to join him to fetch the vice-president, with me seated in the front passenger seat of a maroon colored Ford Customline, the first car that had no separate fenders, but a "pontoon body" in which the fenders of the models of a year earlier were merged. The pleasant ride back to the office always was shorter than I wished for.

When I nowadays walk through the Holbeinstraat, one street from my own street across the canal, and when I in Spring make photos of the trees when they blossom into pink flowers, I then virtually see the light green Volvo of my business partner with whom I drove to our mutual clients. In the middle of the wide street there still is a narrow park between two rows of parked cars, at some eighty meters on the left the corner house of the meanwhile dead colleague of my father, and on the right the house where Ton Bruinsma had lived, one of my best clients for whom I did major graphic design jobs, whose son Klaas I've never met, the meanwhile dead godfather of the drugs mafia.

Hans Arend de Wit

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