Early life and family interests in Holland; study at the Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht; courses in mathematics, physics and astronomy; move to Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden in 1929 and contact with Ejnar Hertzsprung; work for Hertzsprung on variable stars; Hertzsprung's career; Jan Oort's lectures on galactic rotation; recollections of Willem de Sitter; Leiden in the 1930s; Paul Ehrenfest's colloquium series; continued research with Hertzsprung during the 1930s; contact with Gerard Kuiper; research on Delta Cephei, dynamical parallaxes, and energy distributions in stellar spectra; Leiden Ph.D. thesis, 1938; stellar pulsations; Lodewijk Woltjer; year at Yerkes Observatory, 1938-1939; relations with Kuiper; recollections of staff research at Yerkes; South Africa, 1939; recollections of Marcel Minnaert. Short discussion of Jacobus C. Kapteyn, including plans and execution of 1936 eclipse expedition to Russia; war years in Holland; Dutch astronomy in World War II; living conditions; postwar move to South Africa and various positions there; move to Yale University in 1964. Also prominently mentioned are: Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Nikolai Pavlovich Barabashov, Bart Jan Bok, Dirk Brouwer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Christie, Pierre Demarque, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Albert Einstein, Louis Henyey, Edwin Powell Hubble, Ivan Robert King, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Bertil Lindblad, Edward Arthur Milne, A. Nijland, L. S. Ornstein, Henry Norris Russell, Karl Schwarzschild, Martin Schwarzschild, Otto Struve, Thackeray, Hendrik Christoffell van de Hulst; Bethany Observatory, Finsen Radiation Institute, Leiden Southern Station, and Radcliffe Observatory.