Super Lawyers - Minnesota 2011

A HIGH TOLERANCE FOR RISK RUNS IN VAN DYCK’S BLOOD.

During World War II, her Belgian father, Emile, was in the Belgian
Underground, while her mother, Orpha Gresham, left her family
farm in Indiana to join the Women’s Army Corps and U.S. Secret
Service abroad. The two crossed paths during spy missions in
London. A few years after the Allied forces declared victory, the
couple married and moved to Manhattan, where Van Dyck was
born. “GIs brought back women,” she says. “My mom brought
home my dad.”
The way her father’s career took her around the country, Van
Dyck may as well have been an Army baby. “My dad was a real
entrepreneur in the fiber glass industry,” she says. “He invented
processes for developing products. In the early 1950s and ’60s
there was the corporate shuffle. You moved to where the next step
up was. So I attended eight schools in six years. When people ask
me where I’m from, I say, ‘The U.S.A.: New York, Connecticut, South
Carolina, Texas.’”
The moves were sometimes very quick. “When I graduated from
high school in South Carolina,” she says, “my father had taken a
job in Texas. So we went to my graduation, then piled in the car
and moved.”