 When he was three his father abandoned the family for America, and a few years later, when his mother died of tuberculosis, he and his sister went to live in an orphanage.Burkhardt was a 20-year-old gardener's apprentice in the orphanage when he left for New York to work as a cabinetmaker with his father.Within the year he had lost his father in a car accident and his step-mother to an illness.