Page 30 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

through ownership of restaurants and brothels in British Columbia. He lit out for the Yukon territories in time for the Gold Rush, cashing out just before the boom collapsed near the turn of the century.
In 1901, while visiting his family in Germany, Friedrich met and married Elizabeth Christ, a petite blond woman nearly twelve years his junior. He brought his new bride to New York, but one month after the birth of their first child, a girl they named Elizabeth, the couple returned to Germany with the intention of settling there permanently. Because of the circumstances under which Friedrich had originally left the country, he was told by authorities that he could not stay. Friedrich, his wife—now four months pregnant with their second child—and their two-year-old daughter returned for the last time to the United States in July 1905. Their two sons, Frederick and John, were born in 1905 and 1907, respectively. They eventually settled in Woodhaven, Queens, where all three children grew up speaking German.
When Friedrich died of the Spanish flu, twelve-year-old Fred became the man of the house. Despite the size of her husband’s estate, Elizabeth found it difficult to make ends meet. The flu epidemic, which killed upward of 50 million people worldwide, had a destabilizing effect on what otherwise might have been a booming wartime economy. While still in high school, Fred took a series of odd jobs in order to help his mother financially and began to study the building trade. Becoming a builder had been his dream for as long as he could remember. He took every opportunity to learn the business, all aspects of which intrigued him, and during his sophomore year, with his mother’s backing, he began building and selling garages in his neighborhood. He realized he was good at it, and from then on he had no other interests—none. Two years after Fred’s high school graduation, Elizabeth created E. Trump and Son. She recognized her son’s aptitude, and the business, which enabled her to handle financial transactions for her underage middle child—in the early twentieth century, people didn’t attain legal majority until the age of twenty-one—was her way of supporting him. Both the business and the family thrived.
When Fred was twenty-five years old, he attended a dance where he met Mary Anne MacLeod, recently arrived from Scotland. According to family legend, when he returned home, he told his mother that he had met the girl he was going to marry.