Page 54 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

ceremony. Fred and Mary weren’t pleased, but since they didn’t offer to help financially, they had little say. Neither Elizabeth, who was at college in Virginia, nor Donald, who was still at NYMA, attended. The Trumps settled for hosting a reception in New York after the couple returned from their honeymoon.
Trump Village in Coney Island—the largest Trump Management project to date—was slated to break ground in 1963, and Freddy would be assisting in the preparations. Fred expected him to take an apartment in one of his Brooklyn buildings so he could be close at hand to manage any problems that cropped up, but Freddy and Linda moved instead into a one-bedroom in the city on East 56th Street between First Avenue and Sutton Place. They bought a poodle, the first pet Freddy had ever had, and a few months later Linda was pregnant.
That November, Frederick Crist Trump, III, was born. A month later, Freddy bought his first plane—a Piper Comanche 180. He and Linda flew it down to Fort Lauderdale right after Christmas to show it—and their new son—off to Linda’s parents. Her father, Mike, who often parked near the runway of the Fort Lauderdale Airport to watch planes take off and land, couldn’t have been more impressed.
During one of the weekly dinners Freddy and Linda had with Maryanne and her husband, David Desmond, whom she had married in 1960, Freddy told them about the plane, adding “Don’t tell Dad. He wouldn’t get it.”
In September 1963, they moved into the Highlander, one of Fred’s Jamaica buildings, down the block from where Linda had lived when she had first moved to town three years earlier—a stepping-stone to a house on Long Island. The Highlander was typical of Fred’s buildings, having a grand entrance to distract from the substandard rental units. The lobby had a large sunken space with a formal sitting area blocked off by velvet ropes and stanchions on one side and on the other a huge display of oversized tropical plants. Between them, large floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows looked out onto a wide expanse of flagstones and brick steps on either side curving up to the sidewalk. On either side of the steps was more extravagant foliage, towering oak trees and exotic plants with enormous dark green leaves— another Fred Trump touch. The building stood at the top of a hill on Highland Avenue, essentially the dividing line that ran through Jamaica: the