Nest Egg: Gwenda Blair and German Immigrant

nest egg: That Canadian chapter proved pivotal for the entrepreneurial German immigrant, says Gwenda Blair, author of "The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire.""It allowed him to get together the nest egg he'd come to the United States for," the author and Columbia University journalism professor said in an interview."Whether he could've accumulated that much money somewhere else, in that short a period of time, as a young man with no connections, and initially not even English, is certainly ... unlikely."He'd left Europe in 1885 at age 16, a barber apprentice whose father died young, according to National Observer. Trump wanted a life outside the barber shop, far from the family-owned vineyards his ancestors had been working since they'd settled in Germany Kallstadt region in the 1600s carrying the soon-altered surname Drumpf. Friedrich Trump had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon, says the author of a new edition of her multi-generational family biography. He sailed in steerage to join his sister in New York. His next big move was heralded by the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of July 17, 1897, and its exclamatory headline: "Gold! Gold! Gold!"It described a resplendent scene at the port involving mountains of yellow metal and men returning from the "New Eldorado" with fortunes as high as $100,000. Within five years he'd anglicized his name to Frederick; moved to the young timber town of Seattle; and amassed enough cash to buy tables and chairs for a restaurant. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.