Friedrich Trumpf (1869-1918)

He was a sickly child, and deemed too weak to work as a grape picker on the family's modest vineyard, he was apprenticed to a barber. Emigrating to the U.S. at the age of sixteen, he followed the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99) where he became the co-owner of a popular saloon/brothel that offered cheap liquor and “sporting ladies” to miners. He returned to Germany but because he had failed to complete mandatory military service as well as failing to have notified the authorities of his departure in 1885, the Bavarian government stripped him of his citizenship and ordered him to leave. In 1905, he reluctantly returned to the States, settling in The Bronx in New York where his son Fred was born that same year at their home at 539 East 177th Street.

In New York, Friedrich started out tentatively in the construction business and when he died thirteen years later, his estate included the family's distinctly Bavarian-looking two-story, 7-room home at 175-24 Devonshire Road in Queens (click on this link to Untapped New York for images), five vacant lots, $4,000 in savings and life insurance, $3,600 worth of stock, and fourteen mortgages. The net value of his estate was estimated at $31,359. He was certainly not rich, but he had lifted his family out of poverty and laid the beginnings of the foundation on which his son, Fred, would make their initial family fortune.