8
Chapter 1
Born Into a
Wealthy Family
W
hen Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in
Queens, New York, his family had been in the real estate busi-
ness for two generations. Donald’s grandfather Friedrich Trump, who
was born in the small town of Kallstadt, Germany, grew wealthy after
moving to the United States in 1885 at the age of sixteen. Donald’s
father, Fred Trump, was a real estate developer who constructed thou-
sands of row houses and almost twenty-five thousand apartment units
in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
The Trump family fortune can be traced to Donald’s grandfather
Friedrich, who opened a restaurant, saloon, and brothel in the Klon-
dike region of the Yukon in Canada in 1896 during the gold rush. In
1902 Friedrich married Elizabeth Christ, a native of Kallstadt. The
couple moved to Queens, where Donald Trump’s father, Frederick
“Fred” Christ Trump, was born in 1905. By 1915 the population of
Queens was growing quickly, which inspired Friedrich to invest his
savings in the real estate market. He bought five vacant lots and set
up a mortgage company to loan money to people who wished to buy
houses.
In 1918 an influenza pandemic killed somewhere between 20 mil-
lion and 40 million people worldwide. Forty-nine-year-old Friedrich
Trump was among the victims. At the time of his death Friedrich was
worth around $32,000. This was a substantial sum of money during
this era when the average industrial worker made $25 a week and a
three-bedroom home in Queens sold for $3,000.
