Frederick Trump is Immortalized by Woody Guthrie but not in a Good Way
Folk icon Woody Guthrie was a tenant in one of Trump’s apartment complexes, Beach Haven Apartments in Coney Island, Brooklyn in 1950. Guthrie criticized him as a landlord in a song: “Old Man Trump,” whom he accused of stirring up racial hatred “in the bloodpot of human hearts”. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912–1967) was an American…
Donald Trump’s Eminence Grise Mentor: Roy Cohn
Roy Cohen began his career serving on Senator Joe McCarthy’s committee during the senator’s hearing on the US Army in 1953 and 1954. He was responsible not helped in firing alleged Communists but was successful in getting gays banned by government service by President Eisenhower even though he remained in the closet his entire life….
Trump Learned How to be a Bully, a Toady, and a Liar
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York. He grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and attended Kew-Forest School kindergarten through the 7th grade. In 2017, his birthplace and childhood home where he was raised until he was 14 at 85-15 Wareham Place was sold for $2.14…
Generation II: Frederick Christ Trump Expanded the Family Fortune
Frederick Trump, the oldest son (1905-1995) was born in the Bronx, New York, the son of Fredrick Trump and Elizabeth Christ Trump. He grew up in Woodhaven, Queens, where he graduated from Richmond Hill High School. In 1936, he married Mary Anne MacLeod, a Scottish immigrant, and settled in Jamaica Estates, Queens, where they raised…
Generation I: Grandfather Frederick Trump, the Founder of the Family Fortune
Frederick Trump, the grandfather, began the family tradition of putting lipstick on a pig. He was born Friedrich Trumpf (1869 –1918) in Kallstadt, Kingdom of Bavaria. He took shortcuts that came back to haunt him. He left Bavaria without properly notifying the authorities and dodged military service when he left at age 16 in 1885…
The Origin of the Family Name Trump
Donald Trump’s family name is quite appropriate. It is a surname of German origin, from the German word for “drum”, “drumf”. The one thing the Trump family knows is how to beat its own drum! It is unclear when his grandfather, Frederick Trump I, dropped the “f” from the family name and changed the “d” to…
How Donald Trump of New York Became President of the United States
Donald Trump leveraged his family’s real estate fortune into becoming the president of the United States. His grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, set up a barbershop on Wall Street and began investing in NYC real estate after making a fortune mining the miners of the Yukon Gold Rush by setting up restaurants and hotels. His…
The New York City Transit Museum
On Sunday, 27 January 2019, I visited the NYC Transit Museum, located inside a former NYC subway station the corner of 99 Schermerhorn Street and Boreum Place. The station was decommissioned after World War II because the platform was not long enough to accommodate longer trains and in addition there were other subway stations nearby….
Marvelous MoMath
On Saturday, 26 January 2019, I had a most wonderful experience when I visited The National Museum of Mathematics or MoMath, a museum dedicated to mathematics in Manhattan, New York City. I had struggled with math in high school and avoided the subject in college and graduate school. I had to be tutored in algebra…
How is the weather?
Over the years, the weather has been pretty favorable, given this is beginning of the winter season. Whatever the state of the weather is this year, it has to be better than last year’s record low of 9 degrees Fahrenheit last New Year’s Eve. The temperatures will be more pleasant, probably in the forties or…