We were ten children. Agathe is the eldest. She's ninety-seven and lives in Baltimore. Maria [Franziska] will be ninety-six, and she lives here on the property in a little house about half a mile down the road. Then my sister Eleanor lives in Waitsfield, Vermont, twenty-seven miles south of here, my sister Rosemary lives in Stowe, and I live here.
Our estate in Austria was taken over by [Heinrich] Himmler [Hitler's right-hand man] after we left. It was his headquarters during the war. The estate was in the American occupation zone, so it was given back to us shortly after the war. And we decided—I say “we” even though I was very small at the time—we decided that we wanted to stay here [in America] and didn't want to go back to Austria, so it was sold by us to a religious order, and it became a seminary for many years, and now it's a bed and breakfast. I don't think Hitler had an office there, but he visited several times. There were bomb shelters built in the garden. There was a brick wall around the property with an electric fence on top.
We initially settled in Philadelphia because after one of our concerts a gentleman came backstage and introduced himself. He was a lover of baroque music and he said, “I have an empty house across the street from my own where my mother used to live and she recently passed away—would you like to live there?” He said, “It's a large enough house,” and my mother said, “Well, we probably can't afford the rent.” And he said, “No, no—the rent will be singing Bach with me once a week all day!” [He laughs.] His hobby was in translating the choral works of Bach, so we moved there and lived there, except Philadelphia in the summer is very hot, and in the fall, winter, and spring, we were traveling and performing—so it wasn't an ideal place for us.
We wound up here [Vermont] because we had been lent a house in Stowe for the summer, and while we were here, we found this hillside, and my family fell in love with the view and the feeling of space and openness. And I really think that this is one of the few places in the East where I could be happy. I feel really claustrophobic elsewhere. But here you can see twenty miles north and twenty miles south. There's a feeling of open space.
We bought this property in 1942 and moved up here and lived here and farmed the property, and my mother quickly realized that there was no way this was going to support a large family, even though we had bought two farms. The ground was too rocky and stony, and the growing season was too short, and the hills were too steep. At that time, the ski business was just getting started in Stowe. The lifts had been built, and skiing was becoming a popular activity, so when we were away singing, our rooms were rented to skiers. And that's how we got into the lodge business. We began renting rooms in 1950. It was after my father died in 1948. We hired a lady to be a caretaker. My mother was the guiding force but she didn't check people in and out. We also had a music camp down the hill.
I started singing when I was four years old. But then from seven years old on I was full-time with the family singers. Our last concert was in 1956 in New Hampshire. My brothers and sisters had gotten tired of traveling and singing. They just didn't want to do it commercially anymore. They were tired. My brother had six kids, and he didn't want to travel throughout the year. My mother would have happily gone on for another ten years, but my brothers and sisters had pretty well had it.
Most people don't know this, but I'm a forest ecologist. I studied forest ecology. I got my master's and then took two years off to straighten out the lodge business. [He sighs.] My mother, for all her tremendous energy and entrepreneurial ability, was a terrible manager and administrator, so that every person who spent thirty dollars here cost us thirty-five. And so I needed to get some things straightened out. I was going to hire a professional to run things and go back and finish my doctoral work and be a scientist, but that didn't work out. I got married, and we had children, and after a while I realized that this was going to be my career. But I was not into this at all. This is not what I wanted to do. My mother didn't want me to take over. We had a huge battle, although I sometimes wonder whether she staged all that, thinking that if I didn't fight for it I wouldn't care about it. She really had no idea how to run a business. When I took over, we had seventy-five employees, and I cut it to twenty-seven. This was 1969. There were just a lot of people here who weren't doing anything. They were here because they needed this place, not because we needed them. So I, for better or for worse, cleaned that up and we started making money! [He pauses.] It's been a challenge. It's a tough industry, and Vermont's a tough state to have a business because it has a low population base and we have to bring all our visitors up from the eastern megalopolis. But I've been able to do some fun things on the side as well. For instance, we've just launched a new line of draft lager beers with the name “Trapp Family Lodge, Stowe, Vermont.” Is the brand of the von Trapp name still strong? I think we'll find out with this beer.
It's been more than forty-five years, and people are still drawn to the movie. It's sort of a phenomenon. There are a whole bunch of different themes in it I think that resonate with people. It was, for example, not only popular in the English-speaking world—it was popular in Japan. It was extremely popular in China. Now, if you've ever expected a movie to be censored by the Chinese authorities, it would have been The Sound of Music because it highlights resistance to authority and all sorts of sensitive themes, but the film was tremendously popular in China. I think there are certain themes in it that are timeless, such as love of family, pursuing freedom, following your conscience, and doing what you like.
I met Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Christopher Plummer, interestingly, was here as a guest with his grandmother when he was a little boy. They came skiing and stayed in the old lodge, long before any film stuff. Actress Mary Martin and my mother had a very nice relationship. [The original Broadway production of The Sound of Music opened in November 1959, starring Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel.] They got along very well. Julie Andrews and my mother didn't get along quite as well. They respected each other, but Julie Andrews definitely wanted to do her thing and not what my mother wanted. But then, we didn't have creative control over the movie. My mother made a very bad deal a long time ago and sold our rights away. The Sound of Music company was generous enough to say, “Hey, you made a bad deal—we think you should have some participation in this,” and so they gave my mother some participation, both creatively and financially. They needn't have done that, which was very kind. I never met Robert Wise, the director, but my mother knew him quite well. My mother even went to Austria, and she was involved in the making of the film, but the rest of the family were not involved….
The greatest difference between the film and real life is first of all the time scale—my parents were married in 1927 and the film is set in 1938. So the children are all eleven years older. Another one is that the film downplays a very important personality, the priest who was our conductor, our musical director, Franz Wasner [portrayed by the character named Max Detweiler in the movie], and without him the family would have never had great success. He was a gifted conductor and arranger. He knew how to select music and arrange it so that it built on the family's strengths and minimized its weaknesses. [Arturo] Toscanini listened to one of our recordings and is supposed to have said, “They have a good conductor.” [He smiles broadly and chuckles.] Wasner returned to Austria and died there in 1992, I believe. He never became an American citizen. My family all became Americans, although my father did not. But my brothers were in the American army, and they fought their way up through Italy and drove into Salzburg three days after the war ended, wearing their American army uniforms in the jeep—it was quite an emotional feeling for them….
I'm a big-game hunter. I love to hunt. I've been to Africa a few times, traveled all over North America. I want to go to Asia. I've had ranches out west. One was in southwestern Montana, a beautiful property, about twenty-seven thousand deeded acres and another seventy-five thousand acres leased. It was a huge operation. We ran six thousand sheep and two thousand cows and it was hard work. I've never
worked harder in my life. I was up at 5:30 every morning, and I hate getting up in the morning. I have trouble going to sleep in the evening. For me, the day should be thirty hours long rather than twenty-four. I had the ranch for three and a half years. But I had a property in Arizona for ten years before that and one up in British Columbia for three years before that. I'd love to get another ranch.
After my mother died in 1987, her stock in the business was widely distributed among nephews and nieces, etc., and people who had been bought out years earlier once again got stock—so suddenly we went from five stockholders before she died to thirty-two stockholders, and it just wasn't a workable thing. Everybody was pulling in different directions, and I ended up buying most of them out. Actually, I bought them all out. So I own it now with my kids, Sam and my daughter Kristina, who lives on the property in a house with her husband. But in the process, unfortunately, my ranch had to get sold, so I would like to buy another one out there….
Regrets? I was having breakfast with my son, Sam, the other morning and I thought, “This is something that I would have liked to have experienced with my father.” Just sitting there, talking about various things. That's something I didn't get to do because I was eight when he passed. But what I really miss is my family singing. That was a fabulous thing. If we were together working, doing something, one of us might start a song and the others would chime in, and we sang together so much, we were so rehearsed, we knew all the harmonies—and were immediately singing in four-, five-, or six-part harmony—and it was just huge fun.
America's involvement in World War II limited immigration in the early 1940s, which had become not just a matter of economics but a matter of national security. National fears about foreign-born individuals continued to bubble up and were handled poorly, as when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) organized internment camps and detention facilities for enemy aliens, even when they were not actually enemies or aliens. After World War II, INS programs addressed the needs of returning GIs and the conditions in postwar Europe as immigration slowly started to increase again, and has risen steadily ever since.
KEY HISTORIC EVENTS
1940:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt moves the INS from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. The task of securing our borders against enemy aliens is added to the INS's wartime responsibilities; its workforce doubles during the war years, from approximately four thousand to approximately eight thousand employees.
1941:
The United States enters World War II, and Ellis Island serves as a detention center for enemy aliens.
1942:
Japanese Americans along the Pacific coast are detained and sent to internment camps or “War Relocation Camps” by the US government in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, even though 62 percent of those detained are American citizens; Ellis Island is enlisted for use as a detainment facility, holding seven thousand Japanese, Germans, and Italians.
1943:
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed. By the end of the 1940s, all restrictions on Asians acquiring US citizenship are abolished.
1945:
Large-scale Puerto Rican migration to escape island poverty causes many to settle in New York. The War Brides Act provides for admission of foreign-born wives of US servicemen.
1948:
The Displaced Persons Act allows four hundred thousand refugees fleeing persecution to enter the United States during a four-year period.
MIGRATION FLOWS
Total legal US immigration in 1940s: 857,000
Top 10 emigration countries in this decade: Canada and Newfoundland (160,911), United Kingdom (131,794), Germany (119,506), Mexico (56,158), Italy (50,509), France (36,954), Cuba (25,976), China (16,072), Ireland (15,701), Netherlands (13,877)
(See appendix for the complete list of countries.)
FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants who came to America in this decade (here, not all through Ellis Island), and who would later become famous include:
Angela Lansbury, England, 1940, actress
Ricardo Montalbán, Mexico, 1940, actor
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia, 1940, writer
Yoko Ono, Japan, 1940, artist/John Lennon's wife
Bill Graham, Germany, 1941, music producer
Yul Brynner, Russia, 1941, actor
An Wang, China, 1945, cofounder of Wang Laboratories
Ann-Margret, Sweden, 1946, actress
Yma Sumac, Peru, 1947, singer
Tom Lantos, Hungary, 1947, politician (California)
Madeleine Albright, Czechoslovakia, 1948, diplomat/US Secretary of State
Charles Trénet, France, 1948, singer
Max Frankel, Germany, 1948, journalist
Frank Oz, England, 1949, film director/puppeteer
The son of a prominent Jewish industrialist, his is an E. M. Forsteresque journey to America via Asia, India, and South Africa. He traveled with his brother, mother, and father, who left Yugoslavia to escape the Nazis. Their journey took many months, circumnavigating nearly half the globe, only to arrive in New York, find out his brother's visa had expired, and then spend nearly another month in detention on Ellis Island. This interview was conducted on Ellis Island itself for the Oral History Project in February 1991. It was the first time Paul had been back to Ellis Island since 1940, when his family first arrived. “I realize now that I should have come back sooner,” he said, “because there are so many memories attached.”
I was born in Vienna, although we lived in Yugoslavia at the time. My parents thought the hospital in Vienna was better than the hospital in the little town of Maribor, Slovenia. It's close to the Austrian border. We also had a better hospital facility in the town of Graz, Austria, where my brother was born. His name is Ivan. He is two years older.
My father's name was Vilko. He was a textile manufacturer. In fact, he was one of the founders of the textile industry in Yugoslavia. And he had both weaving and knitting mills in Maribor, and then he continued in that career when we came to this country. He started again and had textile mills here.
Our town was in a valley on the Drava River, beside a mountain that is actually the last in the Alpine chain. The name of the mountain is Pohore. The town at the time when we lived there had a population of about fifty thousand people. Now it's three times that size, and the people were, of course, Slovenian, but prior to World War I, that area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and German was the second language. So almost everyone knew German quite well, but Slovenia tried to keep its language going, and therefore all schools and all official functions were strictly in Slovenian.
My father actually had his apprenticeship in the textile industry in Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was quite advanced in that area, much more, of course, than Yugoslavia, and when he moved to Yugoslavia, he thought this would be a good area to develop the industry because of the availability of a labor force. But he had to bring some experts with him from Czechoslovakia who would run certain parts of the mills, so that it was a matter of training many of the employees, and this is just what happened, and it became a flourishing industry.
My mother's name was Margaretta. She was also Czechoslovakian and came to Yugoslavia after marrying my father, when he decided to move his business there. So they met while he was in Czechoslovakia. In fact, he was in business with my mother's mother, my grandmother, who was an importer and exporter and merchant in textiles in Prague and in other towns in Czechoslovakia. She was quite prominent in that business. This was unusual because women were primarily housewives then, but she had both a housewife career and a business career, and she met my father as a business associate, and that's how he met my mother. She actually worked together with her husband, but when he passed away she just continued the business.
My grandmother was a wonderful person. I remember her as being particularly generous and indulgent. She absolutely adored her grandchildren and spoiled us rotten every time she came to visi
t. She was a marvelous cook and we always looked forward to her arrival, not just for the cooking but for all the gifts she was always bringing. Her specialty was a preparation that involved a goose liver. It's taking the liver of a goose and treating it in some way, chilling it, and I remember the liver itself being in the middle of a sea of fat—all this, of course, solid after it's been chilled, very similar to the French foie gras. She made it for the holidays, for Christmas and Easter or whenever she would visit us.
My father's family was originally from Stupava, Czechoslovakia. My grandfather died before I was born. He was also a merchant. I don't know exactly what business he was in, but he had eight or nine children and kept a very close rein on everyone's doings and instilled in each a sense for business because they all have followed in his footsteps in that area.
When my father moved and established his first factory in Yugoslavia, on the factory grounds was a residential house, and we lived there a number of years. I was quite small, but I do remember it because it also had a garden and we had various pets to play with, ponies and, I think, a lamb. I still have photographs of that. I don't remember their names. [He laughs.] I do remember the dog's name that I got in Czechoslovakia. His name was Bonzo. [He laughs.] I don't know why I should remember that.
However, after a number of years we moved to the center of town and actually occupied an apartment from then on in Maribor. That was one of the most modern buildings at the time, and I think we had something like eight or nine rooms plus a kitchen and two bathrooms. I was about six. So it was just Mother, Dad, me, and my brother. And I was just starting school the year we moved in.
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