The incredible, human story of a girl growing up in Vienna, Austria at the time of the Nazi Anschluss, who meets extraordinary challenges in her life to become the Queen of Real Estate and respected member of the community on the Monterey Peninsula. Click on the photo to get your copy today.

What Excerpts from "From Terror to Triumph"
 

 

Her christening: "Here I was with my mother and my grandmother and the priest. We all went up to the altar and here I was standing there and the priest said, ‘Stick out your tongue’ and then he said – and this was his big mistake – ‘I'm going to put a little salt on your tongue.’ I said to myself, ‘He is going to put salt on my tongue? Not on my tongue.’ So I turned and ran out of the church. Behind me came my grandmother, my mother, and the priest, chasing me all the way down the road. Can you imagine that? But they brought me back and then was my christening.”

A narrow escape: “I was maybe eleven years old. I knew I was dead. But on the truck, the people on the truck, they kept moving me away from the front, toward the back of the truck. And then a guy at the back he said, ‘Jump, kid! Jump!’ I was afraid to jump because it were going so fast. But I finally jumped. I somehow wasn’t hurt badly, just some bruises. I rolled off to the side of the road. The truck didn’t stop. I knew that the people on the truck had saved my life and would lose theirs."

Air raid: “There I was, the only child down there with all the wounded soldiers, and it stank like hell down there. But I was so glad to be in there, I can't even tell you. It seemed funny because the soldiers were all singing. I remember from their faces that they were happy that they had let me in. I was scared to death, but I also knew I was safe and it was funny, having those two feelings.

For Chester: “Don’t ask me how I did it. Okay, I bribed them. I had to, number one because he had married an Austrian citizen and that was against the rules. But that didn’t matter. I never paid too much attention to the rules. I gave a man a very expensive marble desk set, and then Chester had his new job working for the State Department. Boy, I tell you he was it. He was dressed very nice every day, he had a secretary and a couple girls in his office. He thought he died and went to heaven.”

At Cerrito's: “One day the door opened and guess who walked in? I recognized her right away. It was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They sat right down where I had my little cocktail situation. They were making a movie here, ‘The Sandpiper.’ So they came in and I was talking to him. He said, ‘Young lady,’ and he had a voice and pockmarks in his face. ‘Young lady I do believe you’re making fun of me.’ “I said, ‘No sir. I am not making fun of you. I also have an accent.’ And that got us into this conversation."

Randolph the Peacemaker: "Randolph was so smart, it scared me. When I used to have an argument, sometimes my husband and I, the dog didn't like it. So what he did, he went to my husband and then he came to me. When Donn was talking he’d go over to him and look at him. And when I was talking he came to me. Then back and forth, as though he was listening to what we were arguing about. And then what happened? We finally started laughing and that was the end of the argument. It was amazing. Because that dog was a peacemaker. That was my Randolph. He was so smart that it was unbelievable.

Real Estate: "When I opened my first office, I never forgot it, it was on Soledad Drive in Monterey. It was a very small office with two desks. And Margret's daughter, as a matter of fact, came to work for me, as a receptionist. It was a small place. Later I opened an office in Carmel and two offices in Monterey and I was going to open an office in Salinas and thank God I didn't; it would have killed me. I worked as hard as I did until midnight every day. I opened up my own building in Monterey. It's at 888 Munras, a beautiful place on the corner. It used to have my name on it and they took it off. I built that building and I built that building in Carmel at 100 Clock Tower Place."
 

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