In August 1958, Freddy Trump rented a plane from an airfield in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and flew with his best friend, Billy Drake, down to Nassau in the Bahamas for a short getaway before the fall semester at Lehigh University started. It was there, one evening at the poolside bar, that Freddy met a pretty, petite blonde named Linda Clapp.
Linda and her friend Harriet had just flown into Nassau from Florida for vacation. At nineteen, she had never met anyone like Freddy Trump. Dressed in black slacks, white shirt, skinny black tie, and madras jacket, he was, at twenty, different from every boy Linda had ever known. Freddy was six feet tall but slender, never weighing more than 152 pounds. He was funny and talkative. He told Linda about the new Corvette he’d bought with money he’d earned working at the Chevy dealership near Lehigh, where he was a rising junior. He was very proud of his first car, but while he was in Nassau, his older sister, Maryanne, called to tell him she’d somehow managed to get his Corvette crushed in a car elevator. Freddy didn’t take it too hard—he wasn’t that kind of guy.
Before Harriet and Linda left to go back to Florida, they told the boys they were planning a trip to New York the following summer. Freddy and Billy offered to show them around the city, and Freddy handed Linda a slip of paper with his name and phone number. “Call as soon as you land,” he said. And then he smiled at her.
Although the streets of New York in the summer of 1959 were not filled with people singing and dancing, as Linda half expected after all the movies she’d seen, there were town houses and skyscrapers and little restaurants a few steps down from the sidewalk. She did call Freddy a day or two after she and Harriet arrived, and he and Billy took them out a few times for dinner and drinks and shows in the city. They also spent a day at Billy’s summer place in Southampton, where Freddy had first learned to love being out on the water. On the way, they stopped at the House briefly to switch cars. There, Linda met thirteen-year-old Donald, who was two months away from being shipped off to a military academy, and Freddy’s mother, who glanced disapprovingly at Linda’s capris but didn’t have much to say.
The four of them enjoyed a wonderful few days together. Harriet was already engaged, and Billy had a girlfriend in Jamaica Estates, but Linda and Freddy clearly had something between them. Freddy offered to take Linda out for a final dinner, just the two of them, the night before she and Harriet returned to Florida. But he never called. When Linda didn’t hear from him, she called the House.
“Hello?” It was Donald.
“This is Linda, Freddy’s friend. We met a few days ago. May I speak with him?”
“He’s not here. He went bear hunting,” Donald said, then hung up.
Linda had known Freddy only briefly, but he’d spoken to her about his love of animals, and how much he wished he could have had a pet growing up. She couldn’t imagine him trying to kill an animal for sport. She sensed a lie, but whose lie was it? She only knew that her attraction to Freddy had grown and she’d begun to have feelings toward him. Now he’d ditched her. On the way back to Florida, Harriet did most of the driving because Linda cried halfway down the Eastern Seaboard.