Bergdoll Boys: America's Most Notorious Millionaire Draft Dodgers

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Bergdoll Boys: America's Most Notorious Millionaire Draft Dodgers

By: Lake, Timothy W.

ISBN: 9781955041089

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Description

A biography of a German American family who grew wealthy from their Philadelphia beer brewing company in the late nineteenth century.

Heirs to the renowned German-American Bergdoll Beer fortune at a young age, the Bergdoll boys used their millions to become champion race car drivers and pioneer aviation heroes in the early 1900s. Grover, the most notorious, is celebrated for his daring record-setting flights in a Wright Brothers airplane. Erwin drives a powerful Benz to win a prestigious motor car race, the equivalent of the Daytona 500. Then, just as Grover is trying to buy a bigger plane to set more records and attempt to fly to Europe a decade before Lindbergh, they’re snared by vengeful local military draft officials. Running and hiding from their war duty, the fugitives are so reviled by nationalistic Americans that two older brothers change their names to avoid infamy.

Eluding capture for years with financial help from their wealthy German Mutter, the Bergdoll boys are entangled with kidnapping and murder, federal agents and bounty hunters, Nazis, and Congressional investigators, and an incredible story of release and escape from an Army jail with bribery, all the way up to the White House to search for buried gold.

Hounded by the unsympathetic press and public, and congress, the Bergdoll fortune is confiscated by the federal government. Their doting mother gets into pistol shootouts with agents trying to search their mansions and country estates. Grover remains one step ahead of bungling lawmen by hiding in Germany and secretly traveling into and out of America on fake passports and producing kinderreiche Familie with his attractive German wife.

Table of Contents

Prologue

1) Pot-O-Gold
2) Bergdoll Beer
3) Gun-Toting, Check-Writing Emma
4) Race Cars and Millions
5) Airplanes and Millions
6) Philadelphia Flyer
7) Bergdoll’s War
8) Next Man in Line
9) Another Pot-O-Gold
10) Escape to Germany
11) Kidnapping and Murder
12) Bertha Emilie Lydia Helene Franck Bergdoll
13) The Wright B Flyer
14) A Man Without a Country
15) Final Flight

Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Illustration
Credits
Other Books by Tim Lake