His daughters had more fame once in Hollywood, but his work as an architect could be quite practical. Three VA hospitals located in NY were scheduled for closing. Were the closings needed due to obsolesence, to excess costs, to unsafe structures? Could faults be corrected without closing the hospitals? Two contracted firms did the work. (He worked for one, Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, the architectural-engineering firm of NY.) Results, dated March-April 1965, were put inside a larger report, published by the US House's Committee on Veteran Affairs.
That team report gave his name as Fred W. Immoor. Earlier, at the time of his marriage to Katherine Shea, "Frederick Wilhelm Immoor" was used, more ethnic, preferred by his parents and at their church. (A granddaughter wrote of this in June of 2002, at ancestry.com, using "JESwanson" as her id.)
BIOGRAPHY. People of the past might have famed sons, but Frederick and Katherine had two famed daughters. One sought the limelight in California via the movies. She then left the lights for family life, as Mrs. Attix. Fred and Katherine probably had no need to worry about her. The younger daughter would have caused more worry. Fred would not know all of it Judith, wrote a book in 1977, four years after Fred's death, trying to defend her reputation. She had spent three to five years in a lifestyle, circa 1961, with a poor choice of friends. Had she been a man, would her actions, when young, have caused her to be called a "playboy"? As a female, her actions, while young, were instead deemed unforgivable?
Seeing her errors, she changed her life.
However, her old life did not forget her.
Two previous Hollywood associates were reputed gangsters, close to her father in age, from Chicago, not from her father's NY. The Church Committee, inside the US Senate, concerned about assassination attempts on foreign leaders, asked the two to testify for a 1975 report. In that connection, her name was leaked, on Dec. 21 of 1975. Why worry? Two reasons-- the two former associates were both murdered, brutally.
One died seven months before her name was leaked, the other, six months after. On June 19, 1975, the first was shot to death at his home in Illinois. Merely subpoenaed, he'd had no chance to testify. One source, perhaps too colorful, said six bullets wounds encircled the man's mouth. Another source, only a bit blander, said that he was shot once in the mouth, then five times through the chin. Alarming either way, his killing was a warning to others who might try to testify.
Despite the warning, five days later, on June 24th, the second man testified anyway.
He may have thought all was fine. But then, many months after the first death, his body was found dumped in the Florida waters, his legs described as chopped off. (Some people wondered, was he perhaps still alive when dumped?)
Considered to be the man who had brought the Chicago mob to Hollywood, Judith had dated that second man before marrying her first husband, Mr. Campbell. To give an idea of her youth, she was just age 18 at that marriage. Given that her name had been leaked, should she worry? Now respectable, would she be "dragged through the mud" if asked what she remembered seeing or hearing,. "back in those days"? Should she be fearful for her own life? She wanted to know everything that had been said about her to the Committee.
Her lawyers painstakingly asked nicely, then more officially, then sued. One wrote letters from San Diego, then the other one took action from Beverly Hills. They essentially asked for government records filed under the different variations of her name, the main ones being those she continued to use after her divorce at age 24, Judy Campbell and Judith Campbell.
Frederick died in 1974, so never heard about the leak or the two deaths, missed the spy drama that would swallow his youngest daughter. Spared this, his last years of retirement would have instead been pleasantly spent. Between her two marriages, daughter Judith would spend considerable time in the LA area, with both him and Katherine. Life was not perfect. Judith was said to worry that he lived beyond his means. Katherine died. Once widowed, he would go to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his other daughter, Mrs. Attix, lived with her family, her husband having taken his dental practice there.
EARLY LIFE. Raised at first in Brooklyn, he was named for his German folk. Wife Katherine was like him in being NYC-born, but in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, with Irish kin, not German. Their parents finished rearing them in Bergen County, NJ, where they could meet.
Note that the two ethnicities, German and Irish, typically had different ideas. These were not just about names, but about education and religion, about music, the differences clearer when both ethnicities attended the same church, the same school. One Irish way to resolve marriage disputes was for the father to raise the sons by his beliefs and the mother to raise the daughters by hers. Had that been their way?
Born to immigrants, his name was Britishized, from Frederick Wilhelm, to Frederick William Immoor, by the time he attended college. After marriage they continued to live in New Jersey for a time? In Frank Sinatra's home territory? Before 1940, however, he and Katherine took their four NY-and NJ-born children to California, seen with them there in the census that year, in Los Angeles County.
Without the glamour seen in the biopics of the two famed daughters, he humbly called himself a draftsman in the motion picture industry, while the census-taker noted that they rented a house on Rooney. Renting instead of owning took advantage of the declines in house values sdue to the Great Depression. It allowed more frequent moves, a greater ability to gind a better job. The list of residences would grow to include San Francisco, for the birth of son Allen, before a return southward. His family's obituary for him is below, above links to family.
The two daughters were not the only children. Son Allen would be in the real estate business, in San Diego County, while daughter Judith also lived there. A third daughter Joan, was, by then, in her most successful marriage. As Mrs. Collingwood, she would be near her other brother, Frederick Kenneth Immoor, in Nevada. Her Mr. Collingwood would be buried in the same cemetery as her brother, in Genoa.
FOUR FREDERICKS AND GERMAN-NESS Frederick Wilhelm was the second of four Frederick Immoors, each the son of the one before. Following old-style German rules, using their different middle names would help separate them if two were at the same family gathering or lived close to each other.
Records show the first, his immigrant father, sometimes used an H as his middle initial, but he normally used none. German rules did not require it, once Fred's father had become the eldest of the remaining Fredericks, the one with "dibs" on the right to use only the first name. Frederick H. took his small family, his wife Bertha, Fred and Fred's sister Alma, from Brooklyn in NYC, to the suburbs in NJ, where he made his moneyin real estate. He presumably died on the East Coast, given that his wife died later in Florida, a retirement spot since the 1920s. After the NJ boom, there had been another land boom for those in real estate in Florida at exactly the right times.
Fred and future wife Katherine would meet in NJ, but tried other places. Thus, their eldest, the son to go to Nevada, Frederick Kenneth Immoor the Sr., would be born back in NY. Note that immigrant Germans did not normally call their children Irish names. Thus, calling the third Frederick's midle name of Kenneth was the idea of Fred's Irish wife Katherine.
Frederick Kenneth would be hard of hearing. His young memorialists out in Nevada, however, said he could read lips. The household would have devoted a lot of energy to teaching him that skill. They succeeded, as he went into freight sales. Once retired, he would learn sign language and help tutor deaf students of middle school age in Nevada. No longer abiding by German rules of name politeness, Frederick Kenneth gave his full name to his son, did not change the middle name.
The last of the four Frederick Immoors, Frederick Kenneth Immoor Jr., would be remembered as a teen only. Jr. would be buried in Genoa, Nevada, before his own father an a now aging Fred, thus, much too early. He was killed while crossing a Nevada highway.
==========DETAILS========================
I. THE IMMIGRANT FREDERICK.
His father probably "came over" at about age 14. He was from northern Germany, judging by his names, peculiar to that region. The Scandinavian-influenced and Lutheran ends of the Germans would have been a majority of his neighbors.
An old leader of the tenth century, Immo/Emmo, had urged peace as a way to deal with the little kings that ruled. An "immoor" would have been a person tribally allied with or fond of the ideas of Immo, sometimes also called Immon. All of this perhaps caused his father to give different versions of their surname in old records, Immoor, Immon, Immonen, some versions beginning with E, as "they all meant the same". Ultimately, those concerned must have all agreed to use Immoor.
The entries of Immoors to America would spread out, over several decades, but were still all in an era when Ellis Island was the only way to arrive. The varied Immoors naturalizing in NYC courts gave no nation of birth. They cited only a ruler, wanting to leave him behind. Technically under the Prussian Kaiser by then, they put "Prussian emperor" in the space reserved for country.
Having that man as ruler implied their past was probably very unpleasant. Causing huge out-migration, it had been so for the majority. Enserfed both recently and for many generations, once freed, they were allowed to rent, rarely to own,maybe another factor to explain why these Immoors so often rented. Long-term militarization and conscriptions were expected of males. The rulers needed their young bodies to help the rulers conquer new peoples eastward, having been stopped from going southward. (Hitler would continue this later, often finding officers among the same "warrior landlord" families of northern Germany as had the Prussian Kaiser.)
Hence, his parents made a sacrifice. They pushed him out of the homeland door at about age 14, off to NYC and Ellis Island, before conscription could happen.
If one left to avoid conscription, the rule was that one could never return to live there permanently.
Two older Immoors, entering then leaving NY quickly, to re-settle in other states, gave Hanover as a more precise birthplace in their censuses. Both used the name Henry Immoor in their censuses. They would have been born and baptized, however, as Heinrich or Hendrick, nickname Heinie. Older than Immigrant Frederick, once could have been an uncle, the other, his father's cousin. It was also possible for two brothers from the same Germanic family to both be named Heinrich/Henry, to honor the same still living ancestor, with different middle names to separate them. However, the British-descended clerks in America refused to write the needed middle names on government forms, so church records have to be checked for full information. (Post-Prussia, the district and city of Hanover were still part of the Westfalen region. Church records are often seen under Westfalen. One Henry lies buried with wife Mary and daughter Wilhelmine in Philadelphia, Penn. The other crossed the Mississippi River, perhaps going via Chicago by train, to Scott County, Iowa, in the city of Dubuque, on the bluffs of the huge river, facing illinois. His death record stated his father had been a Frederich Immoor, his mother, Wilhelmine, the feminine of Wilhelm. His burial is with wife Mathilda/Matilda and an older relative, Johane/ Johanna Immoor. The Pennsylvanian Immoors are buried in a Catholic cemetery, Holy Redeemer. The Iowans' graves are in a town cemetery, so no hint of which churches to check.
Fred's father's arrival at age 14 was perhaps with his older sisters. There was no obvious sign of their parents nearby in Brooklyn. He lived first with one married sister in her apartment in 1900. Once children were born, needing more space, they lived in a different married sister's larger house in 1910. There were not just two surnames per dwelling, but three or four.
Interests lined-up more keenly if most of the men in a household worked in the same industry. Immigrants from Germany arriving at the very end of the 1800s were relatively late, too late for the good farmland of the Midwest. The Germans often had job skills beyond farming, however, letting them earn a living in large cities. In the old country, people had been , for example, farmer-shoemaker, farmer-brewer, farmer-undertaker, farming in the summer, preparing or fixing or selling coffins, shoes, etc. in the "off times". If trained by the same parents or grandparents back home, this could caused the same or similar occupation for all the males in a family group that arrived together. The houses' adult males were all employed in the liquor or brewing industries.
In 1900, this first Frederick was a bartender, while living in his older sister's rented tenement apartment, on DeKalb Ave. in Brooklyn. (Her husband was William Schaerr, mis-written in 1900 as "Shierr". Her name was Marie? Marti? The census-taker's old cursive handwriting could be hard to read, fading as decades passed. The confusing double vowels were perhaps Britishized later into Scherr. )
By 1920, his father, the first Frederick immoor in America, was a saloon-keeper. He had married Bertha/Berth Gans/Janz. Their latest shared dwelling was a house on Pulaski. Their crowded space had three families. (His older sister listed her spouse, Mr. Miller, as the landlord, but the name woul have been spelled Mueller, aybe with an "umlaut" substituted for the double vowel "back home" .)
Prohibition approached, was not yet law. Those coming from the British Isles had far more problems with alcohol abuse, made worse by laws forbidding women from going into saloons with their husbands and then saying it was time to go home. German beer gardens and festivals were instead family places, so the Germans felt they were about to be punished for problems they did not have . However, beer and liquor sales were still legal at the moment, no mafia needed to get around the law.
II. THE NY-TO-NJ FREDERICKS. By the 1910 Census, this Frederick Immoor, the secon of four, had been born. His younger sister Alma was also present, their family of birth not destined to be larger. Life soon changed. Before Prohibition, they had been working class, able to earn a lving with with limited educations. Post-prohibition, old jobs gone, they desired to advance to the middle class , so needed good educations for the children. How to manage this? His father left the saloon-brewery-liquor life, for real estate, specifically, NJ real estate. (If they had stayed in the old life back in NYC? Prohibition forced their old jobs to shift to the underworld. Speak-easies, boot-legging, etc, developed as the main alternatives, after German beer gardens, family-friendly, close, as did Irish whiskey distilleries, not so family-friendly.)
For business reasons, his father needed to be where the new subdivisions were forming, The most affordable way to escape the crowdedness of Brooklyn and Queens was to try the developing suburbs nearby, much to be of interest in north Jersey. His father was believed to make considerable money.
Thus, their next US Census, the 1920, listed his father as a realtor, having taken their little family across the river-marked state line, to Bergen County, NJ. Old habits die hard? They again rented, leaving them freer to move if the "hot spots for business" changed. In addition to budding subdivisions, schools were public, but not city-run, another advantage, instead independent of mayors' desire to reallocate resources away from schools to other city functions,.
His parents choose the old Jersey place of Leonia, which had split apart earlier from the larger mother township of Hackensack. Not incorporated until the 1890s, it had, maybe jokingly, been called Lee-onia. Its history was old. It began as a small village that existed mainly to serve the business needs of old Fort Lee in the Revolutionary days, well situated for transporting things and troops between the two larger places nearby, NYC to the north and Trenton to the south.
His father had a community side. Immigrant Frederick joined the Bergen County Historical Society, giving Leonia as his address. His new membership was listed in that old volume of their proceedings where the society described Leonia's history.
His parents became "monied enough". They were able to make at least three trips back to Germany, a luxury many immigrants could not afford. They would also to be seen in cabin class, instead of tourist class, at least once. This Frederick and his sister Alma went along for the 1922 trip. They would have met whatever aunts and uncles and cousins still lived "back there", where people named Frederick tended to be found north of the Rhine. Did they go for a wedding or funeral? Was a grandparent or two still alive?
Attending college was most unusual then. Yet, he was enrolled though at least the 1922-1923 academic year.
In that era, with too many places elsewhere lacking public high schools , many felt fortunate to get as far as Grades 6 to 8. However, his family was able to educate this Frederick well enough in NJ that he would qualify for the University of Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia, where other Immoors lived, a bit south, still on the coastline. There, the school newspaper, The Pennsylvanian, noted that he had pledged a fraternity, suing a Britishize spelling, as Frederick William Immoor. His fraternity's record-keeper saved space by abbreviating that to "F. W. Immoor". He was a sophomore on his pledge date and had charge of the freshman rowing team. (SOURCES: Page 1, March 8, 1923 issue, "The Pennsylvanian", archived at upenn.edu. Page 191, "The Palm of Alpha Tau Omega", 1923, volume XLIII, viewable at archive.org.)
Many of the first-generation German-Americans would serve for the US in the World Wars. This Frederick was too young for WW I. Having five children and a wife to support would have excused him from WW II, though he would have been drafted had the war grown worse.
Since these Immoors had returned for visits, was it too easy to visualize the faces of people they knew, the mind's eye seeing them bombed on the ground? It was, perhaps, a mercy he did not need to serve.
Did his father expand his real estate business? Parts of New Jersey and Florida saw incoming New Yorkers at about the same time. Both family housing and seaside resorts were built for NJ, retiree housing and more resorts, for Florida.. Builders and realtors aided everyone in leaving NY for elsewhere.
The money-making land boom of his father's era would end. This would happen nationally in the decade in which the Frederick headed for California was beginning his own family. The Great Depression and associated crashes came strongly, overwhelmingly. The next national land boom would not start until WW II veterans returned, ready for marriage and new houses in the 1950s, deposits already saved up as everyone saved during the war-ration years instead of buying. That would be a good time, especially for those who moved to California early.
III. MOVIELAND FREDERICK. He and Katherine moved alone to "movieland", Los Angeles County, between the births of their fourth, daughter Judith, in NJ in 1934, and their fifth, a son, born in San Francisco, after they all moved following their 1940 census. There was no sign of his parents present, though his mother lived long, until 1966.
Yes, a biopic sketch for daughter Jacqueline (actress Susan Morrow) said he and Katherine had seven children. The problem? Only five are found in marriage and other records. Perhaps the number of seven was guessed by counting the surnames of grandchildren in his obituary? (While the brothers had only one marriage each, the daughters, California style, had multiple marriages, too many California-style, with older Hollywood men.)
III. SHEAS, THE BRONX TO NJ. Was renting a Europe-learned habit for more than the Immoors? Others also came to NJ to rent, if not able to afford buying just yet or in an occupation that required moves. These included the family of his future wife Katherine, listed as Catherine Shea in her NYC birth record, her parents living in the Bronx, church records kept centrally, at some diocese or cathedral office in Manhattan. Her family changed her name to Katherine O'Shea for their 1920 Census, truer to their Irish roots, a brave thing to do in a time growing thick with "nativism". They said her father William worked as a "billiards instructor", so perhaps he was employed in the resort/hotel areas of NJ. This would be a type of work that perhaps did not survive the coming Great Depression?
A sister a year or so older had been born in Ireland, listed as Josephine in the Sheas' last census with her present. She was found sharing Frederick and Katherine's house in LA County for their 1940 census with her surname changed to Horton, first name modernized into Jean, in a time when everyone knew of actress Jean Harlow. Whatever name Jean/Josephine used, she and her sister Katherine were alike consistently listed only their mother as Irish-born, their father, William, always, as having been English-born. British and Irish was as uncommon a combination as German and Irish. Perhaps their father's Sheas had tried migrating from Ireland to England, where Wm. Shea was born? Then, finding work wanting, they returned to their homeland, where he could meet his future, wife Ellen/Nellie O'Leary, daughter of Bartholomew? Not happy with either Ireland or England, William and Ellen/Nellie then picked up their baby daughter, Josephine and moved to America in 1905, quickly having Catherine/Katherine, then gradually, the rest.
Catherine Shea was seen in multiple early records, including her birth in NYC. What event excited them into resuming the spelling rules they preferred, just as the Klan was expanding into the Midwest and Northwest, the newspapers covering their actions against Germans and Irish and Jewish and working class labor unions, wherever their usual victims of color could not be found? First, the Klan marketers stayed away from NJ and NY. Second and more important, the southern two-thirds of Ireland had recently split apart as it own Republic. Only Northern Ireland, called Ulster, still remained as a colony of Britain, still required to follow British rules. Thus, in 1920, her mother declined to say she was from a unified Ireland, as done before, but said the truth, "Irish Free State". This would be short-lived. By 1930, US census-takers had been re-trained, told to accept only Ireland as an answer, about the same time southern legislators had convinced the government to stop counting people as "mulatto", the counts having offered strong proof that blacks and whites were mixing, contrary to miscegenation laws in the south.
The granddaughter writing of Katherine's marriage to Frederick Wilhelm said they had moved to the Teaneck area after marriage. Remember that Leonia's old larger township had once been part of an even larger mother township called Hackensack. Growth caused the towns to split apart, done as smaller governments gave people a better say in their own governance, not letting themselves be ruled patron- style by central elites. We have not checked, but it's possible that Teaneck was also carved out of the same mother territory, staying in farmland and woods longer, so later to be developed and split off from grandmother Hackensack, perhaps a once-larger Leonia or Ridgeway its mother.
By everyone's next census, the 1930, Frederick and Katherine were not with parents, doubled up with no one, rented their own house in New Jersey. They had had the first two of their five children, Frederick K., born NY, listed elsewhere as Frederick Kenneth. Joan was born NJ. The next two children, Jackie and Judy, would also be NJ-born, listed as that by their parents in their 1940 census. A biopic sketch giving Judith's birthplace as NY seems wrong in that light, with NJ repeated by her in her marriage records. [Need to double check all this to be sure.]
SINGING WITH SINATRA? Joan would be with them for their 1940 US Census after their move to the Los Angeles area, but then returned to Bergen County, N.J. to graduate from HS, specifically the Hackensack HS. She was thus near relatives again in Leonia and Teaneck, presumably living with one of them to attend a good public school, one not city-run. Frank Sinatra would get his start about this time, after admiring and styling himself after NY's black singer Billie Holiday. He was noted first as at Fort Lee clubs.
He would become one of Judith's associates. She met a mobster we will call R., before her marriage at age 18 to actor William Campbell, a marriage which lasted six years despite the age difference. The newly famed Frank would introduce the recently divorced socialite named Judy Campbell to the mobster we will call G., and to one other man, the political son of an Irish mobster already invested in or otherwise controlling some Hollywood hotels and studio premises. What happened after the introductions is debated. She said the serious relationship lasting two years was with the political son, whom she mistakenly believed had loved her. The others were flirtations or brief affairs, her relationship with G. a business one on behalf of the political son.
SONS VS. DAUGHTERS. As we lie on our death beds, examining our consciences, we may ask what we could have done better. Answering that, we might make amends, wish we had time to tell our children more, apologize for our mistakes, or advise them not to do the same.
Five children survived to marry. Eldest to youngest, they were: Frederick K., Joan, Jacqueline (aka Susan Morrow, actress), Judith, and Allen G. Why did the daughters marry so often, the sons and the parents and grandparents, just once?
If this Frederick went to the University of Penn., if his eldest daughter Joan finished HS, and if his youngest son, Allen, received a degree at a local college in California, why didn't his other two daughters do more of that? One answer was perhaps their mother, Katherine. After living in LA for the 1940 Census, they had some time in San Francisco, where son Allen was born and Judith recalled that she and Jackie were sent to Catholic school. The school was fine, her mother was not. Her mother could have waited until summer vacation, as the Germans did, when sending their children "to visit" relatives, something most of them loved. Yet, Judith recalled that Katherine pulled her and Jackie out of school for a whole month, not summertime, sending them to Chicago to see her re-married sister Jean/Josephine and their bit-younger cousin Patsy Horton. Judith may have been pulled out in the middle of difficult material, while Jackie was in the midst of something easer to make-up on their return. Judith would be humiliated by then being held back a year, not allowed to proceed with her friends to the next grade. Her parents perhaps could have insisted she be advanced, or switched her to a public school. Choosing this humiliation instead of moving children ahead and giving them extra remedial work is associated, statistically, with a much higher rate of dropping out, known in modern times, maybe not then.
Judith no longer liked school, but reported that her mother nearly died in an auto accident. This event was used as the reason (needed to keep truancy officers away) to pull Judith out of school at about age 14, the age when immigrant Frederick came to America to work.
Most places had light requirements for home schooling. A smart-enough child could finish the suggested or required homework and reading easily by 11 am, having the rest of the day "open for whatever", unless the parent teaching at home decided to fill the hours with more. If Jackie was 16, she did not need parent consent, she could drop out on her own. Jackie became a starlet and introduced Judith to things for which she was not ready.
Was there another problem? Judith suggested that Frederick had been too hard for his children to please. Did her brother Frederick Kenneth's hearing problems reduce his noticing all that was going on? Did anyone try to make up for the deep disappointment of never pleasing Papa, by trying to please other older men, not younger ones. In that era, they could try this at work if male, in marriage if female? Were any poor choices of associates then also too hard to please?
Judith first married, at 18, an actor known to Jackie. She had earlier flirted with handsome mobster R, who was in the process of bringing the Chicago mob more deeply into California, already in Nevada .
Dating and marrying too early is statistically dangerous. Far worse than marrying another peraon also age 18 is a woman of 18 dating or marrying a much older man. If dating or marrying someone so young, the older man might hope for someone accustomed to obeying her parents, ready to obey him, as if still a child. Conflict develops if she discovers she can't be a child any longer.
Both of Frederick's sons would have luckier lives than his daughters, in the sense of having just one marriage each. Perhaps they were helped by being told they would be sent to college, even if only one finished, so were mentally ready to postpone marriage. Postponing the first marriage and better educated (better trained in verbal skills) are both now known, statistically, to increase the chances of "'making it" in marriage.
Of Frederick's three daughters, two did finally find lasting relationships. Joan, his eldest daughter, had gone to NJ, hen returned after finishing HS in Hackensack, to the LA area, information give at the time she married an Olstad (see articles at newspaperarchive.com for the Van Nuys area of LA). They had several children, then she would marry two more times. The second marriage, covered in county records, lasted a mere month before divorce was granted, basically an annulment. The third marriage succeeded, a lasting one, with Raymond Collingwood.
The multiple marriages of the other two daughters are public knowledge.
While they still lived out east, the Great Depression spread out of rural parts of the nation. Young farmers went bust as crop prices fell, by 1926, no longer supporting the high prices the newest farmers had promised to pay for land. A boom in the stock market and urban land matched the boom in rural land, but those bubbles took longer to burst. Wall Street did not crash until Oct. of 1929. Two brother-in-laws out East still listed jobs at brokerages when counted for their 1930 US Census, but presumably held them for not much longer. People lingered at their old locations, those with mortgages, like a brother-in-law in Westchester County, NY, were locked into a high expense they could not meet. Once people lost work or a home, they moved, and became hard to find for their 1940 Census. Lots of doubling-ups occurred by the 1940 Census, with too many divorces seen in-between.
He and wife Catherine/Katherine were among the lucky. They were renters in 1930, not burdened by unaffordable mortgages. Was that always true? Frederick was a salesman of window weather-stripping for the new houses still being built at the time of their 1930 Census. That would have been a fine job until all the houses had their weather-stripping, and no more new ones were being built. He needed to do something else.
Their next move took them to movieland, to Los Angeles County, in California, where they rented again. Their marriage was still intact in 1940. This Frederick told the 1940 census-taker that he worked as a draftsman for motion pictures. Presumably, he designed sets, such as business facades for fake downtowns, etc. Did this let him learn construction, to fine-tune his drawing techniques, preparing him to do architectural work later? Had he trained for that in college?
Unlike 1930, when they were the sole occupants of their rented house, they were doubled up in a rented house in 1940. Their housemates were Frederick's sister in-law, Jean Horton, working as a sales clerk, and her daughter Patricia Horton, barely of elementary school age, only a year different in age from Frederick's youngest daughter, Judith, so a natural playmate. That 1940 census asked for their address in 1935, trying to track the moves of the population. Irish-born Jean listed her address in 1935 as Larchmont, Westchester County, NY. His wife Katherine said she had been visiting at Larchmont in 1935, while the rest stayed in NJ, making it clear that Jean was Katherine's Irish-born sister, called Josephine by Mr. and Mrs. Shea.. Jean Horton's life had not been as lucky Katherine's. She was now divorced, she and her daughter in California, no longer living with Jean's spouse, who once had a brokerage job and two servants in a house in Westchester County, but, by 1940, no longer found there.
Who would know better than Frederick and Katherine where their children had been born? They told their 1940 census-taker that their fourth child, Judith, was born in N.J. Yet, gossip columnist kinds of sources insisted she was born in NY . That was not their only error, as some presumed her brother's name matched that of her father. Yet , her father' s middle name was William, not Kenneth, seen used in his college days and a few other times.
Born in 1934, Judith would speak later of being taken out of school at age 14, after her mother had been in a serious auto accident that nearly killed her, to be "tutored', which most likely meant home schooled. Were the medical bills too high to pay her Catholic school tuition? Why didn't they send her to public school? Did his wife need supervision and nursing while Frederick worked? Perhaps the medical bills made private school unaffordable. Jacqueline would have been two years older, so may have decided simply to drop out and become a starlet.
This was bad for Judith and her next older sister Jacqueline. if home schooling is similar to that in this writer's state, a smart child can finish the minimum state requirements by 11 am, leaving lots of time to do other things. Jacqueline became the starlet, took Judith to parties and introduced her to movie actors, with the result that Judith was married by 18 to a much older man, an actor. Before marrying William Campbell, Judith had been introduced to a Chicago mobster coming to Hollywood to takeover one of the studios. Her sister Joan had returned earlier from the Hackensack and Fort Lee area most likely with some knowledge of and excitement about Frank Sinatra. Her brother Frederick Kenneth had gone off to the Tahoe/Reno area, with resorts where casino moguls might be. Movieland marriages had bad reputations as not lasting. Even for ordinary marriages, modern sociology professors would document, later, that as many as 8 out of 10 wedding at 18 saw their marriages turn unhappily, not bad people, just wrong for each other. That research had not yet been done. Not finishing high school, Judith would have no college sociology, few good job prospects, unless her freelance artist talents had been taught by her father, so she could do commercial drawings for real estate and ads. On the bright side, she would have a stipend from her grandmother and alimony from that first marriage, so would live reasonably well. She would keep Frederick and Katherine company as she lived with them between her two marriages, Her second marriage ended, not in divorce, but in separation. ( Her much younger spouse, a golf pro, went with his widowed mother to an area of Idaho with lakeside golf resorts. )
His daughters had two middle names, German-style. These were selected by an ethnically Irish-Catholic mother. Of the two well-known daughters, the elder had been baptized Jacqueline Ann Bernadette , the younger Judith Eileen Katherine. According to German rules, once one's namesake had died, the younger person could begin using the elder's name, if it was one of their names. Judith was the one named for her mother, so, after her mother died, began calling herself Katherine and Kate, a way to remember her mother.
Did that happen with the four Fredericks? Did this one go by William when around his father? Or, was there no need to be William, if this one went by Fred, or F.W.?
The British-descended often refused to let even one middle name be put on a census, much less two. His younger sister, called Alma, did not have parents revealing her middle name in census work, but was allowed to recite her name as Alma Augusta at her marriage. Auguste, the German spelling, was a multi-generation name for females in their father's family, just as Frederick would be for males. One cousin, Augusta Schaerr, avoided the middle name solution in the States. She went by a nickname, Gussie, until their older relative named Augusta Immoor had died. (Gussie's youngest brother was Frederick Schaerr, showing the commonness of the name.)
OLD FAMILY HISTORY. Their 1910 Census, done in April, showed his father, "proprietor" of a saloon, arriving or naturalizing in 1892. Sometimes the censustaker was allowed to ask which "Germany", but that never happened for them. However, given the 1890s timing, and "the emperor" being cited in immigrant records of other Immoors coming into NYC in the same decades, their Germany was probably the short-lived "German Empire" that provoked WW I, the section of northern Germany under the Prussian king known as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The empire's north German colonies were close to Norway and Sweden, so majority Lutheran. There was a Calvinist intermix at the western edge nearer Calvinist Holland. At the other edges, the south nearer Catholic France and the east nearer Catholic Poland, the numerous religious minorities included Catholics, which his family had been, and the Jewish. The Prussian-run colonies extended along the northern German seacoast, where they bordered Denmark. The Prussians and Danes fought over land, to control, for example, parts of what became modern Poland.
All this diversity meant they were used to an ethnic mixed. This was seen in the first Frederick's apartment house in Brooklyn, with Dansk and Polska speakers, not just Deutsch (Danish and Polish, not just German. Note that Deutsch was the Germans' word for the varied dialects of their own language, never saying German, as their language had no J sound.)
Why leave the old places? "Back there", fourteen year olds could be snatched off the street and kept in military service for years. (Young men were required to do multiple wars to expand Prussian territory, which many often did not believe right.) Too many were equally unhappy with the huge landlords. Little future might be envisioned except forever renting from the very same ones who had kept their families long enserfed, giving them no back pay, no land, upon being freed despite centuries of working for free.
Culturally, equally miserable in so many other ways, they differed from southern US slaves in one generous way. Landlords could not separate enserfed families by auctioning off select individuals to other landlords. Serfs "went with the land". They were allowed to stay wherever they were born. Once freed, they lived some generations in the same places as tenants, then moved out together, as family-connected groups, often headed to the same town, not just the same county in the States.
With this second Frederick at age 6 in 1910 and his sister Alma at age 4, the two other families in their aunt's crowded house in Brooklyn included one set whose baby made the third generation present. They spoke Polish Yiddish, fitting their Jewish-sounding last names of Benjamin and Rosenbaum. The home-owning family was John Muller and his wife Dora, a former Immoor, perhaps Theodora/ Dorothea "back there", eventually Dorothy here. The Mullers had a playmate-aged daughter, age 5, and spoke German.
The four adult women present did not work outside the home. Sociology professors and urban historians would tell us those not leaving the home were slow to learn English, maybe never did. This was contrary to the myth that "they all spoke English". The men would learn at work. The children would learn once in school, could translate for their mothers on trips to the store or when the census-taker visited, causing some oddities in census answers.
The first Frederick was self-employed in 1910. At age 32, he called himself the proprietor of a saloon. The playmate's father, John H. Muller, age 33, called himself a bottler at a brewery. John had immigrated just a year earlier, in 1891, so perhaps the earlier arriving arranged for the later ones to come, sent loans for their tickets. The family speaking Polish Yiddish was headed by a Mr. Benjamin nearing retirement age. His daughter had married a Joseph Rosenbaum, who worked as a bookkeeper in "wholesale liquor", similar in age to the other two men, also in the liquor industry, so perhaps they had been good friends.
The Central Europeans used beer gardens and festivals for family gatherings, not making them men-only places . They ran breweries for beer once here, not distilleries of hard liquor. Unlike the American way, European women were allowed into beer-drinking places. There were thus fewer allowed to develop into drunks. Any drunken men spending the family treasure could be hauled out by wives and sisters whenever needed. In contrast, those from the British Isles, including too many Irish, were said to have had alcohol problems, related in part to drinking only "hard liquor", not beer, not wine. Also, the British customs repeated in America were different, only "female employees" allowed in to saloons, no matter how bad a husband's or brother's behavior inside. At least one heroine of Prohibition was depicted with an axe, so she could chop her way into saloons, not otherwise allowed to be in them. This Frederick's wife had an Irish last name, so was British Isles, her father born in England to an Irish father and British mother. His family moved back to Ireland, letting him meet Katherine's mother, Nellie/Ellen O'Leary. What was odd? They would have a marriage record in NYC in 1903, before their stated immigration date, her elder sister Josephine (jean?) would then born back in Ireland in 1905, later given as the family's official immigration year, then Katherine. the next year, in 1906, would be born in the Bronx. What was her maiden name? There were two answers. "Shea" was written into her legal records at birth and when her family lived in the Bronx and for her and Frederick's probable church wedding in Manhattan in 1925. Her father switched to the older, more truly Irish name of "O'Shea" by the time of the 1930 census, after her 1925 marriage to Frederick. Their family would call her O'Shea in the obituary of the third Frederick, not too many years after his own.
With different histories of alcohol use, the different cultures reacted differently to Prohibition. Prohibition would soon arrive, to make all three young family men in the Brooklyn house, Rosenbaum, Muller and Immorr, seek other work, with William Shea losing his job as a instructor in Billiards, an occupation that lasted as long as pool halls served beer. If better work could not be found, prohibition pushed legal occupations into illegal ones, saloons into speak-easies, opened the door for contact with alcohol runners and gangsters of a far worse nature than alcohol-running.
There would have been old family contacts from the Prohibition era that continued, affecting daughter Judith? As drinking by itself violates no commandments, many were moral people. But not all? Did this present problems for a family that tried to stay religious?
In addition, his daughter Judith described her father , this Frederick, who had been only 6 in that pre-Prohibition household 1910, as growing up into someone far too stern. Daughters who could never please a too stern father might be tempted to marry or date men who could also never be pleased, men too inclined to wander?
His daughter Judith would eventually make peace with her life, writing a book in 1977, after her father's death. She was not yet ready to tell the whole truth about her relationships, which came later. She had left out details, but when she revealed them, they were backed up, according to a journalist friend, by her having kept old receipts proving her whereabouts at different dates. She had paid her own way in life. She was independently "wealthy-enough", courtesy of her grandparents. She was no one's kept mistress. Judith had wanted to be a singer and actress, but would not, contented herself with amateur painting and a spouse's real estate projects. Famed sister Jacqueline succeeded as an actress and in her long-lived final marriage to someone in the medical profession, her first two marriages having been mistakes in the high pressure movie world. Judith, after one failed marriage, retreated to her parent's house in the North Los Angeles area (now called Northridge?), then retried marriage much later. She had a son between marriages whom she could have aborted, but did not, carried to term and put up for adoption.
We don' t know what this Frederick thought of all that, as he wrote no books and gave no interviews. The survivors writing Frederick's obituary said zero about this Frederick's past. However, his surviving family considered each other dear and treasured, as their obituary for him named survivors down to the level of great-grand-children. Those listed extended from California into Nevada, from movie stardom, to those perhaps better blessed, with the gift of more ordinary lives.
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From his obituary, submitted by his family to newpapers:
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"IMMOOR, Frederick, 69, passed away Nov. 21, 1974 in Encinitas, Calif.
Survived by son Fred K. of Gold Hill, Nev.; Allen G. of Manhattan Beach; daughters Mrs. Ray Collingwood of Incline Village, Nev., Mrs. Sheldon Attix, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Mrs. Judith Campbell, Solana Beach, Calif.; sister Mrs. Alma Sharp, Largo, Fla.; 9 grandchildren Charles, Elizabeth, Judith & Patricia Attix, Colleen Hosman, Gregory & Terry Immoor, Deborah [check, Corbin?] & Karen Rodriquez; 5 great grandchildren Arron [check, Corbin?], Darcy Immoor, Heidi & Christine Hosman & Fred Immoor. Rosary will be recited 7:00 p.m. Sun. at Praiswater Funeral Home Chapel, Van Nuys. Funeral 11:00 a.m. Mon. at San Fernando Mission Chapel. Interment San Fernando Mission.
NOTE: His obituary included the fourth Frederick, as Fred Immoor, that teen still living. It omitted only one grandson, identity still hidden at the time, due to all adoptions being "closed" back then. (David Bohler, a photographer, would seek out his natural mother in the 1980s, and would be happily received .)
SAMPLE OF OTHER SOURCES
1910 US Census in Brooklyn, on Pulaski, with the first two Fredericks, identified elsewhere as Frederick H. and Frederick W.: Image of handwritten record archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRK7-VFB
1940 US Census in Los Angeles, on Rooney Drive, with the second and third Fredericks present, seen elsewhere as Frederick W. and Frederick K.: Image seen at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9MT-N7QP
NOTE: His son, Frederick K. Immoor, was severely impaired hearing-wise, but could read lips and speak clearly. He would be memorialized in 2001 for his volunteer work with Nevada deaf students in middle school grades. Their teacher, Holly Greenough, had taught him sign language at Lake Tahoe's community college a few years earlier. They called him a "Professional Grandpa" and "Grandpa Fred". Their memories were later published, in Dec. 2001, by Jill Darby on Dec. 19 , archived at TahoeDailyTribune, worded to indicate he was still living when they wrote. Presumably, they knew he was very ill and his death might soon follow.
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Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, written in 2018, revised Nov-Dec 2019. Permission given to Findagrave for use in its entirety at this page. Descendants of people named here may use whole paragraphs in private materials for family.
That team report gave his name as Fred W. Immoor. Earlier, at the time of his marriage to Katherine Shea, "Frederick Wilhelm Immoor" was used, more ethnic, preferred by his parents and at their church. (A granddaughter wrote of this in June of 2002, at ancestry.com, using "JESwanson" as her id.)
BIOGRAPHY. People of the past might have famed sons, but Frederick and Katherine had two famed daughters. One sought the limelight in California via the movies. She then left the lights for family life, as Mrs. Attix. Fred and Katherine probably had no need to worry about her. The younger daughter would have caused more worry. Fred would not know all of it Judith, wrote a book in 1977, four years after Fred's death, trying to defend her reputation. She had spent three to five years in a lifestyle, circa 1961, with a poor choice of friends. Had she been a man, would her actions, when young, have caused her to be called a "playboy"? As a female, her actions, while young, were instead deemed unforgivable?
Seeing her errors, she changed her life.
However, her old life did not forget her.
Two previous Hollywood associates were reputed gangsters, close to her father in age, from Chicago, not from her father's NY. The Church Committee, inside the US Senate, concerned about assassination attempts on foreign leaders, asked the two to testify for a 1975 report. In that connection, her name was leaked, on Dec. 21 of 1975. Why worry? Two reasons-- the two former associates were both murdered, brutally.
One died seven months before her name was leaked, the other, six months after. On June 19, 1975, the first was shot to death at his home in Illinois. Merely subpoenaed, he'd had no chance to testify. One source, perhaps too colorful, said six bullets wounds encircled the man's mouth. Another source, only a bit blander, said that he was shot once in the mouth, then five times through the chin. Alarming either way, his killing was a warning to others who might try to testify.
Despite the warning, five days later, on June 24th, the second man testified anyway.
He may have thought all was fine. But then, many months after the first death, his body was found dumped in the Florida waters, his legs described as chopped off. (Some people wondered, was he perhaps still alive when dumped?)
Considered to be the man who had brought the Chicago mob to Hollywood, Judith had dated that second man before marrying her first husband, Mr. Campbell. To give an idea of her youth, she was just age 18 at that marriage. Given that her name had been leaked, should she worry? Now respectable, would she be "dragged through the mud" if asked what she remembered seeing or hearing,. "back in those days"? Should she be fearful for her own life? She wanted to know everything that had been said about her to the Committee.
Her lawyers painstakingly asked nicely, then more officially, then sued. One wrote letters from San Diego, then the other one took action from Beverly Hills. They essentially asked for government records filed under the different variations of her name, the main ones being those she continued to use after her divorce at age 24, Judy Campbell and Judith Campbell.
Frederick died in 1974, so never heard about the leak or the two deaths, missed the spy drama that would swallow his youngest daughter. Spared this, his last years of retirement would have instead been pleasantly spent. Between her two marriages, daughter Judith would spend considerable time in the LA area, with both him and Katherine. Life was not perfect. Judith was said to worry that he lived beyond his means. Katherine died. Once widowed, he would go to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his other daughter, Mrs. Attix, lived with her family, her husband having taken his dental practice there.
EARLY LIFE. Raised at first in Brooklyn, he was named for his German folk. Wife Katherine was like him in being NYC-born, but in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, with Irish kin, not German. Their parents finished rearing them in Bergen County, NJ, where they could meet.
Note that the two ethnicities, German and Irish, typically had different ideas. These were not just about names, but about education and religion, about music, the differences clearer when both ethnicities attended the same church, the same school. One Irish way to resolve marriage disputes was for the father to raise the sons by his beliefs and the mother to raise the daughters by hers. Had that been their way?
Born to immigrants, his name was Britishized, from Frederick Wilhelm, to Frederick William Immoor, by the time he attended college. After marriage they continued to live in New Jersey for a time? In Frank Sinatra's home territory? Before 1940, however, he and Katherine took their four NY-and NJ-born children to California, seen with them there in the census that year, in Los Angeles County.
Without the glamour seen in the biopics of the two famed daughters, he humbly called himself a draftsman in the motion picture industry, while the census-taker noted that they rented a house on Rooney. Renting instead of owning took advantage of the declines in house values sdue to the Great Depression. It allowed more frequent moves, a greater ability to gind a better job. The list of residences would grow to include San Francisco, for the birth of son Allen, before a return southward. His family's obituary for him is below, above links to family.
The two daughters were not the only children. Son Allen would be in the real estate business, in San Diego County, while daughter Judith also lived there. A third daughter Joan, was, by then, in her most successful marriage. As Mrs. Collingwood, she would be near her other brother, Frederick Kenneth Immoor, in Nevada. Her Mr. Collingwood would be buried in the same cemetery as her brother, in Genoa.
FOUR FREDERICKS AND GERMAN-NESS Frederick Wilhelm was the second of four Frederick Immoors, each the son of the one before. Following old-style German rules, using their different middle names would help separate them if two were at the same family gathering or lived close to each other.
Records show the first, his immigrant father, sometimes used an H as his middle initial, but he normally used none. German rules did not require it, once Fred's father had become the eldest of the remaining Fredericks, the one with "dibs" on the right to use only the first name. Frederick H. took his small family, his wife Bertha, Fred and Fred's sister Alma, from Brooklyn in NYC, to the suburbs in NJ, where he made his moneyin real estate. He presumably died on the East Coast, given that his wife died later in Florida, a retirement spot since the 1920s. After the NJ boom, there had been another land boom for those in real estate in Florida at exactly the right times.
Fred and future wife Katherine would meet in NJ, but tried other places. Thus, their eldest, the son to go to Nevada, Frederick Kenneth Immoor the Sr., would be born back in NY. Note that immigrant Germans did not normally call their children Irish names. Thus, calling the third Frederick's midle name of Kenneth was the idea of Fred's Irish wife Katherine.
Frederick Kenneth would be hard of hearing. His young memorialists out in Nevada, however, said he could read lips. The household would have devoted a lot of energy to teaching him that skill. They succeeded, as he went into freight sales. Once retired, he would learn sign language and help tutor deaf students of middle school age in Nevada. No longer abiding by German rules of name politeness, Frederick Kenneth gave his full name to his son, did not change the middle name.
The last of the four Frederick Immoors, Frederick Kenneth Immoor Jr., would be remembered as a teen only. Jr. would be buried in Genoa, Nevada, before his own father an a now aging Fred, thus, much too early. He was killed while crossing a Nevada highway.
==========DETAILS========================
I. THE IMMIGRANT FREDERICK.
His father probably "came over" at about age 14. He was from northern Germany, judging by his names, peculiar to that region. The Scandinavian-influenced and Lutheran ends of the Germans would have been a majority of his neighbors.
An old leader of the tenth century, Immo/Emmo, had urged peace as a way to deal with the little kings that ruled. An "immoor" would have been a person tribally allied with or fond of the ideas of Immo, sometimes also called Immon. All of this perhaps caused his father to give different versions of their surname in old records, Immoor, Immon, Immonen, some versions beginning with E, as "they all meant the same". Ultimately, those concerned must have all agreed to use Immoor.
The entries of Immoors to America would spread out, over several decades, but were still all in an era when Ellis Island was the only way to arrive. The varied Immoors naturalizing in NYC courts gave no nation of birth. They cited only a ruler, wanting to leave him behind. Technically under the Prussian Kaiser by then, they put "Prussian emperor" in the space reserved for country.
Having that man as ruler implied their past was probably very unpleasant. Causing huge out-migration, it had been so for the majority. Enserfed both recently and for many generations, once freed, they were allowed to rent, rarely to own,maybe another factor to explain why these Immoors so often rented. Long-term militarization and conscriptions were expected of males. The rulers needed their young bodies to help the rulers conquer new peoples eastward, having been stopped from going southward. (Hitler would continue this later, often finding officers among the same "warrior landlord" families of northern Germany as had the Prussian Kaiser.)
Hence, his parents made a sacrifice. They pushed him out of the homeland door at about age 14, off to NYC and Ellis Island, before conscription could happen.
If one left to avoid conscription, the rule was that one could never return to live there permanently.
Two older Immoors, entering then leaving NY quickly, to re-settle in other states, gave Hanover as a more precise birthplace in their censuses. Both used the name Henry Immoor in their censuses. They would have been born and baptized, however, as Heinrich or Hendrick, nickname Heinie. Older than Immigrant Frederick, once could have been an uncle, the other, his father's cousin. It was also possible for two brothers from the same Germanic family to both be named Heinrich/Henry, to honor the same still living ancestor, with different middle names to separate them. However, the British-descended clerks in America refused to write the needed middle names on government forms, so church records have to be checked for full information. (Post-Prussia, the district and city of Hanover were still part of the Westfalen region. Church records are often seen under Westfalen. One Henry lies buried with wife Mary and daughter Wilhelmine in Philadelphia, Penn. The other crossed the Mississippi River, perhaps going via Chicago by train, to Scott County, Iowa, in the city of Dubuque, on the bluffs of the huge river, facing illinois. His death record stated his father had been a Frederich Immoor, his mother, Wilhelmine, the feminine of Wilhelm. His burial is with wife Mathilda/Matilda and an older relative, Johane/ Johanna Immoor. The Pennsylvanian Immoors are buried in a Catholic cemetery, Holy Redeemer. The Iowans' graves are in a town cemetery, so no hint of which churches to check.
Fred's father's arrival at age 14 was perhaps with his older sisters. There was no obvious sign of their parents nearby in Brooklyn. He lived first with one married sister in her apartment in 1900. Once children were born, needing more space, they lived in a different married sister's larger house in 1910. There were not just two surnames per dwelling, but three or four.
Interests lined-up more keenly if most of the men in a household worked in the same industry. Immigrants from Germany arriving at the very end of the 1800s were relatively late, too late for the good farmland of the Midwest. The Germans often had job skills beyond farming, however, letting them earn a living in large cities. In the old country, people had been , for example, farmer-shoemaker, farmer-brewer, farmer-undertaker, farming in the summer, preparing or fixing or selling coffins, shoes, etc. in the "off times". If trained by the same parents or grandparents back home, this could caused the same or similar occupation for all the males in a family group that arrived together. The houses' adult males were all employed in the liquor or brewing industries.
In 1900, this first Frederick was a bartender, while living in his older sister's rented tenement apartment, on DeKalb Ave. in Brooklyn. (Her husband was William Schaerr, mis-written in 1900 as "Shierr". Her name was Marie? Marti? The census-taker's old cursive handwriting could be hard to read, fading as decades passed. The confusing double vowels were perhaps Britishized later into Scherr. )
By 1920, his father, the first Frederick immoor in America, was a saloon-keeper. He had married Bertha/Berth Gans/Janz. Their latest shared dwelling was a house on Pulaski. Their crowded space had three families. (His older sister listed her spouse, Mr. Miller, as the landlord, but the name woul have been spelled Mueller, aybe with an "umlaut" substituted for the double vowel "back home" .)
Prohibition approached, was not yet law. Those coming from the British Isles had far more problems with alcohol abuse, made worse by laws forbidding women from going into saloons with their husbands and then saying it was time to go home. German beer gardens and festivals were instead family places, so the Germans felt they were about to be punished for problems they did not have . However, beer and liquor sales were still legal at the moment, no mafia needed to get around the law.
II. THE NY-TO-NJ FREDERICKS. By the 1910 Census, this Frederick Immoor, the secon of four, had been born. His younger sister Alma was also present, their family of birth not destined to be larger. Life soon changed. Before Prohibition, they had been working class, able to earn a lving with with limited educations. Post-prohibition, old jobs gone, they desired to advance to the middle class , so needed good educations for the children. How to manage this? His father left the saloon-brewery-liquor life, for real estate, specifically, NJ real estate. (If they had stayed in the old life back in NYC? Prohibition forced their old jobs to shift to the underworld. Speak-easies, boot-legging, etc, developed as the main alternatives, after German beer gardens, family-friendly, close, as did Irish whiskey distilleries, not so family-friendly.)
For business reasons, his father needed to be where the new subdivisions were forming, The most affordable way to escape the crowdedness of Brooklyn and Queens was to try the developing suburbs nearby, much to be of interest in north Jersey. His father was believed to make considerable money.
Thus, their next US Census, the 1920, listed his father as a realtor, having taken their little family across the river-marked state line, to Bergen County, NJ. Old habits die hard? They again rented, leaving them freer to move if the "hot spots for business" changed. In addition to budding subdivisions, schools were public, but not city-run, another advantage, instead independent of mayors' desire to reallocate resources away from schools to other city functions,.
His parents choose the old Jersey place of Leonia, which had split apart earlier from the larger mother township of Hackensack. Not incorporated until the 1890s, it had, maybe jokingly, been called Lee-onia. Its history was old. It began as a small village that existed mainly to serve the business needs of old Fort Lee in the Revolutionary days, well situated for transporting things and troops between the two larger places nearby, NYC to the north and Trenton to the south.
His father had a community side. Immigrant Frederick joined the Bergen County Historical Society, giving Leonia as his address. His new membership was listed in that old volume of their proceedings where the society described Leonia's history.
His parents became "monied enough". They were able to make at least three trips back to Germany, a luxury many immigrants could not afford. They would also to be seen in cabin class, instead of tourist class, at least once. This Frederick and his sister Alma went along for the 1922 trip. They would have met whatever aunts and uncles and cousins still lived "back there", where people named Frederick tended to be found north of the Rhine. Did they go for a wedding or funeral? Was a grandparent or two still alive?
Attending college was most unusual then. Yet, he was enrolled though at least the 1922-1923 academic year.
In that era, with too many places elsewhere lacking public high schools , many felt fortunate to get as far as Grades 6 to 8. However, his family was able to educate this Frederick well enough in NJ that he would qualify for the University of Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia, where other Immoors lived, a bit south, still on the coastline. There, the school newspaper, The Pennsylvanian, noted that he had pledged a fraternity, suing a Britishize spelling, as Frederick William Immoor. His fraternity's record-keeper saved space by abbreviating that to "F. W. Immoor". He was a sophomore on his pledge date and had charge of the freshman rowing team. (SOURCES: Page 1, March 8, 1923 issue, "The Pennsylvanian", archived at upenn.edu. Page 191, "The Palm of Alpha Tau Omega", 1923, volume XLIII, viewable at archive.org.)
Many of the first-generation German-Americans would serve for the US in the World Wars. This Frederick was too young for WW I. Having five children and a wife to support would have excused him from WW II, though he would have been drafted had the war grown worse.
Since these Immoors had returned for visits, was it too easy to visualize the faces of people they knew, the mind's eye seeing them bombed on the ground? It was, perhaps, a mercy he did not need to serve.
Did his father expand his real estate business? Parts of New Jersey and Florida saw incoming New Yorkers at about the same time. Both family housing and seaside resorts were built for NJ, retiree housing and more resorts, for Florida.. Builders and realtors aided everyone in leaving NY for elsewhere.
The money-making land boom of his father's era would end. This would happen nationally in the decade in which the Frederick headed for California was beginning his own family. The Great Depression and associated crashes came strongly, overwhelmingly. The next national land boom would not start until WW II veterans returned, ready for marriage and new houses in the 1950s, deposits already saved up as everyone saved during the war-ration years instead of buying. That would be a good time, especially for those who moved to California early.
III. MOVIELAND FREDERICK. He and Katherine moved alone to "movieland", Los Angeles County, between the births of their fourth, daughter Judith, in NJ in 1934, and their fifth, a son, born in San Francisco, after they all moved following their 1940 census. There was no sign of his parents present, though his mother lived long, until 1966.
Yes, a biopic sketch for daughter Jacqueline (actress Susan Morrow) said he and Katherine had seven children. The problem? Only five are found in marriage and other records. Perhaps the number of seven was guessed by counting the surnames of grandchildren in his obituary? (While the brothers had only one marriage each, the daughters, California style, had multiple marriages, too many California-style, with older Hollywood men.)
III. SHEAS, THE BRONX TO NJ. Was renting a Europe-learned habit for more than the Immoors? Others also came to NJ to rent, if not able to afford buying just yet or in an occupation that required moves. These included the family of his future wife Katherine, listed as Catherine Shea in her NYC birth record, her parents living in the Bronx, church records kept centrally, at some diocese or cathedral office in Manhattan. Her family changed her name to Katherine O'Shea for their 1920 Census, truer to their Irish roots, a brave thing to do in a time growing thick with "nativism". They said her father William worked as a "billiards instructor", so perhaps he was employed in the resort/hotel areas of NJ. This would be a type of work that perhaps did not survive the coming Great Depression?
A sister a year or so older had been born in Ireland, listed as Josephine in the Sheas' last census with her present. She was found sharing Frederick and Katherine's house in LA County for their 1940 census with her surname changed to Horton, first name modernized into Jean, in a time when everyone knew of actress Jean Harlow. Whatever name Jean/Josephine used, she and her sister Katherine were alike consistently listed only their mother as Irish-born, their father, William, always, as having been English-born. British and Irish was as uncommon a combination as German and Irish. Perhaps their father's Sheas had tried migrating from Ireland to England, where Wm. Shea was born? Then, finding work wanting, they returned to their homeland, where he could meet his future, wife Ellen/Nellie O'Leary, daughter of Bartholomew? Not happy with either Ireland or England, William and Ellen/Nellie then picked up their baby daughter, Josephine and moved to America in 1905, quickly having Catherine/Katherine, then gradually, the rest.
Catherine Shea was seen in multiple early records, including her birth in NYC. What event excited them into resuming the spelling rules they preferred, just as the Klan was expanding into the Midwest and Northwest, the newspapers covering their actions against Germans and Irish and Jewish and working class labor unions, wherever their usual victims of color could not be found? First, the Klan marketers stayed away from NJ and NY. Second and more important, the southern two-thirds of Ireland had recently split apart as it own Republic. Only Northern Ireland, called Ulster, still remained as a colony of Britain, still required to follow British rules. Thus, in 1920, her mother declined to say she was from a unified Ireland, as done before, but said the truth, "Irish Free State". This would be short-lived. By 1930, US census-takers had been re-trained, told to accept only Ireland as an answer, about the same time southern legislators had convinced the government to stop counting people as "mulatto", the counts having offered strong proof that blacks and whites were mixing, contrary to miscegenation laws in the south.
The granddaughter writing of Katherine's marriage to Frederick Wilhelm said they had moved to the Teaneck area after marriage. Remember that Leonia's old larger township had once been part of an even larger mother township called Hackensack. Growth caused the towns to split apart, done as smaller governments gave people a better say in their own governance, not letting themselves be ruled patron- style by central elites. We have not checked, but it's possible that Teaneck was also carved out of the same mother territory, staying in farmland and woods longer, so later to be developed and split off from grandmother Hackensack, perhaps a once-larger Leonia or Ridgeway its mother.
By everyone's next census, the 1930, Frederick and Katherine were not with parents, doubled up with no one, rented their own house in New Jersey. They had had the first two of their five children, Frederick K., born NY, listed elsewhere as Frederick Kenneth. Joan was born NJ. The next two children, Jackie and Judy, would also be NJ-born, listed as that by their parents in their 1940 census. A biopic sketch giving Judith's birthplace as NY seems wrong in that light, with NJ repeated by her in her marriage records. [Need to double check all this to be sure.]
SINGING WITH SINATRA? Joan would be with them for their 1940 US Census after their move to the Los Angeles area, but then returned to Bergen County, N.J. to graduate from HS, specifically the Hackensack HS. She was thus near relatives again in Leonia and Teaneck, presumably living with one of them to attend a good public school, one not city-run. Frank Sinatra would get his start about this time, after admiring and styling himself after NY's black singer Billie Holiday. He was noted first as at Fort Lee clubs.
He would become one of Judith's associates. She met a mobster we will call R., before her marriage at age 18 to actor William Campbell, a marriage which lasted six years despite the age difference. The newly famed Frank would introduce the recently divorced socialite named Judy Campbell to the mobster we will call G., and to one other man, the political son of an Irish mobster already invested in or otherwise controlling some Hollywood hotels and studio premises. What happened after the introductions is debated. She said the serious relationship lasting two years was with the political son, whom she mistakenly believed had loved her. The others were flirtations or brief affairs, her relationship with G. a business one on behalf of the political son.
SONS VS. DAUGHTERS. As we lie on our death beds, examining our consciences, we may ask what we could have done better. Answering that, we might make amends, wish we had time to tell our children more, apologize for our mistakes, or advise them not to do the same.
Five children survived to marry. Eldest to youngest, they were: Frederick K., Joan, Jacqueline (aka Susan Morrow, actress), Judith, and Allen G. Why did the daughters marry so often, the sons and the parents and grandparents, just once?
If this Frederick went to the University of Penn., if his eldest daughter Joan finished HS, and if his youngest son, Allen, received a degree at a local college in California, why didn't his other two daughters do more of that? One answer was perhaps their mother, Katherine. After living in LA for the 1940 Census, they had some time in San Francisco, where son Allen was born and Judith recalled that she and Jackie were sent to Catholic school. The school was fine, her mother was not. Her mother could have waited until summer vacation, as the Germans did, when sending their children "to visit" relatives, something most of them loved. Yet, Judith recalled that Katherine pulled her and Jackie out of school for a whole month, not summertime, sending them to Chicago to see her re-married sister Jean/Josephine and their bit-younger cousin Patsy Horton. Judith may have been pulled out in the middle of difficult material, while Jackie was in the midst of something easer to make-up on their return. Judith would be humiliated by then being held back a year, not allowed to proceed with her friends to the next grade. Her parents perhaps could have insisted she be advanced, or switched her to a public school. Choosing this humiliation instead of moving children ahead and giving them extra remedial work is associated, statistically, with a much higher rate of dropping out, known in modern times, maybe not then.
Judith no longer liked school, but reported that her mother nearly died in an auto accident. This event was used as the reason (needed to keep truancy officers away) to pull Judith out of school at about age 14, the age when immigrant Frederick came to America to work.
Most places had light requirements for home schooling. A smart-enough child could finish the suggested or required homework and reading easily by 11 am, having the rest of the day "open for whatever", unless the parent teaching at home decided to fill the hours with more. If Jackie was 16, she did not need parent consent, she could drop out on her own. Jackie became a starlet and introduced Judith to things for which she was not ready.
Was there another problem? Judith suggested that Frederick had been too hard for his children to please. Did her brother Frederick Kenneth's hearing problems reduce his noticing all that was going on? Did anyone try to make up for the deep disappointment of never pleasing Papa, by trying to please other older men, not younger ones. In that era, they could try this at work if male, in marriage if female? Were any poor choices of associates then also too hard to please?
Judith first married, at 18, an actor known to Jackie. She had earlier flirted with handsome mobster R, who was in the process of bringing the Chicago mob more deeply into California, already in Nevada .
Dating and marrying too early is statistically dangerous. Far worse than marrying another peraon also age 18 is a woman of 18 dating or marrying a much older man. If dating or marrying someone so young, the older man might hope for someone accustomed to obeying her parents, ready to obey him, as if still a child. Conflict develops if she discovers she can't be a child any longer.
Both of Frederick's sons would have luckier lives than his daughters, in the sense of having just one marriage each. Perhaps they were helped by being told they would be sent to college, even if only one finished, so were mentally ready to postpone marriage. Postponing the first marriage and better educated (better trained in verbal skills) are both now known, statistically, to increase the chances of "'making it" in marriage.
Of Frederick's three daughters, two did finally find lasting relationships. Joan, his eldest daughter, had gone to NJ, hen returned after finishing HS in Hackensack, to the LA area, information give at the time she married an Olstad (see articles at newspaperarchive.com for the Van Nuys area of LA). They had several children, then she would marry two more times. The second marriage, covered in county records, lasted a mere month before divorce was granted, basically an annulment. The third marriage succeeded, a lasting one, with Raymond Collingwood.
The multiple marriages of the other two daughters are public knowledge.
While they still lived out east, the Great Depression spread out of rural parts of the nation. Young farmers went bust as crop prices fell, by 1926, no longer supporting the high prices the newest farmers had promised to pay for land. A boom in the stock market and urban land matched the boom in rural land, but those bubbles took longer to burst. Wall Street did not crash until Oct. of 1929. Two brother-in-laws out East still listed jobs at brokerages when counted for their 1930 US Census, but presumably held them for not much longer. People lingered at their old locations, those with mortgages, like a brother-in-law in Westchester County, NY, were locked into a high expense they could not meet. Once people lost work or a home, they moved, and became hard to find for their 1940 Census. Lots of doubling-ups occurred by the 1940 Census, with too many divorces seen in-between.
He and wife Catherine/Katherine were among the lucky. They were renters in 1930, not burdened by unaffordable mortgages. Was that always true? Frederick was a salesman of window weather-stripping for the new houses still being built at the time of their 1930 Census. That would have been a fine job until all the houses had their weather-stripping, and no more new ones were being built. He needed to do something else.
Their next move took them to movieland, to Los Angeles County, in California, where they rented again. Their marriage was still intact in 1940. This Frederick told the 1940 census-taker that he worked as a draftsman for motion pictures. Presumably, he designed sets, such as business facades for fake downtowns, etc. Did this let him learn construction, to fine-tune his drawing techniques, preparing him to do architectural work later? Had he trained for that in college?
Unlike 1930, when they were the sole occupants of their rented house, they were doubled up in a rented house in 1940. Their housemates were Frederick's sister in-law, Jean Horton, working as a sales clerk, and her daughter Patricia Horton, barely of elementary school age, only a year different in age from Frederick's youngest daughter, Judith, so a natural playmate. That 1940 census asked for their address in 1935, trying to track the moves of the population. Irish-born Jean listed her address in 1935 as Larchmont, Westchester County, NY. His wife Katherine said she had been visiting at Larchmont in 1935, while the rest stayed in NJ, making it clear that Jean was Katherine's Irish-born sister, called Josephine by Mr. and Mrs. Shea.. Jean Horton's life had not been as lucky Katherine's. She was now divorced, she and her daughter in California, no longer living with Jean's spouse, who once had a brokerage job and two servants in a house in Westchester County, but, by 1940, no longer found there.
Who would know better than Frederick and Katherine where their children had been born? They told their 1940 census-taker that their fourth child, Judith, was born in N.J. Yet, gossip columnist kinds of sources insisted she was born in NY . That was not their only error, as some presumed her brother's name matched that of her father. Yet , her father' s middle name was William, not Kenneth, seen used in his college days and a few other times.
Born in 1934, Judith would speak later of being taken out of school at age 14, after her mother had been in a serious auto accident that nearly killed her, to be "tutored', which most likely meant home schooled. Were the medical bills too high to pay her Catholic school tuition? Why didn't they send her to public school? Did his wife need supervision and nursing while Frederick worked? Perhaps the medical bills made private school unaffordable. Jacqueline would have been two years older, so may have decided simply to drop out and become a starlet.
This was bad for Judith and her next older sister Jacqueline. if home schooling is similar to that in this writer's state, a smart child can finish the minimum state requirements by 11 am, leaving lots of time to do other things. Jacqueline became the starlet, took Judith to parties and introduced her to movie actors, with the result that Judith was married by 18 to a much older man, an actor. Before marrying William Campbell, Judith had been introduced to a Chicago mobster coming to Hollywood to takeover one of the studios. Her sister Joan had returned earlier from the Hackensack and Fort Lee area most likely with some knowledge of and excitement about Frank Sinatra. Her brother Frederick Kenneth had gone off to the Tahoe/Reno area, with resorts where casino moguls might be. Movieland marriages had bad reputations as not lasting. Even for ordinary marriages, modern sociology professors would document, later, that as many as 8 out of 10 wedding at 18 saw their marriages turn unhappily, not bad people, just wrong for each other. That research had not yet been done. Not finishing high school, Judith would have no college sociology, few good job prospects, unless her freelance artist talents had been taught by her father, so she could do commercial drawings for real estate and ads. On the bright side, she would have a stipend from her grandmother and alimony from that first marriage, so would live reasonably well. She would keep Frederick and Katherine company as she lived with them between her two marriages, Her second marriage ended, not in divorce, but in separation. ( Her much younger spouse, a golf pro, went with his widowed mother to an area of Idaho with lakeside golf resorts. )
His daughters had two middle names, German-style. These were selected by an ethnically Irish-Catholic mother. Of the two well-known daughters, the elder had been baptized Jacqueline Ann Bernadette , the younger Judith Eileen Katherine. According to German rules, once one's namesake had died, the younger person could begin using the elder's name, if it was one of their names. Judith was the one named for her mother, so, after her mother died, began calling herself Katherine and Kate, a way to remember her mother.
Did that happen with the four Fredericks? Did this one go by William when around his father? Or, was there no need to be William, if this one went by Fred, or F.W.?
The British-descended often refused to let even one middle name be put on a census, much less two. His younger sister, called Alma, did not have parents revealing her middle name in census work, but was allowed to recite her name as Alma Augusta at her marriage. Auguste, the German spelling, was a multi-generation name for females in their father's family, just as Frederick would be for males. One cousin, Augusta Schaerr, avoided the middle name solution in the States. She went by a nickname, Gussie, until their older relative named Augusta Immoor had died. (Gussie's youngest brother was Frederick Schaerr, showing the commonness of the name.)
OLD FAMILY HISTORY. Their 1910 Census, done in April, showed his father, "proprietor" of a saloon, arriving or naturalizing in 1892. Sometimes the censustaker was allowed to ask which "Germany", but that never happened for them. However, given the 1890s timing, and "the emperor" being cited in immigrant records of other Immoors coming into NYC in the same decades, their Germany was probably the short-lived "German Empire" that provoked WW I, the section of northern Germany under the Prussian king known as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The empire's north German colonies were close to Norway and Sweden, so majority Lutheran. There was a Calvinist intermix at the western edge nearer Calvinist Holland. At the other edges, the south nearer Catholic France and the east nearer Catholic Poland, the numerous religious minorities included Catholics, which his family had been, and the Jewish. The Prussian-run colonies extended along the northern German seacoast, where they bordered Denmark. The Prussians and Danes fought over land, to control, for example, parts of what became modern Poland.
All this diversity meant they were used to an ethnic mixed. This was seen in the first Frederick's apartment house in Brooklyn, with Dansk and Polska speakers, not just Deutsch (Danish and Polish, not just German. Note that Deutsch was the Germans' word for the varied dialects of their own language, never saying German, as their language had no J sound.)
Why leave the old places? "Back there", fourteen year olds could be snatched off the street and kept in military service for years. (Young men were required to do multiple wars to expand Prussian territory, which many often did not believe right.) Too many were equally unhappy with the huge landlords. Little future might be envisioned except forever renting from the very same ones who had kept their families long enserfed, giving them no back pay, no land, upon being freed despite centuries of working for free.
Culturally, equally miserable in so many other ways, they differed from southern US slaves in one generous way. Landlords could not separate enserfed families by auctioning off select individuals to other landlords. Serfs "went with the land". They were allowed to stay wherever they were born. Once freed, they lived some generations in the same places as tenants, then moved out together, as family-connected groups, often headed to the same town, not just the same county in the States.
With this second Frederick at age 6 in 1910 and his sister Alma at age 4, the two other families in their aunt's crowded house in Brooklyn included one set whose baby made the third generation present. They spoke Polish Yiddish, fitting their Jewish-sounding last names of Benjamin and Rosenbaum. The home-owning family was John Muller and his wife Dora, a former Immoor, perhaps Theodora/ Dorothea "back there", eventually Dorothy here. The Mullers had a playmate-aged daughter, age 5, and spoke German.
The four adult women present did not work outside the home. Sociology professors and urban historians would tell us those not leaving the home were slow to learn English, maybe never did. This was contrary to the myth that "they all spoke English". The men would learn at work. The children would learn once in school, could translate for their mothers on trips to the store or when the census-taker visited, causing some oddities in census answers.
The first Frederick was self-employed in 1910. At age 32, he called himself the proprietor of a saloon. The playmate's father, John H. Muller, age 33, called himself a bottler at a brewery. John had immigrated just a year earlier, in 1891, so perhaps the earlier arriving arranged for the later ones to come, sent loans for their tickets. The family speaking Polish Yiddish was headed by a Mr. Benjamin nearing retirement age. His daughter had married a Joseph Rosenbaum, who worked as a bookkeeper in "wholesale liquor", similar in age to the other two men, also in the liquor industry, so perhaps they had been good friends.
The Central Europeans used beer gardens and festivals for family gatherings, not making them men-only places . They ran breweries for beer once here, not distilleries of hard liquor. Unlike the American way, European women were allowed into beer-drinking places. There were thus fewer allowed to develop into drunks. Any drunken men spending the family treasure could be hauled out by wives and sisters whenever needed. In contrast, those from the British Isles, including too many Irish, were said to have had alcohol problems, related in part to drinking only "hard liquor", not beer, not wine. Also, the British customs repeated in America were different, only "female employees" allowed in to saloons, no matter how bad a husband's or brother's behavior inside. At least one heroine of Prohibition was depicted with an axe, so she could chop her way into saloons, not otherwise allowed to be in them. This Frederick's wife had an Irish last name, so was British Isles, her father born in England to an Irish father and British mother. His family moved back to Ireland, letting him meet Katherine's mother, Nellie/Ellen O'Leary. What was odd? They would have a marriage record in NYC in 1903, before their stated immigration date, her elder sister Josephine (jean?) would then born back in Ireland in 1905, later given as the family's official immigration year, then Katherine. the next year, in 1906, would be born in the Bronx. What was her maiden name? There were two answers. "Shea" was written into her legal records at birth and when her family lived in the Bronx and for her and Frederick's probable church wedding in Manhattan in 1925. Her father switched to the older, more truly Irish name of "O'Shea" by the time of the 1930 census, after her 1925 marriage to Frederick. Their family would call her O'Shea in the obituary of the third Frederick, not too many years after his own.
With different histories of alcohol use, the different cultures reacted differently to Prohibition. Prohibition would soon arrive, to make all three young family men in the Brooklyn house, Rosenbaum, Muller and Immorr, seek other work, with William Shea losing his job as a instructor in Billiards, an occupation that lasted as long as pool halls served beer. If better work could not be found, prohibition pushed legal occupations into illegal ones, saloons into speak-easies, opened the door for contact with alcohol runners and gangsters of a far worse nature than alcohol-running.
There would have been old family contacts from the Prohibition era that continued, affecting daughter Judith? As drinking by itself violates no commandments, many were moral people. But not all? Did this present problems for a family that tried to stay religious?
In addition, his daughter Judith described her father , this Frederick, who had been only 6 in that pre-Prohibition household 1910, as growing up into someone far too stern. Daughters who could never please a too stern father might be tempted to marry or date men who could also never be pleased, men too inclined to wander?
His daughter Judith would eventually make peace with her life, writing a book in 1977, after her father's death. She was not yet ready to tell the whole truth about her relationships, which came later. She had left out details, but when she revealed them, they were backed up, according to a journalist friend, by her having kept old receipts proving her whereabouts at different dates. She had paid her own way in life. She was independently "wealthy-enough", courtesy of her grandparents. She was no one's kept mistress. Judith had wanted to be a singer and actress, but would not, contented herself with amateur painting and a spouse's real estate projects. Famed sister Jacqueline succeeded as an actress and in her long-lived final marriage to someone in the medical profession, her first two marriages having been mistakes in the high pressure movie world. Judith, after one failed marriage, retreated to her parent's house in the North Los Angeles area (now called Northridge?), then retried marriage much later. She had a son between marriages whom she could have aborted, but did not, carried to term and put up for adoption.
We don' t know what this Frederick thought of all that, as he wrote no books and gave no interviews. The survivors writing Frederick's obituary said zero about this Frederick's past. However, his surviving family considered each other dear and treasured, as their obituary for him named survivors down to the level of great-grand-children. Those listed extended from California into Nevada, from movie stardom, to those perhaps better blessed, with the gift of more ordinary lives.
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From his obituary, submitted by his family to newpapers:
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"IMMOOR, Frederick, 69, passed away Nov. 21, 1974 in Encinitas, Calif.
Survived by son Fred K. of Gold Hill, Nev.; Allen G. of Manhattan Beach; daughters Mrs. Ray Collingwood of Incline Village, Nev., Mrs. Sheldon Attix, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Mrs. Judith Campbell, Solana Beach, Calif.; sister Mrs. Alma Sharp, Largo, Fla.; 9 grandchildren Charles, Elizabeth, Judith & Patricia Attix, Colleen Hosman, Gregory & Terry Immoor, Deborah [check, Corbin?] & Karen Rodriquez; 5 great grandchildren Arron [check, Corbin?], Darcy Immoor, Heidi & Christine Hosman & Fred Immoor. Rosary will be recited 7:00 p.m. Sun. at Praiswater Funeral Home Chapel, Van Nuys. Funeral 11:00 a.m. Mon. at San Fernando Mission Chapel. Interment San Fernando Mission.
NOTE: His obituary included the fourth Frederick, as Fred Immoor, that teen still living. It omitted only one grandson, identity still hidden at the time, due to all adoptions being "closed" back then. (David Bohler, a photographer, would seek out his natural mother in the 1980s, and would be happily received .)
SAMPLE OF OTHER SOURCES
1910 US Census in Brooklyn, on Pulaski, with the first two Fredericks, identified elsewhere as Frederick H. and Frederick W.: Image of handwritten record archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRK7-VFB
1940 US Census in Los Angeles, on Rooney Drive, with the second and third Fredericks present, seen elsewhere as Frederick W. and Frederick K.: Image seen at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9MT-N7QP
NOTE: His son, Frederick K. Immoor, was severely impaired hearing-wise, but could read lips and speak clearly. He would be memorialized in 2001 for his volunteer work with Nevada deaf students in middle school grades. Their teacher, Holly Greenough, had taught him sign language at Lake Tahoe's community college a few years earlier. They called him a "Professional Grandpa" and "Grandpa Fred". Their memories were later published, in Dec. 2001, by Jill Darby on Dec. 19 , archived at TahoeDailyTribune, worded to indicate he was still living when they wrote. Presumably, they knew he was very ill and his death might soon follow.
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Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, written in 2018, revised Nov-Dec 2019. Permission given to Findagrave for use in its entirety at this page. Descendants of people named here may use whole paragraphs in private materials for family.
His daughters had more fame once in Hollywood, but his work as an architect could be quite practical. Three VA hospitals located in NY were scheduled for closing. Were the closings needed due to obsolesence, to excess costs, to unsafe structures? Could faults be corrected without closing the hospitals? Two contracted firms did the work. (He worked for one, Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, the architectural-engineering firm of NY.) Results, dated March-April 1965, were put inside a larger report, published by the US House's Committee on Veteran Affairs.
That team report gave his name as Fred W. Immoor. Earlier, at the time of his marriage to Katherine Shea, "Frederick Wilhelm Immoor" was used, more ethnic, preferred by his parents and at their church. (A granddaughter wrote of this in June of 2002, at ancestry.com, using "JESwanson" as her id.)
BIOGRAPHY. People of the past might have famed sons, but Frederick and Katherine had two famed daughters. One sought the limelight in California via the movies. She then left the lights for family life, as Mrs. Attix. Fred and Katherine probably had no need to worry about her. The younger daughter would have caused more worry. Fred would not know all of it Judith, wrote a book in 1977, four years after Fred's death, trying to defend her reputation. She had spent three to five years in a lifestyle, circa 1961, with a poor choice of friends. Had she been a man, would her actions, when young, have caused her to be called a "playboy"? As a female, her actions, while young, were instead deemed unforgivable?
Seeing her errors, she changed her life.
However, her old life did not forget her.
Two previous Hollywood associates were reputed gangsters, close to her father in age, from Chicago, not from her father's NY. The Church Committee, inside the US Senate, concerned about assassination attempts on foreign leaders, asked the two to testify for a 1975 report. In that connection, her name was leaked, on Dec. 21 of 1975. Why worry? Two reasons-- the two former associates were both murdered, brutally.
One died seven months before her name was leaked, the other, six months after. On June 19, 1975, the first was shot to death at his home in Illinois. Merely subpoenaed, he'd had no chance to testify. One source, perhaps too colorful, said six bullets wounds encircled the man's mouth. Another source, only a bit blander, said that he was shot once in the mouth, then five times through the chin. Alarming either way, his killing was a warning to others who might try to testify.
Despite the warning, five days later, on June 24th, the second man testified anyway.
He may have thought all was fine. But then, many months after the first death, his body was found dumped in the Florida waters, his legs described as chopped off. (Some people wondered, was he perhaps still alive when dumped?)
Considered to be the man who had brought the Chicago mob to Hollywood, Judith had dated that second man before marrying her first husband, Mr. Campbell. To give an idea of her youth, she was just age 18 at that marriage. Given that her name had been leaked, should she worry? Now respectable, would she be "dragged through the mud" if asked what she remembered seeing or hearing,. "back in those days"? Should she be fearful for her own life? She wanted to know everything that had been said about her to the Committee.
Her lawyers painstakingly asked nicely, then more officially, then sued. One wrote letters from San Diego, then the other one took action from Beverly Hills. They essentially asked for government records filed under the different variations of her name, the main ones being those she continued to use after her divorce at age 24, Judy Campbell and Judith Campbell.
Frederick died in 1974, so never heard about the leak or the two deaths, missed the spy drama that would swallow his youngest daughter. Spared this, his last years of retirement would have instead been pleasantly spent. Between her two marriages, daughter Judith would spend considerable time in the LA area, with both him and Katherine. Life was not perfect. Judith was said to worry that he lived beyond his means. Katherine died. Once widowed, he would go to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his other daughter, Mrs. Attix, lived with her family, her husband having taken his dental practice there.
EARLY LIFE. Raised at first in Brooklyn, he was named for his German folk. Wife Katherine was like him in being NYC-born, but in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, with Irish kin, not German. Their parents finished rearing them in Bergen County, NJ, where they could meet.
Note that the two ethnicities, German and Irish, typically had different ideas. These were not just about names, but about education and religion, about music, the differences clearer when both ethnicities attended the same church, the same school. One Irish way to resolve marriage disputes was for the father to raise the sons by his beliefs and the mother to raise the daughters by hers. Had that been their way?
Born to immigrants, his name was Britishized, from Frederick Wilhelm, to Frederick William Immoor, by the time he attended college. After marriage they continued to live in New Jersey for a time? In Frank Sinatra's home territory? Before 1940, however, he and Katherine took their four NY-and NJ-born children to California, seen with them there in the census that year, in Los Angeles County.
Without the glamour seen in the biopics of the two famed daughters, he humbly called himself a draftsman in the motion picture industry, while the census-taker noted that they rented a house on Rooney. Renting instead of owning took advantage of the declines in house values sdue to the Great Depression. It allowed more frequent moves, a greater ability to gind a better job. The list of residences would grow to include San Francisco, for the birth of son Allen, before a return southward. His family's obituary for him is below, above links to family.
The two daughters were not the only children. Son Allen would be in the real estate business, in San Diego County, while daughter Judith also lived there. A third daughter Joan, was, by then, in her most successful marriage. As Mrs. Collingwood, she would be near her other brother, Frederick Kenneth Immoor, in Nevada. Her Mr. Collingwood would be buried in the same cemetery as her brother, in Genoa.
FOUR FREDERICKS AND GERMAN-NESS Frederick Wilhelm was the second of four Frederick Immoors, each the son of the one before. Following old-style German rules, using their different middle names would help separate them if two were at the same family gathering or lived close to each other.
Records show the first, his immigrant father, sometimes used an H as his middle initial, but he normally used none. German rules did not require it, once Fred's father had become the eldest of the remaining Fredericks, the one with "dibs" on the right to use only the first name. Frederick H. took his small family, his wife Bertha, Fred and Fred's sister Alma, from Brooklyn in NYC, to the suburbs in NJ, where he made his moneyin real estate. He presumably died on the East Coast, given that his wife died later in Florida, a retirement spot since the 1920s. After the NJ boom, there had been another land boom for those in real estate in Florida at exactly the right times.
Fred and future wife Katherine would meet in NJ, but tried other places. Thus, their eldest, the son to go to Nevada, Frederick Kenneth Immoor the Sr., would be born back in NY. Note that immigrant Germans did not normally call their children Irish names. Thus, calling the third Frederick's midle name of Kenneth was the idea of Fred's Irish wife Katherine.
Frederick Kenneth would be hard of hearing. His young memorialists out in Nevada, however, said he could read lips. The household would have devoted a lot of energy to teaching him that skill. They succeeded, as he went into freight sales. Once retired, he would learn sign language and help tutor deaf students of middle school age in Nevada. No longer abiding by German rules of name politeness, Frederick Kenneth gave his full name to his son, did not change the middle name.
The last of the four Frederick Immoors, Frederick Kenneth Immoor Jr., would be remembered as a teen only. Jr. would be buried in Genoa, Nevada, before his own father an a now aging Fred, thus, much too early. He was killed while crossing a Nevada highway.
==========DETAILS========================
I. THE IMMIGRANT FREDERICK.
His father probably "came over" at about age 14. He was from northern Germany, judging by his names, peculiar to that region. The Scandinavian-influenced and Lutheran ends of the Germans would have been a majority of his neighbors.
An old leader of the tenth century, Immo/Emmo, had urged peace as a way to deal with the little kings that ruled. An "immoor" would have been a person tribally allied with or fond of the ideas of Immo, sometimes also called Immon. All of this perhaps caused his father to give different versions of their surname in old records, Immoor, Immon, Immonen, some versions beginning with E, as "they all meant the same". Ultimately, those concerned must have all agreed to use Immoor.
The entries of Immoors to America would spread out, over several decades, but were still all in an era when Ellis Island was the only way to arrive. The varied Immoors naturalizing in NYC courts gave no nation of birth. They cited only a ruler, wanting to leave him behind. Technically under the Prussian Kaiser by then, they put "Prussian emperor" in the space reserved for country.
Having that man as ruler implied their past was probably very unpleasant. Causing huge out-migration, it had been so for the majority. Enserfed both recently and for many generations, once freed, they were allowed to rent, rarely to own,maybe another factor to explain why these Immoors so often rented. Long-term militarization and conscriptions were expected of males. The rulers needed their young bodies to help the rulers conquer new peoples eastward, having been stopped from going southward. (Hitler would continue this later, often finding officers among the same "warrior landlord" families of northern Germany as had the Prussian Kaiser.)
Hence, his parents made a sacrifice. They pushed him out of the homeland door at about age 14, off to NYC and Ellis Island, before conscription could happen.
If one left to avoid conscription, the rule was that one could never return to live there permanently.
Two older Immoors, entering then leaving NY quickly, to re-settle in other states, gave Hanover as a more precise birthplace in their censuses. Both used the name Henry Immoor in their censuses. They would have been born and baptized, however, as Heinrich or Hendrick, nickname Heinie. Older than Immigrant Frederick, once could have been an uncle, the other, his father's cousin. It was also possible for two brothers from the same Germanic family to both be named Heinrich/Henry, to honor the same still living ancestor, with different middle names to separate them. However, the British-descended clerks in America refused to write the needed middle names on government forms, so church records have to be checked for full information. (Post-Prussia, the district and city of Hanover were still part of the Westfalen region. Church records are often seen under Westfalen. One Henry lies buried with wife Mary and daughter Wilhelmine in Philadelphia, Penn. The other crossed the Mississippi River, perhaps going via Chicago by train, to Scott County, Iowa, in the city of Dubuque, on the bluffs of the huge river, facing illinois. His death record stated his father had been a Frederich Immoor, his mother, Wilhelmine, the feminine of Wilhelm. His burial is with wife Mathilda/Matilda and an older relative, Johane/ Johanna Immoor. The Pennsylvanian Immoors are buried in a Catholic cemetery, Holy Redeemer. The Iowans' graves are in a town cemetery, so no hint of which churches to check.
Fred's father's arrival at age 14 was perhaps with his older sisters. There was no obvious sign of their parents nearby in Brooklyn. He lived first with one married sister in her apartment in 1900. Once children were born, needing more space, they lived in a different married sister's larger house in 1910. There were not just two surnames per dwelling, but three or four.
Interests lined-up more keenly if most of the men in a household worked in the same industry. Immigrants from Germany arriving at the very end of the 1800s were relatively late, too late for the good farmland of the Midwest. The Germans often had job skills beyond farming, however, letting them earn a living in large cities. In the old country, people had been , for example, farmer-shoemaker, farmer-brewer, farmer-undertaker, farming in the summer, preparing or fixing or selling coffins, shoes, etc. in the "off times". If trained by the same parents or grandparents back home, this could caused the same or similar occupation for all the males in a family group that arrived together. The houses' adult males were all employed in the liquor or brewing industries.
In 1900, this first Frederick was a bartender, while living in his older sister's rented tenement apartment, on DeKalb Ave. in Brooklyn. (Her husband was William Schaerr, mis-written in 1900 as "Shierr". Her name was Marie? Marti? The census-taker's old cursive handwriting could be hard to read, fading as decades passed. The confusing double vowels were perhaps Britishized later into Scherr. )
By 1920, his father, the first Frederick immoor in America, was a saloon-keeper. He had married Bertha/Berth Gans/Janz. Their latest shared dwelling was a house on Pulaski. Their crowded space had three families. (His older sister listed her spouse, Mr. Miller, as the landlord, but the name woul have been spelled Mueller, aybe with an "umlaut" substituted for the double vowel "back home" .)
Prohibition approached, was not yet law. Those coming from the British Isles had far more problems with alcohol abuse, made worse by laws forbidding women from going into saloons with their husbands and then saying it was time to go home. German beer gardens and festivals were instead family places, so the Germans felt they were about to be punished for problems they did not have . However, beer and liquor sales were still legal at the moment, no mafia needed to get around the law.
II. THE NY-TO-NJ FREDERICKS. By the 1910 Census, this Frederick Immoor, the secon of four, had been born. His younger sister Alma was also present, their family of birth not destined to be larger. Life soon changed. Before Prohibition, they had been working class, able to earn a lving with with limited educations. Post-prohibition, old jobs gone, they desired to advance to the middle class , so needed good educations for the children. How to manage this? His father left the saloon-brewery-liquor life, for real estate, specifically, NJ real estate. (If they had stayed in the old life back in NYC? Prohibition forced their old jobs to shift to the underworld. Speak-easies, boot-legging, etc, developed as the main alternatives, after German beer gardens, family-friendly, close, as did Irish whiskey distilleries, not so family-friendly.)
For business reasons, his father needed to be where the new subdivisions were forming, The most affordable way to escape the crowdedness of Brooklyn and Queens was to try the developing suburbs nearby, much to be of interest in north Jersey. His father was believed to make considerable money.
Thus, their next US Census, the 1920, listed his father as a realtor, having taken their little family across the river-marked state line, to Bergen County, NJ. Old habits die hard? They again rented, leaving them freer to move if the "hot spots for business" changed. In addition to budding subdivisions, schools were public, but not city-run, another advantage, instead independent of mayors' desire to reallocate resources away from schools to other city functions,.
His parents choose the old Jersey place of Leonia, which had split apart earlier from the larger mother township of Hackensack. Not incorporated until the 1890s, it had, maybe jokingly, been called Lee-onia. Its history was old. It began as a small village that existed mainly to serve the business needs of old Fort Lee in the Revolutionary days, well situated for transporting things and troops between the two larger places nearby, NYC to the north and Trenton to the south.
His father had a community side. Immigrant Frederick joined the Bergen County Historical Society, giving Leonia as his address. His new membership was listed in that old volume of their proceedings where the society described Leonia's history.
His parents became "monied enough". They were able to make at least three trips back to Germany, a luxury many immigrants could not afford. They would also to be seen in cabin class, instead of tourist class, at least once. This Frederick and his sister Alma went along for the 1922 trip. They would have met whatever aunts and uncles and cousins still lived "back there", where people named Frederick tended to be found north of the Rhine. Did they go for a wedding or funeral? Was a grandparent or two still alive?
Attending college was most unusual then. Yet, he was enrolled though at least the 1922-1923 academic year.
In that era, with too many places elsewhere lacking public high schools , many felt fortunate to get as far as Grades 6 to 8. However, his family was able to educate this Frederick well enough in NJ that he would qualify for the University of Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia, where other Immoors lived, a bit south, still on the coastline. There, the school newspaper, The Pennsylvanian, noted that he had pledged a fraternity, suing a Britishize spelling, as Frederick William Immoor. His fraternity's record-keeper saved space by abbreviating that to "F. W. Immoor". He was a sophomore on his pledge date and had charge of the freshman rowing team. (SOURCES: Page 1, March 8, 1923 issue, "The Pennsylvanian", archived at upenn.edu. Page 191, "The Palm of Alpha Tau Omega", 1923, volume XLIII, viewable at archive.org.)
Many of the first-generation German-Americans would serve for the US in the World Wars. This Frederick was too young for WW I. Having five children and a wife to support would have excused him from WW II, though he would have been drafted had the war grown worse.
Since these Immoors had returned for visits, was it too easy to visualize the faces of people they knew, the mind's eye seeing them bombed on the ground? It was, perhaps, a mercy he did not need to serve.
Did his father expand his real estate business? Parts of New Jersey and Florida saw incoming New Yorkers at about the same time. Both family housing and seaside resorts were built for NJ, retiree housing and more resorts, for Florida.. Builders and realtors aided everyone in leaving NY for elsewhere.
The money-making land boom of his father's era would end. This would happen nationally in the decade in which the Frederick headed for California was beginning his own family. The Great Depression and associated crashes came strongly, overwhelmingly. The next national land boom would not start until WW II veterans returned, ready for marriage and new houses in the 1950s, deposits already saved up as everyone saved during the war-ration years instead of buying. That would be a good time, especially for those who moved to California early.
III. MOVIELAND FREDERICK. He and Katherine moved alone to "movieland", Los Angeles County, between the births of their fourth, daughter Judith, in NJ in 1934, and their fifth, a son, born in San Francisco, after they all moved following their 1940 census. There was no sign of his parents present, though his mother lived long, until 1966.
Yes, a biopic sketch for daughter Jacqueline (actress Susan Morrow) said he and Katherine had seven children. The problem? Only five are found in marriage and other records. Perhaps the number of seven was guessed by counting the surnames of grandchildren in his obituary? (While the brothers had only one marriage each, the daughters, California style, had multiple marriages, too many California-style, with older Hollywood men.)
III. SHEAS, THE BRONX TO NJ. Was renting a Europe-learned habit for more than the Immoors? Others also came to NJ to rent, if not able to afford buying just yet or in an occupation that required moves. These included the family of his future wife Katherine, listed as Catherine Shea in her NYC birth record, her parents living in the Bronx, church records kept centrally, at some diocese or cathedral office in Manhattan. Her family changed her name to Katherine O'Shea for their 1920 Census, truer to their Irish roots, a brave thing to do in a time growing thick with "nativism". They said her father William worked as a "billiards instructor", so perhaps he was employed in the resort/hotel areas of NJ. This would be a type of work that perhaps did not survive the coming Great Depression?
A sister a year or so older had been born in Ireland, listed as Josephine in the Sheas' last census with her present. She was found sharing Frederick and Katherine's house in LA County for their 1940 census with her surname changed to Horton, first name modernized into Jean, in a time when everyone knew of actress Jean Harlow. Whatever name Jean/Josephine used, she and her sister Katherine were alike consistently listed only their mother as Irish-born, their father, William, always, as having been English-born. British and Irish was as uncommon a combination as German and Irish. Perhaps their father's Sheas had tried migrating from Ireland to England, where Wm. Shea was born? Then, finding work wanting, they returned to their homeland, where he could meet his future, wife Ellen/Nellie O'Leary, daughter of Bartholomew? Not happy with either Ireland or England, William and Ellen/Nellie then picked up their baby daughter, Josephine and moved to America in 1905, quickly having Catherine/Katherine, then gradually, the rest.
Catherine Shea was seen in multiple early records, including her birth in NYC. What event excited them into resuming the spelling rules they preferred, just as the Klan was expanding into the Midwest and Northwest, the newspapers covering their actions against Germans and Irish and Jewish and working class labor unions, wherever their usual victims of color could not be found? First, the Klan marketers stayed away from NJ and NY. Second and more important, the southern two-thirds of Ireland had recently split apart as it own Republic. Only Northern Ireland, called Ulster, still remained as a colony of Britain, still required to follow British rules. Thus, in 1920, her mother declined to say she was from a unified Ireland, as done before, but said the truth, "Irish Free State". This would be short-lived. By 1930, US census-takers had been re-trained, told to accept only Ireland as an answer, about the same time southern legislators had convinced the government to stop counting people as "mulatto", the counts having offered strong proof that blacks and whites were mixing, contrary to miscegenation laws in the south.
The granddaughter writing of Katherine's marriage to Frederick Wilhelm said they had moved to the Teaneck area after marriage. Remember that Leonia's old larger township had once been part of an even larger mother township called Hackensack. Growth caused the towns to split apart, done as smaller governments gave people a better say in their own governance, not letting themselves be ruled patron- style by central elites. We have not checked, but it's possible that Teaneck was also carved out of the same mother territory, staying in farmland and woods longer, so later to be developed and split off from grandmother Hackensack, perhaps a once-larger Leonia or Ridgeway its mother.
By everyone's next census, the 1930, Frederick and Katherine were not with parents, doubled up with no one, rented their own house in New Jersey. They had had the first two of their five children, Frederick K., born NY, listed elsewhere as Frederick Kenneth. Joan was born NJ. The next two children, Jackie and Judy, would also be NJ-born, listed as that by their parents in their 1940 census. A biopic sketch giving Judith's birthplace as NY seems wrong in that light, with NJ repeated by her in her marriage records. [Need to double check all this to be sure.]
SINGING WITH SINATRA? Joan would be with them for their 1940 US Census after their move to the Los Angeles area, but then returned to Bergen County, N.J. to graduate from HS, specifically the Hackensack HS. She was thus near relatives again in Leonia and Teaneck, presumably living with one of them to attend a good public school, one not city-run. Frank Sinatra would get his start about this time, after admiring and styling himself after NY's black singer Billie Holiday. He was noted first as at Fort Lee clubs.
He would become one of Judith's associates. She met a mobster we will call R., before her marriage at age 18 to actor William Campbell, a marriage which lasted six years despite the age difference. The newly famed Frank would introduce the recently divorced socialite named Judy Campbell to the mobster we will call G., and to one other man, the political son of an Irish mobster already invested in or otherwise controlling some Hollywood hotels and studio premises. What happened after the introductions is debated. She said the serious relationship lasting two years was with the political son, whom she mistakenly believed had loved her. The others were flirtations or brief affairs, her relationship with G. a business one on behalf of the political son.
SONS VS. DAUGHTERS. As we lie on our death beds, examining our consciences, we may ask what we could have done better. Answering that, we might make amends, wish we had time to tell our children more, apologize for our mistakes, or advise them not to do the same.
Five children survived to marry. Eldest to youngest, they were: Frederick K., Joan, Jacqueline (aka Susan Morrow, actress), Judith, and Allen G. Why did the daughters marry so often, the sons and the parents and grandparents, just once?
If this Frederick went to the University of Penn., if his eldest daughter Joan finished HS, and if his youngest son, Allen, received a degree at a local college in California, why didn't his other two daughters do more of that? One answer was perhaps their mother, Katherine. After living in LA for the 1940 Census, they had some time in San Francisco, where son Allen was born and Judith recalled that she and Jackie were sent to Catholic school. The school was fine, her mother was not. Her mother could have waited until summer vacation, as the Germans did, when sending their children "to visit" relatives, something most of them loved. Yet, Judith recalled that Katherine pulled her and Jackie out of school for a whole month, not summertime, sending them to Chicago to see her re-married sister Jean/Josephine and their bit-younger cousin Patsy Horton. Judith may have been pulled out in the middle of difficult material, while Jackie was in the midst of something easer to make-up on their return. Judith would be humiliated by then being held back a year, not allowed to proceed with her friends to the next grade. Her parents perhaps could have insisted she be advanced, or switched her to a public school. Choosing this humiliation instead of moving children ahead and giving them extra remedial work is associated, statistically, with a much higher rate of dropping out, known in modern times, maybe not then.
Judith no longer liked school, but reported that her mother nearly died in an auto accident. This event was used as the reason (needed to keep truancy officers away) to pull Judith out of school at about age 14, the age when immigrant Frederick came to America to work.
Most places had light requirements for home schooling. A smart-enough child could finish the suggested or required homework and reading easily by 11 am, having the rest of the day "open for whatever", unless the parent teaching at home decided to fill the hours with more. If Jackie was 16, she did not need parent consent, she could drop out on her own. Jackie became a starlet and introduced Judith to things for which she was not ready.
Was there another problem? Judith suggested that Frederick had been too hard for his children to please. Did her brother Frederick Kenneth's hearing problems reduce his noticing all that was going on? Did anyone try to make up for the deep disappointment of never pleasing Papa, by trying to please other older men, not younger ones. In that era, they could try this at work if male, in marriage if female? Were any poor choices of associates then also too hard to please?
Judith first married, at 18, an actor known to Jackie. She had earlier flirted with handsome mobster R, who was in the process of bringing the Chicago mob more deeply into California, already in Nevada .
Dating and marrying too early is statistically dangerous. Far worse than marrying another peraon also age 18 is a woman of 18 dating or marrying a much older man. If dating or marrying someone so young, the older man might hope for someone accustomed to obeying her parents, ready to obey him, as if still a child. Conflict develops if she discovers she can't be a child any longer.
Both of Frederick's sons would have luckier lives than his daughters, in the sense of having just one marriage each. Perhaps they were helped by being told they would be sent to college, even if only one finished, so were mentally ready to postpone marriage. Postponing the first marriage and better educated (better trained in verbal skills) are both now known, statistically, to increase the chances of "'making it" in marriage.
Of Frederick's three daughters, two did finally find lasting relationships. Joan, his eldest daughter, had gone to NJ, hen returned after finishing HS in Hackensack, to the LA area, information give at the time she married an Olstad (see articles at newspaperarchive.com for the Van Nuys area of LA). They had several children, then she would marry two more times. The second marriage, covered in county records, lasted a mere month before divorce was granted, basically an annulment. The third marriage succeeded, a lasting one, with Raymond Collingwood.
The multiple marriages of the other two daughters are public knowledge.
While they still lived out east, the Great Depression spread out of rural parts of the nation. Young farmers went bust as crop prices fell, by 1926, no longer supporting the high prices the newest farmers had promised to pay for land. A boom in the stock market and urban land matched the boom in rural land, but those bubbles took longer to burst. Wall Street did not crash until Oct. of 1929. Two brother-in-laws out East still listed jobs at brokerages when counted for their 1930 US Census, but presumably held them for not much longer. People lingered at their old locations, those with mortgages, like a brother-in-law in Westchester County, NY, were locked into a high expense they could not meet. Once people lost work or a home, they moved, and became hard to find for their 1940 Census. Lots of doubling-ups occurred by the 1940 Census, with too many divorces seen in-between.
He and wife Catherine/Katherine were among the lucky. They were renters in 1930, not burdened by unaffordable mortgages. Was that always true? Frederick was a salesman of window weather-stripping for the new houses still being built at the time of their 1930 Census. That would have been a fine job until all the houses had their weather-stripping, and no more new ones were being built. He needed to do something else.
Their next move took them to movieland, to Los Angeles County, in California, where they rented again. Their marriage was still intact in 1940. This Frederick told the 1940 census-taker that he worked as a draftsman for motion pictures. Presumably, he designed sets, such as business facades for fake downtowns, etc. Did this let him learn construction, to fine-tune his drawing techniques, preparing him to do architectural work later? Had he trained for that in college?
Unlike 1930, when they were the sole occupants of their rented house, they were doubled up in a rented house in 1940. Their housemates were Frederick's sister in-law, Jean Horton, working as a sales clerk, and her daughter Patricia Horton, barely of elementary school age, only a year different in age from Frederick's youngest daughter, Judith, so a natural playmate. That 1940 census asked for their address in 1935, trying to track the moves of the population. Irish-born Jean listed her address in 1935 as Larchmont, Westchester County, NY. His wife Katherine said she had been visiting at Larchmont in 1935, while the rest stayed in NJ, making it clear that Jean was Katherine's Irish-born sister, called Josephine by Mr. and Mrs. Shea.. Jean Horton's life had not been as lucky Katherine's. She was now divorced, she and her daughter in California, no longer living with Jean's spouse, who once had a brokerage job and two servants in a house in Westchester County, but, by 1940, no longer found there.
Who would know better than Frederick and Katherine where their children had been born? They told their 1940 census-taker that their fourth child, Judith, was born in N.J. Yet, gossip columnist kinds of sources insisted she was born in NY . That was not their only error, as some presumed her brother's name matched that of her father. Yet , her father' s middle name was William, not Kenneth, seen used in his college days and a few other times.
Born in 1934, Judith would speak later of being taken out of school at age 14, after her mother had been in a serious auto accident that nearly killed her, to be "tutored', which most likely meant home schooled. Were the medical bills too high to pay her Catholic school tuition? Why didn't they send her to public school? Did his wife need supervision and nursing while Frederick worked? Perhaps the medical bills made private school unaffordable. Jacqueline would have been two years older, so may have decided simply to drop out and become a starlet.
This was bad for Judith and her next older sister Jacqueline. if home schooling is similar to that in this writer's state, a smart child can finish the minimum state requirements by 11 am, leaving lots of time to do other things. Jacqueline became the starlet, took Judith to parties and introduced her to movie actors, with the result that Judith was married by 18 to a much older man, an actor. Before marrying William Campbell, Judith had been introduced to a Chicago mobster coming to Hollywood to takeover one of the studios. Her sister Joan had returned earlier from the Hackensack and Fort Lee area most likely with some knowledge of and excitement about Frank Sinatra. Her brother Frederick Kenneth had gone off to the Tahoe/Reno area, with resorts where casino moguls might be. Movieland marriages had bad reputations as not lasting. Even for ordinary marriages, modern sociology professors would document, later, that as many as 8 out of 10 wedding at 18 saw their marriages turn unhappily, not bad people, just wrong for each other. That research had not yet been done. Not finishing high school, Judith would have no college sociology, few good job prospects, unless her freelance artist talents had been taught by her father, so she could do commercial drawings for real estate and ads. On the bright side, she would have a stipend from her grandmother and alimony from that first marriage, so would live reasonably well. She would keep Frederick and Katherine company as she lived with them between her two marriages, Her second marriage ended, not in divorce, but in separation. ( Her much younger spouse, a golf pro, went with his widowed mother to an area of Idaho with lakeside golf resorts. )
His daughters had two middle names, German-style. These were selected by an ethnically Irish-Catholic mother. Of the two well-known daughters, the elder had been baptized Jacqueline Ann Bernadette , the younger Judith Eileen Katherine. According to German rules, once one's namesake had died, the younger person could begin using the elder's name, if it was one of their names. Judith was the one named for her mother, so, after her mother died, began calling herself Katherine and Kate, a way to remember her mother.
Did that happen with the four Fredericks? Did this one go by William when around his father? Or, was there no need to be William, if this one went by Fred, or F.W.?
The British-descended often refused to let even one middle name be put on a census, much less two. His younger sister, called Alma, did not have parents revealing her middle name in census work, but was allowed to recite her name as Alma Augusta at her marriage. Auguste, the German spelling, was a multi-generation name for females in their father's family, just as Frederick would be for males. One cousin, Augusta Schaerr, avoided the middle name solution in the States. She went by a nickname, Gussie, until their older relative named Augusta Immoor had died. (Gussie's youngest brother was Frederick Schaerr, showing the commonness of the name.)
OLD FAMILY HISTORY. Their 1910 Census, done in April, showed his father, "proprietor" of a saloon, arriving or naturalizing in 1892. Sometimes the censustaker was allowed to ask which "Germany", but that never happened for them. However, given the 1890s timing, and "the emperor" being cited in immigrant records of other Immoors coming into NYC in the same decades, their Germany was probably the short-lived "German Empire" that provoked WW I, the section of northern Germany under the Prussian king known as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The empire's north German colonies were close to Norway and Sweden, so majority Lutheran. There was a Calvinist intermix at the western edge nearer Calvinist Holland. At the other edges, the south nearer Catholic France and the east nearer Catholic Poland, the numerous religious minorities included Catholics, which his family had been, and the Jewish. The Prussian-run colonies extended along the northern German seacoast, where they bordered Denmark. The Prussians and Danes fought over land, to control, for example, parts of what became modern Poland.
All this diversity meant they were used to an ethnic mixed. This was seen in the first Frederick's apartment house in Brooklyn, with Dansk and Polska speakers, not just Deutsch (Danish and Polish, not just German. Note that Deutsch was the Germans' word for the varied dialects of their own language, never saying German, as their language had no J sound.)
Why leave the old places? "Back there", fourteen year olds could be snatched off the street and kept in military service for years. (Young men were required to do multiple wars to expand Prussian territory, which many often did not believe right.) Too many were equally unhappy with the huge landlords. Little future might be envisioned except forever renting from the very same ones who had kept their families long enserfed, giving them no back pay, no land, upon being freed despite centuries of working for free.
Culturally, equally miserable in so many other ways, they differed from southern US slaves in one generous way. Landlords could not separate enserfed families by auctioning off select individuals to other landlords. Serfs "went with the land". They were allowed to stay wherever they were born. Once freed, they lived some generations in the same places as tenants, then moved out together, as family-connected groups, often headed to the same town, not just the same county in the States.
With this second Frederick at age 6 in 1910 and his sister Alma at age 4, the two other families in their aunt's crowded house in Brooklyn included one set whose baby made the third generation present. They spoke Polish Yiddish, fitting their Jewish-sounding last names of Benjamin and Rosenbaum. The home-owning family was John Muller and his wife Dora, a former Immoor, perhaps Theodora/ Dorothea "back there", eventually Dorothy here. The Mullers had a playmate-aged daughter, age 5, and spoke German.
The four adult women present did not work outside the home. Sociology professors and urban historians would tell us those not leaving the home were slow to learn English, maybe never did. This was contrary to the myth that "they all spoke English". The men would learn at work. The children would learn once in school, could translate for their mothers on trips to the store or when the census-taker visited, causing some oddities in census answers.
The first Frederick was self-employed in 1910. At age 32, he called himself the proprietor of a saloon. The playmate's father, John H. Muller, age 33, called himself a bottler at a brewery. John had immigrated just a year earlier, in 1891, so perhaps the earlier arriving arranged for the later ones to come, sent loans for their tickets. The family speaking Polish Yiddish was headed by a Mr. Benjamin nearing retirement age. His daughter had married a Joseph Rosenbaum, who worked as a bookkeeper in "wholesale liquor", similar in age to the other two men, also in the liquor industry, so perhaps they had been good friends.
The Central Europeans used beer gardens and festivals for family gatherings, not making them men-only places . They ran breweries for beer once here, not distilleries of hard liquor. Unlike the American way, European women were allowed into beer-drinking places. There were thus fewer allowed to develop into drunks. Any drunken men spending the family treasure could be hauled out by wives and sisters whenever needed. In contrast, those from the British Isles, including too many Irish, were said to have had alcohol problems, related in part to drinking only "hard liquor", not beer, not wine. Also, the British customs repeated in America were different, only "female employees" allowed in to saloons, no matter how bad a husband's or brother's behavior inside. At least one heroine of Prohibition was depicted with an axe, so she could chop her way into saloons, not otherwise allowed to be in them. This Frederick's wife had an Irish last name, so was British Isles, her father born in England to an Irish father and British mother. His family moved back to Ireland, letting him meet Katherine's mother, Nellie/Ellen O'Leary. What was odd? They would have a marriage record in NYC in 1903, before their stated immigration date, her elder sister Josephine (jean?) would then born back in Ireland in 1905, later given as the family's official immigration year, then Katherine. the next year, in 1906, would be born in the Bronx. What was her maiden name? There were two answers. "Shea" was written into her legal records at birth and when her family lived in the Bronx and for her and Frederick's probable church wedding in Manhattan in 1925. Her father switched to the older, more truly Irish name of "O'Shea" by the time of the 1930 census, after her 1925 marriage to Frederick. Their family would call her O'Shea in the obituary of the third Frederick, not too many years after his own.
With different histories of alcohol use, the different cultures reacted differently to Prohibition. Prohibition would soon arrive, to make all three young family men in the Brooklyn house, Rosenbaum, Muller and Immorr, seek other work, with William Shea losing his job as a instructor in Billiards, an occupation that lasted as long as pool halls served beer. If better work could not be found, prohibition pushed legal occupations into illegal ones, saloons into speak-easies, opened the door for contact with alcohol runners and gangsters of a far worse nature than alcohol-running.
There would have been old family contacts from the Prohibition era that continued, affecting daughter Judith? As drinking by itself violates no commandments, many were moral people. But not all? Did this present problems for a family that tried to stay religious?
In addition, his daughter Judith described her father , this Frederick, who had been only 6 in that pre-Prohibition household 1910, as growing up into someone far too stern. Daughters who could never please a too stern father might be tempted to marry or date men who could also never be pleased, men too inclined to wander?
His daughter Judith would eventually make peace with her life, writing a book in 1977, after her father's death. She was not yet ready to tell the whole truth about her relationships, which came later. She had left out details, but when she revealed them, they were backed up, according to a journalist friend, by her having kept old receipts proving her whereabouts at different dates. She had paid her own way in life. She was independently "wealthy-enough", courtesy of her grandparents. She was no one's kept mistress. Judith had wanted to be a singer and actress, but would not, contented herself with amateur painting and a spouse's real estate projects. Famed sister Jacqueline succeeded as an actress and in her long-lived final marriage to someone in the medical profession, her first two marriages having been mistakes in the high pressure movie world. Judith, after one failed marriage, retreated to her parent's house in the North Los Angeles area (now called Northridge?), then retried marriage much later. She had a son between marriages whom she could have aborted, but did not, carried to term and put up for adoption.
We don' t know what this Frederick thought of all that, as he wrote no books and gave no interviews. The survivors writing Frederick's obituary said zero about this Frederick's past. However, his surviving family considered each other dear and treasured, as their obituary for him named survivors down to the level of great-grand-children. Those listed extended from California into Nevada, from movie stardom, to those perhaps better blessed, with the gift of more ordinary lives.
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From his obituary, submitted by his family to newpapers:
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"IMMOOR, Frederick, 69, passed away Nov. 21, 1974 in Encinitas, Calif.
Survived by son Fred K. of Gold Hill, Nev.; Allen G. of Manhattan Beach; daughters Mrs. Ray Collingwood of Incline Village, Nev., Mrs. Sheldon Attix, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Mrs. Judith Campbell, Solana Beach, Calif.; sister Mrs. Alma Sharp, Largo, Fla.; 9 grandchildren Charles, Elizabeth, Judith & Patricia Attix, Colleen Hosman, Gregory & Terry Immoor, Deborah [check, Corbin?] & Karen Rodriquez; 5 great grandchildren Arron [check, Corbin?], Darcy Immoor, Heidi & Christine Hosman & Fred Immoor. Rosary will be recited 7:00 p.m. Sun. at Praiswater Funeral Home Chapel, Van Nuys. Funeral 11:00 a.m. Mon. at San Fernando Mission Chapel. Interment San Fernando Mission.
NOTE: His obituary included the fourth Frederick, as Fred Immoor, that teen still living. It omitted only one grandson, identity still hidden at the time, due to all adoptions being "closed" back then. (David Bohler, a photographer, would seek out his natural mother in the 1980s, and would be happily received .)
SAMPLE OF OTHER SOURCES
1910 US Census in Brooklyn, on Pulaski, with the first two Fredericks, identified elsewhere as Frederick H. and Frederick W.: Image of handwritten record archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRK7-VFB
1940 US Census in Los Angeles, on Rooney Drive, with the second and third Fredericks present, seen elsewhere as Frederick W. and Frederick K.: Image seen at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9MT-N7QP
NOTE: His son, Frederick K. Immoor, was severely impaired hearing-wise, but could read lips and speak clearly. He would be memorialized in 2001 for his volunteer work with Nevada deaf students in middle school grades. Their teacher, Holly Greenough, had taught him sign language at Lake Tahoe's community college a few years earlier. They called him a "Professional Grandpa" and "Grandpa Fred". Their memories were later published, in Dec. 2001, by Jill Darby on Dec. 19 , archived at TahoeDailyTribune, worded to indicate he was still living when they wrote. Presumably, they knew he was very ill and his death might soon follow.
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Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, written in 2018, revised Nov-Dec 2019. Permission given to Findagrave for use in its entirety at this page. Descendants of people named here may use whole paragraphs in private materials for family.
That team report gave his name as Fred W. Immoor. Earlier, at the time of his marriage to Katherine Shea, "Frederick Wilhelm Immoor" was used, more ethnic, preferred by his parents and at their church. (A granddaughter wrote of this in June of 2002, at ancestry.com, using "JESwanson" as her id.)
BIOGRAPHY. People of the past might have famed sons, but Frederick and Katherine had two famed daughters. One sought the limelight in California via the movies. She then left the lights for family life, as Mrs. Attix. Fred and Katherine probably had no need to worry about her. The younger daughter would have caused more worry. Fred would not know all of it Judith, wrote a book in 1977, four years after Fred's death, trying to defend her reputation. She had spent three to five years in a lifestyle, circa 1961, with a poor choice of friends. Had she been a man, would her actions, when young, have caused her to be called a "playboy"? As a female, her actions, while young, were instead deemed unforgivable?
Seeing her errors, she changed her life.
However, her old life did not forget her.
Two previous Hollywood associates were reputed gangsters, close to her father in age, from Chicago, not from her father's NY. The Church Committee, inside the US Senate, concerned about assassination attempts on foreign leaders, asked the two to testify for a 1975 report. In that connection, her name was leaked, on Dec. 21 of 1975. Why worry? Two reasons-- the two former associates were both murdered, brutally.
One died seven months before her name was leaked, the other, six months after. On June 19, 1975, the first was shot to death at his home in Illinois. Merely subpoenaed, he'd had no chance to testify. One source, perhaps too colorful, said six bullets wounds encircled the man's mouth. Another source, only a bit blander, said that he was shot once in the mouth, then five times through the chin. Alarming either way, his killing was a warning to others who might try to testify.
Despite the warning, five days later, on June 24th, the second man testified anyway.
He may have thought all was fine. But then, many months after the first death, his body was found dumped in the Florida waters, his legs described as chopped off. (Some people wondered, was he perhaps still alive when dumped?)
Considered to be the man who had brought the Chicago mob to Hollywood, Judith had dated that second man before marrying her first husband, Mr. Campbell. To give an idea of her youth, she was just age 18 at that marriage. Given that her name had been leaked, should she worry? Now respectable, would she be "dragged through the mud" if asked what she remembered seeing or hearing,. "back in those days"? Should she be fearful for her own life? She wanted to know everything that had been said about her to the Committee.
Her lawyers painstakingly asked nicely, then more officially, then sued. One wrote letters from San Diego, then the other one took action from Beverly Hills. They essentially asked for government records filed under the different variations of her name, the main ones being those she continued to use after her divorce at age 24, Judy Campbell and Judith Campbell.
Frederick died in 1974, so never heard about the leak or the two deaths, missed the spy drama that would swallow his youngest daughter. Spared this, his last years of retirement would have instead been pleasantly spent. Between her two marriages, daughter Judith would spend considerable time in the LA area, with both him and Katherine. Life was not perfect. Judith was said to worry that he lived beyond his means. Katherine died. Once widowed, he would go to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his other daughter, Mrs. Attix, lived with her family, her husband having taken his dental practice there.
EARLY LIFE. Raised at first in Brooklyn, he was named for his German folk. Wife Katherine was like him in being NYC-born, but in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, with Irish kin, not German. Their parents finished rearing them in Bergen County, NJ, where they could meet.
Note that the two ethnicities, German and Irish, typically had different ideas. These were not just about names, but about education and religion, about music, the differences clearer when both ethnicities attended the same church, the same school. One Irish way to resolve marriage disputes was for the father to raise the sons by his beliefs and the mother to raise the daughters by hers. Had that been their way?
Born to immigrants, his name was Britishized, from Frederick Wilhelm, to Frederick William Immoor, by the time he attended college. After marriage they continued to live in New Jersey for a time? In Frank Sinatra's home territory? Before 1940, however, he and Katherine took their four NY-and NJ-born children to California, seen with them there in the census that year, in Los Angeles County.
Without the glamour seen in the biopics of the two famed daughters, he humbly called himself a draftsman in the motion picture industry, while the census-taker noted that they rented a house on Rooney. Renting instead of owning took advantage of the declines in house values sdue to the Great Depression. It allowed more frequent moves, a greater ability to gind a better job. The list of residences would grow to include San Francisco, for the birth of son Allen, before a return southward. His family's obituary for him is below, above links to family.
The two daughters were not the only children. Son Allen would be in the real estate business, in San Diego County, while daughter Judith also lived there. A third daughter Joan, was, by then, in her most successful marriage. As Mrs. Collingwood, she would be near her other brother, Frederick Kenneth Immoor, in Nevada. Her Mr. Collingwood would be buried in the same cemetery as her brother, in Genoa.
FOUR FREDERICKS AND GERMAN-NESS Frederick Wilhelm was the second of four Frederick Immoors, each the son of the one before. Following old-style German rules, using their different middle names would help separate them if two were at the same family gathering or lived close to each other.
Records show the first, his immigrant father, sometimes used an H as his middle initial, but he normally used none. German rules did not require it, once Fred's father had become the eldest of the remaining Fredericks, the one with "dibs" on the right to use only the first name. Frederick H. took his small family, his wife Bertha, Fred and Fred's sister Alma, from Brooklyn in NYC, to the suburbs in NJ, where he made his moneyin real estate. He presumably died on the East Coast, given that his wife died later in Florida, a retirement spot since the 1920s. After the NJ boom, there had been another land boom for those in real estate in Florida at exactly the right times.
Fred and future wife Katherine would meet in NJ, but tried other places. Thus, their eldest, the son to go to Nevada, Frederick Kenneth Immoor the Sr., would be born back in NY. Note that immigrant Germans did not normally call their children Irish names. Thus, calling the third Frederick's midle name of Kenneth was the idea of Fred's Irish wife Katherine.
Frederick Kenneth would be hard of hearing. His young memorialists out in Nevada, however, said he could read lips. The household would have devoted a lot of energy to teaching him that skill. They succeeded, as he went into freight sales. Once retired, he would learn sign language and help tutor deaf students of middle school age in Nevada. No longer abiding by German rules of name politeness, Frederick Kenneth gave his full name to his son, did not change the middle name.
The last of the four Frederick Immoors, Frederick Kenneth Immoor Jr., would be remembered as a teen only. Jr. would be buried in Genoa, Nevada, before his own father an a now aging Fred, thus, much too early. He was killed while crossing a Nevada highway.
==========DETAILS========================
I. THE IMMIGRANT FREDERICK.
His father probably "came over" at about age 14. He was from northern Germany, judging by his names, peculiar to that region. The Scandinavian-influenced and Lutheran ends of the Germans would have been a majority of his neighbors.
An old leader of the tenth century, Immo/Emmo, had urged peace as a way to deal with the little kings that ruled. An "immoor" would have been a person tribally allied with or fond of the ideas of Immo, sometimes also called Immon. All of this perhaps caused his father to give different versions of their surname in old records, Immoor, Immon, Immonen, some versions beginning with E, as "they all meant the same". Ultimately, those concerned must have all agreed to use Immoor.
The entries of Immoors to America would spread out, over several decades, but were still all in an era when Ellis Island was the only way to arrive. The varied Immoors naturalizing in NYC courts gave no nation of birth. They cited only a ruler, wanting to leave him behind. Technically under the Prussian Kaiser by then, they put "Prussian emperor" in the space reserved for country.
Having that man as ruler implied their past was probably very unpleasant. Causing huge out-migration, it had been so for the majority. Enserfed both recently and for many generations, once freed, they were allowed to rent, rarely to own,maybe another factor to explain why these Immoors so often rented. Long-term militarization and conscriptions were expected of males. The rulers needed their young bodies to help the rulers conquer new peoples eastward, having been stopped from going southward. (Hitler would continue this later, often finding officers among the same "warrior landlord" families of northern Germany as had the Prussian Kaiser.)
Hence, his parents made a sacrifice. They pushed him out of the homeland door at about age 14, off to NYC and Ellis Island, before conscription could happen.
If one left to avoid conscription, the rule was that one could never return to live there permanently.
Two older Immoors, entering then leaving NY quickly, to re-settle in other states, gave Hanover as a more precise birthplace in their censuses. Both used the name Henry Immoor in their censuses. They would have been born and baptized, however, as Heinrich or Hendrick, nickname Heinie. Older than Immigrant Frederick, once could have been an uncle, the other, his father's cousin. It was also possible for two brothers from the same Germanic family to both be named Heinrich/Henry, to honor the same still living ancestor, with different middle names to separate them. However, the British-descended clerks in America refused to write the needed middle names on government forms, so church records have to be checked for full information. (Post-Prussia, the district and city of Hanover were still part of the Westfalen region. Church records are often seen under Westfalen. One Henry lies buried with wife Mary and daughter Wilhelmine in Philadelphia, Penn. The other crossed the Mississippi River, perhaps going via Chicago by train, to Scott County, Iowa, in the city of Dubuque, on the bluffs of the huge river, facing illinois. His death record stated his father had been a Frederich Immoor, his mother, Wilhelmine, the feminine of Wilhelm. His burial is with wife Mathilda/Matilda and an older relative, Johane/ Johanna Immoor. The Pennsylvanian Immoors are buried in a Catholic cemetery, Holy Redeemer. The Iowans' graves are in a town cemetery, so no hint of which churches to check.
Fred's father's arrival at age 14 was perhaps with his older sisters. There was no obvious sign of their parents nearby in Brooklyn. He lived first with one married sister in her apartment in 1900. Once children were born, needing more space, they lived in a different married sister's larger house in 1910. There were not just two surnames per dwelling, but three or four.
Interests lined-up more keenly if most of the men in a household worked in the same industry. Immigrants from Germany arriving at the very end of the 1800s were relatively late, too late for the good farmland of the Midwest. The Germans often had job skills beyond farming, however, letting them earn a living in large cities. In the old country, people had been , for example, farmer-shoemaker, farmer-brewer, farmer-undertaker, farming in the summer, preparing or fixing or selling coffins, shoes, etc. in the "off times". If trained by the same parents or grandparents back home, this could caused the same or similar occupation for all the males in a family group that arrived together. The houses' adult males were all employed in the liquor or brewing industries.
In 1900, this first Frederick was a bartender, while living in his older sister's rented tenement apartment, on DeKalb Ave. in Brooklyn. (Her husband was William Schaerr, mis-written in 1900 as "Shierr". Her name was Marie? Marti? The census-taker's old cursive handwriting could be hard to read, fading as decades passed. The confusing double vowels were perhaps Britishized later into Scherr. )
By 1920, his father, the first Frederick immoor in America, was a saloon-keeper. He had married Bertha/Berth Gans/Janz. Their latest shared dwelling was a house on Pulaski. Their crowded space had three families. (His older sister listed her spouse, Mr. Miller, as the landlord, but the name woul have been spelled Mueller, aybe with an "umlaut" substituted for the double vowel "back home" .)
Prohibition approached, was not yet law. Those coming from the British Isles had far more problems with alcohol abuse, made worse by laws forbidding women from going into saloons with their husbands and then saying it was time to go home. German beer gardens and festivals were instead family places, so the Germans felt they were about to be punished for problems they did not have . However, beer and liquor sales were still legal at the moment, no mafia needed to get around the law.
II. THE NY-TO-NJ FREDERICKS. By the 1910 Census, this Frederick Immoor, the secon of four, had been born. His younger sister Alma was also present, their family of birth not destined to be larger. Life soon changed. Before Prohibition, they had been working class, able to earn a lving with with limited educations. Post-prohibition, old jobs gone, they desired to advance to the middle class , so needed good educations for the children. How to manage this? His father left the saloon-brewery-liquor life, for real estate, specifically, NJ real estate. (If they had stayed in the old life back in NYC? Prohibition forced their old jobs to shift to the underworld. Speak-easies, boot-legging, etc, developed as the main alternatives, after German beer gardens, family-friendly, close, as did Irish whiskey distilleries, not so family-friendly.)
For business reasons, his father needed to be where the new subdivisions were forming, The most affordable way to escape the crowdedness of Brooklyn and Queens was to try the developing suburbs nearby, much to be of interest in north Jersey. His father was believed to make considerable money.
Thus, their next US Census, the 1920, listed his father as a realtor, having taken their little family across the river-marked state line, to Bergen County, NJ. Old habits die hard? They again rented, leaving them freer to move if the "hot spots for business" changed. In addition to budding subdivisions, schools were public, but not city-run, another advantage, instead independent of mayors' desire to reallocate resources away from schools to other city functions,.
His parents choose the old Jersey place of Leonia, which had split apart earlier from the larger mother township of Hackensack. Not incorporated until the 1890s, it had, maybe jokingly, been called Lee-onia. Its history was old. It began as a small village that existed mainly to serve the business needs of old Fort Lee in the Revolutionary days, well situated for transporting things and troops between the two larger places nearby, NYC to the north and Trenton to the south.
His father had a community side. Immigrant Frederick joined the Bergen County Historical Society, giving Leonia as his address. His new membership was listed in that old volume of their proceedings where the society described Leonia's history.
His parents became "monied enough". They were able to make at least three trips back to Germany, a luxury many immigrants could not afford. They would also to be seen in cabin class, instead of tourist class, at least once. This Frederick and his sister Alma went along for the 1922 trip. They would have met whatever aunts and uncles and cousins still lived "back there", where people named Frederick tended to be found north of the Rhine. Did they go for a wedding or funeral? Was a grandparent or two still alive?
Attending college was most unusual then. Yet, he was enrolled though at least the 1922-1923 academic year.
In that era, with too many places elsewhere lacking public high schools , many felt fortunate to get as far as Grades 6 to 8. However, his family was able to educate this Frederick well enough in NJ that he would qualify for the University of Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia, where other Immoors lived, a bit south, still on the coastline. There, the school newspaper, The Pennsylvanian, noted that he had pledged a fraternity, suing a Britishize spelling, as Frederick William Immoor. His fraternity's record-keeper saved space by abbreviating that to "F. W. Immoor". He was a sophomore on his pledge date and had charge of the freshman rowing team. (SOURCES: Page 1, March 8, 1923 issue, "The Pennsylvanian", archived at upenn.edu. Page 191, "The Palm of Alpha Tau Omega", 1923, volume XLIII, viewable at archive.org.)
Many of the first-generation German-Americans would serve for the US in the World Wars. This Frederick was too young for WW I. Having five children and a wife to support would have excused him from WW II, though he would have been drafted had the war grown worse.
Since these Immoors had returned for visits, was it too easy to visualize the faces of people they knew, the mind's eye seeing them bombed on the ground? It was, perhaps, a mercy he did not need to serve.
Did his father expand his real estate business? Parts of New Jersey and Florida saw incoming New Yorkers at about the same time. Both family housing and seaside resorts were built for NJ, retiree housing and more resorts, for Florida.. Builders and realtors aided everyone in leaving NY for elsewhere.
The money-making land boom of his father's era would end. This would happen nationally in the decade in which the Frederick headed for California was beginning his own family. The Great Depression and associated crashes came strongly, overwhelmingly. The next national land boom would not start until WW II veterans returned, ready for marriage and new houses in the 1950s, deposits already saved up as everyone saved during the war-ration years instead of buying. That would be a good time, especially for those who moved to California early.
III. MOVIELAND FREDERICK. He and Katherine moved alone to "movieland", Los Angeles County, between the births of their fourth, daughter Judith, in NJ in 1934, and their fifth, a son, born in San Francisco, after they all moved following their 1940 census. There was no sign of his parents present, though his mother lived long, until 1966.
Yes, a biopic sketch for daughter Jacqueline (actress Susan Morrow) said he and Katherine had seven children. The problem? Only five are found in marriage and other records. Perhaps the number of seven was guessed by counting the surnames of grandchildren in his obituary? (While the brothers had only one marriage each, the daughters, California style, had multiple marriages, too many California-style, with older Hollywood men.)
III. SHEAS, THE BRONX TO NJ. Was renting a Europe-learned habit for more than the Immoors? Others also came to NJ to rent, if not able to afford buying just yet or in an occupation that required moves. These included the family of his future wife Katherine, listed as Catherine Shea in her NYC birth record, her parents living in the Bronx, church records kept centrally, at some diocese or cathedral office in Manhattan. Her family changed her name to Katherine O'Shea for their 1920 Census, truer to their Irish roots, a brave thing to do in a time growing thick with "nativism". They said her father William worked as a "billiards instructor", so perhaps he was employed in the resort/hotel areas of NJ. This would be a type of work that perhaps did not survive the coming Great Depression?
A sister a year or so older had been born in Ireland, listed as Josephine in the Sheas' last census with her present. She was found sharing Frederick and Katherine's house in LA County for their 1940 census with her surname changed to Horton, first name modernized into Jean, in a time when everyone knew of actress Jean Harlow. Whatever name Jean/Josephine used, she and her sister Katherine were alike consistently listed only their mother as Irish-born, their father, William, always, as having been English-born. British and Irish was as uncommon a combination as German and Irish. Perhaps their father's Sheas had tried migrating from Ireland to England, where Wm. Shea was born? Then, finding work wanting, they returned to their homeland, where he could meet his future, wife Ellen/Nellie O'Leary, daughter of Bartholomew? Not happy with either Ireland or England, William and Ellen/Nellie then picked up their baby daughter, Josephine and moved to America in 1905, quickly having Catherine/Katherine, then gradually, the rest.
Catherine Shea was seen in multiple early records, including her birth in NYC. What event excited them into resuming the spelling rules they preferred, just as the Klan was expanding into the Midwest and Northwest, the newspapers covering their actions against Germans and Irish and Jewish and working class labor unions, wherever their usual victims of color could not be found? First, the Klan marketers stayed away from NJ and NY. Second and more important, the southern two-thirds of Ireland had recently split apart as it own Republic. Only Northern Ireland, called Ulster, still remained as a colony of Britain, still required to follow British rules. Thus, in 1920, her mother declined to say she was from a unified Ireland, as done before, but said the truth, "Irish Free State". This would be short-lived. By 1930, US census-takers had been re-trained, told to accept only Ireland as an answer, about the same time southern legislators had convinced the government to stop counting people as "mulatto", the counts having offered strong proof that blacks and whites were mixing, contrary to miscegenation laws in the south.
The granddaughter writing of Katherine's marriage to Frederick Wilhelm said they had moved to the Teaneck area after marriage. Remember that Leonia's old larger township had once been part of an even larger mother township called Hackensack. Growth caused the towns to split apart, done as smaller governments gave people a better say in their own governance, not letting themselves be ruled patron- style by central elites. We have not checked, but it's possible that Teaneck was also carved out of the same mother territory, staying in farmland and woods longer, so later to be developed and split off from grandmother Hackensack, perhaps a once-larger Leonia or Ridgeway its mother.
By everyone's next census, the 1930, Frederick and Katherine were not with parents, doubled up with no one, rented their own house in New Jersey. They had had the first two of their five children, Frederick K., born NY, listed elsewhere as Frederick Kenneth. Joan was born NJ. The next two children, Jackie and Judy, would also be NJ-born, listed as that by their parents in their 1940 census. A biopic sketch giving Judith's birthplace as NY seems wrong in that light, with NJ repeated by her in her marriage records. [Need to double check all this to be sure.]
SINGING WITH SINATRA? Joan would be with them for their 1940 US Census after their move to the Los Angeles area, but then returned to Bergen County, N.J. to graduate from HS, specifically the Hackensack HS. She was thus near relatives again in Leonia and Teaneck, presumably living with one of them to attend a good public school, one not city-run. Frank Sinatra would get his start about this time, after admiring and styling himself after NY's black singer Billie Holiday. He was noted first as at Fort Lee clubs.
He would become one of Judith's associates. She met a mobster we will call R., before her marriage at age 18 to actor William Campbell, a marriage which lasted six years despite the age difference. The newly famed Frank would introduce the recently divorced socialite named Judy Campbell to the mobster we will call G., and to one other man, the political son of an Irish mobster already invested in or otherwise controlling some Hollywood hotels and studio premises. What happened after the introductions is debated. She said the serious relationship lasting two years was with the political son, whom she mistakenly believed had loved her. The others were flirtations or brief affairs, her relationship with G. a business one on behalf of the political son.
SONS VS. DAUGHTERS. As we lie on our death beds, examining our consciences, we may ask what we could have done better. Answering that, we might make amends, wish we had time to tell our children more, apologize for our mistakes, or advise them not to do the same.
Five children survived to marry. Eldest to youngest, they were: Frederick K., Joan, Jacqueline (aka Susan Morrow, actress), Judith, and Allen G. Why did the daughters marry so often, the sons and the parents and grandparents, just once?
If this Frederick went to the University of Penn., if his eldest daughter Joan finished HS, and if his youngest son, Allen, received a degree at a local college in California, why didn't his other two daughters do more of that? One answer was perhaps their mother, Katherine. After living in LA for the 1940 Census, they had some time in San Francisco, where son Allen was born and Judith recalled that she and Jackie were sent to Catholic school. The school was fine, her mother was not. Her mother could have waited until summer vacation, as the Germans did, when sending their children "to visit" relatives, something most of them loved. Yet, Judith recalled that Katherine pulled her and Jackie out of school for a whole month, not summertime, sending them to Chicago to see her re-married sister Jean/Josephine and their bit-younger cousin Patsy Horton. Judith may have been pulled out in the middle of difficult material, while Jackie was in the midst of something easer to make-up on their return. Judith would be humiliated by then being held back a year, not allowed to proceed with her friends to the next grade. Her parents perhaps could have insisted she be advanced, or switched her to a public school. Choosing this humiliation instead of moving children ahead and giving them extra remedial work is associated, statistically, with a much higher rate of dropping out, known in modern times, maybe not then.
Judith no longer liked school, but reported that her mother nearly died in an auto accident. This event was used as the reason (needed to keep truancy officers away) to pull Judith out of school at about age 14, the age when immigrant Frederick came to America to work.
Most places had light requirements for home schooling. A smart-enough child could finish the suggested or required homework and reading easily by 11 am, having the rest of the day "open for whatever", unless the parent teaching at home decided to fill the hours with more. If Jackie was 16, she did not need parent consent, she could drop out on her own. Jackie became a starlet and introduced Judith to things for which she was not ready.
Was there another problem? Judith suggested that Frederick had been too hard for his children to please. Did her brother Frederick Kenneth's hearing problems reduce his noticing all that was going on? Did anyone try to make up for the deep disappointment of never pleasing Papa, by trying to please other older men, not younger ones. In that era, they could try this at work if male, in marriage if female? Were any poor choices of associates then also too hard to please?
Judith first married, at 18, an actor known to Jackie. She had earlier flirted with handsome mobster R, who was in the process of bringing the Chicago mob more deeply into California, already in Nevada .
Dating and marrying too early is statistically dangerous. Far worse than marrying another peraon also age 18 is a woman of 18 dating or marrying a much older man. If dating or marrying someone so young, the older man might hope for someone accustomed to obeying her parents, ready to obey him, as if still a child. Conflict develops if she discovers she can't be a child any longer.
Both of Frederick's sons would have luckier lives than his daughters, in the sense of having just one marriage each. Perhaps they were helped by being told they would be sent to college, even if only one finished, so were mentally ready to postpone marriage. Postponing the first marriage and better educated (better trained in verbal skills) are both now known, statistically, to increase the chances of "'making it" in marriage.
Of Frederick's three daughters, two did finally find lasting relationships. Joan, his eldest daughter, had gone to NJ, hen returned after finishing HS in Hackensack, to the LA area, information give at the time she married an Olstad (see articles at newspaperarchive.com for the Van Nuys area of LA). They had several children, then she would marry two more times. The second marriage, covered in county records, lasted a mere month before divorce was granted, basically an annulment. The third marriage succeeded, a lasting one, with Raymond Collingwood.
The multiple marriages of the other two daughters are public knowledge.
While they still lived out east, the Great Depression spread out of rural parts of the nation. Young farmers went bust as crop prices fell, by 1926, no longer supporting the high prices the newest farmers had promised to pay for land. A boom in the stock market and urban land matched the boom in rural land, but those bubbles took longer to burst. Wall Street did not crash until Oct. of 1929. Two brother-in-laws out East still listed jobs at brokerages when counted for their 1930 US Census, but presumably held them for not much longer. People lingered at their old locations, those with mortgages, like a brother-in-law in Westchester County, NY, were locked into a high expense they could not meet. Once people lost work or a home, they moved, and became hard to find for their 1940 Census. Lots of doubling-ups occurred by the 1940 Census, with too many divorces seen in-between.
He and wife Catherine/Katherine were among the lucky. They were renters in 1930, not burdened by unaffordable mortgages. Was that always true? Frederick was a salesman of window weather-stripping for the new houses still being built at the time of their 1930 Census. That would have been a fine job until all the houses had their weather-stripping, and no more new ones were being built. He needed to do something else.
Their next move took them to movieland, to Los Angeles County, in California, where they rented again. Their marriage was still intact in 1940. This Frederick told the 1940 census-taker that he worked as a draftsman for motion pictures. Presumably, he designed sets, such as business facades for fake downtowns, etc. Did this let him learn construction, to fine-tune his drawing techniques, preparing him to do architectural work later? Had he trained for that in college?
Unlike 1930, when they were the sole occupants of their rented house, they were doubled up in a rented house in 1940. Their housemates were Frederick's sister in-law, Jean Horton, working as a sales clerk, and her daughter Patricia Horton, barely of elementary school age, only a year different in age from Frederick's youngest daughter, Judith, so a natural playmate. That 1940 census asked for their address in 1935, trying to track the moves of the population. Irish-born Jean listed her address in 1935 as Larchmont, Westchester County, NY. His wife Katherine said she had been visiting at Larchmont in 1935, while the rest stayed in NJ, making it clear that Jean was Katherine's Irish-born sister, called Josephine by Mr. and Mrs. Shea.. Jean Horton's life had not been as lucky Katherine's. She was now divorced, she and her daughter in California, no longer living with Jean's spouse, who once had a brokerage job and two servants in a house in Westchester County, but, by 1940, no longer found there.
Who would know better than Frederick and Katherine where their children had been born? They told their 1940 census-taker that their fourth child, Judith, was born in N.J. Yet, gossip columnist kinds of sources insisted she was born in NY . That was not their only error, as some presumed her brother's name matched that of her father. Yet , her father' s middle name was William, not Kenneth, seen used in his college days and a few other times.
Born in 1934, Judith would speak later of being taken out of school at age 14, after her mother had been in a serious auto accident that nearly killed her, to be "tutored', which most likely meant home schooled. Were the medical bills too high to pay her Catholic school tuition? Why didn't they send her to public school? Did his wife need supervision and nursing while Frederick worked? Perhaps the medical bills made private school unaffordable. Jacqueline would have been two years older, so may have decided simply to drop out and become a starlet.
This was bad for Judith and her next older sister Jacqueline. if home schooling is similar to that in this writer's state, a smart child can finish the minimum state requirements by 11 am, leaving lots of time to do other things. Jacqueline became the starlet, took Judith to parties and introduced her to movie actors, with the result that Judith was married by 18 to a much older man, an actor. Before marrying William Campbell, Judith had been introduced to a Chicago mobster coming to Hollywood to takeover one of the studios. Her sister Joan had returned earlier from the Hackensack and Fort Lee area most likely with some knowledge of and excitement about Frank Sinatra. Her brother Frederick Kenneth had gone off to the Tahoe/Reno area, with resorts where casino moguls might be. Movieland marriages had bad reputations as not lasting. Even for ordinary marriages, modern sociology professors would document, later, that as many as 8 out of 10 wedding at 18 saw their marriages turn unhappily, not bad people, just wrong for each other. That research had not yet been done. Not finishing high school, Judith would have no college sociology, few good job prospects, unless her freelance artist talents had been taught by her father, so she could do commercial drawings for real estate and ads. On the bright side, she would have a stipend from her grandmother and alimony from that first marriage, so would live reasonably well. She would keep Frederick and Katherine company as she lived with them between her two marriages, Her second marriage ended, not in divorce, but in separation. ( Her much younger spouse, a golf pro, went with his widowed mother to an area of Idaho with lakeside golf resorts. )
His daughters had two middle names, German-style. These were selected by an ethnically Irish-Catholic mother. Of the two well-known daughters, the elder had been baptized Jacqueline Ann Bernadette , the younger Judith Eileen Katherine. According to German rules, once one's namesake had died, the younger person could begin using the elder's name, if it was one of their names. Judith was the one named for her mother, so, after her mother died, began calling herself Katherine and Kate, a way to remember her mother.
Did that happen with the four Fredericks? Did this one go by William when around his father? Or, was there no need to be William, if this one went by Fred, or F.W.?
The British-descended often refused to let even one middle name be put on a census, much less two. His younger sister, called Alma, did not have parents revealing her middle name in census work, but was allowed to recite her name as Alma Augusta at her marriage. Auguste, the German spelling, was a multi-generation name for females in their father's family, just as Frederick would be for males. One cousin, Augusta Schaerr, avoided the middle name solution in the States. She went by a nickname, Gussie, until their older relative named Augusta Immoor had died. (Gussie's youngest brother was Frederick Schaerr, showing the commonness of the name.)
OLD FAMILY HISTORY. Their 1910 Census, done in April, showed his father, "proprietor" of a saloon, arriving or naturalizing in 1892. Sometimes the censustaker was allowed to ask which "Germany", but that never happened for them. However, given the 1890s timing, and "the emperor" being cited in immigrant records of other Immoors coming into NYC in the same decades, their Germany was probably the short-lived "German Empire" that provoked WW I, the section of northern Germany under the Prussian king known as Kaiser Wilhelm II. The empire's north German colonies were close to Norway and Sweden, so majority Lutheran. There was a Calvinist intermix at the western edge nearer Calvinist Holland. At the other edges, the south nearer Catholic France and the east nearer Catholic Poland, the numerous religious minorities included Catholics, which his family had been, and the Jewish. The Prussian-run colonies extended along the northern German seacoast, where they bordered Denmark. The Prussians and Danes fought over land, to control, for example, parts of what became modern Poland.
All this diversity meant they were used to an ethnic mixed. This was seen in the first Frederick's apartment house in Brooklyn, with Dansk and Polska speakers, not just Deutsch (Danish and Polish, not just German. Note that Deutsch was the Germans' word for the varied dialects of their own language, never saying German, as their language had no J sound.)
Why leave the old places? "Back there", fourteen year olds could be snatched off the street and kept in military service for years. (Young men were required to do multiple wars to expand Prussian territory, which many often did not believe right.) Too many were equally unhappy with the huge landlords. Little future might be envisioned except forever renting from the very same ones who had kept their families long enserfed, giving them no back pay, no land, upon being freed despite centuries of working for free.
Culturally, equally miserable in so many other ways, they differed from southern US slaves in one generous way. Landlords could not separate enserfed families by auctioning off select individuals to other landlords. Serfs "went with the land". They were allowed to stay wherever they were born. Once freed, they lived some generations in the same places as tenants, then moved out together, as family-connected groups, often headed to the same town, not just the same county in the States.
With this second Frederick at age 6 in 1910 and his sister Alma at age 4, the two other families in their aunt's crowded house in Brooklyn included one set whose baby made the third generation present. They spoke Polish Yiddish, fitting their Jewish-sounding last names of Benjamin and Rosenbaum. The home-owning family was John Muller and his wife Dora, a former Immoor, perhaps Theodora/ Dorothea "back there", eventually Dorothy here. The Mullers had a playmate-aged daughter, age 5, and spoke German.
The four adult women present did not work outside the home. Sociology professors and urban historians would tell us those not leaving the home were slow to learn English, maybe never did. This was contrary to the myth that "they all spoke English". The men would learn at work. The children would learn once in school, could translate for their mothers on trips to the store or when the census-taker visited, causing some oddities in census answers.
The first Frederick was self-employed in 1910. At age 32, he called himself the proprietor of a saloon. The playmate's father, John H. Muller, age 33, called himself a bottler at a brewery. John had immigrated just a year earlier, in 1891, so perhaps the earlier arriving arranged for the later ones to come, sent loans for their tickets. The family speaking Polish Yiddish was headed by a Mr. Benjamin nearing retirement age. His daughter had married a Joseph Rosenbaum, who worked as a bookkeeper in "wholesale liquor", similar in age to the other two men, also in the liquor industry, so perhaps they had been good friends.
The Central Europeans used beer gardens and festivals for family gatherings, not making them men-only places . They ran breweries for beer once here, not distilleries of hard liquor. Unlike the American way, European women were allowed into beer-drinking places. There were thus fewer allowed to develop into drunks. Any drunken men spending the family treasure could be hauled out by wives and sisters whenever needed. In contrast, those from the British Isles, including too many Irish, were said to have had alcohol problems, related in part to drinking only "hard liquor", not beer, not wine. Also, the British customs repeated in America were different, only "female employees" allowed in to saloons, no matter how bad a husband's or brother's behavior inside. At least one heroine of Prohibition was depicted with an axe, so she could chop her way into saloons, not otherwise allowed to be in them. This Frederick's wife had an Irish last name, so was British Isles, her father born in England to an Irish father and British mother. His family moved back to Ireland, letting him meet Katherine's mother, Nellie/Ellen O'Leary. What was odd? They would have a marriage record in NYC in 1903, before their stated immigration date, her elder sister Josephine (jean?) would then born back in Ireland in 1905, later given as the family's official immigration year, then Katherine. the next year, in 1906, would be born in the Bronx. What was her maiden name? There were two answers. "Shea" was written into her legal records at birth and when her family lived in the Bronx and for her and Frederick's probable church wedding in Manhattan in 1925. Her father switched to the older, more truly Irish name of "O'Shea" by the time of the 1930 census, after her 1925 marriage to Frederick. Their family would call her O'Shea in the obituary of the third Frederick, not too many years after his own.
With different histories of alcohol use, the different cultures reacted differently to Prohibition. Prohibition would soon arrive, to make all three young family men in the Brooklyn house, Rosenbaum, Muller and Immorr, seek other work, with William Shea losing his job as a instructor in Billiards, an occupation that lasted as long as pool halls served beer. If better work could not be found, prohibition pushed legal occupations into illegal ones, saloons into speak-easies, opened the door for contact with alcohol runners and gangsters of a far worse nature than alcohol-running.
There would have been old family contacts from the Prohibition era that continued, affecting daughter Judith? As drinking by itself violates no commandments, many were moral people. But not all? Did this present problems for a family that tried to stay religious?
In addition, his daughter Judith described her father , this Frederick, who had been only 6 in that pre-Prohibition household 1910, as growing up into someone far too stern. Daughters who could never please a too stern father might be tempted to marry or date men who could also never be pleased, men too inclined to wander?
His daughter Judith would eventually make peace with her life, writing a book in 1977, after her father's death. She was not yet ready to tell the whole truth about her relationships, which came later. She had left out details, but when she revealed them, they were backed up, according to a journalist friend, by her having kept old receipts proving her whereabouts at different dates. She had paid her own way in life. She was independently "wealthy-enough", courtesy of her grandparents. She was no one's kept mistress. Judith had wanted to be a singer and actress, but would not, contented herself with amateur painting and a spouse's real estate projects. Famed sister Jacqueline succeeded as an actress and in her long-lived final marriage to someone in the medical profession, her first two marriages having been mistakes in the high pressure movie world. Judith, after one failed marriage, retreated to her parent's house in the North Los Angeles area (now called Northridge?), then retried marriage much later. She had a son between marriages whom she could have aborted, but did not, carried to term and put up for adoption.
We don' t know what this Frederick thought of all that, as he wrote no books and gave no interviews. The survivors writing Frederick's obituary said zero about this Frederick's past. However, his surviving family considered each other dear and treasured, as their obituary for him named survivors down to the level of great-grand-children. Those listed extended from California into Nevada, from movie stardom, to those perhaps better blessed, with the gift of more ordinary lives.
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From his obituary, submitted by his family to newpapers:
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"IMMOOR, Frederick, 69, passed away Nov. 21, 1974 in Encinitas, Calif.
Survived by son Fred K. of Gold Hill, Nev.; Allen G. of Manhattan Beach; daughters Mrs. Ray Collingwood of Incline Village, Nev., Mrs. Sheldon Attix, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Mrs. Judith Campbell, Solana Beach, Calif.; sister Mrs. Alma Sharp, Largo, Fla.; 9 grandchildren Charles, Elizabeth, Judith & Patricia Attix, Colleen Hosman, Gregory & Terry Immoor, Deborah [check, Corbin?] & Karen Rodriquez; 5 great grandchildren Arron [check, Corbin?], Darcy Immoor, Heidi & Christine Hosman & Fred Immoor. Rosary will be recited 7:00 p.m. Sun. at Praiswater Funeral Home Chapel, Van Nuys. Funeral 11:00 a.m. Mon. at San Fernando Mission Chapel. Interment San Fernando Mission.
NOTE: His obituary included the fourth Frederick, as Fred Immoor, that teen still living. It omitted only one grandson, identity still hidden at the time, due to all adoptions being "closed" back then. (David Bohler, a photographer, would seek out his natural mother in the 1980s, and would be happily received .)
SAMPLE OF OTHER SOURCES
1910 US Census in Brooklyn, on Pulaski, with the first two Fredericks, identified elsewhere as Frederick H. and Frederick W.: Image of handwritten record archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRK7-VFB
1940 US Census in Los Angeles, on Rooney Drive, with the second and third Fredericks present, seen elsewhere as Frederick W. and Frederick K.: Image seen at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9MT-N7QP
NOTE: His son, Frederick K. Immoor, was severely impaired hearing-wise, but could read lips and speak clearly. He would be memorialized in 2001 for his volunteer work with Nevada deaf students in middle school grades. Their teacher, Holly Greenough, had taught him sign language at Lake Tahoe's community college a few years earlier. They called him a "Professional Grandpa" and "Grandpa Fred". Their memories were later published, in Dec. 2001, by Jill Darby on Dec. 19 , archived at TahoeDailyTribune, worded to indicate he was still living when they wrote. Presumably, they knew he was very ill and his death might soon follow.
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Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, written in 2018, revised Nov-Dec 2019. Permission given to Findagrave for use in its entirety at this page. Descendants of people named here may use whole paragraphs in private materials for family.
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