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Spring 2008
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An heiress and last surviving member of a prominent Louisiana merchant family, Pauline Friedman led a charmed life of parties and world travel.
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QUEEN OF THE DEL
To everyone's surprise, Pauline Friedman
left a major legacy to the small Louisiana
town
where her fortune began.
by Anne Butler |
In early 2004, I was asked to write the history of a distinguished German Jewish family whose story spanned three generations and crossed the continent, beginning in antebellum Louisiana and ending along the Pacific Ocean in southern California where I met the last survivor, Pauline Friedman, 94, living in an upscale nursing home in LaJolla.
As a young woman Pauline had been extremely attractive, a stylish adventurer and enthusiastic athlete, excelling at golf, swimming, tennis and riding. She had led a cultured life, socializing, traveling the world. For the previous four decades, she had held court as the last permanent resident of the fabled Hotel del Coronado, just down the beach from the nursing home.
Her story, I was sure, would be a breeze to write, as her family had an illustrious history. The fact that my deadline was August 2004, in time for her birthday, was of some concern, but once I began, the first two generations were inspiring and interesting to record. |
I found that the story of Pauline’s ancestors and their move to this country was the story of not one, but many.
In the mid-1800s the United States experienced an influx of Jewish immigrants escaping anti-Semitism in Bavaria and the German states along the Rhine. As the cotton empire in this country moved westward into the fertile lands bordering the Mississippi River, these immigrants found that their skills as merchants and traders were vital to the South’s agrarian economy. Often, they began as peddlers and moved up to clerking in stores until they could start their own businesses.
Young Julius Freyhan, Pauline’s grandfather, was typical.
He came to Louisiana in his early 20s in the 1850s, going off to the Civil War with his friends and neighbors (though as a non-combatant musician), returning to establish a string of successful businesses in Bayou Sara and St. Francisville – dry goods stores, saloons, cotton gins and presses, gristmills, sawmill, even an opera house where the earliest Jewish congregation met before establishing a synagogue in the thriving river town. J. Freyhan & Co. was the principal source of supply for dozens of Louisiana parishes and Mississippi counties, most years selling more than a million dollars worth of goods and handling thousands of bales of cotton. Billheads for the company advertised everything from boots to buggies and from cultivators to coffins, clothing and hats, furniture and stoves.
After many large factors in New Orleans failed during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, these country storekeepers became the pivotal figures in cotton marketing and financing. They provided credit to struggling planters and sharecroppers, and took cotton as payment when cash was scarce. |
Julius Freyhan became one
of
Louisiana's richest men.
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They prospered mightily in their turn, Julius Freyhan among them, and financial success allowed them to contribute generously to local public improvements and far-reaching philanthropies while summering in Newport and taking transatlantic trips. Freyhan was a founding member of the Bayou Sara Lodge #162 of B’nai B’rith, contributed to the building of levees and roads, and donated the organ for St. Francisville’s Temple Sinai. When he died in New Orleans in 1904 after suffering a stroke of apoplexy during a summer sojourn in New York, newspaper obituaries described him as one of Louisiana’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens.
His will provided the funding to construct the first central public school in St. Francisville, a fine brick structure overlooking the Mississippi River that was given his name and opened in 1905, burned to the ground in 1907 and was immediately rebuilt with funding assistance from his widow. |
Julius and Sarah Wolf Freyhan had four daughters, and after the family moved to New Orleans they all married exceedingly well.
The eldest, Pauline, wed Sigmund Odenheimer, who succeeded Julius as president of Lane Cotton Mills in New Orleans. Odenheimer was an astute businessman, accomplished engineer and inventor who served on the state board of health and as president of the New Orleans International Trade Exhibition in the 1920s. |
| A major benefactor of Audubon Park and Zoological Gardens who personally funded the aquarium and the sea lion pool flanking Odenheimer Court with its beautiful fountain, he was also a widely respected civic leader, a trustee of the public library, school board member, and director of Touro Infirmary and both Canal and Hibernia banks. While treasuring his German heritage, Sigmund Odenheimer was a dedicated American patriot. |
The Odenheimer sea lion pool in Audubon Park. |
During World War II he provided his two yachts to the Coast Guard for military service and worked tirelessly to rescue relatives from the horrors of persecution in Europe.
In 1903, another of Julius Freyhan’s daughters, Juliet, married William S. Friedman, a charismatic young rabbi she met on an ocean voyage. Raised in the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, Friedman was just out of college and rabbinical school when called to the Temple Emanuel in Denver. He would spend half a century guiding the development of what became the largest Reform congregation between Chicago and San Francisco and becoming one of the most important religious leaders of his time. |
Rabbi William Friedman |
In 1887, Rabbi Friedman joined with two Protestant ministers and a Roman priest to find more effective ways to address Denver’s social problems. They formed the Charity Organizations Society, the first “United Way” organization, which planned and coordinated local services and conducted a single fund-raising campaign for 22 agencies. Friedman was also active in the American Red Cross and the Big Brother organization.
Perhaps his most significant contribution was co-founding the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives in 1899. Dry mountain air and sunshine were considered the only cures for tuberculosis, and consumptives had flocked to the Denver area with hollow cheeks and hacking coughs. |
The hospital was nondenominational, for as the rabbi insisted, pain knew no creed; furthermore, unlike most sanitariums of the day, it welcomed the neediest of sufferers on the principal that “None may enter who can pay, and none can pay who enter.”
Rabbi Friedman made lecture tours and fundraising appearances around the world in support of the hospital. Now called the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, it is one of the world’s leading treatment centers for respiratory, immune, and allergic disorders.
The Friedmans had two children, a son J. Freyhan born in 1904 who served in World War II and spent an illustrious career on Wall Street, and a daughter Pauline, born in 1910. It would be Pauline that I would meet when I was asked to write her family’s history, and I knew what an adventurous social life she had led. Adding her contributions to the two earlier generations would round out the family history nicely, I was sure; a piece of cake.
There would be problems in the narrative, however.
Pauline had been pampered and indulged all of her life. She never married, never had children, never owned a house and never had any responsibility at all – spending nearly half of her life as the longest-tenured residential guest of the del Coronado, the fabulous Victorian seaside resort best known for its “star” role in the 1958 movie Some Like It Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis.
The Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, Pauline Friedman's home for 40 years,
has been a favorite of kings, movie stars, presidents, and tycoons.
At the Del, Pauline’s parties were given in the cocktail lounge, her cleaning was done in the hotel laundry, her meals were prepared in the dining rooms and even the chopped steak for her dog was sent up by room service. *Now frail and nearly blind, she cared little for surviving relatives, had outlived most of her friends, and had every anticipation of dying intestate with her family fortune enriching only the state.
I once asked her how she had spent World War II, mindful of the fact her uncle had helped rescued dozens of Jews from Nazi concentration camps and that she lived near a number of major military bases around San Diego. Her nonchalant response: “I played golf.” And that was the extent of her social conscience.
“Heaven help me,” I thought. “However could I possibly write a book on the noble benefactions of her family and include her?”
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Pauline Friedman, late in life. |
Considering the long and distinguished line of philanthropists that came before, I had hope that somehow Pauline’s life would have greater meaning.
The book Three Generous Generations was published in time for Pauline to enjoy hearing it read aloud. The sections were rather precariously balanced, with the grandfather arriving penniless and amassing great wealth, the next generation using it for great good, and Pauline’s chapters heavy with the fascinating history of the Del with the comings and goings of guests from Sarah Bernhardt to Babe Ruth.
Meanwhile, back in St. Francisville, residents had formed the nonprofit Freyhan Foundation to restore the 1907 school building and Temple Sinai for use as a much-needed community cultural center and museum. The foundation had great intentions, but funding was hard to come by. |
| Pauline Friedman died in November, 2004 and – to everyone’s great surprise – left $300,000 to the Freyhan Foundation for the school built through her grandfather’s generosity, rebuilt through her grandmother’s kindness, in the town where her family had prospered more than a century ago. |
At the end, Pauline had given in to pleadings by her devoted caregiver that her money should benefit institutions and causes important to the Freyhan family. Bequests were made to medical research programs, orchestras and theatres, and libraries.
Some of her St. Francisville legacy was quickly spent on a new roof for the school building. Says Freyhan Foundation director Nancy Vinci: “We were in dire need of funds, because the leaking roof was causing interior damage to the building, so we are extremely grateful.” |
The 1907 Julius Freyhan school in St. Francisville will be restored as a cultural and community center. |
Pauline also left the foundation all of her family photographs, providing the inspiration to augment the planned cultural center in the restored school with museum exhibits of early education and the significant contributions of the area’s early Jewish citizens.
The chapters of the story of this remarkable family were finally balanced, after all. |
* * *
Anne Butler is a member of the Freyhan Foundation board, a longtime resident of St. Francisville and author of 14 books, mostly on Louisiana history and culture. Proceeds from the sale of Three Generous Generations benefit the Freyhan School restoration.
The Freyhan Foundation welcomes tax-deductible donations and other support at P.O. Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775 For more information, or to arrange and informative program for your organization, visit http://www.freyhanfoundation.org
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