A Tribute to Joseph Federer

Who we are is determined by many things: who are parents are, where we grow up, our experiences, and how we respond to God’s shaping the events and movements of our lives and history. But in spite of our immediate environment, so much of our personality often comes from our ancestors, many of whom we have never met. God puts something in us that we can’t put there ourselves, a unique blending of personality traits from our genes that make us uniquely us. It’s uncanny how you can think you are your own person, but there are character traits about you that keep presenting themselves which you can’t explain.

If someone were to ask “who in your family do you most take after”, I would have to say my grandfather, Joseph Federer, who died in 1980 and whom I really did not know very well at all. Yet ironically many of his same interests, talents and giftedness seem to have resurfaced in me. I would like to dedicate this entry to this man who fascinates me because I find that I am in so many ways like him, yet in so many ways different.

My grandfather was born as Johann Joseph Federer in the town of Berneck, Switzerland, August 3, 1891, he grew up in a huge old timber framed house in Berneck which I had the privilege to visit twice in my life. Berneck is a small village situated in the beautiful, gently rolling hills of the northeastern corner of Switzerland near Germany’s Bodensee and Austria. It is the same village where many notorious Federers have come from, including mayors, poets and Roger Federer, the famous tennis player.

As a teenager my grandfather decided he wanted to be a pastry chef after seeing beautifully decorated cakes on display in one of the little pastry shops in his town. He served an apprenticeship in Paris, where he specialized in cake decorating and sugar sculpture, and became rather fluent in French. Shortly after that he worked for a while in London. But he didn’t learn to speak English until he immigrated at the age of 29 to the United States.

After he died in 1980 at the age of 89, 70 letters were discovered by his family in Switzerland, which were letters he wrote home to his parents, all written in German. These letters reveal many fascinating facts about him, his thoughts, and who he really was. These letters also reveal his motivation to immigrate to America – it was a land of opportunity, and there was high unemployment in Europe.

One of his brothers and a cousin, who were also chefs, had come to America before him, and helped him find as job as a pastry chef in Atlantic City at $100 a month. After two months there, he followed a lead to a better job in Los Angeles, California, which he described as the “land of milk and honey”.

In Los Angeles he worked for two years as a pastry chef for the Ambassador Hotel, where even in tough economic times he was able to hold a job because of his specialized and rare skills in sugar sculpture.

After two years at the Ambassador, he went to work in a pastry shop in Hollywood where his specialized skills were required. At a later time he got a job working as a pastry chef for United Airlines, creating many masterpieces for various celebrities who traveled with the airline. Among our favorite photos is the head chef presenting one of his cakes to Bob Hope.

While in Los Angeles, he met my grandmother, Elizabeth Martin, through the Swiss Society. They had four daughters, their youngest being my mother, Catherine.

Besides having inherited his artistic inclinations, I also seem to have inherited his love of nature and farming. Even though he worked in the huge city of Los Angeles, he mentioned that he once wished he had a job as a farmhand. He kept many close friendships with other Swiss farmers in Southern California, and one of his favorite activities was milking the cows on his friends’ farms, something he knew well from growing up in Switzerland. My mother tells me how embarrassed she was that he tried to raise chickens and grow potatoes right in the middle of Los Angeles. I remember him years later, when he had retired to Arizona, growing citrus trees in his yard, and teaching me how to catch and pin butterflies. Ironically here I am today living in Africa, with a citrus orchard and a huge butterfly and moth collection that I have helped my children to put together.

My mother taught me many cake decorating techniques that she learned mostly on her own, inspired by her father, and I in turn learned a few more. From a young age I have always loved decorating cakes, and I continue to do it for my children and many friends. Even my daughter Katie, who has natural talent, has taken an interest in cake decorating, and was already making pretty decent roses at the age of 8.

Among the family memories we still have of my grandfather are some of his now antique cake decorating tools and supplies, as well as his collection of recipes, many of which are in his own handwriting, in four different languages: German, French, English and Italian. I hope to learn more of his recipes and in some small way carry on the legacy he started, creating the incredible art that he so loved and which brought pleasure to so many people, using the talent and gifts that God put in me, and passing that on to my children.