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.

Holding the family together on a "bad" day

For me a "good day" or a "bad" day is defined most often by my physical health and how few crisis arose. On “good days” I get up early, get in a 15-20 minute quiet time before everyone is up, I am able to cook, do a little cleaning, keep the kids’ homeschooling going, check email, do a little internet browsing, take a walk outside, read stories to the children, get in a little sewing, and relax in the evening watching a tv episode with my hubby. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get a few hours in working on a language project, like the grammar book I have been editing.

But today was not one of those days. Yesterday I forgot to take my thyroid hormone supplement, and didn’t remember till this morning. I have taken a supplement since four years ago when I had a partial thyroidectomy due to three pre-cancerous tumors my doctor found. Whenever I don’t take my supplement, I usually pay for it the next day. Such was the case today. I slept in and didn’t have the energy to get up in time to have quiet time. I got through breakfast and even read the kids a few stories, but then school started. Now for me on a “bad” day, when my thyroid hormone levels are not where they should be, my brain shuts down. If that happens at the same time as any crisis, I’m in trouble. Multi-tasking demands are the first thing to trigger it. It is almost like a switch goes off. Once I am in the middle of one thing, and another thing presents itself, I get confused, forgetful, and suddenly cannot process anything, even the first thing I was doing. That is what happened today. I was doing school with my 6-year-old, when I remembered I needed to make a phone call. While making the phone call, listening to it ring on the other end, my 11-year-old comes to me with a question about how to attach pictures to an email to his friends for an assignment he is writing for school. I look at the clock and realize that it was getting close to lunch time and I hadn’t even begun to think about what to fix for lunch. Suddenly realizing that four things were now presenting themselves which only I could do, I felt tired, weak, confused, and needed to lay down. I did so, realizing that if I didn’t get my “act together”, no one would eat.

This is the interesting dilemma I am sure many a mother faces on a “hectic” day. For me, it is complicated by my hypothyroidism. Some days it just seems that if I can’t keep it all together, keep everything organized, keep everything running smoothely, everything will cease to function, things will come screeching to a halt, everyone will starve to death. I am thankful for my older kids who can help out. So I asked my kids to stop school and, one step at a time, I walked them through turning our leftover cream-of-wheat from breakfast into corn fritters, and making the left-over bread into toast so they could eat something for lunch. I quietly lay down in bed, drank some “triple greens” (which I have found to be brain food), and let my brain recover a little and get past the tangled “knot” in my brain so I could think clearly again.