Royal decree ordered Friedrich Trump to leave Bavaria and never come back after he failed to do military service 
 
 A historian has discovered a royal decree issued to Donald Trump’s grandfather ordering him to leave Germany and never come back. 
 
 Friedrich Trump, a German, was issued with the document in February 1905, and ordered to leave the kingdom of Bavaria within eight weeks as punishment for having failed to do mandatory military service and failing to give authorities notice of his departure to the US when he first emigrated in 1885. 
 
 Kallstadt, Germany: on the trail of 'the Donald' in the Trump ancestral home Read more 
 
 Roland Paul, a historian from Rhineland-Palatinate who found the document in local archives, told the tabloid Bild: “Friedrich Trump emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1885. However, he failed to de-register from his homeland and had not carried out his military service, which is why the authorities rejected his attempt at repatriation.” 
 
 The decree orders the “American citizen and pensioner Friedrich Trump” to leave the area “at the very latest on 1 May ... or else expect to be deported”. Bild called the archive find an “unspectacular piece of paper”, that had nevertheless “changed world history”. 
 
 Trump was born in Kallstadt, now in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in 1869. He emigrated to the US aged 16 initially to escape poverty, attracted by the gold rush. 
 
 
 
 
 
 He quickly turned his attention to catering for the masses of other gold hunters in Alaska, later allegedly running a brothel for them, and there made his fortune. He habitually sent the gold nuggets with which his customers regularly paid for their food to his sisters who had already emigrated to New York and had started trading in property. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump in the 1987 with his father, Fred, son of Friedrich. Photograph: NY Daily News via Getty Images 
 
 Returning on a visit to Kallstadt in 1901, Trump fell in love with Elisabeth Christ, whom he married a year later, returning with her to the US. But when she became homesick and wanted to return to Germany, the authorities blocked his attempts to settle there. 
 
 Trump transition goes on after weekend meeting potential appointees – live Read more 
 
 In an effort to overturn the royal decree dated 27 February 1905, Trump wrote an obsequious letter appealing to Prince Regent Luitpold, addressing him as “the much-loved, noble, wise and righteous sovereign and sublime ruler”. 
 
 But the prince rejected the appeal and the Trumps left Germany for New York with their daughter on the Hapag steamship Pennsylvania on 1 July 1905. Elisabeth was three months pregnant with Donald Trump’s father, Fred. 
 
 Residents of Kallstadt, a small wine-growing town of about 1,200 people in south-west Germany, joke that the blame for Trump becoming US president-elect lies with the German authorities who threw his grandfather out. They have so far shown little enthusiasm for claiming the businessman turned politician as their own. ||||| Friedrich Trump faced a deportation order, fighting it for months in the early years of last century before losing a legal struggle, the mass-circulation newspaper "Bild" reported on Monday, citing a historical document found in Donald Trump's ancestral town of Kallstadt, southwest Germany. 
 
 The grandfather of the future US president left the city at the age of 16, first arriving in New York in 1885 and later moving further west during the Gold Rush era. There, he made his money running taverns and a brothel. 
 
 He returned to Kallstadt as a wealthy man in 1901 and met his future wife Elisabeth Christ. The two married and moved to New York in 1902, but returned to Kallstadt two years later, with Elisabeth complaining of extreme homesickness. 
 
 Kallstadt's current population is around 1,200 inhabitants 
 
 According to Monday's report, the authorities soon discovered that Friedrich Trump had never performed the mandatory military service before leaving Germany. Another problem, according to local historian Roland Paul, was that Trump never officially unregistered from his hometown. 
 
 The German-born businessman was banned from "reclaiming his citizenship in 1905," Paul said. 
 
 Letter to the prince 
 
 Trump was labeled a draft-dodger and officials ordered him to leave the Kingdom of Bavaria, which at the time included Kallstadt. The town is currently part of the Rhineland-Palatinate state. 
 
 "The American citizen and pensioner Friedrich Trump, currently residing in Kallstadt, is hereby informed that he is to depart the state of Bavaria, or face deportation," authorities said in a document dated in February 1905. 
 
 Historian Roland Paul also found a letter that Friedrich Trump sent to the Bavarian prince regent Luitpold a few months later, imploring the "well-loved, noble, wise and just" prince to heed his "most modest plea" and allow him to stay in Germany. The court denied the request. 
 
 The move forced the Trumps to leave Germany for good in July 1905, and return to New York. Elisabeth Trump was pregnant at the time. Three months after their return to the US, she had Fred Trump, who grew up to become a real-estate magnate and the father of the current President-elect Donald Trump. 
 
 Watch video 04:10 Now live 04:10 mins. Share Donald Trump's roots in Kallstadt Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1HnLc Donald Trump's roots in Kallstadt 
 
 dj/kl (AP, dpa) ||||| BERLIN—An impassioned 111-year-old letter written by Donald Trump’s grandfather appealing his expulsion from his German homeland has turned up in regional German archives. 
 
 In the letter signed by Friedrich Trump, then a newly minted U.S. citizen, he urged the “well-loved, noble, wise and just” Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria to grant his “most subservient request” to remain in the Kingdom of Bavaria with his wife. 
 
 The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, was unearthed in the state archives of Rhineland-Palatinate by a local historian. The mass-market Bild tabloid first printed excerpts from the letter on Monday. 
 
 Letter penned by President-elect Donald Trump's grandfather Friedrich Trump to Leopold, the Prince Regent of the Kingdom of Bavaria, pleading to be allowed to remain in Germany, after being threatened with deportation. Photo: Speyer State Archive 
 
 While it was well-known that Mr. Trump’s grandfather had sought to turn his back on the U.S. almost 20 years after he arrived, this is the first time his actual appeal to permanently return to Germany has emerged. 
 
 Had that appeal succeeded, Friedrich’s time in the U.S. might have remained a footnote in his biography. Instead, the banished patriarch made his way back to America, entered the real-estate business, and put in motion the chain of events that made possible his grandson’s election as the 45th U.S. president. 
 
 His appeal to remain in Germany might not have fallen on deaf ears had Friedrich not set off for the U.S. in 1885 at the age of 16 without leaving behind a security deposit with the government to ensure he would return for compulsory military service, according to the historian Roland Paul. When he later returned to Germany to live with his wife, he was discovered to be a scofflaw by local authorities and ordered out. 
 
 At the time of grandfather Trump’s birth, his hometown of Kallstadt belonged to the then-independent Kingdom of Bavaria, which now makes up a large swath of southern Germany. 
 
 More than a century after his grandfather’s ousting, Mr. Trump has emerged as a withering critic of his ancestral home, lambasting German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her pro-immigrant policies. His sideswipes have left officials in Kallstadt debating whether to congratulate the president-elect. 
 
 The owner of the former Trump family home in the southwestern town put the property on the market to avoid unwanted attention. 
 
 Friedrich Trump set off for America because he couldn’t get a paying job at home as a barber, he told officials from the Kingdom of Bavaria who were investigating his service-dodging in 1905. 
 
 He picked the profession “because I was frail by nature and my mother and I thought that I couldn’t withstand agricultural work,” he said. 
 
 When his time came to serve in the military, the elder Trump was working as an assistant in a New York barbershop and had given up any plans to return to German soil, he told the officials. 
 
 In fact Mr. Trump had returned several times to visit Germany, where he met and later married his wife Elisabeth Trump, nee Christ. He brought his wife back to New York, promising his father-in-law they would return if she didn’t like America. 
 
 This happened in 1904, when the couple went back with their months-old daughter and 80,000 marks, according to Mr. Paul’s research. 
 
 Despite his evident ability to support his family and positive character recommendations, the local authorities seized on his rule-breaking. Mr. Trump’s grandfather was ordered to leave Bavaria and forbidden from visiting the country again. 
 
 Write to Zeke Turner at Zeke.Turner@wsj.com ||||| As a boy, he lost himself in tales of the American Wild West and dreamt of becoming a scientist and curing diseases. In his freshman year of high school, he was the only straight-A student in his class, but at the end-of-year ceremony, the director announced that not a single freshman had earned the top academic prize. Henry was gutted. The school, he realized, would not give this award to a Jew. 
 
 Such anti-Semitism was rife all over Europe in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, and Henry remembers begging his father to move the family to America. “In desperation, I threw myself on the bed, face down, started crying hysterically, and said, ‘Hitler will come here, and he’ll kill us all!’” 
 
 The German army rolled into Poland on September 1, 1939. A few days later, England and France declared war on Germany. A few weeks after that, Poland was divvied up between Germany and Russia, and the border between the two sides was just a few kilometers from Hrubieszów. The Orenstein men fled to the Russian side while Golda and Hanka stayed home. “We felt the Germans would not kill women, but they might kill men,” Henry says. 
 
 A couple months after Lejb, Henry and his brothers left, 2,000 Jewish men from Hrubieszów and a neighboring town were rounded up and sent on a death march. Only a few hundred survived. 
 
 The Orenstein men spent the next two years in Soviet-occupied Poland, where Henry studied Russian, learned to play chess and graduated from high school at the top of his class. News occasionally trickled in from Golda and Hanka, who were still in their family home, although the Germans had seized the family businesses. 
 
 In June 1941, Germany turned on its eastern ally and invaded Russia, which meant the Orenstein men were no longer safe. They gave half their money to a Polish engineer who worked construction on both sides of the border. He promised to shepherd them back to Hrubieszów, but as they crouched in their hiding place and watched the sun rise, they knew he had abandoned them. 
 
 They bartered with strangers for food and shelter, giving away the rest of their money, Felix’s herringbone tweed coat and even the straight razor they had been saving in case they needed to slit their wrists. At last they got lucky: A woman agreed to hide them in a haystack behind her house, bring them food and water, and arrange for their journey across the river. “She is one of the most brave and courageous and honorable people I’ve ever met in my life, and she is definitely responsible for me staying alive,” says Orenstein, who made sure Yekaterina Lipinskaja was named at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem that honors gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. 
 
 Newsweek 
 
 “In Poland, the penalty for hiding Jews was immediate death for the entire family,” says Adler. “People had to be pure angels from heaven—or they had to be paid really well.” 
 
 The family was finally reunited back in Hrubieszów on October 1, 1942, but just a couple of weeks later, the Gestapo gave all the Jews there two days to gather their belongings and assemble in the town square. The Orensteins gathered two weeks’ worth of food and water and disappeared behind fake walls in the homes of neighbors. 
 
 On October 20, 3,000 Jews from Hrubieszów were sent to the Sobibor gas chambers. 
 
 While in hiding, Henry listened as search parties barged into homes and pounded on walls, dragging out any Jews they found. When he wasn’t sitting in silence, terrified, he read a copy of Gone With the Wind that was missing the last 20 pages. “I always remembered how regretful I was that I would never know know what happened to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler because I probably wouldn’t survive the war.” 
 
 After a week of this, the Orensteins heard a voice in the street shouting: “Amnesty! All Jews can come out of hiding. The action is finished.” They knew it was a ruse—they’d heard of Jews turning themselves in only to be shot dead and tossed into mass graves—but they had no more food, no more water and nowhere to go. “There was no sign or possibility of help,” Henry says. “So we gave up.” 
 
 On October 28, 1942, Henry’s family walked through the thick iron gate at the local Gestapo headquarters. Trucks pulled into the yard and Polish police officers started shoving Jews inside. The Orenstein children were separated from their parents; Henry saw his father helping his mother onto a truck. She looked beaten, desperate as she howled in Yiddish, “Niuniek, ndavor define di kinder! ” “Fred, save the children!” 
 
 Henry and his siblings were sent to a local labor camp. Lejb and Golda were driven to the Jewish cemetery in Hrubieszów, where they were told to undress and lie down in rows at the edge of an execution pit. They were then shot in the head and shoved into the hole. 
 
 The Double Hoax 
 
 
 
 AP 
 
 Skeletal and weak, Henry stood in front of three German civilians at his third concentration camp, this one near Krakow. They were interviewing the Jewish prisoners who’d registered as scientists, engineers and mathematicians, including Henry and his brothers; Hanka had been deemed too young for the special group and was shipped off to another camp. 
 
 Fred had already passed his interview. The civilians, who addressed each other as “Herr Professor,” merely asked him how many legs a fly had. 
 
 Fred couldn’t believe his luck. He knew the answer: six. 
 
 Next up were Felix and Sam, who were only asked about their “schooling” (they’d memorized whatever details Henry put down when he’d first registered the family). Then it was Henry’s turn. “Are you familiar with calculators?” one of the civilians said. 
 
 “Oh yes, I used them a lot at school,” he replied, summoning up every shred of confidence he had left in him. The men seemed satisfied with all of them. 
 
 A few days later, guards escorted Henry, his brothers and a handful of other prisoners to a barracks. Inside were the “Herr professors.” Henry, Sam and six other were taken to a table lined with old-fashioned cash registers. They were the “mathematicians.” One of the professors handed them thick manila envelopes with hundreds of sheets of paper, each one covered with multiplication and division problems. 
 
 256.1 x 788.2 = 
 
 52,354.05 ÷ 1.263 = 
 
 “We had to punch in a number, times or divide it—whatever they wanted—then turn the handle by hand. A result appeared in the window. Write it down,” Henry says. “That was the extent of our scientific endeavor.” 
 
 Outside, he could see freezing prisoners struggling to work in the snow, while Fred and Felix sat nearby, at a table with the chemists, translating textbooks on insects from Polish to German. A prisoner who couldn’t read or write German had been appointed the librarian of the group. The “engineers” and “inventors” were gathered around an automobile engine, turning it on and off. They’d been told they’d be inventing a gas that could immobilize cars, planes and tanks, but their materials had not yet arrived. 
 
 Orenstein's letter to President Ronald Reagan, published in The New York Times, April 22, 1985. 
 
 Henry marveled at the ludicrous scene—cadaverous prisoners, selected for their “expertise” and tasked with inventing secret weapons for the Nazis, were doing work that wouldn’t tax a third-grader. Henry had been suspicious about the project since those interviews—why hadn’t the professors asked more questions, or harder ones? And why was their “research” so loosely supervised? It gradually became clear that the German civilians knew Henry and his brothers weren’t scientists, weren’t mathematicians, and they didn’t care. “It was a cover-up on both sides!” he says. “German professors created this project to keep themselves from being drafted into the army. If they told the Gestapo that we were faking, we would have been killed, but they would have been drafted into the German army. To be sent to the Russian front was the worst thing that could happen. The winter and snow and all that; everyone was dying like flies. So they decided to fake the whole thing. Lucky for us.” 
 
 (Many years later, Henry asked two German historians to verify that this sham operation had been real. They uncovered a letter between the head of the SS in Poland and Heinrich Himmler, the second-most-powerful man in Nazi Germany, and another between Himmler and a high-ranking SS commander in Berlin, both of which discussed the importance of the scientific research being done by these prisoners. The historians also found a page from the Ravensbrück register listing all eight mathematicians in the scientific group, including Henry, their names written in careful cursive and “Jude” scrawled next to each one.) 
 
 The Orenstein brothers were protected by this sham for nearly a year and a half, but as the Allied forces approached, Henry and Sam were among the 33,000 prisoners sent on a death march north, toward the Baltic Sea. (By that point, Fred and Felix had been deported to another camp.) Thousands died during this march from exhaustion, illness or gunshots, Henry says. “If you couldn’t walk, they would shoot.” 
 
 After marching for 10 days, Henry awoke one morning at the edge of a forest and heard someone shout: “The guards are gone!” 
 
 ‘My First Million-Dollar Doll’ 
 
 
 
 COURTESY OF HENRY ORENSTEIN 
 
 Dressed in a sharp suit, Henry Orenstein glided through his showroom as if he were a king on roller skates. For two weeks each year, buyers descended upon the Toy Center at 200 Fifth Ave. in New York City to shop for the latest novelties from the top toy companies, huddling around elaborate displays as finely dressed demonstrators revealed the magic of how this little oven opened or that doll’s hair grew. “Henry was always in a hurry and very busy, but very nice to the people working for him,” says Susie, who met Orenstein when she got a job as a showroom demonstrator at Topper Toys, which he founded in the 1950s under its original name, Deluxe Reading. At its peak, Topper had 5,000 employees in its New Jersey factory. “Henry could step in and do the job of any one of them at any time. He was really something,” Susie says. “Everybody used to talk about it all the time—if anything ever changed, he should be the president of the United States, because he was such a hotshot.” 
 
 In 1958, Orenstein landed his first hit, Betty the Beautiful Bride, a 30-inch doll in an ornate white dress with 10 layers of ruffles. He came up with the idea when he saw a bride doll in a dazzling white dress displayed in a department store window. She cost $29.95 (the equivalent of nearly $250 today), so he told his designer to make him a taller, less expensive version that he could sell for $9.99. “That’s how I made my first million,” he says. The next year, he launched Betty’s bridesmaids and brought in $2 million. 
 
 By then, 10 years had passed since Henry, Fred and Sam had stood on the deck of their Liberty ship, watching the Statue of Liberty slowly come into view. (Hanka had died on a death march in East Prussia and Felix had been murdered just days before liberation.) When Henry walked off the dock in New York City, he immediately bought copies of the New York Daily News and the New York Daily Mirror. He’d memorized 2,000 English words while waiting two years in Germany for his immigration papers to be approved. “I read every single word on every page [of those papers] from beginning to end, and there was not a single anti-Semitic reference anywhere,” he says. “I breathed a sigh of relief.” 
 
 His uncle rented him a room in a rough building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His hallway was full of prostitutes, and like many immigrants, his resume began filling up with odd jobs as he hustled for work. He loaded heavy bales of cotton for 85 cents an hour; bought, ran and sold a grocery store; then convinced a manager at a canned food company to hire him for a position that required five years of experience, even though he had none. His first day on the job, he signed up more orders than the company’s entire salesforce combined. 
 
 Shaminder Dulai 
 
 Orenstein had always been a tinkerer and sculptor—and he’d never been content to work for someone else—so when he came up with an idea in the mid-1950s to fill empty grocery store shelves with beautifully packaged dolls, his uncle loaned him startup capital (he’s also the one who urged Susie to go out with Henry). Orenstein commissioned a series of dolls from a manufacturer and designed an attractive display box. “I took it for a test in Pennsylvania, because I didn’t want anybody to see it [in New York].” A few days later, the store had received two dozen orders. “I said to myself, ‘There it is!’” These dolls, which looked like the expensive fashion dolls sold in department stores but cost much less, came to be known as “Grocery Store Dolls.” 
 
 Creative sparks came to him anywhere, anytime. A TWA commercial inspired him to create the best-selling toy of 1964, the toy gun Johnny 7 One Man Army (tagline: “It’s seven guns in one!”). A dull social visit to a friend’s house led to one of his biggest successes: a doll with blinking eyes. He’d thought of that one as he sat on the sofa, bored; he noticed a magnet on the glass table and, near it, a small metal object. “I took that magnet under the glass and as I moved it, the metal object followed. I thought, That would be a great idea for a toy!” 
 
 The money and the patents started rolling in; today, he holds close to 100. 
 
 For more than two decades, Orenstein flooded American homes with some of the most memorable toys of the mid-20th century. His Johnny Lightning racing cars rivaled Hot Wheels. His Dawn dolls competed with Barbie. He created Suzy Homemaker appliances, Zoomer Boomer trucks and baby dolls with faces Orenstein designed. He sold “Walking Letters,” which taught children how to spell, to Sesame Street, and hired Louis Armstrong to sing the ad jingle for his Suzy Cute doll. (“Armstrong was getting so drunk that at the end he couldn’t walk,” Orenstein says. “I remember, when we finished, I had him on one side, my assistant on the other side, and we actually dragged him along the floor, down the steps and out to the car.”) 
 
 Courtesy of Henry Orenstein 
 
 Orenstein’s outsider status and his seemingly effortless success rankled the more established players in the toy world. “Mattel was determined to destroy Topper,” Susie says. “Former employees of Mattel would tell us how they’d have days of meetings on how to destroy Henry Orenstein.” 
 
 A Huge Transformation 
 
 Henry turned the small toy car over in his hands, gauging the weight of it. He’d spotted the thing in a showroom at the New York Toy Fair, on a shelf off to the side, so far away from the main display he assumed it had been discarded. He gently flipped the front doors open and nudged the backseat, and poof: The car transformed into a plane. He thought, This is the best idea I’ve seen in many years! 
 
 “He went into a trance,” recalls Susie, who was with him that day. “I didn’t know what he was talking about!” 
 
 It was the early 1980s; Topper had filed for bankruptcy in 1972 after the bank called back their loan (Susie calls it “the blemish on his career”), but Henry had remained in the business, pitching ideas to large toy companies. He always had an eye for the overlooked, so when he saw that car turn into a plane, he got the feeling he’d had many times before. “Ideas don’t come in little pieces. It’s in; it’s out. It’s there, or it’s not. It’s like a sparkle,” he says. “I was just an inventor. You needed a big company to do what I thought should be done: making real transformations from complex things to other complex things.” 
 
 That tiny car was manufactured by a Japanese toy company named Takara. “I knew the president,” Orenstein says. “I went to him and said, ‘I think this could be a great thing, building a bridge between Japanese ingenuity and American marketing.’” He then went to Hasbro, the toy giant behind G.I. Joe and My Little Pony, and became a matchmaker, pitching his vision for a line of transforming toys that went far beyond cars turning into planes. “Very definitely, Henry was the bridge in this one transaction with Takara,” says Alan Hassenfeld, former chairman and CEO of Hasbro. “Henry basically had a sense that Transformers was going to be something that would be transformational for the toy industry.… To be able to take a car and, with a little bit of dexterity, change it into another toy, that was something magical.” 
 
 “It was Henry who really saw the magic, the potential, that was inside all these different brands that Takara was presenting,” says Tom Warner, Senior Vice President of the Transformers franchise. “There’s a lot of toys out there, but it takes a very special individual to look at something, identify it, and say it will be a big hit in the U.S. ” 
 
 “Everyone in the toy business is looking for the next big thing,” says toy historian Tim Walsh, but coming up with a truly successful toy “takes an outsider.… The things that are huge hits, people never see coming.” Silly Putty was originally a synthetic rubber created by accident during World War II. The Slinky was a torsion spring created by a mechanical engineer to immobilize sensitive equipment at sea. Play-Doh was supposed to be a commercial wallpaper cleaner. And Transformers were just a small car cast aside at a toy fair. 
 
 Henry didn’t style Bumblebee or create Optimus Prime’s backstory—teams of writers, designers and artists at Hasbro developed the ubiquitous Transformers we know today—but he was there first, the one who saw the promise. “Henry was absolutely the catalyst that made this happen,” Hassenfeld says. 
 
 Hasbro, working with Takara, created the Transformers in 1984, and since then those multifaceted robots have become one of the most successful action figure brands in history, touching all outposts of popular culture, from comic books and a popular theme song to numerous TV series, imitators (GoBots, anyone?) and a blockbuster movie franchise. In 2007, the first Transformers movie made over $700 million worldwide. Three more films followed. Hasbro says the Transformers franchise has brought in more than $10 billion since 2004. 
 
 Show Me His Cards 
 
 
 
 Shaminder Dulai 
 
 Mori Eskandani first met the toy man in 1987, during a game of Seven Card Stud at the Bicycle Hotel & Casino, a 100,000-square-foot ocean of poker tables in Los Angeles. “We just had fun,” says Eskandani, a veteran poker player whose company, Poker Productions, produces the World Series of Poker. “Henry was entertaining, not just because of the skill level of his game but also because of how fun the atmosphere was. Nobody was mad. Nobody was cussing and fussing.” 
 
 Dressed in his signature blue suede Western shirt and string tie, Orenstein played until he ran out of money. “He asked me if I would cash him a check, and I did. If you’re a professional poker player, you always know by the way people conduct themselves if they’re good for it. It was very, very obvious he was a wealthy man. He wasn’t worried about putting his money in the pot; he was just having fun.” A week later, Orenstein mailed Eskandani a check, along with a box the size of a refrigerator for his two kids, filled with every Transformer toy on the market. 
 
 Henry had been an avid chess player since he’d learned the game in Russian-occupied Poland as a teen; he only took up poker in his 60s. He was a very wealthy man by then, so he could afford to pay for his “lessons” in some of the best poker rooms in the country, playing high-stakes games in California; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Las Vegas. This was in the early 1990s, when poker was still a slightly shady game shrouded in cigar smoke; once a year, ESPN aired a one-hour special on the World Series of Poker, but other than that, it was where it had always been, in the shadows, or in the basement rec room. The poker world had no idea how lucky it was that day when Henry Orenstein, a man who found inspiration in the most mundane things—a magnet on a glass table, a tiny toy car—sat down to watch the World Series and quickly became bored out of his mind. Where’s the drama in watching people play poker if you can’t see their cards? 
 
 He spent six months creating the solution: a poker table equipped with hole-card cameras. (Hole cards, also known as down cards, are kept face down; only the player can see them.) By placing cameras under glass panels, Henry could bring TV viewers in on the secrets and strategies and ballsy bluffs of the game. 
 
 He patented his table in 1995, and the world of poker stood up and said, as one: pass. 
 
 The best players balked at revealing their secrets on TV. “It would take someone like Henry to tell them they’re wrong,” Eskandani says. “He said, ‘Don’t worry—you put a TV camera in front of them, and they’ll do anything you want.’” 
 
 But TV execs weren’t interested, so Orenstein tabled his table, and devoted his time to becoming one of the top poker players in the U.S. He won the 1996 World Series of Poker Seven Card Stud tournament. In 2005, he beat Chip Reese in the first round of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship—a feat that’s like beating Michael Jordan in a game of horse. 
 
 In 2002, Orenstein was ready for another transformation, another big gamble. He cold-called Jon Miller, head of NBC Sports. 
 
 “On a Tuesday morning, I came back to my office after my staff meeting and my assistant says, ‘You have a 10:30 a.m. call with a man named Henry Orenstein.’ I said to her, ‘Who is Henry Orenstein?’ She says, ‘Just do me a favor, please take the phone call.’” 
 
 Miller’s phone rang at 10:30 a.m. sharp. 
 
 “Do you have the package I sent you?” Orenstein asked. 
 
 Miller scanned his desk. No package. “Is there a package?” he asked his assistant. She walked into his office holding a FedEx in hand. “I was supposed to give this to you when you got on the phone,” she said, apologizing. 
 
 Inside, Miller found two bank statements. “I won’t tell you the numbers, but both of them had significantly large balances,” he says. “Eight- or nine-figure balances. It was a lot of money.” 
 
 Shaminder Dulai 
 
 Orenstein explained that he needed Miller to understand that he was “a serious man…with a serious idea.” Henry then told him about his table with hole-card cameras, and his vision for a high-stakes tournament with a huge buy-in and the best poker players in the country, shown live on TV. Miller was captivated. NBC had walked away from NFL and NBA programming, and he was looking for new, profitable ways to fill air time. He also had two teenage sons who spent weekends playing poker. “I’ve learned a lot from my kids, and I think if you don’t, you’re kind of a fool,” he says. “I knew this was something we had to pay attention to.” 
 
 Together, they launched Poker Superstars and High Stakes Poker. Soon after, the sport exploded on TV and online. “None of that happens…without the hole-card camera,” Miller says. “This one man is the reason poker is as big as it is—that ESPN pays millions of dollars for the World Series of Poker, that Pokerstars and Full Tilt and Betfair and all these other [online poker] companies are out there. The reason poker is a multibillion-dollar business is because of this one man!” 
 
 “We called that table the Holy Grail,” Eskandani says. “Henry had to improve something all the time. That’s how his mind works. I used to say, ‘They’d give him the Statue of Liberty and he’d make it a little taller or shave the handle.’” 
 
 Johnny Lightning 
 
 Orenstein is getting antsy. He has delayed his weekly poker game by a few hours to make time for this interview, but now he wants to know where his “sharks” are, because he is ready to play some poker. Behind him hangs a framed photograph of 1971 Indianapolis 500 winner Al Unser taking a victory lap in the “Johnny Lightning” car (Orenstein sat inside; he sponsored it). Next to it, a photo of Orenstein directing Louis Armstrong in that 1964 Suzy Cute commercial. 
 
 Shaminder Dulai 
 
 These days, Susie says, their lives are all about poker. She has accompanied Henry to tournaments in Las Vegas, California and Atlantic City, and arranged three-month-long stays at the Commerce Casino near Los Angeles, where he’ll play 12 hours a day, with only a break for lunch. “He wanted to move to California to be near this casino. I mean, this is the armpit of the world, Commerce!” she says. “In 2014, he was still sharp and was in a poker tournament in Las Vegas and he came in ninth out of 130 people. He was definitely the oldest guy. Everybody was rooting for him.” 
 
 Finally, there’s a knock on the door and five of Henry’s poker buddies walk in. Most are about half his age, and they gather around the table shaking hands and catching up. “Do you know how many people in the poker world this man helps?” says Stuart Kempner, who everybody calls Stuey. He’s dressed in all black and his skin glows with a deep orange hue. “This guy got cancer and Henry was paying his rent and giving him money. He helps them all. Paid bills. Sent kids to college.” For nearly half a century, Orenstein has also supported Holocaust survivors and low-income families, helping them buy medical devices, furniture, clothes, food, even tombstones. “He took cases where there was nowhere else to turn,” says Jackie Ebron, who oversees his charitable giving at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. “And the people never knew who he was. He didn’t want you to know who it was.” 
 
 For a few seconds, all we hear is the soft, rhythmic chattering of cards being shuffled. Then Stuey deals a hand. The players assess their cards, and the room goes quiet except for their bids and the gentle thud of poker chips landing on the padded green felt table. 
 
 Orenstein doesn’t see too well anymore, so the guys call out the up cards on the table. “Ace, queen of spades, Henry,” someone says. Orenstein picks up his down cards and slowly, with almost no movement, checks his hand. 
 
 Susie puts on her coat and picks up her purse, explaining that she usually steps out during her husband’s poker games. “When I met Henry, he had all these regrets,” she says, standing near the door. “He wanted to do something important, like research—something that would mean something, or cure something. He thought making toys was not that important. Little did he know.…” 
 
 Orenstein peers across the table. “I’ve got three [of] diamonds?” he says, referring to his upcard. 
 
 “Yeah,” someone says. 
 
 “Don’t raise me because I won’t be able to call if you raise me,” another player says. 
 
 “I raise you!” Henry says, barely cracking a smile. 
 
 Everyone laughs, and a couple of calls later, Henry takes the hand, tossing his cards into the pile before anyone can tell if he was bluffing. Once again, he bet big, and won big. Call it luck, and he’d probably agree with you. 
 
 Read more from Abigail Jones on Newsweek.com: 
 
 - The women of the CIA and the hidden history of American spycraft 
 
 - Phil Toledano's professional flirtation with the cruel fates of life 
 
 - Rachel Platten and the story behind 'Fight Song'
– It's being called a document that "changed world history," at least as of Nov. 8. Germany's Bild reports historian Roland Paul has uncovered the 1905 decree that banished Donald Trump's grandfather from Germany. The Guardian has the timeline: In 1885, a then 16-year-old Friedrich Trump left Germany for the US and ended up finding a fortune among the Alaska gold rush (as Bloomberg explains, it wasn't gold, but a restaurant/brothel that brought him riches). He returned to his hometown of Kallstadt in 1901, where he a year later married Elisabeth Christ. The couple's subsequent time in New York City was short-lived: Elisabeth pined for Germany, but Trump found himself unable to return permanently, done in by his having not performed mandatory military service or alerted officials to his 1885 emigration. The February 1905 decree gave Trump eight weeks to leave the Kingdom of Bavaria or else face deportation. On the 27th of that month, Trump appealed to Prince Regent Luitpold, sending the "much-loved, noble, wise and righteous sovereign and sublime ruler" a "most modest plea," reports Deutsche Welle, to no avail. In the letter, Trump explained he originally left for America after being unable to find work as a barber in his homeland. The Wall Street Journal, which obtained a copy of the letter, reports that Trump should have in 1885 left a security deposit behind; such deposits were meant to ensure people would return for their mandatory military service, and he would have had it returned upon doing his military duty. On July 1, 1905, a three-months-pregnant Elisabeth, Trump, and their daughter sailed for New York. That unborn child would be Fred, Donald Trump's father.