In 1940, a young real estate developer named Fred Trump finally got himself a small office space after years of running his growing construction business from his mother's dining room table, keeping all his accounts in a tiny pocketbook that he carried everywhere, and around that same time he hired a secretary named Amy Luerssen who would show up to work every single day for the next 59 years, becoming perhaps the most loyal employee in the history of American business, a woman who watched Fred Trump transform from a scrappy young builder constructing single-family homes in Queens into the developer of 27,000 apartments across New York City, who typed his letters and managed his appointments and kept his books through World War II and the postwar housing boom and the investigations by Senate committees and New York State, who knew every detail of his business and every quirk of his personality, and what's remarkable about this relationship is that it speaks to something fundamental about Fred Trump's character that gets lost in all the controversy and complexity of his legacy, he was a man of extraordinary routine and loyalty who hated change, who lived in the same 23-room Jamaica Estates house from 1951 until his death in 1999, who kept the same secretary for nearly six decades when most executives would have gone through dozens of assistants, who famously drove around his construction sites in the evening picking up loose nails from the ground and handing them to carpenters the next morning because waste offended him, who valued consistency and dependability above flash and novelty, and Amy Luerssen embodied those values, showing up year after year decade after decade, becoming not just an employee but a witness to history, the woman who sat in that small office when it was just Fred Trump and his ambitions, who stayed through his rise to become one of New York's most successful developers, who was there when his son Donald took over the company in 1971, and when Fred Trump died in 1999 after a six-year battle with Alzheimer's, Amy Luerssen had been by his side through 59 years of American history, through war and peace and boom and bust, the ultimate testament to the power of showing up, of dedication, of two people who found in each other the perfect working partnership and never saw a reason to end it.

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