Page 16 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 1 Fall 2012

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and a blessing, acknowledges Sam
von Trapp ’90, as he walks the property that captured
his heart as a child and summoned him home five years
ago to carry on the family tradition.
Von Trapp’s love for the 2,400 acres that surround
the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt., is not unlike the
affection his family’s story has inspired in millions since
his grandmother wrote the 1949 memoir The Story of the
Trapp Family Singers, a tale adapted into one of the most
beloved musicals of all time. But being the descendant of
a clan with a popular following is not always a leisurely
stroll among the green hills. Sam is a third-generation
von Trapp and, much to the surprise of many lodge visi-
tors, he doesn’t sing.
The youngest grandchild of the Baron and Maria von
Trapp, Sam estimates that a billion people have watched
the fact-based 1959 Broadway portrayal and the 1965
Hollywood version of his family’s saga, director Robert
Wise’s Oscar-winning The Sound of Music.
“If I were given the chance to go back, I probably
wouldn’t change anything,” he says. “At the same time,
when someone asks what it’s like to grow up as a von
Trapp, I don’t know anything different. I probably would
have been less self-conscious because when people are
constantly asking questions about you and your family,
you can become accustomed to talking about yourself.”
Momentarily distracted, von Trapp uses his iPhone to
snap a photo of a budding apple tree that thrives mere
feet away from the family plot in which his grandparents
are interred; later he’ll e-mail it to two of the movie-
version children. But even as he hovers with his smart
phone between the real and fictional worlds of the von
Trapps, he talks of the confusion he felt as a child when
strangers and – worse – friends would ask him about
the von Trapp legend.
“What we are learning is to bring out the better side of
it,” he says, noting the constant barrage of questions and
expectations that come with being a member of a famous
family. “Some of my relatives only saw the cursed side
– the last thing they ever wanted to talk about was The
Sound of Music. I did go through a period like that, and
some of my friends from St. Paul’s would probably re-
member that I didn’t quite understand why all these
people were still so excited about this movie.”
Von Trapp, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday,
lived a relatively idyllic life on his family’s green-acred
property in the mountains of Stowe. With the television
relegated to the closet (except for an appearance every
four years to show the Olympics), he spent summers out-
side, biking, swimming, and exploring the property. He
and his sister, Kristina, were exposed to agriculture early
in life, taking on responsibility for the family chickens,
among other duties. Von Trapp began working at the
lodge at eight and, by 14, was clocking a 40-hour week.
“It was an amazing place to grow up, to step out of the
house and have access to 2,400 acres of land,” he says,
putting away the iPhone with an explanation that he will
forward the image of the apple tree to Nicholas Hammond
and Duane Chase, the film actors and still close family
friends who played Friedrich and Kurt in the Rodgers and
Hammerstein version of his family’s saga. The tree was
planted by three generations of von Trapps in 2008 in
memory of Sam’s uncle, Werner (a.k.a. Kurt in the movie),
and with “gratitude to the von Trapp children who lived
It’s a curse
PHOTOS COURTESY TRAPP FAMILY LODGE