Gustave Maurice Heckscher

Gustave Maurice Heckscher (May 15, 1884 – June 11, 1967), was a pioneer aviator with seaplanes. and later a real estate developer in California. Early life Heckscher was born on May 15, 1884, in Philadelphia. He was the son of Anna (née Atkins) Heckscher (1859–1924) and the German-born August Heckscher (1848–1941), who made money in zinc mining with the New Jersey Zinc Company before entering the New York real estate business. His younger sister, Antoinette Heckscher, married the British aristocrat and architect, Capt. Oliver Sylvain Baliol Brett, 3rd Viscount Esher, a son of Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher. After the death of his mother in 1924, he father remarried to Virginia Henry Curtiss, the widow of Edwin Burr Curtiss, who was 27 years younger than his father. His father's second wife inherited all of his father's real estate and $10,000. His paternal grandparents were Johann Gustav Heckscher, a German politician who was the Minister of Justice in the provisional German government headed by Archduke John of Austria, and Marie Antoinette (née Brautigan) Heckscher. He graduated from Yale in 1906 and was a classmate and associate of Pebble Beach developer Samuel Finley Brown Morse.