Famous Nathan (14 page)

Nathan's son Sol would later provide an interesting analysis of the situation. “You're in a conflicted position,” he said. “You want to catch people who are stealing, but sometimes the people who are stealing are your best workers. You didn't always want to catch them because you didn't want to fire them because they were so good. What they were bringing into the business with their effective work was more important than what they were taking.”

Over the years, several employees were let go because they were caught red-handed. In one case, a worker was caught hot-footed. Someone alerted Nathan that a certain counterman was slipping coins into his footwear. The boss resorted to a perfect strategy to expose the theft, spilling hot water on the guy's shoes and then insisting that he come to the office to change into a pair of dry socks. The shoes came off, and the coins were revealed. The guilty party had a milk can full of change in his locker.

One father-and-son team was caught in a short-sale scam. The son, working the counter, kept under-ringing every sale. If a customer ordered forty cents' worth of food, the son rang up twenty cents. Whoever worked the registers always needed a lot of change. When the coins ran short, the practice was to holler “Nickels out!” or “Dimes out!” The father, a little higher up in the store's hierarchy, would head back into the kitchen where the coin rolls were kept. When he returned with the rolls of nickels and dimes, he'd skim off whatever amount his son had under-rung.

The two were caught and fired.

The pilfering wasn't limited to money. Employees were once caught discarding full five-gallon cans of oil into the store's garbage cans. The thieves would return at night, retrieve the cans from the garbage, and head home with a free month's worth of cooking oil.

In response to these situations—and perhaps because of a paranoid element in his personality—Nathan developed what could be termed a Panopticon philosophy of management. He did his best to be all-seeing, all-knowing.

Directly behind the store's frankfurter griddle stood a large root beer barrel, and Nathan would post himself atop a box beside the barrel. This gave him a view down the “drink side” of the counter in one direction and, in the other direction, the frankfurter and french fry stations. From time to time, Nathan would shout out from his post, calling attention to some situation or directing his employees to address a problem. Atop his box, he was like the ringmaster of his own commercial circus.

“He watched whether the men at the counter were handling the food right,” remembered Nathan's son Sol. “It was very important to him that they looked clean, that they kept their equipment clean, and they scraped the griddles properly to keep them clean. He was concerned that the food was cooked properly—not overcooked, not undercooked. He was always watching how the men were preparing the food.”

He wasn't just watching his workers, either. “He would stand next to the root beer barrel looking at the griddle and looking at the customers,” Sol said. “He could tell from the customers' faces how they felt. He could see if they were having fun or were annoyed. He wanted to find out which way they were. He could always tell if something was wrong. His sixth sense about that was always amazing.”

Nathan didn't limit his domain to the store's interior, but extended it to the sidewalks and streets outside. In late-night incognito visits, he would don a disguise—a slouch hat that came down over his eyes, perhaps a raincoat or sweater, at rare times a wig—and mingle with the customers. He'd eavesdrop, on the prowl for their comments, compiling a personal sort of pre-Yelp Yelp.

“It's the spirit of a successful business that gave him pleasure, in terms of satisfying the customers,” said Sol. “If they were happy, he was happy. And that's what he always tried to achieve.”

The hands-on boss never thought menial tasks were beneath him. He would often patrol for litter. Nathan's obsession with cleanliness reached into all corners of the property. The other thoroughfares of Coney were stained dark with dirt, grease, and the tramp of millions of pairs of human feet, to the degree that area sidewalks often appeared black.

“When you came to Nathan's, it was clean,” recalled one veteran employee. “You had light-gray sidewalks.”

As the volume of sales mounted, the store's physical plant took a tremendous beating. Grease, sand, and salt combined to make cleaning a constant daily—or, as the business began to stay open round the clock, nightly—chore. When the portable steam-vapor Jenny washers came on the market, Nathan was an early adopter. Employees later marveled that the trash facilities at the back of the store were so well-scrubbed that the room never smelled of garbage.

Busy as he was with his constant attendance at the store, in the mid-1920s Nathan found time to complete the final steps to U.S. citizenship. Normally, applicants had to possess the ability to understand, speak, read, and write basic English. In that era, the literacy requirement was often waived, especially for immigrants who had been established in the country for a period.

Nathan tried to learn, anyway. He hired tutors to visit him at home and expand his rudimentary understanding of the English language. He progressed to the point where he could pretend to read a newspaper, becoming a lifelong skimmer, at least, of New York
Daily News,
a picture-heavy publication founded in 1919. But he could never claim to be literate. On the rare occasions that Nathan ventured out to a restaurant not his own, Ida would always have to read the menu to him.

“He didn't read English,” his son Murray recalled. “He used to look at the
Daily News
for the pictures. Reading English was a whole different level.”

Nathan's literacy cram course turned out to be effective enough. On March 12, 1925, thirteen years almost to the month after his arrival in America, Nathan Handwerker took the oath and became an American citizen. Ida soon followed.

*   *   *

Throughout the teens and the early twenties, members of the Handwerker family had been crossing from Europe to America, coming over in ones and twos. It was as though Nathan was importing his workforce. Soon eight of the thirteen sons and daughters were in New York: Israel, Joseph, Dora, Nathan, Anna, Helen, Lena, and Phillip. In Yiddish, the names were Yisrool, Yuske, Dinele, Nachum, Elke, Chaya, Leah, and Hervel. The only Handwerker sibling never to live in America was the fifth brother, Shmuel, whose brain had been damaged in a street brawl and who later died in a European mental hospital.

In the successive waves of Handwerker immigration, the matriarch of the family tragically didn't survive the transatlantic voyage. Rose Handwerker died in February 1926 aboard SS
Zeeland,
the ship that was carrying her to America to join the rest of the family. She had left Jarosław a month before, traveling with Jacob and her four youngest children, Golde, Yitte, Moishe, and Herschel (in the United States, they would be known as Goldie, Yetta, Morris, and Harry).

The family headed for Antwerp, the same debarkation port from which Nathan had left for New York over a decade before. But at the dock, doctors employed by the shipping line deemed Jacob Handwerker too unhealthy to sail, quarantining him because of an eye infection.

The family was separated. Rose continued on board with her children but was “very much agitated from grief” over being separated from her husband, according to an account of her death printed in a Yiddish newspaper. After eating dinner one Friday evening, she simply “sat down and died,” as her daughter Anna Singer phrased it later. Rose was still fairly young, fifty-seven years old, but her hard life in Galicia had taken its toll.

Nathan always felt close to his mother. He didn't get along as well with Jacob but was devoted to Rose. She encouraged him in his first forays into commerce, when the two of them banded together to sell fruits and vegetables in the markets of Narol. Her forlorn death, hundreds of miles away at sea, affected him greatly. Nathan afterward always felt the loss. He felt he never was able to say a proper good-bye to the woman who had meant so much to him.

A situation arose after Rose's death. The children huddled around the lifeless body of their mother, unwilling to allow authorities to take her away. The policy on board the ship was to perform an ocean burial. This was a fairly common practice whenever immigrants crowded into steerage class died. It saved the cost of having to preserve the body until the ship reached landfall.

Anna recalled the family in America receiving a telegram from the ship urgently requesting $125, in order that Rose Handwerker's remains would be duly transported to New York. Nathan and the other Handwerker siblings in New York pooled their resources and wired the requested funds. (“We sent them right away a bundle of money,” Anna recalled.)

The arrival of the ship into port in New York made for a tearful scene. All of Rose's surviving children were present on the dock. Rose was eventually buried in the family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery, Queens. Jacob, still heavily bearded and limited in his speech to Hebrew and Yiddish, finally accomplished the crossing on a later ship.

Jacob's presence in the New World provided a symbolic reminder of the Old. Nathan and Jacob never seemed a good fit, always seeming to butt heads. Jacob remained an extremely religious figure and because of his adherence to dietary rules would not eat in his children's homes, only drinking water. He never got to taste the source of his son's success, a Nathan's Famous frankfurter.

Abroad in the fast-moving world of New York City, the shtetl patriarch could be childishly naïve. At one point, Jacob was taken in by a scam that would have never fooled his savvier son, buying “jewels” on the street that proved to be fake. He lived to the ripe age of eighty-five, marrying twice more before passing away in 1937.

The stop-and-start nature of the family's immigration led to some unlikely pairings. Some of the younger cousins had never met their relatives. The result was striking, even among the unsettled standards of Manhattan's Tenth Ward.

Joe Handwerker, the son of Nathan's brother Israel, first encountered his aunt Goldie when he was already a young man of eighteen. She was Nathan's much younger sister and was around the same age as Joe. The two met, fell in love, and married, with Nathan's nephew thereby becoming his brother-in-law. Rosie, Joe's sister and one of Nathan's nieces, would marry her uncle Morris Handwerker.

It was young Joe Handwerker who would prove integral to the future of the business. In 1920, Nathan's twelve-year-old nephew had begun to work for his uncle and future brother-in-law. It was the boy's first job. He signed on for the summer season, working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, for nine dollars a week. At that point, Nathan's was not yet Nathan's Famous.

Over the next two decades, Joe became much more than a relative twice over. He would eventually rise to serve as Nathan's right-hand man. Among all the Handwerkers who worked at the store, Joe was the one who would stay the longest and have the biggest impact. All the other family members left, some after short stints, some after many years. A few started businesses of their own. Phil had a candy store and a bar and grill. Morris opened a restaurant-bar called H&H.

Because of his mother's untimely death, Nathan never got to say good-bye to her, and Rose would never get to say hello to her new grandchildren. In March 1920, Nathan and Ida had welcomed their daughter, Leah, into the world. Sixteen months later, Murray came along and, after a lag of four years, a second son, Sol. (The family never used middle names.)

As oldest son, Murray was the obvious future head of the family and heir to the business empire. But he lived in the shadow of a praise-withholding father and grew up always trying to prove himself. Sol developed into the family's Hamlet, prone to introspection and rebellion against the authority figures of his father and brother.

A daughter and two sons. The perfect nuclear family. They lived right in Coney or, a little later on, a few miles east in Brighton Beach, always near the store. Even after his children were born, Nathan continued to spend long hours at work. Ida did, too. She would hold a baby in her arms, turning frankfurters on the griddle. She had merely added a second shift to her long workday, taking care of the family as well as taking care of business at Nathan's Famous.

Ida and Nathan would bring the children into the store, keeping one eye on them as they went about their duties. Oftentimes, Leah, Sol, and Murray would find themselves relegated to a makeshift playpen, as Ida plopped them down into the crib-like, three-by-three wooden bins in which the store's hot dog buns were kept. The roll crate became the children's second home.

“I observed a lot of things going on around me,” Sol remembered about his earliest days. “There was a lot of commotion, a lot of action, a lot of men working in the kitchen. I remember in particular there were a lot of Chinese men and some black workers, too. The employees were some of my best friends. They were always taking care of me and watching over me. I used to wander around in the kitchen and watch them cutting the potatoes.”

The process the store used to create its popular crinkle-cut fries fascinated the young Sol: the fat, yellow-gold spuds coming out of the electric peeling drum and fed, one by one, into the manual cutter. “One of the workers would throw a potato into this machine and with one hand bring down the blade of the crinkle cutter. He kept doing that all day long. I thought it was the most difficult job in the world.”

Leah, Murray, and Sol might not have realized it at first, but the new family had a dynamic that was different from most other households. The children were in competition, jostling for attention, vying not just with each other but with the family business. The store dominated the time, focus, and energy of their parents. Al Shalik, a longtime Nathan's employee, put it this way: “Murray and Sol had another brother, and that other brother was Nathan's Famous.”