Famous Nathan (15 page)

Leah probably suffered the most being that she was the oldest and being a girl. She was born during a time when her parents were working the hardest at establishing their business. She was never going to have an identity connected to the business. It was a symptom of the “delicate flower” gender bias of the period. Females, even the oldest child in the family, were not considered next in line to run such an establishment as Nathan's Famous. Though her mother worked there, the atmosphere of the store was probably considered too rough-and-tumble for a girl, especially when Leah grew to adolescence.

As kids, however, the Handwerker children had a perfect knee-high view of the goings-on in the store. “I used to walk around behind the counter,” Sol remembered. “I watched what the men were doing. I used to watch the customers—that was kind of fun. And I used to watch my father. As an employer, my father was a very, very tough man. He was a perfectionist. He was very demanding of his people. If they didn't do the right thing, he let them know in no uncertain terms.”

For all of that, Leah, Murray, and Sol enjoyed pleasant, happy childhoods throughout the 1920s and 1930s. When away from the store, Nathan relaxed to a degree that wasn't possible while on the job. Surprisingly, given his domineering ways with his employees, he did not serve as the family disciplinarian. Ida did.

“Although at work [Nathan] sometimes appeared to be a tough man, he really wasn't,” said his youngest son. “He was a really soft man. It was my mother who was the tough one. She was the one who'd get angry at me.”

Ida's method of punishment wasn't the paddle, the belt, or even the raised hand. “She wouldn't hit me as much as pinch me. She used to like pinching, and it hurt.”

The grown-ups were busy with work, but they also devoted themselves to the wider Handwerker family. Monthly get-togethers of the dozen brothers and sisters who had by then emigrated from Poland to America were marked by equal measures of joking and bickering. Nieces, nephews, and cousins took the opportunity to play. The meetings featured raffle contests and dinners, and the group named itself the Jacob and Rose Handwerker Family Circle.

Nathan took the time to attend every family circle meeting. “He was very family-oriented,” his nephew Sidney Handwerker recalled. “They had all grown up together as children in Europe.”

The family circle's first item of business was always the funding, design, and arrangements for the family burial plot. Endless amounts of time seemed to go into the planning of every detail. But there was also time for socializing, playing cards, squabbling.

“They loved each other, but they fought all the time,” remembered Sidney. As he recalled them, the poker games at the get-togethers were marked by a lot of second-guessing. “Why didn't you raise your hand with three aces?” one of the brothers would cry out to another.

“They were some nice people there but they just couldn't get along,” said Jack Dreitzer, who married into the family and worked at Nathan's Famous from the twenties onward. Dreitzer remembered Handwerker siblings in stark terms. “Each brother hated the other. Each one was jealous of the other. Each one was envious of the fact that he had one cigar and the other had two. They couldn't get along together. They used to fight like cats and dogs.”

An increasingly visible presence at family gatherings, and at the store, was Nathan's nephew and brother-in-law, Joe Handwerker. A small fireplug of a guy with a Jackie Mason accent, he was fast becoming a favorite of Nathan's. He could match his uncle's outbursts of volcanic temper. The family circle meetings featured a raffle. For some reason, the prize was almost always won by Ida. The one time Joe won, the prize for that month enraged him: a bun warmer. He had seen enough of bun warming at work to last him a lifetime. He threw the offending device to the floor and stomped on it.

Gradually, Nathan rose to take his position as first among equals in the family. This was the decade of the Roaring Twenties, when America's prospects appeared limitless. The country boomed, Coney Island boomed along with it, and Nathan's Famous boomed in turn. As Nathan put it, the twenties were a time of getting “larger, every year a little bigger.”

At the time, there was stiff competition in Coney, with over two hundred restaurants offering fare in the neighborhood.

One way Nathan sought to address his need for workers was by hiring family members. Nepotism wasn't at all a negative concept around Nathan's Famous. It came to represent a foundational principle of the business. Part of the incentive was to guard against employee theft. The idea was that while relatives might steal from you, they would be marginally less larcenous than strangers. But of course the motivation also stemmed from love, generosity, and simple familial feeling.

“I always want to have all the Handwerkers together,” Nathan said. “I want to create a business where all the Handwerkers can work together as a big family.”

The founder of the store cherished a vision for it. Nathan thought a great deal about his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He hoped that the business would go on forever in the family, so he surrounded himself with successive circles of relatives.

Closest to him was the core of his wife and children. Then came the wider spectrum of Handwerker relations, Joe Handwerker most prominent among them, as well as Ida's sisters and their spouses. Sisters-in-law, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, cousins all found their way onto the payroll. The idea was to have the business serve as a coalescing force, bringing the whole clan together.

Practice often ran counter to theory. Yes, Nathan wanted his relatives around him. At the same time, he could judge them unworthy of his patronage. A relative could be fired as easily as a stranger.

“He didn't like a lot of the people in the family,” recalled his grandson Steve. “Even though he always said he wanted to have a family business, he really didn't. He saw them as lazy, as nonindustrious, or trying to get away with something.”

“My name is on that sign,” Nathan said. “So whoever is going to be here and on the job is going to do it right or they're not going to be here. I don't reject them as a family member, but I might reject them as employees working for my business.”

As the company grew, its manpower demands began to outstrip even the abundant supply of Handwerker blood relations. Nathan was forced to widen his circle. He did so by creating another sort of family, a fiercely loyal group of workers who would go a long way toward making Nathan's Famous the phenomenon it was.

 

10

The Family (2)

“You have to be crazy to work here.” Nathan's second family—his workers—in action.

A JOB AT
Nathan's Famous meant long hours in conditions that were oftentimes so busy that employees did not have a chance to catch their breath. It was not easy work. Many were called, but few lasted past a few hours. One notable incident came during a summer rush. Six workers were in the kitchen doing nothing but toasting rolls for twelve hours straight. A number of them quit.

When it came time to hire new workers, Nathan was convinced he possessed a foolproof, almost mystical sixth sense about who would make the grade and who would wash out.

“How can you know?” asked one longtime worker after Nathan had correctly predicted a newcomer wouldn't last.

“I look at the back of the neck,” Nathan answered. “I can tell right away if they aren't going to make it.”

What specific qualities he found via his neck checks Nathan never revealed, but he did demonstrate a knack for hiring loyal employees, demon workers who could stand the punishment.

A nice, well-dressed young man once approached Nathan. “Excuse me, who do I see for a job?”

“Are you crazy?” the boss asked him.

“Why, no,” said the applicant. “I'm a college man.”

“You can't work here,” Nathan told him, raising his voice. “You have to be crazy to work here. Get out!”

The poor fellow ran.

“You sometimes see a help-wanted sign that reads, ‘We're Looking for Friendly People,'” said veteran Nathan's Famous manager Jay Cohen. “Nathan didn't look for friendly people. He looked for people that were like horses.”

By the standards of the day, Nathan paid good wages, always well above minimum wage. He was generous with bonuses and personal no-interest loans. Some of his senior workers felt comfortable enough to refer to Nathan as “Pop.” His “horses” stayed with him for decades, with a number of employees putting in more than a half century at the store. Even workers who openly despised the boss's brusque methods still stayed on for extended periods.

Jack Dreitzer was a longtime counterman, one of the first non-blood relations that Nathan ever hired. Married to Ida's sister, he signed on to the store in the twenties, when he was still a teenager. “They used to call me the oldest youngest man in the place.”

Dreitzer started at the store in 1928, when street frontage of the counter was about thirty feet all told. “We used to work twelve hours a day. I started for 25 cents an hour, and for that 25 cents I really had to produce. I was just out of public school, making $3 a day. If I worked seven days in the summer, I made $21 a week. I was Coney Island's wealthiest fellow at that time. I dressed beautifully.”

Even at a young age, Dreitzer was a bruiser. He grew into his job, boasting that he once served 9,100 hamburgers in the course of a single twelve-hour shift. He became celebrated for his take-no-prisoners style of interacting with the public.

“Man, we used to get some mean people over there in Coney,” Dreitzer remembered. “Meeee-an. I'm talking mean.”

Dreitzer did not suffer fools gladly. “Of course, I wasn't going to let nobody come over to me and say, ‘Hey, you Jew bastard, give me a hamburger.' Nahhh! When they did that to me, I used to say, ‘Come here, I want to talk to you.' Then I'd reach over the counter, put my left hand behind his head, and I'd belt him with my right hand.”

Two or three times a shift, Dreitzer felt himself compelled to confront the people who made remarks about his Jewish background. “They had to lock me up at least once a month,” he recalled. “People used to press charges.”

Dreitzer was surly not only with the clientele. He back-talked the man in charge, too. Nathan once criticized him for having a dirty griddle. In response, Dreitzer threw an aluminum tray at his boss, winging it across the store.

“If he didn't duck, he'd've got hit in the head,” Dreitzer recalled. “I said, ‘Now ya gonna get the hell outta here? Get inside!' Of course, I had no right to do that, but you know, how much can you take?”

The store was a prank-filled environment, and Dreitzer played a few mean-spirited practical jokes. Once catching a rat by its tail, he dangled the squirming creature in front of Ida's face. She fainted. Ida was Dreitzer's sister-in-law, so he felt the stunt was all in good fun.

Veteran manager Hy Brown believed that Nathan put up with a certain amount of insubordination from Dreitzer simply because the man was so good at his job. “He was a fast worker, an efficient worker, but he was very nasty,” Brown remembered. “Nathan didn't care much about what you thought about him. If you brought the money in and got the merchandise out, you were a Nathan's man.”

The situation became more difficult when the store went to a twenty-four-hour day in the summer. This was where Joe Handwerker, Nathan's nephew who worked with Dreitzer from the twenties on, came into his own. As night manager, Joe kept the store on an even keel when the crazies emerged out of the postmidnight furnace of New York City. The bar crowd could be incredibly unpleasant. But they spent money freely, too.

Arguments, shouting matches, outright fisticuffs were common enough in a venue that was open all night, attracting crowds of the unruly after the city's clubs, theaters, and drinking establishments emptied out in the wee hours. The night shift was busy, exhausting, surreal. Most of the customers were simply tired and hungry. But some people didn't wait for the full moon to turn ugly.

“We'd do more business from twelve o'clock midnight until daylight than you can imagine,” said Joe. “When the bars and grills closed, when the movie houses closed, there were twenty people deep at the counters. I thought they were going to push the place into the ocean. That's how busy we were.”

In such a hectic atmosphere, a kind of undeclared war existed between customers and workers. Dreitzer was often in the middle of it. “People would throw a ketchup bottle at him or something, and he'd go over the counter,” recalled manager Hy Brown. “When that happened, I had to get there first. You'd have to really push him out of the way to get him inside.”

The cross fire flew both ways. Jack Dreitzer remembered a prank he would pull on anyone on the other side of the counter who might annoy him.