Famous Nathan (23 page)

Even though the king's wiener probably wasn't from the store, the whole episode demonstrated the increasing identification of the hot dog with America's democratic ideals. The nationalistic icons of Mom and apple pie were joined by a sausage that emigrated to the United States from central Europe. And the astonishing popularity of Nathan's Famous and Coney Island contributed mightily to that populist association.

After it closed in fall 1940, the World's Fair turned into something of a road show. More than a few of its attractions were carted off to Coney Island. Luna Park, then struggling, adopted so many of the exposition's rides and attractions that it earned the right to be officially called “New York World's Fair of 1941.”

The famed Parachute Jump, defunct but still standing as a landmark today, was dismantled and taken from the World's Fair site in Flushing and reerected in its current place next to Coney Island's boardwalk, four hundred yards southwest of Nathan's Famous. (Even though it no longer drops thrill-seekers from its tower, the ride is recognized as “the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn.”)

Nathan himself participated in the wholesale transfer of the fair's infrastructure. From one of the pavilions, he got a bargain-basement deal on a collection of enormous walk-in refrigerators, gorgeous, overengineered wooden monsters that were heavily insulated.

“Those refrigerators are the best ones you can possibly get,” Hy Brown said. “They retained the cold. They were compartmentalized. They could be refrigerated or used as freezers. He built the whole store around the freezers that he got from the World's Fair.”

One of the behemoths was given over entirely to storage of frankfurters.

“We sold sixty thousand franks on a weekend,” recalled Hy Brown. “We had that walk-in refrigerator, so, my goodness—it held tons and tons of frankfurters.”

During this period in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the summer weekend tally—Friday night to Sunday—amounted to an incredible four tons of franks. The Nathan's Famous frankfurter counter had developed to the point it was doing the heaviest retail business in the entire world, when measured by revenue per square foot. All those humongous refrigerators were simply a necessary facet of doing business.

In keeping with his informal management style, Nathan occasionally repurposed the chilled spaces for private conferences with employees. “If he ever didn't want to be overheard, he would bring you into the refrigerator,” said one longtime employee. “And even then, he would whisper. You could see your breath. It was crazy.”

Sol was still living at home at the time. When the store was hit by a second period of labor unrest, including another picket line, Sol's support for the strikers caused some discontent on the part of his parents. Dinner table conversation became fraught.

“I wouldn't say [Nathan] was mistreating workers,” Sol said. “He was tough on everybody, but he generally paid well. The fact is, there was a strike, and it was hurting him, and he wasn't happy with it. He couldn't have been very pleased that I would not cross the picket line.”

The second strike was a sign that the paths of the Handwerker sons might continue to diverge. Murray ignored the picket line and continued to work at the store. His little brother balked. Ominous clouds were piling up between them that would eventually develop into a full-fledged storm front.

Nathan couldn't hide from what was happening in the wider world. The army recruitment
chappers
threatened to knock on his door as they had when he was a young man in Galicia. Even though he had fled across an ocean to avoid it, war searched Nathan out. This time, it was coming not for him but for those near and dear.

*   *   *

Both Murray and Sol eventually served in the American armed forces in World War II. Their time in uniform was largely benign, but they each returned from service in Europe with transformed outlooks, plans, and adult personalities. For Murray, especially, his posting overseas resulted in new tastes and attitudes that would have serious impact on the subsequent history of Nathan's Famous. But Sol also had experiences that shaped him forever.

The older son went first, drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. Just before Murray left for overseas, he and Dorothy married. His new wife loved the Handwerker family, even though she had difficulty aligning her ways with theirs.

“I'm Russian,” Dorothy said. “We're very warm and affectionate. We hug and kiss. I hugged and kissed Ida when she was around. And she would say to me, ‘I love you, but I can't show my love the way you do.' Murray told me he didn't remember his parents ever hugging and kissing him. It wasn't lack of love. Ida was just not able to. First of all, she worked so damn hard when they were little that she probably didn't have the strength left over to give them hugs and kisses. She was worn out. But she certainly loved her children. She just didn't have time to be a mama.”

Ida and Nathan saw their oldest son off and adopted his new wife into their family circle. It was a nail-biting time. Card-playing was always a great pastime among the Handwerker clan. Ida introduced Dorothy to the family's preferred game of gin rummy, teaching her so well that the student surpassed the teacher.

“You're cheating!” Ida would exclaim laughingly when Dorothy made gin time after time.

The trio bonded over cards and also over their shared concern for the fate of their boys in uniform, first Murray and then, in 1943, Sol, when he also entered the service.

The household kept the home fires burning. Nathan was beside himself with anxiety about his sons. For the first time in his life, he had difficulty applying himself at the store. He couldn't concentrate. “His time was mainly spent making packages [to send overseas], because it made him feel better to know he was doing something for his sons,” Dorothy said. “During those years, he was really very, very distracted.”

It was as though the forces of history were visiting their revenge upon Nathan. In 1912, he had slipped away from the slaughter that became World War I. But the bloody sequel—with some of the same forces slugging it out on some of the same battlefields—swept down on his life three decades later. He could run, but it turned out that he couldn't hide.

With German U-boats on the prowl in the waters off the eastern coastline of the United States, authorities considered Coney Island as the first line of homeland defense. The whole area became militarized. Civil defense authorities ordered the nighttime lights of the amusement parks extinguished in order to fox enemy plans for bombardment. On the west end of the island, at Sea Gate, the military installed a pair of immense circular gun batteries, the turrets made of concrete. The Coast Guard maintained a station in Manhattan Beach.

In the middle of all this, Nathan's Famous remained an oasis of normalcy. The government considered the store to be an American institution of sorts, central to the war effort as a symbol of everything the country held dear. Service personnel, the reasoning went, had to have at least a few landmarks of the good times before the war. They needed to remember what they were fighting for. A Nathan's hot dog was one of those things.

Thus Nathan's Famous was the single business in the neighborhood that was allowed to skirt curfew rules and remain open at night. The store had a comfortable, almost intimate relationship with the military. Many of the customers lined up were wearing uniforms, some of them fresh from a duty posting overseas and anxious for a nostalgic taste of home. Defense workers also had to have a place where they could get a quick bite. The local MPs (military police) and SPs (shore police) were on familiar terms with Joe Handwerker.

“I worked with the Coast Guard people; they had a base in Manhattan Beach,” Joe recalled. “I had to teach them how to make french fries. They sent their chefs to me. They came down and watched what I was doing.”

Air wardens permitted the store's lights to stay lit even in the midst of the blackout, after Joe Handwerker demonstrated to them that, when the sirens sounded, the whole display could be switched off with the flick of a switch.

“I showed them that we could be in complete darkness in sixty seconds,” Joe said.

An issue arose during the blackouts with customers lighting cigarettes as they stood in line in front of the darkened counters, waiting for the all-clear.

“This was a big problem for the air wardens,” Joe remembered. “So I set up a microphone, and I pleaded with the public, please not to light cigarettes until the alarm comes on that we're safe. And they were good.”

When the nighttime curfew hit and the rest of the borough went dark, the city's human population reacted like moths. They gravitated to the nearest bright light. “We were busy all day long,” remembered Joe. “But most of the business at that time started at midnight. As soon as all the lights went off all over the place, we got jammed.”

Viewed from the air, the former electric fantasyland of nighttime Coney Island became merely a dark smear upon the Brooklyn landscape, with only a single pinprick of light—Nathan's Famous.

*   *   *

The story of the store during these years centered around the rise of Joe Handwerker, who had steadily risen in the ranks of the business until he was the trusted second-in-command to Nathan himself. Their relationship became so tight that he could almost be considered Nathan's third son—or fourth son, if the store is to be counted as one.

Intensely loyal, not a great innovator but an individual who understood every facet of every front counter station, every kitchen procedure, and every supplier's order, Joe gave his uncle a great gift. With him in charge, Nathan could leave the store for days, even weeks or months, and return to find it still humming along smoothly. Joe allowed the man who never took time off to take time off.

“He never had a vacation,” Joe said. “When I started to run the business, he started to take two weeks, two months, three months, and finally six months. When he came back, he found it better than he ever left.”

After signing on to the store's labor force in November 1920 at age twelve, Joe thoroughly familiarized himself with the business. For a quarter of a century, he was king of the night shift, reigning over that prickly, unpredictable, but surprisingly lucrative time when Nathan's Famous was virtually the only game in town. In the wee hours, he battled boredom, drunks, thieving employees, and random nighttime craziness to keep the place running.

Joe usually sported a wide smile and a thin mustache. He had a ruddy complexion. He was, in the words of Steve Handwerker, “a kind of cherub of a guy.” Nathan's Famous was Joe's first job and for decades his only one. It's a measure of how close he was to the boss that he and Nathan both moved into the same building, 1119 Ocean Parkway, their three-bedroom apartments literally one on top of the other.

Whenever Nathan wasn't in command at the store, Joe would step into the role. He would climb atop the Coca-Cola box behind the counter and monitor the situation, shouting encouragement at the workers just like the boss did, functioning as Nathan's Mini-Me.

In the course of his long service, Joe became adept at handling complaints. When a customer once objected to her drink having orange pulp in it, he was quick with an answer. “We got a new machine in there, ma'am,” Joe told her. “That orange pulp is sterilized! It's perfect!”

The longtime night policy at the store was never to accept bills larger than twenty dollars. A group of customers came in one evening and put in a collective order for hot dogs and drinks that amounted to two dollars and change. They tried to pay with a fifty-dollar bill.

“I'm sorry,” apologized Sidney Handwerker, working as a counterman that night. “We don't accept fifties. Nothing more than twenties.”

A stocky, slightly inebriated gent in the group objected. “Look, that's American money. You'll take it, or you'll get nothing.”

Other members of the group offered to pay with smaller bills, but the guy insisted.

Sidney summoned in his brother, Joe.

“What's the problem here?” the feisty night manager asked.

The big guy leaned over the counter. “You've got a fifty-dollar bill, and that's American. You'll take it.”

“Okay,” Joe responded, the soul of reason. “Just a minute.”

The store always had a lot of change on hand. Joe came out with a canvas money sack heavy with rolled pennies.

“Take the fifty-dollar bill,” he told Sidney. To the customer, he said, “You'll get change in pennies. That's American money, and you'll take it. If you're going to be a wise guy, I'll open every roll, and you'll get a loose fifty dollars.”

That was that. The hulking customer shut his mouth, took back his big bill, and allowed others to pay with smaller ones. Chalk one up for the little guy.

Joe's relationship with his uncle and boss was oftentimes tumultuous. Nathan realized what a good worker he had in his nephew, but he never restrained himself from correcting Joe when something went wrong. Nathan could lose his temper about inappropriate staff scheduling, for example, or incorrect preparation of the food, improper storage, or poor cleanup. If he saw something, he'd say something, oftentimes to Joe.

The conversations would blow up into full-scale arguments. The two would sometimes rage at each other in full view of the public but more often would remove themselves to the store's upstairs office. There they would shake the rafters with top-volume Yiddish invectives. Manager Hy Brown once timed one of Nathan and Joe's shouting matches, clocking the exchange of screams, snarls, and yells at a full two hours.

“Everybody else would hide,” remembered Brown.

“Everybody would be scared to death,” added coworker Jay Cohen.

“You didn't want to be around,” said Brown.

“Joe would have to walk away crying,” said Nathan's grandson Steve Handwerker. “Grandpa would still be yelling at him from across the store. That was the typical once-a-month blowup.”