Famous Nathan (33 page)

When another of the resort town's periodic fires ravaged the nearby Ravenhall Bathhouse on the night of April 28, 1963, just before the summer season began, Nathan's charitable impulses kicked in. He offered free food to firefighters and displaced residents. He took personal charge of the relief efforts.

“A lot of people there, all their clothes burned up,” remembered Joe Handwerker. “We put out a sign to give the people shelter, and we gave them food. Mothers with children. We fed them, and we gave them cab fare to go home. Nathan never turned anybody down.”

Ravenhall, next door to Steeplechase Park to the west of the store at Surf Avenue and Nineteenth Street, had been a Coney Island institution, opening in 1867 as a hotel. In the 1960s, the bathhouse represented a cherished holdover from the past. Its saltwater pool, with diving boards labeled “Jack,” “King,” “Queen,” and “Ace” depending on their height, had survived when other bathhouses of the area closed one by one. Ravenhall encompassed a gym, handball courts, steam rooms, a dance floor, and a small private ocean beach.

When Ravenhall burned, it seemed one more nail in the coffin. Old Coney was passing from the scene. After the fire, Nathan became an outspoken advocate of rebuilding. He sat on Mayor John Lindsay's Seaside Advisory Board. Even though Coney Islanders widely fingered Lindsay as one of those destroying the resort town with redevelopment projects, the mayor reached out to his advisory board to ask what could be done for the resort town.

“What does Coney Island need most?” Lindsay asked.

Nathan was the first to answer. In the wake of the Ravenhall fire, he knew exactly what was needed and was going to tell truth to power.

“We need a place our visitors could take a bath.”

Laughter from the other board members and the audience at the hearing. Lindsay laughed, too.

The Ravenhall bathhouse was never rebuilt.

The accumulation of such events finally moved Nathan to retire from the store he had nurtured and loved so long. The creation of the Yonkers branch of Nathan's Famous in 1965 was one marker. Nathan showed up to look around exactly once and never returned. The company going public in 1968 was another demarcation line, as was Murray's transfer of the company headquarters to Times Square in the same year.

Away from the store, away from his post atop the soda box next to the root beer barrel, Nathan lacked a vital, stimulating purpose. Nathan's Famous could have been called “Nathan's Lifeblood,” and it would have been the truth. He was one of those men who do not take well to retirement. The essence of his existence dwindled.

“He was not happy, not really,” Steve Handwerker said. “He did have his place, his Florida abode, but he was not happy. Whenever he went back to New York, he felt unwelcome in a certain way. He wanted to be more involved, until the day he died. He wanted to die in the store, actually. He said that to me more than once.”

 

20

Endgame

“He wasn't blood or anything, but I respected him, I cared for him.” Nathan's Famous employees line up as the funeral cortege passes by.

ON SUNDAY, MARCH
24, 1974, in the aftermath of a cardiac arrest he had suffered the day before, Nathan died at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Port Charlotte, Florida. He passed away near to his beloved Warm Mineral Springs, three months shy of his eighty-second birthday. A story circulated about the circumstances of the heart attack. Nathan had arrived at the Sarasota airport the day before to find there was no driver there to meet him. In frustration he hefted his two heavy suitcases himself and that's what precipitated the later attack.

Nathan Handwerker's death was big news, covered nationally in print and on TV. The body was flown back to New York, and a service was held on the following Tuesday at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Ocean Parkway, near Prospect Park. As a member of the Masons high up in the hierarchy of the fraternal order, Nathan was accorded the elaborate honors of Freemasonry at his memorial. Brooklyn political leaders and community figures crowded the ceremony.

The funeral cortege left the chapel and proceeded to Coney Island. As it drove past the store that morning, the employees lined up on the curb, hands over their hearts in a show of deference, more than a few of them with tears in their eyes.

“When the old man passed, his family was hurting, but his employees were hurting more,” recalled employee Jimmy Bologna. “I mean, he wasn't blood or anything, but I knew him. I respected him. I cared for him.”

After the procession had passed, the employees did what they believed Nathan would have wanted them to do. They opened the store for business and went back to selling hot dogs.

The Coney Island that Nathan's funeral procession passed through was no longer the same place it was when he had ruled the store. He had not been able halt the decline of the resort town that had nurtured him and that he nurtured in turn. The best he had been able to do was retreat to Florida, so as not to be present when ruin swept over Coney in consecutive waves.

If Nathan had lived, he would have no longer recognized the place. The store was still there, of course, but its neighbors had fallen all around it. In 1966, Fred C. Trump, Donald's father, a real estate developer and an enthusiastic demolisher of classic New York City landscapes, had held a celebration marking his $2.5 million takeover and destruction of Steeplechase Park.

Historian Charles Denson labeled Trump's event “bizarre,” and even by Coney Island standards, the developer had gone totally over the top. Trump had sent out invitations and handed out bricks to those who showed up. Surrounded by bikini-wearing models, and evidently unaware of the biblical injunction regarding those without sin throwing stones, Trump himself had tossed the ceremonial first brick through a pane of the glorious glass windows of Steeplechase's Pavilion of Fun.

Two years later, in April 1968, something of a coup de grâce had occurred, when the unrest triggered by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spilled over into Coney Island from other parts of Brooklyn. Denny Corines, owner of Denny's Ice Cream on Surf Avenue, later told the New York
Daily News
that he would “never forget” the night. The looters who broke into his store passed by the cash registers.

“They weren't interested in the money; they wanted the candy,” Corines said. “They were just kids. They ran in, took the candy, and left.” He reported that one teenager had reached into a 350-degree deep fryer to grab a funnel cake.

By the time Nathan Handwerker died, Coney Island had been reduced to half a wasteland. The amusement zone barely held on. Somehow Nathan's passing and the decline and fall of the resort town seemed to go hand in hand.

*   *   *

The sadness surrounding Nathan's death lingered. Sol took his family to the 1975 revival of Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman,
a searing production with George C. Scott in the lead role. Nathan's own passing was still fresh on the family's mind. Sol broke down in tears at the end of the play, the story of Willy Loman, a man whose next-door neighbor Charley articulated the home truth of his life: “The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.”

Above and beyond all the other roles that Nathan took on—a son, husband, father, hard worker, entrepreneur, success story, tough boss, community leader, Freemason, philanthropist—perhaps the truest element of his character was that of a salesman. He started selling in his childhood, calling out “Hot knishes for sale!” in the streets of Galicia, did the same with lemonade on a street corner in Manhattan, and then reached his peak in a small store that he made big on Coney Island.

The public always wanted to believe that Nathan was a billionaire, or at least a multimillionaire. The years of toil had to have paid off big-time. People witnessed the crowds lined up twenty deep outside the store. Everyone assumed the founder of Nathan's Famous had amassed a huge fortune.

Americans increasingly subscribe to the jackpot mentality. The American dream used to be that if you worked hard, you would wind up with a little something. But by the late sixties, the dream had morphed into wanting it all.

The truth might be disappointing for anyone wishing to believe there was a pot of gold at the end of Nathan's rainbow. His wealth was, by modern hedge-fund manager standards, extremely modest. His estate totaled something less than $3 million. The billionaire ideal misses a fundamental truth about the way Nathan approached business and life.

Greed was not part of the equation. Slow and steady was the rule. It actually wasn't the nickel that made Nathan wealthy. It was the penny. He never took an exorbitant salary. In 1925, for example, according to his visa application, Nathan was making $75 a week in wages and had savings of $10,000. Twenty years later, in 1945, he listed $100,000 in total assets and earned an annual salary of $15,000. Even in terms of modern-day purchasing power ($1.26 million in assets, $200,000 in salary), this was not a bonanza.

Joe Handwerker found himself bitterly disappointed not to be listed as a beneficiary in Nathan's will. “When I worked for him, he buttered me, kept buttering me for fifty years, kissed me and hugged me. He loved me, and I'm his right-hand man, and he couldn't live without me. Everyone thinks he left me a million dollars. I didn't get five pennies [in Nathan's will], and that's what I'm a little upset about. I was his top man, right?”

Nathan's trusted manager fully expected to be taken care of when the last will and testament of his boss, uncle, and brother-in-law was read. Joe had retired in 1973 after fifty years at the store. At that time, Nathan presented him with a proverbial gold watch.

“Every time I look at it, I could cry,” Joe said. “I don't even wear it. [Nathan] was only good to you when he could get something out of you, all right? He was two-faced, and I'm not ashamed to tell you. It's the truth.”

Such sentiments were the exception to the rule. The overwhelming response to Nathan's death was one of fondness and respect. He was remembered as a tough boss but equally as a good man. A young Jimmy Bologna was one of the workers who cried as Nathan's funeral motorcade passed by the store.

“I don't care if you were sixteen or seventeen years old, like me, or you were a Sinta, who was sixty,” Bologna said. “Everybody looked up to him. Everybody respected him. Not because he started with very little and made a success but because of how he treated people. How you treat people is how you're going to be remembered. Not because you sell a hundred million hot dogs. Anybody can sell a hundred million hot dogs in the course of time. But it's
how
you sold a hundred million hot dogs that's the way you're going to be remembered.”

Of course, the person wounded most deeply by Nathan's death was Ida. “After Grandpa died, she just didn't want to go on,” said her grandson Steve. “She had no connection to life anymore.”

Steve recalls seeing his grandmother during this period in her apartment in North Miami. She wept a lot and tried to relieve her sadness by throwing herself into cooking, her favorite occupation. Obviously depressed, Ida gave Steve a bleak picture of her existence.

“You know,” she said, “I have no reason to live, no reason to cook, now that Grandpa's gone.”

Ida died of heart failure on the day before Christmas 1976, at age seventy-nine.

*   *   *

Wetson's, once a thriving fast-food chain, had fallen on hard times by the midseventies. Founded in 1959 by Herb Wetanson, the restaurants were slavish imitators of McDonald's. Wetanson had visited the same original San Bernardino McDonald's that influenced Ray Kroc. His stores served “Big W” hamburgers in imitation of Big Macs and displayed orange circles in imitation of golden arches.

At one time, the chain had seventy outlets scattered across Long Island and the New York metropolitan area, but that number had dwindled by 1975, when the Wetson's chain entered bankruptcy.

As he had several times before (Roadside Rest, Toffeneti's, Adventurer's Inn), Murray swooped down upon a business that had already closed its doors. Nathan's Famous and Wetson's merged in 1975. At that time, the Wetson's chain was comprised of forty-three company-owned stores and ten franchised ones, so on paper, the merger must have looked like a good match.

It wasn't. Murray imported many executives from Wetson's, including Harold Norbitz and his son Wayne, a man who would eventually be named to lead the entire company. The acquisition marked the beginning of a downward spiral that left the combined businesses awash in red ink. Many of the Wetson's stores were failing and located in unsuitable locations. Instead of lifting Nathan's Famous up, the merger dragged it down.

Murray attempted to follow the same prescription he had disparaged when his brother first proposed it, opening small “Nathan's Juniors” with limited menus. In a fast-food marketplace crowded with McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's franchises, those didn't work either.