Famous Nathan (10 page)

Seventy percent of new start-up restaurants fail, a ratio that has held constant over the years. Nathan was desperate to succeed. “When I came to this country, I had nothing,” he said, looking back at this period. “I knew that if I didn't really work hard and do something, I couldn't survive.”

His first idea was to expand his product line. He knew of a store on Broome Street in Manhattan, a block south of the Busy Bee, that sold malteds, candy, and cigarettes. The place had a machine for sale, used and cheap, a mixer for making malted milkshakes. He bought the rig and then went farther downtown to Delancey Street, where he knew of a firm called I. Lefkowitz & Son, a syrup manufacturer.

Nathan had in mind to create the finest malted in New York. He purchased a half gallon of chocolate syrup and a half gallon of vanilla, the latter to “open up the flavor of the malted.” Enlisting his older brother Joseph, he lugged the machine and the stock of ingredients out to Brooklyn and the little cubbyhole store on Surf Avenue.

“Three cents for a malted, five cents for a malted with ice cream, six cents for a little ice before the machine mixes it up. I had the best malted to buy.”

He wasn't finished. In Coney, he bought another “little machine,” one that would grind a whole pineapple to make juice. “Two cents for a pineapple juice. Fresh made, like the orangeade and lemonade.”

It didn't matter. Nothing did the trick. He was still selling frankfurters for a dime and still grossing no more than sixty or seventy dollars on summer weekends, not enough to keep him in business.

There were other difficulties. Joseph Handwerker had been working as a peddler, and Nathan wanted to give his brother a leg up. He brought him out to the struggling Coney Island store.

“‘Come, want to help me?' I says to him. ‘Come on.' I didn't tell him anything. I didn't promise to make him a partner. I thought that I'll see how it works out.”

He first gave Joseph the deceptively simple job of making lemonade, something that, by that time, Nathan had been doing nearly every day for four years. Joseph might not have yet grasped the fact that in Nathan Handwerker's world, there was a right way and wrong way of doing everything—at least, everything within the microcosm of a luncheonette.

“I told him what to do to make lemonade. I tell him how to make it, and he makes it another way. The way he makes it, the sugar wouldn't melt. Because if you put the lemon and the sugar in together, the sugar gets hardened up. First you got to put the lemon, then half water, then sugar, then spoon, mix it. Four gallons a night to make.”

How hard could it be? But perhaps the issue was a younger brother telling an older brother what to do. A disagreement ensued, escalating into a full-blown argument, with the two siblings yelling at each other. The passersby on Surf Avenue might have thought it was just one more Coney Island sideshow. The quarrel culminated in Joseph cursing Nathan out and spitting in his face.

“He cursed me the devil to my mother in Yiddish,” Nathan recalled. Since the two were brothers, it was an odd oath. “I say to him, ‘Why are you cursing your own mother?'”

The first experiment in Handwerker nepotism ended in disaster.

“I didn't say nothing to him after that,” Nathan recalled. “At night, I paid him off. And I says, ‘Joe, I'm sorry. I didn't want to fight with you. Business is business, and I can't do it. You're not for me. I told you what to do, you didn't do the right thing, you didn't listen to me, and you're not for me.' I didn't hire him anymore.”

Nathan was a tough boss from the start. At the young age of twenty-four, he had already developed an uncompromising management style. Business was business, as he said, and in business dealings, he would forever be a hard soul. Early poverty in Galicia had broken many people, but with Nathan, it seemed hardship had only tempered his steel.

There were two elements for success in business. There was toughness on the one hand and on the other a taste for calculated risk. Joseph Handwerker was content to work a pushcart. (“If you want to be a peddler, be a peddler,” Nathan said when showing his older brother the door.) On a scale of daring, perhaps opening a store on Coney was not extreme, but within the context of Nathan's hard-scrabbling, dog-eat-dog immigrant world, it was a gamble.

As was his next move, lowering the price of his signature product to a nickel. He had proposed this plan to his first partner, Sam. Now, with no partner to object, Nathan forged ahead. Frankfurters would be five cents instead of ten, and two cents for lemonade.

Sam had originally objected to the idea out of fear that the Coney Island bosses wouldn't welcome a threat to the status quo. Nathan himself remembered worrying about the boldness of his new business plan: “I was afraid of the politicians trying to close me out for underselling everybody. But I took a chance. I didn't give up.”

Were his fears justified? Would there be interference from Coney Island bigwigs, angry over competition for such powerful establishments as Feltman's? Ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the resort town had always been rife with cronyism. The audacious newcomer with his tiny five feet of storefront would be underpricing the big boys. Nathan didn't know how such a move would go down in the tightly knit business community around him. He had learned during his childhood in Galicia to fear the arbitrary moves of those in authority. The notorious Habsburg bureaucracy had taught him well.

But as he waited for the other shoe to drop, it never did. “Nobody ever bothered me about it,” Nathan said later.

No one interfered, and there's some question if anyone in power even noticed the little store on the corner of Surf Avenue and Schweikerts Walk. Who did notice—in droves—were the working people who came on holiday to Coney Island. Many of them were common laborers, visitors who had to count their pennies and well knew the difference between a dime and a nickel. They recognized a bargain when they saw one.

The first weekend Nathan dropped the price of a hot dog, he more than quadrupled his business. He took in $260 as opposed to the $50 or $60 he had been grossing before. He had discovered a price point, as modern business schools would term it, and he had done so instinctively, without a day's worth of education and indeed without even being able to read or write.

He was on his way. Nathan didn't need to be told twice, and he didn't hesitate, either, but plunged in with both feet. It was another business lesson he grasped intuitively. Recognize a win when one comes along.

“I go to my boss on Spring Street,” he recalled. “I say to him, ‘I'll give you a week's notice until you get somebody.' Instead of going to Coney just for the weekend, I'll be there seven days a week, and I'm making five cents a frankfurter.”

 

7

Ida

“I liked her very much. So I hired her.” Nathan and Ida Handwerker, ca. 1920.

THAT SUMMER, WHILE
Nathan was getting his first tantalizing taste of success in America, the war that would have killed him had he stayed in Europe cranked up to an unbelievable level of ferocity. Russia's celebrated June Advance of 1916 rolled over Nathan's home province of Galicia, one of the most lethal offensives in the history of warfare, with an incredible 1.6 million casualties.

It took another full year, but the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, the country dragged kicking and screaming into a war it had done its level best to ignore. Turning a blind eye didn't work, and in May, the Selective Service Act, passed the previous December, was enacted. The same monster that licked its lips in Galicia now reared its head in America, with modern-day
chappers
reaching out for recruits.

War fever gripped New York City. A ubiquitous stern-faced Uncle Sam, in J. M. Flagg's celebrated “I Want You” poster, jabbed his recruitment finger at passersby. Boarding the subway in Union Square, Nathan would have witnessed the surreal vision of a battleship afloat in the middle of the city. The navy erected a full-scale wooden mock-up of a vessel in the park, christening it USS
Recruit
. The government used the ship for enlistment and training.

Nathan experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. “I came from Europe to America for one reason—because from Europe I heard that a young man didn't have to go in the army in America.” The new draft laws changed the rules.

But Nathan sidestepped them. The young immigrant, long enough in his new country not to be labeled a greenhorn, remained ineligible for the draft. The United States had entered the war on the side of the Allies (the UK, France, and Russia) against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Since Nathan hailed from Austria-Hungary, he was considered an “enemy alien” and unsuitable as cannon fodder. He had not yet taken out “first papers,” the initial step toward United States citizenship. He was safe.

As the world turned its fond gaze to violence, Nathan Handwerker found romance.

In modern parlance, he had no life. Nathan was spending all his time at the store, often sleeping overnight on a straw mattress or on the big burlap sacks full of potatoes. He installed a bell on the counter, so that if someone wanted a frankfurter at three or four in the morning, say, they could ring the bell and wake him up.

What he didn't have was a cash register. “I had a sugar box from a hundred pounds of sugar; it came in five-pound packages, twenty to a box. I turned over the box, and I put in all the money I made during the day. I had a little bag, a sleeping bag. And I slept next to the box.”

Predictably, whatever social life Nathan had came through work. His sister Anna, the Handwerker sibling who had first introduced him to Coney Island, tried her hand at a business just down the block on Surf Avenue. She and a friend of hers, Ida Greenwald, had a small concession stand.

Nathan visited and could tell immediately that the two women weren't making any money. He refrained from criticizing because Anna's business partner was attractive. He asked Ida to come work for his store. In Nathan's world, such an invitation was tantamount to courtship. Anna Singer, who didn't seem to begrudge her brother poaching her partner, always said that Nathan offered Ida “big money” to make the switch.

“I liked her very much, so I hired her. She worked so fast, serving frankfurters and drinks and giving change.” It was love. His new employee proved a speedy worker who could peel a fifty-pound bag of onions in under an hour. Nothing could have proven a more certain path to Nathan's heart.

In summer of 1918, sleeping in the store, he had a dream that he would become engaged to Ida. “I got dressed, and there was a fruit stand across the street. I says to myself, ‘I'll buy a pear for her, a pear for me.'”

But his dream lover refused his humble offering. “Give it to your sister; she needs it better.”

Nathan could be direct enough in business, but he was shy in love. Too nervous to come right out and pop the question, he asked Anna to speak for him. “I need you to go up and tell Ida that I want to get an engagement. If you do it, if you come back, if she'll accept it, I'll give you fifty dollars.” Nathan watched as Anna went to Ida. He saw the two women talk and then shake hands. Anna came back to him.

“What did she say?”

“She said she's going to ask her father and mother.”

“She agreed?”

“If she asks her father and mother,” Anna said, wise to the ways of the world, “that means she agrees.”

“When we make the engagement,” Nathan said, “you get the fifty dollars.”

On July 13, 1918, Nathan and Ida formally got engaged. They set October 26 for the wedding. In addition to the reward payment to his sister, Nathan also had to find someone to cover for him at the store during the engagement celebration. The process of getting hitched was proving to be an expensive proposition.

A summer Saturday in the middle of the busy season. He and Ida planned to go into Manhattan for the party. By that time, Nathan had a nephew working for him, another Joe Handwerker, Israel's son, named after Nathan's brother Joseph. Joe put on a formal jacket, naturally assuming he'd be invited to the festivities.

“Who's going to stay here?” Nathan asked. “We can't close; it's a hot day, it's July 13. How can I close the place?”

Joe sensed an opportunity. “Give me the fifty dollars you were going to give Anna.”

Nathan hesitated.

“You gotta pay cash,” Joe added.

What could Nathan do? A man has to celebrate one of the most important events of his life. He dipped into the sugar box and counted out five thousand pennies for his nephew Joe. He had to dig even deeper for Ida's ring—$650 for a diamond solitaire, $10,000 in today's money. Then he went and got engaged.

That same summer of 1918, U.S. Marine casualties mounted in the vicious hand-to-hand combat of the Battle of Belleau Wood along the Marne River in France. In Russia, Bolshevik radicals lined the czar and his family up against a wall in a basement room and executed them. The disconnect between the bloody chaos in Europe and the chattering, laughing crowds at Coney Island had to be unsettling.