Famous Nathan (19 page)

“I never went to Queens or Manhattan,” remembered Murray Handwerker. “I lived and grew up in Coney Island. The beach, the boardwalk. The boardwalk was built from Sea Gate to Ocean Parkway. I used to walk the boardwalk from the store to Brighton Beach Avenue. That was my whole life, lower Brooklyn.”

Murray was four years older than his younger brother, Sol, so he was the first of the boys to sample the joys of Coney Island. There was something heady, almost intoxicating, about having the freak shows of the Bowery and the attractions of Steeplechase right nearby.

“That was part of my growing up at Nathan's—I had to stay out from under their feet,” Murray said. “They would tell me to please go on the boardwalk, because I was in the way. There were a lot of people moving around there during busy times, especially in the summer on the weekends.”

So Murray dove into the streets, lanes, and alleys of the amusement zone. “Drive Your Own Car!” promised a sign on one ride. What eight-year-old could pass up such an unbelievable opportunity? He'd trek past the food booths and candy shops, sampling the wares. He liked to watch people fish off Steeplechase Pier, hauling in their catches and gutting them in front of the goggle-eyed kid.

Murray sometimes went down to Luna Park to look at the premature infants in the incubators. Dr. Martin A. Couney pioneered what he termed “baby hatcheries” in the United States. When hospitals had refused to take such an untested idea on, Couney had turned to amusement parks for sponsorship. First inaugurated in 1903 at Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park, the whole hospital was re-created at Luna Park after a 1911 fire flattened Dreamland for good.

By the time Murray visited, the attraction had been in place for so long that there were “graduates” who had grown up and were working in the neighborhood. They came together at the amusement park for well-publicized reunions. Two of the male graduates had become doctors themselves.

Many of the Coney Island attractions were off limits for underage customers like Murray. Barkers called out the attractions of Magdalena, a hoochie-coochie dancer who set herself up in a booth just across Stillwell Avenue from Nathan's Famous. There was an amusement called the Dark Ride, a tunnel-of-love arrangement that featured a spooky apparition that appeared suddenly out of the gloom. The famed Cyclone roller coaster was also too adult for such a young kid, who could only stand and watch as the cars screamed past.

Murray became adept at mastering the rides that he could go on. Because the nearby Steeplechase Park was totally enclosed, Nathan and Ida liked for him to spend his time there, believing he couldn't get in too much trouble. The Steeplechase Ride ran in a circuit around the whole park, harking back to the days when horse racing was Coney's main attraction. Murray soon learned to mount up immediately behind the heavier-weight customers. The ride was partially gravity controlled, and the heftier riders would increase the speed on the downhill portions of the track.

There were a few unforeseen dangers in the resort town. Murray once experimented with a sharp-bladed clipper on the counter of a Bowery tobacco store where his father purchased cigars. Patrons used the knifelike arrangement to slice off the ends of their stogies. “I put my finger in there, and it clipped off the end,” Murray recalled. “I was scared, really scared and bleeding. They came and put bandages on and everything, but I learned to mind my own business.”

One of the boy's local favorites was a scooter ride located on the Bowery just a block to the south of Nathan's Famous. The price was five cents for a five-minute turn, and one day in the late twenties, Murray could not resist the scooter's draw. At age eight, he was allowed to wander alone while his father and mother slaved at the store. He had a nickel burning a hole in his pocket.

Round and round went little Murray on the scooter track. At the end of five minutes, a carny worker approached the riders.

“Do you want to go again?” he asked Murray.

“Yeah, sure, I want to go again,” said the boy.

So the carny took Murray's admission ticket and punched it for another ride. At the end of five minutes, the ride jockey came around again, asking if Murray wanted another turn.

“I kept saying, yes, yes. I must have been on fourteen or fifteen times.” He might have been a little uncertain about the concept.
Do you want to go again?
Yes, of course I want to go again! When the ride finally cleared and Murray had to get off, he still had the nickel in his pocket, but he didn't have what he owed—five cents times fifteen.

“What do you mean?” demanded the carny. “You gotta pay! You rode fifteen times!”

Murray started crying. He could almost see his parents' store, just a few steps away on Surf Avenue.

“I'm going to call the police!” threatened the carny. He wouldn't let Murray leave the property until the weeping boy paid for the punch ticket that he had in his hand. His parents eventually had to come rescue him.

These were different times, perhaps better times, a period when a young child could be trusted to wander alone with a certainty of safety—even in the hugger-mugger of Coney Island. Most locals recognized Murray. The carny at the scooter ride was an exception.

“On the Bowery, there were always hundreds of people,” Murray said. “I wasn't afraid of anyone stealing or kidnapping me. First of all, I knew the right people. And whether it was at a candy store or the rides, they usually knew me, too. They knew I was Nathan's son.”

The scion of Coney Island royalty, in other words.

Child labor laws did not extend to the owner's relatives, an exclusion designed to protect family businesses like Nathan's Famous. Life as a son of Nathan Handwerker wasn't always a day at the beach. Murray and Sol eventually graduated out of their roll crate playpen to take on a succession of positions at the store.

Murray went first, employed in 1931 at age ten. He immediately came to an understanding that his father at home was a very different person from his father at work. “If I did something wrong or I piled too many frankfurters on a board so some fell off, or the rolls that I was supposed to separate weren't done right, I caught hell. He was a very tough taskmaster.”

Initially, the boys weren't allowed to use knives or operate the machinery in the kitchen. But as Murray grew older, he was tasked with transferring potatoes from the huge drum peeler to the cutter, which was hand operated.

“One time, when I came in and was helping, one potato got away,” Murray said, recalling a significant memory of his youth. “I'm working up top, so I didn't see it fall onto the floor.”

His father, ever vigilant, came by. “Look at what you're doing,” Nathan said to Murray, pointing at the runaway tuber. “Look at what you got there. You got the potato—you think that's not my money? This is a profit you make that you're losing there.”

In later life, Murray always remembered being schooled over a lost potato. “After that, I was very careful to keep track of where the potatoes were going,” he said. “That's the kind of stuff you watched when you were working at the store.”

Small hands were good at rolling coins, so naturally helping out at that job fell to the sons. Murray recalled spending long days in the stuffy little counting room under the stairs. In those days before the war, the store had no air-conditioning, and the fan did little more than move the hot summer air around.

“I'm sitting there, I hear a big commotion going on the kitchen,” Murray said. It was his father's voice in an argument with one of the workers. “Excited and screaming, under the pressure of the day's business in the kitchen. So I closed my shop up. I couldn't leave the door open with all that money in the counting room.”

He ventured out into the kitchen to find his father dressing down an employee. Murray confronted him. “Dad, what are you so excited about? You'll have a heart attack before you can control yourself.”

Nathan turned on his son, pronouncing a line that Murray said he would never forget.

“I don't
have
heart attacks,” Nathan said. “I
give
heart attacks.”

Nathan's hard-crust exterior at work concealed a soft core. Both Sol and Murray witnessed their father's random acts of kindness throughout their time at the store. Nathan had an informal, unannounced policy of never turning away a hungry person who could not pay. But he verged on phobic about keeping his charity anonymous.

Jay Cohen, a longtime manager, recalled the boss directing him to provide a meal for this or that penniless individual. “Then he would run upstairs and hide so he couldn't be thanked,” Cohen said.

“I never saw my father refuse anyone that was hungry,” said Nathan's son Sol. “It was something that impressed me and something I never forgot.”

For Nathan Handwerker, virtue was its own reward. He was an active contributor to numerous local charities, but his donations were often made anonymously. He didn't play favorites. When a local Catholic congregation didn't have the funds to paint its church, Our Lady of Solace on Seventeenth Street, the priest made the rounds of Coney Island businesses with a request for a contribution. The job amounted to some seven hundred dollars.

“Make sure the father has everything he needs,” Nathan told his trusted aide-de-camp, Joe Handwerker. “But make sure no one finds out about it.”

Nathan demonstrated a similar shyness when the time came to give out year-end bonuses to his managers, head cook, and other core employees. The bonuses represented a practice that distinguished Nathan's Famous from practically every other business on Coney Island.

Manager Jay Cohen: “He would never, never stick around to give you the Christmas bonus, okay? He just never did it. He knew that there was twenty thousand, thirty thousand dollars allotted to the employees, but he never was around to give it to you. Why was that? It's hard for me to fathom. Maybe he didn't want to be in that position to be seen as a nice guy. Was that it?”

Nathan would deflect any thanks extended to him by his employees, usually invoking the same line. “I can go out and go shopping every day for the rest of my life, and I still couldn't spend what I have.”

*   *   *

If Nathan was hard on the outside and soft on the inside, his wife mixed warmth and toughness all the way through. Ida had a friendly, open face matched with a reserved personality. Her children could testify to her uncompromising approach to discipline and had the pinch marks to prove it. She hated pretense and could be quick with a deflating remark whenever she encountered it.

“My mother usually pooh-poohed people,” remembers her son Sol. “She was never overly impressed with so-called important folks. She was very—what's the word? Self-effacing?”

“Grandma was a very feminine figure,” testified her grandson Steve Handwerker. “People generally don't see her that way because she's a very strong, large woman. But she was a very soft-spoken, very humble person who was just a master in the kitchen. I mean, there wasn't anything she couldn't do in the kitchen, there wasn't anything she couldn't make.”

“Ida, she was fun,” said her nephew Sidney Handwerker. “She used to wear jewelry that was imitation, not real jewels. She used to say, ‘On me, they think it's real.' But she had one pin, a locket, that Nathan had bought her. ‘This is real,' she said. She was a regular person. Down to earth, very down to earth.”

For her whole life, Ida took the public bus to work. Nathan loved his wife's dedication, which matched his own. Their shared bywords of thrift and industry permeated the store's whole atmosphere.

“Before we had the big tanks of oil upstairs, we used to open up two-and-a-half-gallon cans of Mazola oil,” said manager Hy Brown. “Nathan would look in to see if you completely drained the cans. If he'd see any oil left, he'd say, ‘You know how many eggs my wife could cook with this oil here?'”

Supposedly, that was the source of Nathan's use of pure corn oil at the store—because Ida favored it at home. “If it was good enough for my wife to cook with,” he would say, “it's good enough for my customers to have.”

Over the years, a persistent myth emerged regarding Ida's vital contribution to the success of the business. She possessed a “secret recipe” for the spices that went into the Nathan's Famous frankfurter. Ida was the one, in other words, who helped make Coney Island's bestselling hot dog delicious. Some accounts had it that the formula was passed down from her grandmother.

The story filtered into press reports only after Nathan's Famous began to employ advertising and public relations firms, a sure sign that it was a bit of created mythology. The concept of an old family recipe served to warm the aura surrounding the business. It was the kind of homey detail that Americans loved.

Years later, another successful chain restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken, would also invoke an “Original Recipe” of “secret spices” from its grandfatherly founder, “Colonel” Harland Sanders. KFC owner John Y. Brown Jr. later identified the ruse as a “brilliant marketing ploy.”

Ida's secret spices. The story was compelling. Was it true?

Steve Handwerker, Murray's son and Nathan and Ida's grandson, certainly believed the story to be fact.

“There's no myth. Grandma Ida, she's the greatest cook that I've ever experienced in my life. Whatever she made was just incredible. And she has a tongue, a sense of taste: she could tell you anything and everything that's going on with that food. She came up with the formula for the hot dog. She tasted maybe one hundred different possibilities, and she came up with the right blend of different spices and the meat and how it should be done, how it should be added, and how it should be mixed. It was all Grandma Ida and of course Grandpa.”

Steve is adamant about this particular origin story. Ida herself, he says, told him the tale. “We went down to the butcher's to pick out only the best meat that would go into the hot dog,” Ida told Steve. “They didn't know about spices at all, these butchers.” For the spicing, Ida went to different places, tasting samples.