Famous Nathan (18 page)

The particular bill in question was a Federal Reserve Note from a 1934 issue that featured a portrait of President Grover Cleveland. Nathan decided to hold on to his prize. He had it framed and posted it behind the french fry station, where the store had various signs of all sorts on the wall.

“$1,000—we will present this bill to anyone who can prove that we don't use pure Mazola cooking oil for our fries.” Placed above bubbling vats of hot oil, the sign was visible but not reachable by the public.

At 3:00
A.M.
on a night in 1939, a trio of thieves decided to claim the bill without proving anything at all, yea or nay, about the store's use of pure corn oil.

“Three guys started an argument,” recalled Nathan's son Murray, a teenager at the time. “One of them drew the attention of the workers. The other two jumped over the counter and ripped the sign off the wall. They had a car waiting for them. The three ran out to their car, and off they went.”

A thousand dollars, gone in a puff of getaway car exhaust.

Except …

Nathan notified police of the theft. Authorities caught the IQ-challenged culprits in New Jersey when they tried to pass the bill. Collected along with it was the sign from the french fry station's back wall. To everyone's surprise except Nathan's, the bill proved to be counterfeit.

Before he would agree to cash it, Nathan of course had gone to the bank and checked out the validity of the bill himself.

“They told him, ‘No, it's a counterfeit.' They wanted to take it away from him, they wanted to condemn it and withdraw it from the market,” Murray recalled. “But they knew he wasn't going to pass it off to someone else, so they gave him the bill.”

Nathan had told no one about the counterfeit. He did not pony up the cash for the holder who had offered it to him but simply posted the bill as if it were real. A couple of lessons can be gleaned here. One is that Nathan always held his cards extremely close to his chest. Another is that he had the kind of pull in the neighborhood that a bank would allow him to keep a thousand-dollar bill that by law should have been confiscated and destroyed.

Reality is like sculpting clay in a PR agent's hands. Perhaps Murray's version of the story was shaped by publicity ace Morty Matz. Jack Dreitzer always claimed that he was the one who found the fake $1,000 bill, discarded on a sidewalk in Coney Island. “I turned it over and it was an ad for a French brassiere company,” Dreitzer said.

Mazola continued as the store's brand of choice. Around that time, Nathan's Famous, the number-one consumer of cooking oil in the New York metropolitan area, developed a novel delivery system for its prized ingredient. Nathan installed a five-thousand-gallon tank atop the store. Originally, it contained simple sugar syrup that was delivered via copper pipes to the drink vats. Converted to a tank for corn oil, it was connected to a system of gravity-fed tubing that distributed the precious liquid to the voracious deep fryers down below.

As much as the frankfurter was the star of Nathan's Famous, the potatoes were celebrated also. Deep-fried to a golden brown, they were sold in small cellophane bags, the store's logo printed on the side. A serving usually came with small, extra-crispy leftover pieces that were, to some, the best part of the meal.

The production process of the crinkle-cut fries rivaled the complicated ballet of frankfurters on the grill. The crispy potatoes were so popular that it took ten fryolators to keep up with demand. (Two smaller fryolators were reserved for other menu items.) Each one of the deep-frying appliances was drained and filtered in the early hours of the morning, tended by a four-man cleanup and rotation crew trained to keep the oil pristine.

“We rotated the oil from left to right as we filled the frylators, and we filtered them at night,” explained Hy Brown. “We used the same procedure, and we started over fresh with the fryolators on the left. That was the secret of the crispy, crunchy potatoes that we had.”

Filter devices cleaned impurities from the cooking oil. Oil from the first fryolator was filtered and transferred to the second, the second to the third, and so on. After the used liquid had been cycled through all ten cookers, the crew transferred it to huge barrels that would later be picked up by waste oil companies.

The fresh potatoes went through a two-step frying process. They were peeled, cut, and cooked at 325 degrees until soft, all processes that occurred in the back kitchen. Workers brought the once-cooked fries to the counter in “wires,” as the large, round metal frying baskets were called. The temperature in the front fryolators was held at 375 degrees, and the fries were finished off there. Whenever the oil started to “cream up”—display a frothy surface—that meant it was dead and could no longer be used.

“Once a fryolator got creamy, it was no good anymore because it would soak the product with oil,” said Brown. “It had to be pretty clear oil for us to cook with it.”

Tanker trucks filled with corn oil pulled up in the alley beside the store twice a week, pumping their contents up to the huge reservoir on the roof. The big Mazola tank would be joined later by the celebrated hot dog clock—with a huge, six-foot-wide dial that sported a pair of wieners for hands—as high-visibility beacons for Nathan's Famous of that period.

*   *   *

Nathan's semiofficial police force patrolled the sidewalks on the block, and Nathan made certain that other members of New York's Finest felt welcome inside, too. But there was another layer of regulation that kept the business on track. In-house policing proved every bit as essential to success as beat cops and friendships with Coney Island's power elite.

Business and management practices that Nathan put in place addressed problems of employee theft, yes, but also issues of inventory, production, and sales. Homegrown yet sophisticated, organic yet rigorous, a system gradually came to control all aspects of cooking, serving, supplying, and managing the menu items for which customers eagerly lined up.

When Nathan started his company, his approach to record keeping was crude in the extreme. He remained functionally illiterate. In the course of constantly working with sums of money, however, his facility with numbers gradually developed. Early workers recall him scribbling business records on a back wall of the store's kitchen, always using a stubby pencil. At the end of the year, he would paint over the numbers and start over, keeping a fresh set of records for the new year. The accounting geniuses at a top firm like PricewaterhouseCoopers might not approve, but it worked for Nathan.

At least at first. As sales volume swelled, Nathan's Famous was on its way to becoming the busiest restaurant in America. The task of managing all aspects of the business became more difficult. Nathan struggled fiercely to keep up. All the rules he instituted flowed directly from his no-nonsense personality. The store became a mirror of the man. His personal obsessions about cleanliness, quality, and service played out in the day-to-day functioning of the store.

“It was just a single restaurant,” said Charles Schneck, “but the place was run with procedures that rivaled IBM.”

Prominent among those procedures was the Count.

“Everything at Nathan's was counted,” said former Nathan's manager Sidney Handwerker. “The frankfurters, the rolls, the french fry bags, everything.” Nathan knew to the dog the number his supplier delivered. He recorded how many he had left at the end of the day. He compared the tally with the amount in the till.

“We used to count frankfurters every day,” recalled Hy Brown. “We knew how many frankfurters we started the day with. We knew how many frankfurters we finished with. Any frankfurters that were broken were put in a separate box. Any frankfurters that were given out free—for employees to eat, or the police, or anybody else who was involved with free frankfurters—we had to put a chip in the register to account for it. The next day when the tallies were finished, they were always pretty close to the amount of money we took in for frankfurters.”

As a method of inventory control, it was pretty basic. But it worked because Nathan had an iron hand. His illiteracy took nothing away from his business acumen.

Former Nathan's Famous accountant Aaron Eliach recalled showing Nathan a financial statement he had prepared. “I was very proud of myself,” he said, believing he had done excellent work.

Nathan examined the spreadsheet. “You're $10,000 off in the inventory.”

“How would he know that?” Eliach remembered asking himself. “I didn't think he knew anything about accounting. But I went through my numbers, and sure enough, he was right.”

Eliach realized that his client basically kept track of the store's whole business in his head. “Whenever I discussed numbers with him, he knew exactly what I was talking about. He knew everything that was happening. I mean, the inventory wasn't a small inventory. Ten thousand dollars wasn't a major part of it, because we had inventory in cold storage and in warehouses. This was just numbers, so $10,000 wasn't a material amount. How he knew it, I will never figure it out.”

“He felt nothing should interfere with business,” said Hy Brown. “Business was business. He could be the kindest, nicest guy away from the store, but in the store, he didn't want anybody to think that he was letting down his guard.”

There was another aspect of the Count, just as vital but more troublesome. As owners of other cash businesses know, and all drug dealers come to learn, handling the money can be a much bigger headache than inventory. Banks would not take loose change. Every penny, nickel, dime, and quarter had to be packed into paper sleeves.

The money taken in at the store was in a very literal sense filthy lucre. Coins and bills both were slimed with grease, salt, sand, and sweat. The currency was often crumpled.

With paper money, the job was to count out a hundred one-dollar bills and secure them with a currency wrapper. “You had to take the greasy bills out of a box,” Nathan's nephew Sidney Handwerker recalled. “To try to flatten them, we used to sit on them.”

Sidney remembered an incident where one of the bills he was sitting on stuck to his behind and threw off his count. “I wrapped up the hundred, and then the next one I put underneath my leg had 101 bills in it,” he said.

Nathan double-checked the kid's work and saw that the count was off. “Go back on the sandwich station,” Nathan commanded. “You can't count anymore.” All because a dollar bill had stuck to the bottom of young Sidney's pants.

Eventually, the money counting operations were transferred to a small room at the back of the store, located beneath the stairs to the second floor. It was what passed for a vault on the premises, where the proceeds from the day's business wound up. The door was made of metal for security purposes.

Rolling the coins, in particular, was tedious work. Count, roll, count, roll, for hours on end. Nathan's oldest son, Murray, was often placed on counting duty. “In those days before the machines, you counted with two fingers,” he said. “You spread out the coins—twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. Ten dollars of quarters or nickels. It all had to be packed.”

Tallying the avalanche of coins from the weekend took all of Monday. At every step along the way, there were opportunities for employees to skim. One cleaning person was caught pocketing the coins he salvaged when he took up the store's floorboards for a steam wash.

How to handle the immense amount of cash bedeviled Nathan for years. The old method of cigar boxes placed beneath the counter was replaced by a fancier system that used suction to vacuum paper currency away from where it was collected, transferring it to central collection boxes. But coin counting remained a thorn in the side of the business. It would not be fully mechanized until the postwar years—and even then, the modernizing process would cause friction between Nathan and his sons.

 

12

Growing Up Coney

“That was my whole life, lower Brooklyn.” Murray Handwerker, lower right, with sister Leah and Aunt Lily.

DURING THE 1920
S
and '30s, Nathan and his family lived in a series of rented apartments, always fairly close to the store. In 1925, they moved in at 2890 W. Twenty-First Street, just off Mermaid Avenue, and then relocated three blocks east to Mermaid Avenue and Seventeenth Street. From 1935 on, the family lived in a three-bedroom apartment at 1119 Ocean Parkway in Brighton Beach, across the street from Washington Cemetery. Coney Island was a brisk walk or a short bus ride away.

The residential neighborhoods in the area were overwhelmingly Jewish, with dollops of Irish folded in. Life transpired in a circumscribed, almost provincial environment, embracing such traditional New York City activities as bouncing a Spaldeen against the steps of the front stoop, but with the added charm of having a beach and amusement parks nearby.