Famous Nathan (22 page)

“The boys were more understanding. Murray, my father, was more understanding of that. And certainly Leah wasn't. I remember she was very angry, always blaming Grandma and Grandpa. And Grandma had a lot of guilt about that. They both had a lot of guilt about that.”

Nathan freely admitted to the agonizing dilemma of the first-generation immigrant. “I just don't have the time,” he said. “I feel badly about it, but I don't have the time to be with my kids. My children.”

Later, as Leah grew into adulthood, there would be other injustices. Nathan and Ida ruled out a marriage to her “first love,” believing the match to be inappropriate. Although she married later, she would never forgive her parents for their interference.

The high season on Coney Island remained a jealous god. During the glorious summers, when visitors flocked to the seaside in the millions, the Handwerker children were shipped the other way, to summer camps in the Pocono Mountains. They all loved the experience. Sol remembers his introduction to camp life when he was four years old.

“My mother and father brought me up to visit my sister and brother in Pennsylvania, at Camp Navajo. When time came to return home, I refused to go. I wanted to stay.”

Remain behind he did. Nathan and Ida went back to their twelve- and fifteen-hour workdays in Brooklyn. Leah, Sol, and Murray spent all their childhood summers at camp. It didn't seem like a particular hardship to the children.

“I loved camp,” Sol remembered. “I was always looking forward to going back, and I enjoyed it when I did. I was good at sports and athletics. I was good at track and running. I liked everything about it. Baseball, basketball, handball. I just enjoyed it.”

The family circle was forever becoming more and more extended. At one time, four of the brothers—Israel, Harry, Morris, and Nathan—all ran Coney Island businesses within blocks of each other. Phillip also had a candy store and a bar and grill. The sisters got into the act, too. Anna Singer ran a food stand and scooter ride located directly across Schweikerts Walk from Nathan's Famous, a sort of adjunct or branch of the store. The Schuchmans, Hyman and his wife, Lena—Nathan's sister—owned the Atlantis, a bar, eatery, and dance hall on the boardwalk where Frank Sinatra and other popular entertainers performed.

Although it might have seemed that Coney would go on forever, changes were happening that would transform the seaside resort town. The innocent fun-seekers of the midthirties were like swimmers in a tub whose plug had been pulled. They felt the underneath tug as the water began to drain but were having too much fun to realize the high times would soon come to an end. Historical forces acted upon the area that were beyond anyone's control. War was coming. America was shedding old ways and acquiring new ones. Few people grasped the full extent of the transformations ahead.

More than a few of those transformations came at the hands of a single man. In the halls of power, a figure had arisen who would threaten everything Coney Island was celebrated for, from the Bowery to Steeplechase, from Luna Park to Nathan's Famous. Master builder and political insider Robert Moses had little appreciation for the popular amusements that so many millions loved.

Son of a New Haven real estate speculator, Yale educated, Moses was often pictured posed in front of one of the scale models showing the various developments he championed. He gazed down at the miniature cityscapes like an all-knowing lord. The humans in those scale models would have been the size of ants, easily brushed aside.

The source of Moses's influence arose from force of personality, not from any mandate from voters. The only time he ran for office, as a Republican candidate in the 1934 race for New York governor, he lost by eight hundred thousand votes. His power was bureaucratic, not democratic.

Moses cast a cold eye on Coney Island, dismissing the whole affair as a low-class bauble that scarred the city's coastline—loud, garish, and louche. Confronted by the raucous reality of an amusement park, Moses was not amused. He had other plans for the place, radically different from the chaotic fun zone that was so fast, so cheap, and so out of control. Where others saw entertainment and enjoyment, Moses envisioned tidy parks and high-rise housing developments.

“Such beaches as the Rockaways and those on Long Island and Coney Island lend themselves to summer exploitation, to honky-tonk catchpenny amusement resorts, shacks built without reference to health, sanitation, safety, and decent living,” Moses said.

“Why did [the shoreline of New York] end up with so much government-financed housing?” asked Robert Caro, author of
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
. “Largely because Robert Moses wanted it there.”

In 1934, Mayor La Guardia appointed Moses as commissioner for a new, reorganized citywide Department of Parks. Four years later, La Guardia transferred control of city beaches from the borough presidents to the Department of Parks. Coney Island thus acquired a new master. La Guardia's successor, Mayor William O'Dwyer, named Moses citywide “construction coordinator.”

Robert Moses was a busy man. He had highways to plan, parks to develop, bridges to build. He couldn't act on his designs for Coney Island immediately. It would take a few years for him to get around to it, but he would eventually allow his heavy hand to pass across the landscape of the small spit of sand at the southern terminus of Brooklyn. When he did, the effects would be far reaching and ultimately catastrophic.

Nathan Handwerker and, in later years to a lesser degree, his son Murray would battle the power broker every step of the way. As it was, Coney Island in the years before the war stood poised on a precipice. The lights still shone like beacons, the barkers still barked, and the crowds still lined up outside Nathan's Famous. But looking east, toward Europe, a darkness gathered. Coney's midthirties high season was coming to a close.

 

14

The War

“Most of the business started at midnight. As soon as all the lights went off all over the place, we got jammed.” Nathan's Famous during World War II.

IN THE SPRING
of 1939 a sprawling, 1,200-acre exposition opened on the site of a former swamp and garbage dump in Flushing, Queens. Originally conceived as an economic boost for Depression-ravaged New York City, the 1939 World's Fair would host forty-four million visitors before it closed in October 1940. With a “Dawn of Tomorrow” theme, the massive enterprise was supposed to foster a progressive, optimistic atmosphere.

During the eighteen months the fair was open, world events overtook the best-laid plans of its organizers. Citing “economic reasons,” Germany abandoned preparations for a colossal cannons-and-monuments pavilion, designed to showcase its imperial designs. Anti-Nazi opposition to the German presence at the fair had risen to fierce levels, and eventually, Hitler's government decided it would prefer to spend its money on tanks, not fair exhibits. But the Jewish Palestine Pavilion went ahead as planned, introducing and promoting the Zionist idea of a Jewish state.

Nathan's Famous was there, too. Nathan opened four outlets on the World's Fair grounds. Two of them braced the fair's famed Parachute Jump, later to become a fixture on Coney Island. The Nathan's Famous outlets were primarily drink stands that did not even feature the store's trademark hot dogs. The 1939 fair was one of the few times that Leah—then coming up on her nineteenth birthday—worked in the business.

Another of the Nathan's Famous booths was located in the six-acre Children's World area of the fair, near the Swan Ride and in the shadow of a small, very tame Ferris wheel. Working at this booth, busily making malteds, was a teenaged girl named Dorothy “Dottie” Frankel. At age seventeen, she was already Murray's longtime childhood sweetheart.

They had met in 1936, when she was fourteen and he was fifteen, while sharing an American history class at Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway. Dottie was a Bronx girl whose family had only recently relocated to Brooklyn. Murray's opening line to his fourteen-year-old crush: “Are you interested in ballet?”

It just so happened that Dottie was. “How did you know?”

“I can tell by your legs,” replied the budding Lothario.

“From the age of fourteen on,” Dottie recalled, “it was really a romance.”

Murray happened to have tickets to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, at that time one of the foremost ballet companies of the world.

“Would you be interested in going?” Murray asked.

“Of course,” Dottie replied. He took her for a predate test run of sorts, on a walk down the boardwalk to the Tuxedo theater. The grand movie palace, on Ocean Parkway at Brighton Beach Avenue just north of the BMT subway line, was ornate, inexpensive, and jam-packed with activities.

“In those days, they used to have bingo plus movies and all sorts of other short features. And they gave away dishes. All for ten cents. On the back of my bingo card, I wrote, ‘Nice boy,' with about seventeen exclamation marks.”

Murray sealed the deal on his visit to Dottie's house to pick her up for the ballet. “We had a piano, and he sat down and played Chopin. Well, that did it. He invites me to the ballet,
and
he plays Chopin? What more could a girl want?”

But the course of true love did not run smooth.

“Right before the senior prom, Murray stopped seeing me,” Dorothy remembered. “He didn't call or anything. Oh, I was flabbergasted.” It turned out that her erstwhile boyfriend had a thrifty streak that prevented him from laying out the funds for a proper prom date. Dottie went to the dance with another boy.

“I accepted this other invitation not because I liked him—I really didn't—but because I wanted to show Murray, ‘Ha-ha, who needs you?' Inside, I was devastated. And you know what? He wasn't even there! All of that was for naught. I mean, I went to the prom, but my heart wasn't in it.”

Murray soon resurfaced with “a lovely letter” to Dorothy, and the two made up. In the letter, he quoted a truism of the day, attributed to automobile industrialist Henry Ford: “Never explain. Your enemies won't believe you, and your friends don't need it.”

Later in life, Dorothy laughed over the memory. “That was his big explanation for why he vanished out of the blue!”

After that, the two were rarely apart. At first, Dorothy was blissfully unaware of what she was getting herself into. The fame of Nathan's Famous had not penetrated into the Frankel household. “I had never heard of Nathan's. First of all, my mother would never let us eat hot dogs or delicatessen. I think she thought it was poison. Even when I found out that his father was Nathan of Nathan's Famous, I was very unimpressed because I had never been there.”

Eventually, Dorothy Frankel found her way into the Handwerker family fold. It was Murray who secured his young girlfriend the summer job at the World's Fair malted booth.

Among the visitors to the exhibition were King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England, the first British monarchs to sojourn in the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt engineered the visit as part of his effort to cement relations between the two countries and to ease the grip of American isolationism. The trip was something of a PR effort. FDR knew war was looming in Europe, and he wanted his fellow citizens to see the royals as just plain folks, since he knew the United Kingdom would need its former colony's help in facing off with the Nazis.

In addition to the World's Fair, the king and queen visited a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington—and trekked to Roosevelt's Hyde Park estate for a country picnic. It is a measure of the period that when FDR decided to serve the Windsors a downscale luncheon of hot dogs, the world let out a collective gasp. The June 11, 1939, picnic came to be nicknamed the “Hot Dog Summit,” since it combined diplomacy with just-plain-folks democratic eats.

When the queen whispered a question to her hostess, Eleanor Roosevelt—“How do you eat this?”—was she referring to a Nathan's Famous frankfurter? She used a knife and fork, but when the king took his serving in hand and even asked for seconds, was he reacting to the quality of the bestselling hot dog in Coney Island? Was the frankfurter served at the summit from Nathan's?

That was the story that circulated in the picnic's aftermath. You can trace its genesis in the literature about the event. The Hot Dog Summit's frankfurter became a Nathan's Famous hot dog only after the fact. There is no evidence one way or another in reports from the time.

Given Nathan's in-tight relationship with Democratic leaders, he could conceivably have catered the event. It would be nice to think so. But again, as with Ida's secret spice recipe, a PR man's opportunistic imagination most likely was in play. His Majesty chowing down on Nathan's franks became an anecdote, taken up and repeated in histories of the summit and of Nathan's Famous. It's hard to keep a good story down. The
New York Times,
a.k.a. the paper of record, reports that it was a Smith's frank.