Famous Nathan (24 page)

Joe took on more and more responsibility, so there were more and more things for the two men to disagree over, more issues to shout about. Joe would almost always be the one to back down.

“Okay, Nathan, you're right,” he would admit after the tiff cooled. “I'll do it differently.”

Beginning in the late thirties, Joe was responsible for much of the store's purchasing. His boss relied on him. But whatever he did, whatever position he filled, Joe always had an authority figure looking over his shoulder. Nathan would double-check his work. It must have been maddening, but as volatile as the relationship was, it managed to endure.

In the New York area, the freshest ingredients came from the teeming central markets of Manhattan—the Gansevoort meatpacking district centered around West Fourteenth Street, and the Commission Market on Washington Street was for produce, located on what was then called the Lower West Side, before it became Tribeca. Joe would oversee the night shift and then journey into the city, checking the onions, examining the sides of beef himself, putting in a fourteen- or sometimes sixteen-hour workday.

“He enjoyed the politics of the purchasing,” recalled Steve Handwerker. “He liked interacting with the vendors and being ‘Joe from Nathan's.' He really enjoyed that part of it.”

Wartime rationing and shortages made the purchasing job exponentially more difficult. Good beef was an especially sought-after commodity. It was only the mutual loyalty of Nathan and his suppliers that got the store through the war years. Nathan's Famous tried all sorts of strategies to stretch its supply of meat. The store shrunk the size of its servings, including dishing up a smaller frank.

“Then meat became very scarce to the point where we couldn't get enough product,” Joe said. “So [Nathan] gave an order to only serve the servicemen, and only the servicemen in uniform. Civilians couldn't get served at certain hours. Then the servicemen got wise, and instead of buying two franks, they bought ten. They sold the extras. They paid a nickel, and they sold them for a quarter.”

In response, the store had to limit even soldiers to two hot dogs apiece.

But with Nathan's Famous frankfurters selling for a quarter on the black market, the writing was on the wall. One high-profile casualty of the war was the celebrated nickel frankfurter. The price of meat became too high to sustain the price point. Nathan resisted as long as he possibly could, depending on sales volume to make up the difference. But it was a losing proposition.

“The frankfurters were seven to the pound, which was a pretty large frankfurter,” recalled longtime manager Hy Brown. “As time went by, rather than raise the price, we would make the frankfurter a little smaller. We went to seven and a half to the pound. We'd try and keep the price as long as we could, because Nathan's theory was always to give the best for the least and trust that volume would cover everything else.”

In terms of modern buying power, the nickels that customers were shoving across the counter were becoming worth less and less, the equivalent of today's eighty-seven cents in 1935, eighty-five cents in 1940, eighty-one cents in 1941, seventy-three cents in 1942, and down to sixty-six cents in 1945.

The business was beginning to resemble a Ponzi scheme, with increasing numbers of customers in one year making up for slimming profit margins from the year before. There was nothing for it. The nickel dog had to go.

Paul Berlly, the Hygrade Provision rep, was finally the one who tipped the scales. Nathan complained to him that the spiraling cost of meat was cutting into the store's profits. At the time, the store was going through a hundred and fifty barrels of franks per week, six hundred in each barrel. Hygrade was charging forty-five cents per eight count, which worked out to be more than five cents a frank. Nathan's Famous was actually losing money on its signature item, making up the difference on other menu offerings and especially on drink sales.

“So why don't you raise the price?” Berlly asked.

“Oh, we'll lose half the business.”

“I'll tell you what, Nathan. Hygrade will back any amount of business that you lose. We'll make good. Understand?”

Nathan caved, but he was still upset about it. When the price rise went into effect, he reacted with a sort of embarrassed shame.

“He didn't want to face his old-time customers,” recalled Hy Brown. “He didn't want for them to say, ‘Ah, Nathan, now that you're getting rich, you're changing the price.'”

When the price of a dog got kicked up to seven cents in 1944, Nathan left town rather than face the music. He didn't show himself around the store for days. The seven-cent frankfurter was a major pain for the countermen, since they were forced to make change in pennies. But more than that, in Nathan's mind, it represented a kind of moral failing. In a quite literal demonstration as to how important Nathan's Famous was to the working class, the Communist Party USA organized a protest over the price hike.

Juggling price and size eventually got Joe in trouble from the wartime Office of Price Administration, which accused him, as the primary purchaser of the meat that went into the Nathan's Famous frankfurter, of market manipulation, a.k.a. price gouging. Facing the charges, a panicked Joe ordered a fresh sign painted with a revised set of prices.

“Five cents, small frankfurter,” read the new, hastily assembled menu. “Seven cents, medium frankfurter; ten cents, large frankfurter.” In reality, no separately sized franks existed. The whole scheme was a ruse to fend off the Office of Price Administration's allegations.

In whatever manner Joe maneuvered through his troubles, having a trusted second-in-command represented a great boon for Nathan during the war, when his gnawing worry over his sons distracted him from his usual hawk-like vigilance at work.

By the war's end, Nathan would be approaching his thirtieth year at the store, thirty years of vigilance and hard work, always on his feet, always watching, correcting, controlling. It wasn't that he was tired or ready to retire. He just wanted his boys to join him in the business, so the passing of the torch, when it came, could be done as smoothly as possible.

It didn't work out that way.

 

15

The Prodigal Sons Return

“And music, and dancing, with all the food you could possibly eat!” Murray
(left)
and Sol Handwerker in Europe, 1945.

FOR THE MAJORITY
of 11.5 million men and women who served abroad during World War II, the experience represented an indelible and formative part of their lives. Murray and Sol were no different. They were both in the U.S. Army in Europe for over two years, and they both returned to the States changed men.

Murray spent a good portion of his service in France and came away as a confirmed Francophile, impressed with the people, the culture, and, most importantly for his future dealings with Nathan's Famous, the food.

The idea of cuisine—as opposed to eats—entered his personal makeup. He would forever afterward aspire to fine dining, white tablecloths, sit-down meals. The oldest Handwerker son's time in Europe worked to separate him from the basic “give 'em and let 'em eat” philosophy of his father. The developing friction did not express itself immediately, but it would soon act as a wedge that came between Murray and Nathan.

Sol's time with the U.S. Army could best be summed up by the fact that he spent a stretch of his time in Switzerland studying playwriting. He visited art museums. Although he did enter Dresden soon after the city was leveled by Allied bombing and was among the soldiers present at the April 25, 1945, meeting of the Russian and American armies in the city of Torgau on the Elbe River, he never saw actual battle.

This state of affairs is not so odd as it sounds. For the almost two million American soldiers in the European theater, the experience varied widely, from the bloody beaches of Normandy and the horrific winter conditions during the Battle of the Bulge to less dangerous service like Sol's.

Murray and Sol were quite literally brothers in arms. Incredibly enough, given the absolute chaos Europe was back then, they managed to meet up. Sol heard that his brother was nearby, found a car and driver, and sought Murray out. The two G.I.s had a short but emotional reunion amid the fog of war.

Murray had gone overseas first and returned first also. His parents greeted their all-grown-up boy like a conquering hero. “They were so enthralled,” Dorothy remembered. She portrays Nathan as spreading the news throughout the Coney Island community.

“Thank God Murray's home,” said the proud papa. “He's right here!”

Sol took a slightly different approach to his homecoming. One morning in 1946 the First Army headquarters phoned Nathan.

“The first American soldier to meet the Russians at the crossing of the Elbe has returned to the States,” said the officer's voice on the other end of the line, an embellishment of the truth. “This G.I.'s first request was for a frank at Nathan's.”

Could Mr. Handwerker possibly accommodate a heroic boy in uniform? Nathan didn't have to be asked twice. He quickly decorated the store with red-white-and-blue banners normally reserved for July 4th. He hired three musicians to provide patriotic songs in preparation for the G.I.'s arrival.

The soldier arrived with a public-relations officer and a photographer who posed him munching a Nathan's Famous frankfurter. Nathan came out of the store and pushed his way through the milling crowd, announcing “This frankfurter is on the house!”

His jaw dropped when he realized the G.I. was Sol, a wide grin on his face and a discharge emblem on his uniform. A miracle! And one that tested the cardiac systems of both parents.

Nathan was overjoyed. In celebration of the safe return of his sons, he commissioned a Sefer Torah at the local synagogue. The creation of a new holy scroll was an elaborate, highly prized, and expensive undertaking, a mitzvah that did great honor to Murray and Sol. The inauguration celebration, the Hachnasat Sefer Torah, is based on traditions that are at least three thousand years old. This one filled the streets around the store with dancing, singing, and feasting.

“The entire Coney Island was there,” remembered family friend Claire Kamiel. “All the food that you could possibly eat was brought in by Nathan Handwerker. They walked with the scroll through the streets. And music, and dancing, with
all the food you could possibly eat
! Nobody was questioned. Only one thing: help yourself, enjoy! Nathan Handwerker!”

In the aftermath of the war's upheavals, displacements, and horrors, the mood in both the country at large and around Nathan's Famous centered on an overwhelming urge to return to some kind of normalcy. It was probably a vain hope. Monstrous revelations concerning the murder of six million victims in the Holocaust were beginning to filter over from Europe. Mushroom clouds hung above two cities in Japan. The world could never really be the same again.

But Nathan tried. His vision of normal was simple. He wanted his sons working at the store, continuing to learn the business, making themselves ready to take over when, in some unimaginable future, the founder would be ready to retire. At first, both veterans dutifully fell in line and took jobs under Nathan's watchful, hopeful eye. But they also indulged in other, grander plans, both entering college under the GI Bill.

Before the war, Murray had attended the University of Pennsylvania, but he returned to the States with other ideas. He enrolled at New York University and graduated with a degree in French. The boy who had so impressed his young girlfriend with a mastery of Chopin was essentially doubling down on his high-culture enthusiasms. How fluency in French might serve him at the store was a question largely left unasked. The father who had never spent a day in class (outside of a brief brush with Hebrew lessons) was probably too impressed with his son's college degree to voice any doubts.

“Nathan tried to teach his sons what he knew,” said Jay Cohen. “I'm sure that he saw that some things they couldn't learn no matter what college they went to.”

To some extent, Nathan himself was caught in the middle. To the old guard, he was a god, his way being the only way. He desperately wanted his sons in the business. But he wanted them there on his terms. The difference between the two camps cropped up constantly.

“Murray, you've got to be on the line,” Nathan would tell his son. “You've got to be in the store.”

“No, no, no,” Murray would respond. “I have managers for that.”

“Nathan was not an office person,” said Jay Cohen. “As soon as lunchtime came around, he would be outside there, watching the potatoes and how they were cooked, how the frankfurters were cooked, and if this or that was served properly and so on and so forth.”

That kind of vigilance was hugely responsible for the success of the store. But Murray and Sol could not bring themselves to follow their father's lead.