Famous Nathan (25 page)

“The damned business was Nathan's life, and his family probably came second,” Cohen said. “His children were not into the nitty-gritty of the business. Nathan was into the nitty-gritty. He was there behind the potato chopper. He saw to it that you understood what he wanted on a daily basis. But his sons were not into that. They were not into the nitty-gritty.”

No one could challenge Murray's devotion to Nathan's Famous. His presence definitely relieved some pressure from his father. With the able Joe Handwerker installed as general manager and purchasing agent, and with his eldest son also taking larger responsibility for running the overall business, Nathan felt that he and Ida could at long last absent themselves from the store for extended periods. He didn't want to retire, and he still saw himself as very much in charge, but he did want to step back.

Nathan and Ida's winter sojourns in Florida at first lasted weeks and then stretched to months. They always returned for the season. Winter was a relatively slack time in Coney Island, anyway. There came to be a rhythm to the flow of power at the store. Nathan and Ida always thought it was their patriotic duty to vote. They would wait until after Election Day in November, then they would decamp, turning the business over to Joe and Murray. Months later, the couple would come back to take up their responsibilities during the busy summer rush.

“When Nathan was in Florida, Nathan's Famous was foremost on his mind,” said Marsha Abramson. “There were calls from him and questions that had to be answered. When he came back to Coney Island in April, you felt his presence. Things started changing as soon as he came back.”

Nathan was a “trust but verify” kind of person. Whenever he left the store for his Florida sojourns, he would always fully reassert himself upon his return.

“It wasn't a week in the spring when he got back [from vacation] that he changed every padlock in the building,” recalled Jay Cohen. “That man must have gone through seven thousand padlocks in the years that I knew him, because that's how he operated.”

Transitions were hard. The handover of authority was always a little difficult. Speaking of his father, Sol put it simply: “He couldn't not be in charge.”

Even from Florida, the store was only a phone call away. Murray remembered a brutal winter day in December 1947, soon after he returned from the war. His father was on vacation and, as Murray phrased it, “the famous store was me.” He and Dorothy lived on Twenty-Third Street between Avenues M and N at that time. Snow started to fall the day after Christmas and didn't stop until almost twenty-seven inches had piled up. Over his wife's objections, Murray pulled on his boots and set out for Nathan's Famous.

“You can't!” Dorothy wailed, about to be left behind with the couple's first child, Steve. “The snow is so thick on the roof, it's going to collapse. You can't leave me alone here!”

But neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could stay Murray from his appointed job. “I walked four miles to get to the store from my house, down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island. Not a car was in the street. No cabs.”

When he finally made it to Nathan's Famous, he found many of the employees marooned there, sleeping overnight because the subways were halted. That morning, the phone rang. Murray answered. It was Nathan, calling from Florida.

“What are you doing in the store?”

“I'm here,” Murray said. “We're open.”

“How did you get there?”

“I walked.”

“You're crazy. There's fourteen inches of snow!”

“Twenty-seven,” Murray corrected him.

A pause. “Did you do any business?” Nathan asked.

“Believe it or not, we sold 150 frankfurters already.”

Murray felt responsible. With Nathan gone, he had to be there. But the store's clientele had to be there, too. Even in the decade's worst snowstorm, they heard the siren call of Nathan's franks. Murray went on to serve six thousand hot dogs that blizzard-bound day.

“People drove up and, so help me God, they didn't get out of the car,” he remembered. “They drove on the sidewalk, parallel to the counter, opened up the window to the car and called out to us. ‘Four frankfurters!' We handed the frankfurters directly over to them.”

*   *   *

Murray was an able steward of his father's legacy and looked constantly to innovate. But the disagreements that arose between Nathan and Murray became a source of friction around the store during the postwar years.

A prime case in point came when Murray proposed adding seafood to the store's menu. His father instantly came out against the idea. He thought the move might turn the store's traditional customers away.

“You want to do seafood?” Nathan said. “People think our frankfurters are kosher. You're going to sell shrimp? They're gonna say, ‘Wait a second.' You'll kill the business!”

“I never tell people it's kosher,” Murray responded. “It's kosher-style.”

“People will stop buying the hot dogs,” Nathan said, thinking of his clientele of observant Jews. “They're not supposed to buy where there's nonkosher food.”

“Don't worry about it, Pop. It's a new world. The people coming back from Europe, the soldiers, the thousands of soldiers, what did they eat in Italy? What did they eat in Germany and France? They weren't worried about kosher.”

Round and round went the argument, Murray pushing, Nathan resisting. Finally, Nathan retreated from the field, taking a long winter vacation. “If you want to do it, then I'm going to go to Florida. Do it on your own. I want nothing to do with it.”

With his father gone, Murray was free to do what he wanted. He installed his seafood counter, offering shrimp, fresh abalone, soft-shell crabs, lobster rolls, and a chowder made with fresh-shucked clams.

In terms of Jewish dietary strictures, many of the seafood offerings were
trayf
. Murray took a calculated risk that customers would embrace the new menu items. After all, didn't pioneer frankfurter man Charles Feltman start out selling clams?

In addition to the seafood counter, Murray also decided that Nathan's Famous would be dragged into the contemporary age of proper food service hygiene. Back at the dawn of time, Nathan had installed original shelving made out of wood, a no-no in terms of modern public health concerns, since wood could be a breeding ground for germs.

“I came in early in the morning one day, and I went to the counters in the kitchen,” Murray recalled. “I saw a couple of cockroaches, which just sickened me.”

He confronted Sinta, the absolute ruler of the store's kitchen. “How the hell can you work in here every day? How do you do that?”

Sinta told him that the kitchen staff had to replace the cardboard lining on the shelves every week, it got so battered in the ordinary course of doing business. Murray ripped the freshly laid cardboard off and dumped it into a waste can.

“Strip the whole counter down,” he ordered the cook.

“How are we going to work here?” Sinta asked.

“You're working in the other kitchen,” Murray said, referring to a secondary space at the back of the store. “You're doing a section at a time. I want everything stripped and thrown out.”

Murray knew that wood was unacceptable for kitchen shelving and that the modern standard was sanitary stainless steel. “I called my stainless-steel man, who became very wealthy because of me. I told him to make measurements and that I wanted stainless-steel shelves in the entire kitchen and in the entire refrigeration section.”

“Murray, I've got other customers,” the man complained.

“No, no, I'm your only customer right now. You have to help me, because I have to change this whole kitchen. I don't want to see wood, and I don't want to see cardboard in the kitchen at all.”

Out with the old wood, in with the new stainless. Murray had the ancient floor planking ripped out, too, and laid new concrete in the kitchens as well as along the counter spaces up front. The clock was ticking, since Nathan would soon be returning from his Florida retreat. When he did show up back at the store, he was confronted by the new world order.

Nathan said not a word. To receive a compliment from Pop was like pulling teeth, “well done” being an almost unheard of phrase around the store. Nathan believed that praise only rendered workers complacent. More than that, a good word might make them greedy.

“We had a little guy who was working on the counter,” Jay Cohen recalled. “The guy was running around all over the place, really energetic. With a slip of the mouth, Nathan said ‘good work' to the kid. The kid said, ‘Hey, boss, how about a raise?' Nathan ran. He never once said good morning to that guy after that incident.”

As Sol articulated it, referring to his father, “He was less inclined to compliment somebody on doing something well than to criticize someone for doing something wrong. He was not prone to complimenting people too much, especially his sons.”

Giving a rueful laugh, Sol went on. “He took it for granted that they were going to do something good and that they should do something good. It was expected of them. But that seemed to be his old-school approach to personnel management.”

It was all the more of a miracle, then, that Nathan extended an olive branch to his son when the seafood counter took off in a spectacular way, reeling in profits for the store.

“You had a good idea, Murray,” Nathan said, finally giving credit where it was due, the terse compliment coming as if he were being charged by the word.

Nathan remained wary and slightly cynical about his son's penchant for innovation. There would be many more ideas emanating from Murray's young, ambitious, and very active brain. Some of them would be great, terrifically successful along the lines of the seafood menu or eminently necessary like modernizing the kitchen facilities.

Others would lead the business into difficulties.

*   *   *

When he returned from his military service, Sol went in a direction very different from his older brother.

“I was not particularly anxious to work [at Nathan's Famous] when I got out of the army. I went to NYU and then worked in a machine shop. I wanted to be on my own. I wanted to be independent. I felt [working at the store] was going to be a difficult thing, with my father and his personality and my brother and his personality. I was the odd man out.”

If Murray came back from Europe with visions of French culture dancing in his head, Sol had proletarian dreams. He became a union shop steward at his new working-class factory job. He continued to be active in left-leaning causes, which in those days meant labor issues and peace initiatives.

The Cold War was ramping up, and the Iron Curtain was slamming down. The American right wing was busy whipping up anti-communist fervor. Almost overnight, the country found itself in the Orwellian position of seeing its former Russian allies suddenly transformed and demonized as the enemy.

As the postwar era bled into the Eisenhower fifties, witch hunts of political radicals began in earnest. It was a bad time to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, which Sol had decided to become. This put him further at odds not only with Murray, whose politics increasingly veered toward moderation, but also with Nathan, the very prototype of a capitalist.

Nathan never forgot his poor upbringing and always arrayed himself on the side of the underdog. So he could be said to be at least partially responsible for Sol's leftward leanings. But Nathan was also leery of getting too directly involved in politics and chuckled at Sol's socialist passions.

In reaction to the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the fiery demagoguery of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, Sol felt that he was vulnerable, and he briefly fled to California. He was probably too small a fish for the red-baiters to fry, but the mood of the country was dark and unsettled. Better safe than sorry. He soon returned to Brooklyn.

On a train ride from New York to Chicago for a Decoration Day peace rally in 1952, Sol found a seat next to a literal fellow traveler, a Brooklyn college student named Minnie Geller, who was headed to the same event. She and Sol had friends in common. Their romance kicked off on the trip, somewhere along the rail line in the vicinity of Cleveland.

“I remember being very impressed by his lips,” Minnie recalled. “They were very luscious.”

When the two returned home to New York, they began dating. Minnie knew the young Sol only as a union organizer and a machine shop lathe tool operator. He didn't tell her about his Nathan's Famous connection until they had been seeing each other for months.

“I came from a working-class family,” Minnie said. “I knew poverty. Maybe he was skeptical about anyone who might be interested in him for his background. But when he finally told me, I didn't recognize his dad's name. It really meant nothing to me.”

Sol and Minnie made friends among his fellow workers at the machine shop. “We had a nice black couple that we used to go out with, to picnics with the guys from the shop. It was really, really nice.” She laughed with the reminiscence. “Sol had a lot of commie friends.”

Her parents, Chaim and Dora Geller, were simpatico with Sol's political views. “My parents were very pleased with the fact that he was a progressive person, fighting for good and just causes, which my parents liked very much. Sol's parents weren't progressive. But as long as Sol was, I guess that was good enough for my mom and dad. They liked that.” Dorothy Frankel's parents were also committed leftists.

Sol finally introduced Minnie to Nathan and Ida at a dinner where he also proposed marriage, pulling her into the bathroom for privacy and presenting his sweetheart with what Minnie characterized as a “beautiful” wedding ring. “I guess he was shy or very bashful or whatever,” Minnie recalled. “He didn't want anyone to be there except the two of us.”