Famous Nathan (28 page)

Murray had to admit his father made a valid point. The money that came in off the Nathan's Famous counter was filthy, contaminated by beach sand, fried-potato oil, frankfurter grease, and salt, if not mystery schmutz of unknown origin. Murray had to have the coins washed before they came into his cubbyhole office to be tallied.

Over Nathan's objections, Murray installed two machines in the counting room. The first machine separated the coins; the second packed them in the paper sleeves that he could take to the bank. Nathan was right. Sand, salt, and grease played hell with the fancy new devices. But thoroughly washing the coins first proved effective.

“We solved the problem, because cleaning the money was still much easier than doing it the old way,” Murray said. The machines stayed, and Nathan's Famous took another small step into the brave new world of automation.

*   *   *

The machines represented something greater than a mechanical shortcut. They indicated Murray's enthusiastic participation in the National Restaurant Association, a group that promoted scientific applications to food service issues. As a general manager at the store, he was all about finding new solutions to old problems. He was a man of his time.

The fifties were a period of almost boundless faith in progress, science, and new technology. In furniture stores along Broadway in Manhattan, wooden boxes with glass windows displayed flickering images, the first hint of the television revolution to come. Cars became bigger, better, glossier. Nuclear war represented the dark side of progress, but even that looming shadow would be dissipated by such “scientific” measures as installation of fallout shelters and duck-and-cover training in schools.

Gripped by the same sense that a modern approach could resolve all issues, Murray sought help to update management practices at the store. But staffing wasn't a problem you could address with a machine.

You needed a consultant.

In 1954, Murray found one in the person of Dr. Victor Eimicke, president of V. W. Eimicke Associates. The two met through the supplier of paper goods at the store, Ted Pinska, who had employed Dr. Eimicke in his own business. The consultant's academic background was in psychology. He billed himself as an “industrial psychologist,” or “business psychologist.”

He and Murray hit it off right away. Their families became close, to the degree that the toddler daughter of Victor Eimicke and his wife, Maxine, took her first steps in Murray and Dorothy's home. The couples socialized together, with the two men spending hours discussing updates to the antiquated business practices of Nathan's Famous.

Dr. Eimicke had developed a management approach he called “the table of organization.” He had used it before in consulting jobs with the insurance giant Blue Cross and a chain of grocery stores in Europe. Murray became determined that, under the good doctor's guidance, he would lift up the store by the scruff of its neck and shake some modern scientific sense into it.

Together, they worked up an alternative to Nathan's “I-look-at-the-back-of-the-neck” hiring philosophy, developing a rigorous program to test and train new managers. The recruitment process took a full year. Every step of the way was laid out in exhaustive detail. Potential candidates would submit to psychological evaluations and aptitude tests. Murray and Dr. Eimicke would also regularize the store's somewhat chaotic management structure, streamline the way the staff served customers, and change how work assignments were handled.

“Murray was just starting to get a handle on the new technique of the table of organization,” recalled Maxine Eimicke. “Victor, my husband, helped enormously. At that time, Nathan's just had a bunch of fellows around the counter, everybody helping anyone that walked up. Nobody was in charge.”

Flowcharts, organization, management training, and the scientific method would help smooth out the situation.

Nathan openly ridiculed the new methods. “Murray and his Dr. Eye-mick-keee,” he'd say. Part of this reaction was the cynicism of a man who had put in over three decades developing management practices of his own—crude, unschooled, and instinctual, but ones that had served him in good stead as he built one of the most successful businesses of his time.

“Victor Eimicke was going to come in and train the managers. He'd organize things so that the managers followed the principles that he believed in,” said Sol. “He ridiculed my father's method for a lot of it. Basically, I agreed with [Nathan]. I didn't have much use for Eimicke. I don't think he helped very much.”

Nathan's impatience boiled over during the lunchtime rush one day. Murray and Dr. Eimicke were closeted in the store's upstairs office, working out their plans. As usual, Nathan was out front, perched atop his box next to the root beer barrel, surveying his domain. When he didn't see Murray on the job, he exploded. The thought that anyone could sit in an office and believe they could manage the activity in the front counters and the kitchens downstairs struck him as ludicrous.

He charged upstairs and confronted his son. “Why are you in this place doing almost nothing, when there's so much to be done downstairs?”

Ensconced behind a desk cluttered with their work, Murray and Dr. Eimicke stared at him, astonished by the sudden interruption. With a sweep of his hand, Nathan crashed the desktop full of papers and charts to the floor. He ordered his son to take his place at the front counters.

Dr. Eimicke, unused to such direct, almost violent reaction to his work, immediately grabbed his briefcase and beat a hasty retreat. “Vic was not a violent man,” his wife said. “His policy was always to stay calm and talk things out.”

When Eimicke arrived back at their Bronxville home that day, Maxine took one look at his face and asked him what had happened. “Well, I almost got fired,” said the shell-shocked doctor. “Maybe I did and don't know it.”

With the wisdom of hindsight, the consultant came to a belated understanding of Nathan's anger. “Looking back, it makes sense,” he told his wife. “We should have broken off at the time, about eleven thirty or a quarter to twelve, going through the lunch hour, letting Murray be downstairs on the floor. Things downstairs weren't going right in [Nathan's] opinion, because there was a lunch-hour rush, and there were not enough servers to take care of the line. Nathan was upset about it. You know, that's money. That comes first.”

“Those are the kind of things that even executives have to learn,” Maxine Eimicke commented. “You've got to learn by doing.”

The storm passed. Dr. Eimicke wasn't fired, after all. Murray and he proceeded with their new table of organization methods. They took out blind ads in the New York newspapers that read, “Restaurant managers—$110 a week,” without mentioning Nathan's Famous. In 1954, that was an attractive salary for restaurant work, equivalent to almost $1,000 in today's money.

Those who answered the ad received a letter in response, directing them to show up in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Astor in Times Square at a specific day. A thousand people assembled at the time appointed, all men. Dr. Eimicke went in front of the group and explained that a certain organization wanted to expand. He remained coy about which company it was, saying only it had $3 million in gross receipts—again, an impressive number at the time. Eimicke laid out the training program requirements and the battery of tests that candidates would face. Then he finally told the crowd that they would be interviewing for a job at Nathan's Famous on Coney Island.

“Those of you who are not interested in continuing may leave,” Dr. Eimicke said.

A good portion of the crowd did. “All the chefs and cooks and gourmets got up and walked,” recalled Hy Brown, who was there that day and was eventually hired through the new program. “To them, Nathan's was still a hot dog stand, and it was still Coney Island. It wasn't Broadway.”

Dr. Eimicke allowed the uninterested to depart and the crowd to settle. “The rest of you will be given various aptitude tests over a period of time,” he announced. “The group will be dwindling down to a select few. We will make our choices then.”

The aptitude tests used various strategies to winnow out the pool of prospective managers. The questions were posed by psychologists seated on platforms, so that the experts would be elevated and could look down on the candidates.

When it came Jay Cohen's turn, the first questions were direct and challenging. “You have no restaurant experience at all. What do you know about a restaurant? What do you know about shrimp?”

“Listen, I'm a Jewish boy from New York,” Cohen said. “I don't know anything about shrimp. I don't know anything about any shellfish because we never had it.”

“Why do you think you could be a manager for us?”

“I have basic abilities in management,” Cohen answered. “But not having any experience, I assume that you'll help train me to do what you want me to do. And if I learn what you want me to do, I'll do that. I won't know any other way, and I won't have any preconceived convictions.”

The interviewers asked a final question. “Where would you like to be a year from now?”

“Sitting up there asking the questions that you're posing to people,” Cohen responded.

The new initiative did result in some impressive hires, managers who would stay with Nathan's Famous for decades, including Cohen and Hy Brown. Other newcomers did not fit in. Charles Schneck, who signed on as the company's director of personnel in the 1960s, assessed the hiring program's successes and failures, including the complex battery of tests Dr. Eimicke instituted to gauge a prospect's suitability. Eventually he decided the process wasn't working.

“These tests don't do what they are supposed to do,” Schneck told Murray. “I think we should change the tests or do away with them altogether.”

“Let's give it a little more time,” Murray said. But he finally saw the light, and stopped using Dr. Eimicke to test job applicants.

At the same time, the consultant had come to admire Nathan's native intelligence and canny business sense. Eimicke thought, for example, that Nathan's practice of reducing the size of his frankfurter rather than raising the price was a truly remarkable strategy.

“Victor thought that was genius, because no one could tell the difference,” Maxine recalled. “The customer could not tell the difference in the size of the dog. It's in a bun! The size difference is very subtle. Vic thought that was fantastic.”

Such a technique is called package downsizing or “shrinkflation.” It's commonplace enough today, often employed in such varied products as coffee, candy bars, ice cream, even toilet paper and soap. Back then, it was novel. Dr. Eimicke gave credit where credit was due, describing Nathan as “the brightest guy with no education that I ever met.”

The consultant served as a useful buffer between Nathan and his oldest son. Maxine Eimicke, who knew Murray well, said she believed he was “afraid” of his dad.

“Victor gave him more confidence,” she said. “He was always there to back Murray up when he wanted to change things. Murray wouldn't stand up to his dad, which Victor would do, because Vic had nothing to lose.”

No doubt there were things around the store that needed changing. But the whole Eimicke affair served to measure the gap between Murray's way of doing things and his father's. At best, Nathan only tolerated Dr. Eimicke's presence around the store. He would come to grudgingly admit that some of the reforms served to optimize the flow of work. And he enjoyed teasing the consultant's twenty-nine-year-old wife.

“Your husband is so dumb,” Nathan told Maxine, invoking the line repeatedly whenever he was in a playful mood. He was joking, to be sure, but it was a joke with a little sting in it.

 

17

Roadside Rest

“Times have changed. You've got to grow, and you've got to do different things.” Oceanside, Nassau County, the first Nathan's Famous outlet outside Coney Island.

THE CITY OF
New York Department of Parks commissioner Robert Moses would have been right at home as a bureaucrat in the Habsburg Empire. He exhibited the kind of heavy-handed, imperious attitudes that Nathan brushed up against as a youth in Galicia. Moses would have liked Dr. Eimicke, too. They shared a similar unshakable faith in the rightness of their approach, trusting themselves to guide the actions of the common folk. It was the kind of paternalistic, authoritarian viewpoint that ran through the postwar period like a virus.

Dr. Eimicke lacked what Moses had in spades: a poisonous, vengeful reaction to any and all opposition. It was his way or the highway—in fact, his way
was
the highway often enough, in that he developed the Belt, Grand Central, Cross Island, and Henry Hudson Parkways, among others. (The joke: if this Moses would have been the one who parted the Red Sea, it would have been with a stone-bridged parkway.) He leveled vicious attacks against his perceived enemies, slamming them both in the media and via bureaucratic channels.