Famous Nathan (27 page)

The tiny Nathan's Famous dining room off Schweikerts Walk represented a hidden world unto itself, a downscale diamond in the rough, just a place where a family might sit and eat. Most people didn't know it existed. There were about ten tables with metal, ice cream parlor–style chairs. Waiter Richard Traunstein laughed when he described it. “This was low-class dining, don't get me wrong. It was just as common as common could be.”

The waiters there—among them Sol Gaber, Sol Siederman, Felix Vasquez, and Traunstein—stayed in the position for years, even decades. Originally required by city regulations when the store began to sell beer, the dining room endured long after it had served its original purpose. Nathan could have closed it, but he cared too much about the loyal employees working there.

Out front, the counters were more of a free-fire zone. The undeclared war between countermen and customers still occasionally flared up, just like the old days. The frenetic pace of service fostered a kind of impatient arrogance. Any misbehaving or wisecracking nimrod could cause the machine to slip a gear and was thus dealt with ruthlessly. Fights remained a not uncommon phenomenon. Rarely did they require police intervention, but at times they did.

“We had one drastic fight, where somebody was seriously injured,” recalled Sidney Handwerker. “It was about three o'clock in the morning, and we were cleaning up. I was working on the steam table, scrubbing the pans for the next day and stacking them on top of the counter. Four or five guys—I don't know if they were drunks, but tough guys—started to pull the pans down and throw them into the gutter.”

The toughs hadn't gotten the attention they thought they deserved. The sweep had somehow left them unswept.

Joe Handwerker came to Sidney's rescue. “I'll meet you outside,” he suggested to the unruly customers. He tore into the street with two kitchen men backing him up. Everyone started swinging.

“Sidney,” said Sammy Fariello pointedly, “your brother is in a fight.”

Sidney took it as his cue to go over the counter. But his foot got stuck in a beverage tub on the way, and he wound up with a shoe full of grape drink. Meanwhile, Gerry Monetti dashed into the kitchen, retrieved a club-like tool used to push beef into the hamburger grinder, and dove into the fray.

The next morning, police officers showed up at Sidney's house. “You're under arrest.”

They brought in the whole graveyard shift from the night before. The cops had checked the time cards at the store and took down the names of everybody who was working. One of the tough-guy customers had been clubbed senseless by Monetti's beef-stuffing tool.

“It was a good thing that the police were on our side” was Sidney's morning-after comment. The whole affair was smoothed over.

Except for his mystical check-the-back-of-the-neck routine, Nathan was an equal opportunity employer, long before the phrase was ever invented. All horses welcome, no prejudice in play. Sinta integrated the kitchen with fellow Chinese Americans. Tom Settle was an early African American hire. Both became trusted veterans at the store.

As early as the summer of 1947, a year before President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. armed forces with his landmark Executive Order 9981, Nathan put a black man out front, interacting with the public. Derwood Jarrett became the Jackie Robinson of Nathan's Famous, the first African American to integrate the working side of this particular lunch counter.

The move caused a few problems with small-minded customers objecting to being served by an African American. Nathan didn't care. He simply liked Jarrett and respected his work ethic. It wasn't a political issue for him—the way it might have been with Sol, say—just a question of simple practicality. But the final effect was the same.

“There was no discrimination there,” recalled Felix Vasquez, a longtime store employee. “There was no discrimination whether it was Jewish or black or Puerto Rican. You got people from all over the world.”

“We had a real United Nations around Nathan's,” Jay Cohen said. “All kinds, all types. If you could work, you had a place.”

*   *   *

The old-time employees—Monetti, Jack Dreitzer, and Joe Handwerker—and the favored newer hires—like Sinta and Fariello—had a complex relationship with Murray and Sol. A gulf separated them. Nathan's boys were the young princes, the heirs apparent, the only ones who had a hope for equity in the business. The best the others could receive were steady paychecks and end-of-the-year bonuses.

Oddly enough, for all of Nathan's pronounced desire to have his sons with him, at times he seemed to ally himself with his hard-core workers. They were the ones who were cut out of the same cloth as he was. They were the ones who put in the long hours out front or in the kitchen.

Even at this late date, in the fifties, when he could have easily eased off and assumed a purely managerial role, Nathan would take on menial duties that usually fell to the lower-paid staff. He always wanted to be, and wanted to be seen to be, an ordinary worker, just one of the guys. The only employees Nathan unleashed his full tirades upon were Joe, Murray, and Sol. It was never a picnic being a Handwerker son at the store.

Manager Jay Cohen recalled an incident when Murray's style clashed with that of his father's. Nathan made it a habit to hang around in the kitchen early in the morning with a cup of coffee, shooting the breeze around with the inner circle of longtime employees. During this supposed downtime, he would be looking around, seeing what was in the refrigerators, checking the work assignments.

One morning, Murray and his African American driver swept by this group of old-timers. “He had a chauffeur that he used more like a personal servant,” said Charles Schneck. “He liked the trappings of success.”

The driver carried Murray's briefcase and wore a black coat and black hat. Murray hustled along behind him, heading for the store's second-floor office.

“Hiya, everybody!” the heir said before running upstairs.

After this display, one of the old-timers put a question to the boss. “Hey, Nathan, how come you don't have a chauffeur?”

Nathan's reply was instant. “Didn't have a rich father,” he said in his usual clipped, deadpan way.

The group broke up laughing.

A division developed, largely unspoken but very real. Jack Dreitzer, Sinta, Joe Handwerker, and a core of other workers had been employed at the store for years, some of them for decades. They understood Nathan's ways. The business had been built on their backs, courtesy of their incredible work ethic.

Murray and to a lesser degree Sol represented a challenge to this group. Oftentimes they weren't present on the weekends, the busiest time. The sons came in with fresh ideas, different procedures, rewritten menus. The world war might have been over, but at Nathan's Famous, there arose a new conflict, a battle between the old and new.

Beyond modernizing the physical plant, Murray tried to bring the store's labor practices into the contemporary era, too. During the demanding summer season, none of the Nathan's Famous managers had the luxury of a day off. They worked twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks for the busy three months from Memorial Day to Labor Day. No extra pay for overtime, no weekends off.

“Dad, it's not right,” Murray said to Nathan. “You can't have people working seven days. A man should have a day off, to be with his family and to take a break, go to the beach, go to the park, do what he wants.”

“You think you can cover for them?” Nathan wanted to know.

“Yeah, the other people have to do their work for them on their days off.”

Nathan shrugged. “You want to do that? Go ahead and do that.”

Murray kicked off the new policy with one of the hardest-working employees in the store, Gerry Monetti, the star counterman on the fried potato station. “He didn't mind working seven days,” Murray said. “He absolutely did not.”

But like it or not, Monetti would simply be ordered to comply with the new regime. Murray called the man into his office. “Look, from now on, I'll give you a new work schedule. We'll give you a day off work.”

“I don't want to take a day off,” Monetti replied. He clearly considered the outlandish idea of taking a break during the season as some sort of punitive measure.

“It's unfair to your family,” Murray said. “It's not fair to you, physically. You got to take a day off. I insist, and I'm the boss.”

Monetti reluctantly agreed. His absence would be a real hardship for the business, since in addition to the fry station, he was the all-around handyman for the store, a genius at repairing broken-down machines. He lived in Bay Ridge, and he took a sort of busman's holiday by bringing his whole family to the beach at Coney Island. The next day, he didn't come in to work.

Monetti's wife called Murray. “Gerry's not coming in, because he can't move, he's so sunburned. He went on the beach and got burned. Seriously sunburned.”

The store's Mr. Crinkle-Cut, its Mr. Fix-it, was out for a full week.

“Where's Gerry?” Nathan wanted to know.

“He's not well,” Murray replied. “He won't be in today.”

“Why isn't he going to be here?”

Murray didn't want to be the bearer of the news, but he had to do it. He told his father that his favorite employee had been burned to a crisp.

Nathan shook his head, disgusted. “He took a day off, and he went to the beach. Now you see what happens. Now you haven't got him for the week. You haven't got him for ten days.”

“His wife isn't happy, either,” Murray added, baleful. He didn't back down on his new day-off-for-managers policy. But from that point on, he was careful to warn everyone about the perils of leisure.

Dorothy always said her husband missed his true calling, that Murray fancied himself a public relations man. The heat of the sun also disrupted another of Murray's innovations. In 1954, a group of entrepreneurs purchased an enormous dead whale from a fisherman. Murray rented them a space behind the store to display the carcass. The owners charged admission for a glimpse of the beast. Murray believed the attraction would draw customers to Nathan's Famous.

It didn't work out that way. In the heat of the summer, the carcass quickly began to rot. “It stunk up all of Coney Island,” remembered Sidney Handwerker. The entrepreneurs quickly vanished, leaving Murray with a ton of dead whale on his hands. He had to pay to have it removed, with rumor having it that two Mafia soldiers were hired to do the job. The wise guys dragged the carcass out to sea and blew it up.

Murray also once suggested putting a glass tank of mustard on the roof, alongside the huge reservoir of corn oil. He thought the bright-yellow cylinder would attract the attention of passersby on Surf Avenue. Nathan shut him down with a question: “What if it breaks?”

Despite his setbacks, Murray doggedly continued his efforts to modernize. As a kid and as a teenager, he had spent long hours in the store's tiny counting room, putting coins into sleeves.

The miserable cubbyhole beneath the steps to the second floor was small, five feet by eight, and chronically underventilated. A single fan stirred the stale air. In four-hour, five-hour, or sometimes six-hour work sessions, Murray locked himself into the room and labored at the count, rolling quarters, dimes, nickels, even pennies.

Even to describe the process sounded wearisome. “You couldn't take the coins loose to the bank,” Murray said. “Everything had to be packed. You spread out the coins—twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, using two fingers to separate out ten dollars of quarters or nickels, then put them in a paper tube, all by hand, no machines, not even a device to hold the tube. I had to seal one end, put them in, then fold it closed.”

For some reason, the bulk of the work fell to Murray. His father might have considered it as a gesture of trust, but mistrust of other employees could have figured in, too. Also, perhaps unconsciously, Nathan was hazing the young heir, putting him through the kind of labor that Nathan himself had endured for years.

Murray would also make the bank runs, making cash deposits. After a summer weekend, the amounts would rise to tens of thousands of dollars. “We didn't go to the bank every day at the same time. We'd vary it, two o'clock, three o'clock. So we never had a robbery.”

Murray made it practice not to use obvious money bags or leather pouches. Instead, he would put the money in an innocent-looking brown paper bag or conceal it in a briefcase. Often he would take along the six-foot-two Tom Settle.

“With him, even a guy with a gun would never try anything. [Settle] always used to carry [the cash]. I didn't cargo. I had the car and pulled up to the alley beside the store and say, ‘Tom, I'm ready to go.' We alerted the bank we were coming. We never had any problems, never.”

Murray was becoming more and more active in the National Restaurant Association, a lobbying, educational, and advocacy group founded in 1919 and headquartered in Washington, D.C. One year soon after the war, he journeyed to an annual convention that the trade group held in Chicago. There, he glimpsed a vision of the future. The gleaming automatic coin-counting machines on display at the convention seemed an answer to his prayers, promising to help relieve him of his least favorite duty at the store.

Nathan initially balked at the idea. He hadn't even seen the machines, and he was already ruling them out. “Too expensive,” he told his son. “The old way is good. You don't buy one, Murray.”

“I'm not buying one, I'm just trying it out,” Murray responded. “Promise me a two-week trial, and if it works, then I'll buy two machines.” He had already proposed the test-period arrangement with the purveyor, agreeing to purchase only after they had proven effective.

“It'll never work,” Nathan said, stubborn.

“Why?”

“You'll jam up the machines.”