“It was beautiful to see the love that Nathan had for his wife. That was a beautiful thing.” Nathan and Ida in Florida, ca. 1960.
NATHAN AND IDA remained in Florida, out of the fray, only occasionally returning to New York.
During this twilight period of Nathan’s professional life, a pair of high schoolers named Bob Levine and John Larosa hired on as summer help at the Oceanside Nathan’s Famous. “We were out there one day, two high school kids doing a very menial job cleaning the parking lot, and this big Cadillac pulls in, and a guy in a suit got out,” Levine remembered. “He took a broom, and he started sweeping.”
Levine approached him. “Why do you want to help us do this?”
“I’m Nathan Handwerker,” said the new volunteer. “I own this place.”
“Wow! Nice to meet you.”
Nathan spent an hour with the youths. Together, they swept the parking lot of the old Roadside Rest. Nathan spoke about the number of people who had gained experience working at the Coney Island store. He asked the boys where they went to school and how they were doing in their studies.
“He showed that he really gave a damn about us,” Levine said.
The old man’s words about the value of work stuck with Levine for the rest of his life. “He said that it doesn’t matter what you’re doing—do it right. Do it to the best of your ability, and you’ll be rewarded for it.”
Nathan was back where he wanted to be, back where he started, a man with a push broom engaging in the necessary task of keeping the premises of his business tidy. He had changed from the youngster in the Galician shtetl and from the person who had founded Nathan’s Famous in 1916. After all, he had emerged from a Cadillac. But the world around him had changed more. It had moved on.
Nathan and Ida now led lives that divided into two sharply contrasting periods. Summers were the hectic high season that they had always known, and they put in long hours at the store. But beginning in the 1930s, they started spending time in Florida during Coney Island’s slack winter period. The vacations were not extended at first, and they lasted weeks, not months. But the couple increased the length of their sojourns down south as they became familiar with the region and came to trust the store would not fall apart in their absence. They knew they could rely on such stalwarts as Joe Handwerker and Hy Brown to take care of the business.
“I’m going away for the winter,” Nathan would tell them. “The store is yours, the store is for your employees, what you do with the store is what you get rewards for.”
As she had when she’d introduced her brother to the joys of Coney Island, it had been Anna Singer who first brought Nathan and Ida to Florida. Anna had discovered the beautiful beaches of the Sunshine State in the early 1930s. Nathan and Ida visited several locales, from Sarasota to Miami’s North Shore. In the 1950s, they built a three-bedroom home on Normandy Isle, in Miami Beach. The place was beautiful but by no means palatial, with terrazzo floors and two acres of land along the Intracoastal Waterway.
Florida was a godsend to the hardworking couple. Nathan became a different creature down south, unrecognizable as the stern, compulsive overseer of the store. In family snapshots, he sprawls in the sand, a huge grin on his face. He was clearly having a good time, earning a well-deserved respite from his eighteen-hour days at the store. His employees always typed their boss as a “workaholic.” The word entered the language in 1947, probably helped along by the generational example of people like Nathan. The Florida photos represent a different portrait of the man, hard evidence that he was actually able to get away from it all.
“It was beautiful to see the love that Nathan had for his wife,” recalled Marsha Abramson. “That was a beautiful thing. She was a very beautiful woman, with beautiful blue eyes. He would never let us forget that Ida worked right alongside him to build the business.”
The couple had a serene, peaceful existence. Neither Nathan nor Ida exerted themselves much. They didn’t have a golf game. They liked to fish, visit the jai alai courts, play cards with friends and relatives. Ida enjoyed The Jack LaLanne Show and followed along with the exercises as she watched on TV. Sol and Leah would often bring their families over to celebrate Passover and Hanukkah. Leah moved down permanently in the early 1950s.
Nathan and Ida spent most of their time in the house on Normandy Isle but essentially remained Florida “bicoastals,” shuttling back and forth between the Atlantic and the Gulf. Anna Singer had also introduced them to the Warm Mineral Springs area south of Sarasota. Local myth had it that the pools there represented the true Fountain of Youth searched for by Spanish explorer Ponce de León.
The Warm Mineral Springs spa invigorated the elderly Brooklyn refugees, and they bought an apartment in a nearby town to be close to the facilities. Nathan dressed the part. Wearing a white safari helmet and a tobacco-colored terry cloth robe, clutching a rubberized float, he’d set off for a soak.
Back at Normandy Isle, Nathan most enjoyed tending to the flowers and fruit trees on the property—bananas, oranges, grapefruit, and especially loquats. The evergreen shrub yielded fruit that was also called Chinese plums. He didn’t forget his family and employees shivering back in New York, periodically bringing them boxes of oranges, lemons, and mangoes from sunny Florida.
The gifts flowed the other way, too. When Hy Brown vacationed in the neighborhood, he’d always stop by with a little something for the boss. “I went to their place often with fish,” he remembered. “I caught it and brought it. They used to love fresh fish. It was a way of kissing ass, too.” Brown talks about going to the Normandy Isle place for dinner and how hospitable they were, with Nathan barbecuing and Ida cooking.
Not only fish, but information passed between the Florida outpost and the Coney Island store. Nathan was always eager for reports. An informal jungle tom-tom network came into play, between Nathan, Murray, Sol, and several longtime Nathan’s Famous employees.
“We always knew who we wanted to get what information,” said Brown. “So we knew who to tell to make sure it went that way.”
Have a message, a tidbit of information, or a comment for Nathan to hear? Tell Gerry Monetti. Hy Brown acted as Murray’s guy, while Al Shalik served as proxy for Sol. A word dropped into the right ear always reached the intended target, even from the far remove of Miami Beach.
Like all doting grandparents, Nathan and Ida enjoyed having their grandchildren visit them. “They were very loving,” remembered Sol’s wife, Minnie. “Grandma would always be tickling the kids and have them sitting on her lap on the swivel chair. Grandpa would always take them out to the yard and peel the loquats and feed them. They were warm grandparents. They weren’t the kind that would take their grandchildren to a museum or the beach or anything like that, but they were always there for them.”
“He showed me every tree in the garden,” Nathan’s grandson Steve Handwerker reminisced about spending time at the Normandy Isle home. “How each different fruit and vegetable needed to be taken care of and when to pick the vegetables and when to water them and how to treat them. He was very, very attentive to all that, and he shared it with me.”
His status as paterfamilias meant Nathan was allowed to pose questions about the future plans of his grandson. “Do you want to eventually go into the business?” he asked Steve during one of their early fruit-tree walks.
“No, not really, I don’t,” Steve replied after thinking it over. “I want to work with countries. I want to be in international relations.”
Nathan was shocked by the answer and took a minute to compose himself. “It’s very good to be a professional,” he said. “It’s a good thing to do that.”
What Nathan was always looking for—in his sons, and now in his grandchildren—was a version of his former self, the indefatigable, ambitious, and work-hungry young man who had founded Nathan’s Famous. Apart from Joe Handwerker and, to some extent, his sons, he never found it within the family, certainly not in his grandchildren. A few of the longtime, hard-core employees fit the bill, people like Sammy Fariello, Gerry Monetti, Jay Cohen, Hy Brown, and Sinta. But they weren’t kin.
“I was the stepson,” said Cohen. “Pop used to call me the son he never had.” He recalled Nathan coming into the store and asking him where Murray and Sol were. After working at Nathan’s Famous for a quarter century, Cohen was let go when he opposed Murray’s expansion plans.
Nathan, wholly untutored in business psychology, still managed to motivate his team of managers. Someone like Monetti devoted his energy to the store to an almost fanatical degree. He was constantly tinkering with the infrastructure, inventing new ways to approach common restaurant procedures. One problem with fryolators, for example, was that water from potatoes and other food items built up, mixed with the oil, and eventually contaminated it. Monetti created an ingenious grooved bottom in the deep fryer, linked to a nozzle that could separate and drain the water out.
“That extended the life of the oil, which was a tremendous money saver and a quality move that helped the product,” Hy Brown recalled. The Pitco Frialator company adopted the innovation as its own. Monetti was one of a few Nathan’s Famous employees that proved their loyalty to the final degree—by dying at the store. After more than thirty years on the job, he collapsed one day and passed away from a heart attack. His coworkers laid his body out on a cold griddle. But the former Patsy’s Tasties manager went the other diehards one better, reaching out from beyond the grave.
Hy Brown remembered the eerie incident on the day Monetti died. “The front countermen had called the police already. I went back into the office, and the tears started to come. I slammed my hand onto the desk. When I did that, an envelope fell off the shelf in front of me.”
TO HY BROWN IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH read the words handwritten on the front of the envelope. Inside was a list of all the projects Gerry Monetti thought needed to be done for the betterment of Nathan’s Famous.
“There were old projects he was working on, who he had contacted,” Brown remembered. “It was a comprehensive thing. He could write pages and pages on a subject. There it was in front of me. I read it and could not believe it. It was like an act of God.”
Nathan had said that he wished to go as Monetti had, at work, on the job. With the old-timers either dropping in their tracks or retiring, he could have taken it as a sign to put his affairs in order. But he could never quite cut the umbilical cord linking him to the business he’d created. Throughout the sixties, when he and Ida were in their seventies, they still came back from Florida to work at the store for at least part of the season.
When another of the resort town’s periodic fires ravaged the nearby Ravenhall Bathhouse on the night of April 28, 1963, just before the summer season began, Nathan’s charitable impulses kicked in. He offered free food to firefighters and displaced residents. He took personal charge of the relief efforts.
“A lot of people there, all their clothes burned up,” remembered Joe Handwerker. “We put out a sign to give the people shelter, and we gave them food. Mothers with children. We fed them, and we gave them cab fare to go home. Nathan never turned anybody down.”
Ravenhall, next door to Steeplechase Park to the west of the store at Surf Avenue and Nineteenth Street, had been a Coney Island institution, opening in 1867 as a hotel. In the 1960s, the bathhouse represented a cherished holdover from the past. Its saltwater pool, with diving boards labeled “Jack,” “King,” “Queen,” and “Ace” depending on their height, had survived when other bathhouses of the area closed one by one. Ravenhall encompassed a gym, handball courts, steam rooms, a dance floor, and a small private ocean beach.
When Ravenhall burned, it seemed one more nail in the coffin. Old Coney was passing from the scene. After the fire, Nathan became an outspoken advocate of rebuilding. He sat on Mayor John Lindsay’s Seaside Advisory Board. Even though Coney Islanders widely fingered Lindsay as one of those destroying the resort town with redevelopment projects, the mayor reached out to his advisory board to ask what could be done for the resort town.
“What does Coney Island need most?” Lindsay asked.
Nathan was the first to answer. In the wake of the Ravenhall fire, he knew exactly what was needed and was going to tell truth to power.
“We need a place our visitors could take a bath.”
Laughter from the other board members and the audience at the hearing. Lindsay laughed, too.
The Ravenhall bathhouse was never rebuilt.
The accumulation of such events finally moved Nathan to retire from the store he had nurtured and loved so long. The creation of the Yonkers branch of Nathan’s Famous in 1965 was one marker. Nathan showed up to look around exactly once and never returned. The company going public in 1968 was another demarcation line, as was Murray’s transfer of the company headquarters to Times Square in the same year.
Away from the store, away from his post atop the soda box next to the root beer barrel, Nathan lacked a vital, stimulating purpose. Nathan’s Famous could have been called “Nathan’s Lifeblood,” and it would have been the truth. He was one of those men who do not take well to retirement. The essence of his existence dwindled.
“He was not happy, not really,” Steve Handwerker said. “He did have his place, his Florida abode, but he was not happy. Whenever he went back to New York, he felt unwelcome in a certain way. He wanted to be more involved, until the day he died. He wanted to die in the store, actually. He said that to me more than once.”