“I liked her very much. So I hired her.” Nathan and Ida Handwerker, ca. 1920.
THAT SUMMER, WHILE Nathan was getting his first tantalizing taste of success in America, the war that would have killed him had he stayed in Europe cranked up to an unbelievable level of ferocity. Russia’s celebrated June Advance of 1916 rolled over Nathan’s home province of Galicia, one of the most lethal offensives in the history of warfare, with an incredible 1.6 million casualties.
It took another full year, but the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, the country dragged kicking and screaming into a war it had done its level best to ignore. Turning a blind eye didn’t work, and in May, the Selective Service Act, passed the previous December, was enacted. The same monster that licked its lips in Galicia now reared its head in America, with modern-day chappers reaching out for recruits.
War fever gripped New York City. A ubiquitous stern-faced Uncle Sam, in J. M. Flagg’s celebrated “I Want You” poster, jabbed his recruitment finger at passersby. Boarding the subway in Union Square, Nathan would have witnessed the surreal vision of a battleship afloat in the middle of the city. The navy erected a full-scale wooden mock-up of a vessel in the park, christening it USS Recruit. The government used the ship for enlistment and training.
Nathan experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. “I came from Europe to America for one reason—because from Europe I heard that a young man didn’t have to go in the army in America.” The new draft laws changed the rules.
But Nathan sidestepped them. The young immigrant, long enough in his new country not to be labeled a greenhorn, remained ineligible for the draft. The United States had entered the war on the side of the Allies (the UK, France, and Russia) against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Since Nathan hailed from Austria-Hungary, he was considered an “enemy alien” and unsuitable as cannon fodder. He had not yet taken out “first papers,” the initial step toward United States citizenship. He was safe.
As the world turned its fond gaze to violence, Nathan Handwerker found romance.
In modern parlance, he had no life. Nathan was spending all his time at the store, often sleeping overnight on a straw mattress or on the big burlap sacks full of potatoes. He installed a bell on the counter, so that if someone wanted a frankfurter at three or four in the morning, say, they could ring the bell and wake him up.
What he didn’t have was a cash register. “I had a sugar box from a hundred pounds of sugar; it came in five-pound packages, twenty to a box. I turned over the box, and I put in all the money I made during the day. I had a little bag, a sleeping bag. And I slept next to the box.”
Predictably, whatever social life Nathan had came through work. His sister Anna, the Handwerker sibling who had first introduced him to Coney Island, tried her hand at a business just down the block on Surf Avenue. She and a friend of hers, Ida Greenwald, had a small concession stand.
Nathan visited and could tell immediately that the two women weren’t making any money. He refrained from criticizing because Anna’s business partner was attractive. He asked Ida to come work for his store. In Nathan’s world, such an invitation was tantamount to courtship. Anna Singer, who didn’t seem to begrudge her brother poaching her partner, always said that Nathan offered Ida “big money” to make the switch.
“I liked her very much, so I hired her. She worked so fast, serving frankfurters and drinks and giving change.” It was love. His new employee proved a speedy worker who could peel a fifty-pound bag of onions in under an hour. Nothing could have proven a more certain path to Nathan’s heart.
In summer of 1918, sleeping in the store, he had a dream that he would become engaged to Ida. “I got dressed, and there was a fruit stand across the street. I says to myself, ‘I’ll buy a pear for her, a pear for me.’”
But his dream lover refused his humble offering. “Give it to your sister; she needs it better.”
Nathan could be direct enough in business, but he was shy in love. Too nervous to come right out and pop the question, he asked Anna to speak for him. “I need you to go up and tell Ida that I want to get an engagement. If you do it, if you come back, if she’ll accept it, I’ll give you fifty dollars.” Nathan watched as Anna went to Ida. He saw the two women talk and then shake hands. Anna came back to him.
“What did she say?”
“She said she’s going to ask her father and mother.”
“She agreed?”
“If she asks her father and mother,” Anna said, wise to the ways of the world, “that means she agrees.”
“When we make the engagement,” Nathan said, “you get the fifty dollars.”
On July 13, 1918, Nathan and Ida formally got engaged. They set October 26 for the wedding. In addition to the reward payment to his sister, Nathan also had to find someone to cover for him at the store during the engagement celebration. The process of getting hitched was proving to be an expensive proposition.
A summer Saturday in the middle of the busy season. He and Ida planned to go into Manhattan for the party. By that time, Nathan had a nephew working for him, another Joe Handwerker, Israel’s son, named after Nathan’s brother Joseph. Joe put on a formal jacket, naturally assuming he’d be invited to the festivities.
“Who’s going to stay here?” Nathan asked. “We can’t close; it’s a hot day, it’s July 13. How can I close the place?”
Joe sensed an opportunity. “Give me the fifty dollars you were going to give Anna.”
Nathan hesitated.
“You gotta pay cash,” Joe added.
What could Nathan do? A man has to celebrate one of the most important events of his life. He dipped into the sugar box and counted out five thousand pennies for his nephew Joe. He had to dig even deeper for Ida’s ring—$650 for a diamond solitaire, $10,000 in today’s money. Then he went and got engaged.
That same summer of 1918, U.S. Marine casualties mounted in the vicious hand-to-hand combat of the Battle of Belleau Wood along the Marne River in France. In Russia, Bolshevik radicals lined the czar and his family up against a wall in a basement room and executed them. The disconnect between the bloody chaos in Europe and the chattering, laughing crowds at Coney Island had to be unsettling.
In Luna Park’s War of the Worlds building (shaped like a massive battleship), paying customers watched the model boat navies of Germany, England, and Spain maneuver on a pretend sea. The armadas attacked New York Harbor, only to be repulsed by the heroic Admiral George Dewey and the American fleet. Until the caskets started coming home from France, the Luna Park show was the closest the war came to the homeland.
All during this period, Nathan’s business had been growing in leaps and bounds or, more to the point in his case, foot by foot. Almost as soon as he leased the small store on Surf and Schweikerts, he had begun expanding.
“I bought a saw and made a bundle of wood and carried it in the subway. I had hammer and nails. I made an extension to my counter. Two feet more, because I didn’t have enough room for an icebox. I needed to put more than one can of milk there. I needed two cans. I had to buy two cans, and each can was forty quarts.”
The store lacked refrigeration. Keeping his food cold was a constant issue. A health inspector came by the store and demanded Nathan dump one of his cans of milk because it had not been stored at the proper temperature. He needed ice cream for his malteds. It was a common engineering problem that the totally unschooled Nathan would solve in a simple but ingenious manner.
“I had no freezers, no refrigerators. So what could I do? I took some barrels, fifty-gallon barrels for sugar. I got them when they were selling sugar in a fruit stand nearby when they were making jelly apples.”
Nathan cut the wooden sugar barrels in half and drilled a hole in the bottom. “I put a faucet in to drain the water out. Then I put a layer of ice, and a layer of frankfurters, a layer of ice, and a layer of frankfurters.”
The cracked ice came in waxed, thirty-pound boxes, and the store would go through a whole box on busy summer Sundays. “If I didn’t sell all the frankfurters, I used to take them out of the barrels every day, let the ice melt, and take the frankfurters out, and put more ice in, the same way, a layer of ice, a layer of frankfurters. I never lost a frankfurter, never got green, never got spoiled.”
The hot dogs kept selling. Nathan kept the same limited menu, offering frankfurters, malteds, ice cream sodas, lemonade, orangeade, pineapple juice. He resisted adding new items. The walls of the storefront served as a bill-of-fare billboard. All the drinks sold for three cents except root beer, which was a nickel. An ice cream cone cost five cents, a malted milk five cents also.
The most expensive item was an ice cream soda that went for eight cents. In an early example of what would become a common practice touting the quality of the food, Nathan posted a sign offering a reward to anyone who could prove that the milkshake wasn’t made from good Borden’s ice cream.
He also made it a practice of shouting out his wares, as he had when he was hawking lemonade on a Manhattan street corner. Now that the products he was selling were his own, he put his lungs into it. “You could hear me for twenty blocks.”
The menu stayed small, but the store kept enlarging. Nathan displaced a couple of neighboring businesses on what had now been renamed Schweikerts Walk, a shoeshine stand and a cigar store. “I kept on making two feet more, five feet more, stretching it out. Another piece of store, another piece of store.”
The place was small, and for the whole first season, it was anonymous.
At the end of the summer, a woman approached the store. “Who is the boss?” she asked.
Nathan didn’t want to tell her. He was standing in front, on Surf Avenue, hawking frankfurters. Questions were never good. Questions slowed him down. They implied a problem with customers or the intrusion of authority.
His workers, Ida and his nephew Joe among them, knew enough to stay silent, but the woman was persistent. “Why don’t you want to tell me? What are you afraid of? I must know who the boss is.”
The woman seemed almost ready for a fight. Nathan turned to her. “Ma’am, why do you want to see the boss? I’m the boss.”
“I’m sending people to you, and they can’t find you. You haven’t got a name on your place. Why don’t you put a name on so we can be able to find you? I know your stuff is very good. When I send my friends from the Bronx, they come here and can’t find you.”
“Lady, this is the end of the year. Labor Day is going to be here soon, and I’ll be closing up the place for the winter.”
By the following summer season, he told himself, when I open up, I’ll have signs. “Next year,” he promised the pestering woman, “I’ll open up with a name.”
As annoying as the nudge was, she had a point. Nathan started to think about a name for his store. I’ve worked for Max’s Busy Bee. But if I put Nathan Handwerker on, “Handwerker” would be hard to remember. It would take a hundred years to know how to find the store if it was called Handwerker’s. So why can’t I do the same thing like Max’s Busy Bee in Manhattan?
Nathan’s. Not “Nathan’s Famous”—that addition would come along in a few years. “I put on Nathan’s, and I paid three and a half dollars for the sign.”
The Coney Island sign painter of choice in those days was Harry Wildman, who came to America from Austria in 1875. He designed the green Nathan’s logo, complete with elaborate curlicues and serifs. Wildman’s iconic work has survived, with a few modifications, to this day. As he had done with numerous signs and ads around Coney, he painted the broadly stylized lettering on oilcloth. Finally, the store had a name.
In later days, when the press agents took over publicity for the business, they deemed the true origin story too banal. A more romantic legend got cooked up, linking the naming of the business to a song that was popular at the time. The new story presented Nathan at the store, mulling thoughtfully over what he might call his new establishment. From a nearby café, a gramophone record played Sophie Tucker singing the chorus of a song, “Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin’?”
According to this version of events, while trying to come up with a name for his business, Nathan overheard Sophie, the “Red-Hot Mama,” belting it out. He said to himself, Wait a minute—my name is Nathan, so why don’t I just call the place “Nathan’s”?
Naturally, in the way of all press-agent confections, the tale got mangled over time. “Nathan, Nathan, Why You Waitin’?” wasn’t a Sophie Tucker’s song—at least, she never recorded it. It was actually another chanteuse, Rhoda Bernard, who first put out a novelty number called “Nat’an (For What Are You Waitin’, Nat’an?).” Comedian and singer Fanny Brice came along afterward with a reply song called “Oy, How I Hate that Fellow Nathan.”
The lyrics of the Rhoda Bernard original offer a charming glimpse into romance, circa 1916.
Nat’an, Nat’an, Nat’an, tell me for what are you waitin’, Nat’an?
You said we’d marry in June, my dear
You told me the month, but you didn’t say what year
My whole family, they keep asking me, “Nu? When?”
And I don’t know what to tell them
Nat’an, Nat’an, Nat’an
I’m sick and tired of waitin’ Nat’an
Every minute seems like ages
I should live to see to see the day
That you make heavy wages
Nat’an, Nat’an, what are you waitin’ for?
Labor Day came and went. The summer crowds dwindled and then disappeared entirely. But a funny thing happened on the way to Nathan closing up shop for the season. Day by day, he continued selling frankfurters. He kept telling himself that the next weekend would be the last, that finally it would no longer make economic sense to keep the little store open.
Coney Island was a summer resort town, but it was increasingly becoming a year-round residential neighborhood. The area was populous enough—and hungry enough—that there were customers even in the harshest weather. The store became the little hot dog stand that could.
Winter conditions at the store challenged all the employees. “My nose used to turn like a popsicle,” recalled one veteran worker, adding that he once suffered a frostbitten ear from working in the cold. The store kept a fire in an ash can behind the counter. No matter how low the temperature fell, Nathan continued to exhort his troops.
“Sell!” he would call out. “Give ’em! Sell ’em!”
It was as though the new entrepreneur was walking a tightrope, knowing all the time that any minute he would fall off. But he never did. The store would never close from the day it first opened.
Nathan himself did take a rare weekend day off that fall—Saturday, October 26, 1918, when Nathan stopped keeping Ida waiting and they celebrated their marriage vows with an elaborate wedding. But once again, history would poke its ugly snout into Nathan’s life in a disagreeable way. A specter of death more deadly than even the carnage on the battlefields of Europe cast a pall over a day that should have been sunny clear through.
* * *
“So I made a wedding. I hired a woman, a cook. I went to a butcher and bought fifty chickens. I bought fish, forty or fifty dollars’ worth. I bought a big sack of flour, a whole box of eggs, a big box. Then I went down to the baker and paid him for a day’s work. He used to bake all kinds of cake. Honeycake, spongecake, and cookies. I paid him forty dollars for the whole thing. And I bought a whole case of oranges for the wedding.”
Here was Nathan declaring his new prosperity, spending what would have been, for him, only a few years before, an exorbitant sum—$1,700 in today’s money—on his big day.
Only one thing was wrong. “Everyone was sick,” Nathan remembered. “They had a fever.”
A contagion stalked humankind at that time, one of the deadliest in history. The H1N1 influenza virus would wind up killing untold numbers of people. Fifty to a hundred million victims fell, a toll that is staggering both in its extent and its inexactitude. All told, 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population died. In a perverse change from the usual, the young and healthy perished in greater numbers than did infants, the elderly, or the infirm.
The troop mobilizations allowed the contagion to spread quickly. “I saw hundreds of young stalwart men in uniform coming into the wards of the hospital,” stated one U.S. Army doctor that fall. “Every bed was full, yet others crowded in. The faces wore a bluish cast; a cough brought up the bloodstained sputum. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cordwood.”
On the Tuesday before Nathan and Ida’s wedding, a record 869 New Yorkers died of influenza or the resulting pneumonia in a single twenty-four-hour period.
Nathan had invited three hundred guests to the nuptial celebration—members of the extended family, a few friends, fellow worshippers at their synagogue, and business associates—pretty much everyone he and Ida knew in New York.
Only 125 showed up. Like the rest of the public, Nathan couldn’t quite grasp the true scope of what was happening. To maintain wartime morale, the horrific extent of the pandemic was suppressed in news reports. No one outside of public health officials and those in government knew that millions were dying. To Nathan, the event remained a private annoyance as much as a public tragedy.
The big day was a big bust. There was a lot of food left over. After the wedding, the officiating rabbi approached Nathan. “Mr. Handwerker, what should I do with all this food? Where do you want to take it?”
“Give it to whoever you want,” Nathan responded. He described his feelings: “I was sick and tired and disappointed.”
The following day, Sunday, he and Ida were back at work in the Coney Island store.