“I always want to have all the Handwerkers together.” Family portrait (clockwise from left): Murray, Ida, Nathan, Leah, and Sol.
BY 1925, THE business had come to be called Nathan’s Famous. Harry Wildman, the sign painter, now joined in the business by his son Lester, created a billboard atop the store. In a demonstration of permanency, the builders fabricated their creation out of wood, not oilcloth.
On the tail-end swoosh that ran off the terminal n in the name, Wildman added the phrase, “Famous frankfurter and soft drink stand.” Later the tag would be reduced to the simple modifier, “Famous.” Word had gotten out. People came from all over to visit Coney Island. Among the resort town’s attractions was the busy frankfurter stand on Surf Avenue.
An excursion to Coney often went like this: Visitors exited the subway terminal and immediately headed to Nathan’s Famous to buy a hot dog. They then continued on to the beach, perhaps sampling the demotic delights of the Bowery or Steeplechase Park along the way. When they left the beach at the end of the day, they visited Nathan’s Famous once again for a second frankfurter. The store caught them coming and going.
For Nathan and Ida Handwerker, the business was family and the family was business. The line between the two entities blurred. They worked sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-hour days, both of them on their feet much of the time, fierce in their determination to make the fledgling enterprise succeed. On the busy three-day holiday weekends in the summer, Nathan often never went home.
The work took its toll not only on his person but on his clothing. He always wore a traditional luncheonette uniform of white duck, sometimes—if important visitors were expected or if circumstances warranted—topped off with a black bow tie. Slaving over the stove was hell on fabric. Burn holes and grease stains were constants.
“He always wore his cuffs out, he ran around so much,” noted veteran Nathan’s Famous employee Jay Cohen.
The damage extended even to his shoes.
Pat Auletta was a prominent Coney Island businessman and community figure who as a boy in the 1920s worked at the shoeshine stand in his father’s barbershop. He recalled Nathan as a genial enough customer whose sturdy leather wing tips were a mess.
“It was a great challenge to give him a shine because he always had all this grease on his shoes, from the frankfurters and whatever else came off the grills,” Auletta remembered. Any shoe polish the boy applied would simply smear. Nathan would be too busy exchanging pleasantries with Auletta’s father and the other customers to notice what was going on at ankle level.
“Every time he came in, I tried and tried to get that grease off his shoes,” Auletta said. “Someone suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you try a match and burn it off?’ So I did just that. He was talking to the barbers, so he had no idea what I was doing. The shoes went up in flame. I almost burned his whole leg, and I burned my fingers smothering out the fire.”
Such were the hazards of life for a dedicated frankfurter man. On rare occasions, Nathan would head over to Loew’s Shore Theatre, directly across Surf Avenue from the store, and slip into the darkened interior for a nap. Otherwise, he seemed to be always busy, always working, always watching. He was, very simply, always at the store.
Nathan had a strict, almost obsessive hands-on approach to running his business. Vigilance was his byword. Though he eventually expanded the premises to include upstairs offices, he always remained very visible presence “on the floor,” in both the kitchen and the counter area.
Longtime employees referred to his habitual cigar as a mark of his presence. They’d smell the smoke and know that he was around. He would step into various nooks and recesses at the store. Workers would look up to be surprised to see the diminutive owner staring out at them, monitoring their movements.
“You never knew,” said one of his longtime employees. “You turned around and he was right behind you. He was quiet.”
“I trust myself and the stove,” Nathan said. “I don’t trust anybody else.”
After leaving to have dinner at home with his wife, Nathan would at times return to the store later without warning. “I hate to see the manager walking around with a clean apron,” he would announce, checking the workers for signs they had been hard at it.
One young manager was aware of these late-evening sneak attacks, and while Nathan was absent, he would take off his apron and stomp on it to make it dirty. Nathan must have gotten wind of the trick, since he confronted the kid.
“I got to ask you a question,” Nathan said. “You’re always working by the steam table. On the steam table, we’ve got barbecue gravy, which is red, and the roast beef gravy, which is brown. But you never have barbecue gravy or roast beef gravy on your apron. You have footprints.”
Nathan started to laugh, and because the guilty party was a good worker, he wrote the whole thing off as youthful high jinks. But the kid learned he’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip one past the boss.
During his last rounds at night, Nathan would often check the store’s waste cans. He uncovered discarded frankfurters, pieces of meat that had been cut off along with the fat, half-empty bottles discarded with a portion of their contents unused. The next morning, he would confront this or that employee.
“I found too many french fries; what went wrong?” Or “I found some extra hamburgers; they shouldn’t be there.” If he found anything amiss, Hy Brown recalls “the roof coming off the next day,” with the boss checking everything back to the source to figure out what might have happened. Nathan made it clear he was in the business of selling food, not throwing it away. He eventually had the insides of the waste cans painted white, so he could more easily ascertain their contents.
“He really resented wasting food,” recalled his grandson Steve Handwerker. “It’s not an idiosyncrasy; it’s a valid concern, not just on financial terms but as a moral issue. Because he grew up in a time when he had no food.”
The contents of the garbage pails represented the terminal end of the store’s supply chain. Nathan paid strict attention to the opposite end, too, keeping close tabs on the wholesalers who delivered the food he served to his customers. Believing firmly that the sweetest potatoes came from Maine, he made excursions to the state himself, actually surveying the farm fields where the crop was being grown. It was almost as if he were replaying an experience of his youth, when he’d purchased a supply of potatoes from the Baron and returned with them in triumph to the spud-less Jarosław marketplace.
Eventually, he settled on a specific region—in the fertile valleys below the slopes of Maine’s Mount Katahdin—where he found the best-tasting potatoes. He didn’t buy them by the bushel, either, or even by the truckload. If he liked what he saw, Nathan would buy out a farm’s entire crop. He had them shipped south via railroad and stored in warehouses. Eventually, it would take fourteen railway cars to transport a season’s worth of potatoes.
His vigilance didn’t end with these out-of-state trips. Nathan noticed that soaking potatoes in water leached some of the starch out of them, leaving behind the more concentrated sugars that made the tubers taste extra sweet. He instituted the water soak as part of the preparation process. Word got around about the matchless potato fries Nathan was serving. The man was simply not content to sell the normal, everyday fries that every other Coney Island outlet dished up. His had to be not ordinary but extraordinary. He went the extra mile—all the way to Maine—to make it happen.
Today, almost every french fry sold in the country is frozen first and then cooked. The average fast-food outlet never sees a real potato, one that does not arrive in the kitchen already cut and frozen. Frozen products provide ease of distribution, preparation, and storage. As with the roast chicken of Woody Allen’s mother, the modern french fry has been “put through the de-flavorizer.” Current-day consumers might not be able to detect the difference between fresh and frozen.
But for Nathan, freshness mattered.
The same level of care went into every menu item. Nathan was always extremely cautious about adding new offerings beyond the frankfurters and fries that were his staples. An early entry to debut was a roast beef sandwich, added to the bill of fare soon after he and Ida were married.
“I cooked a piece of roast beef at home,” Nathan remembered. “I brought it into the store and put it on the griddle. I’d cut it on a board beside the griddle. Five cents a sandwich.”
Hamburgers were freshly made. Suppliers delivered beef hindquarters on hooks in the alleyway beside the store. Employees rolled them into a butcher section of the kitchen, where they would cut the meat and blend it. The ground beef went into a hand-cranked patty machine, which flattened the burgers and placed each one on its square of waxed paper. The top round of the beef hindquarters became the meat for the store’s roast beef sandwiches.
As an all-cash business, much of it in coins, Nathan’s Famous had serious money-handling concerns. In the beginning, Nathan could not afford cash registers. Countermen tossed the pennies, nickels, and dimes they received into open cigar boxes on the floor below them. Eventually, the workers adopted the kind of canvas aprons that newspaper vendors used, with three separate pockets for nickels, dimes, and quarters.
In the very early days of the business, Nathan would summon friends and family members to help tally the money, in festive communal sessions over beer and food. Counting the coins, packing them into paper money rolls, keeping track of the receipts—it all amounted to a major challenge for the new business. Paper currency was easier. Nathan simply placed it into a paper bag and walked it to the bank.
In any enterprise that deals in cash, employee theft is an obvious concern. The store was a sieve with money constantly tumbling through it. There were plenty of opportunities for workers to pluck a few dollars here and there. Even when Nathan finally installed cash registers, they failed to fully solve the problem.
Nathan’s son Sol would later provide an interesting analysis of the situation. “You’re in a conflicted position,” he said. “You want to catch people who are stealing, but sometimes the people who are stealing are your best workers. You didn’t always want to catch them because you didn’t want to fire them because they were so good. What they were bringing into the business with their effective work was more important than what they were taking.”
Over the years, several employees were let go because they were caught red-handed. In one case, a worker was caught hot-footed. Someone alerted Nathan that a certain counterman was slipping coins into his footwear. The boss resorted to a perfect strategy to expose the theft, spilling hot water on the guy’s shoes and then insisting that he come to the office to change into a pair of dry socks. The shoes came off, and the coins were revealed. The guilty party had a milk can full of change in his locker.
One father-and-son team was caught in a short-sale scam. The son, working the counter, kept under-ringing every sale. If a customer ordered forty cents’ worth of food, the son rang up twenty cents. Whoever worked the registers always needed a lot of change. When the coins ran short, the practice was to holler “Nickels out!” or “Dimes out!” The father, a little higher up in the store’s hierarchy, would head back into the kitchen where the coin rolls were kept. When he returned with the rolls of nickels and dimes, he’d skim off whatever amount his son had under-rung.
The two were caught and fired.
The pilfering wasn’t limited to money. Employees were once caught discarding full five-gallon cans of oil into the store’s garbage cans. The thieves would return at night, retrieve the cans from the garbage, and head home with a free month’s worth of cooking oil.
In response to these situations—and perhaps because of a paranoid element in his personality—Nathan developed what could be termed a Panopticon philosophy of management. He did his best to be all-seeing, all-knowing.
Directly behind the store’s frankfurter griddle stood a large root beer barrel, and Nathan would post himself atop a box beside the barrel. This gave him a view down the “drink side” of the counter in one direction and, in the other direction, the frankfurter and french fry stations. From time to time, Nathan would shout out from his post, calling attention to some situation or directing his employees to address a problem. Atop his box, he was like the ringmaster of his own commercial circus.
“He watched whether the men at the counter were handling the food right,” remembered Nathan’s son Sol. “It was very important to him that they looked clean, that they kept their equipment clean, and they scraped the griddles properly to keep them clean. He was concerned that the food was cooked properly—not overcooked, not undercooked. He was always watching how the men were preparing the food.”
He wasn’t just watching his workers, either. “He would stand next to the root beer barrel looking at the griddle and looking at the customers,” Sol said. “He could tell from the customers’ faces how they felt. He could see if they were having fun or were annoyed. He wanted to find out which way they were. He could always tell if something was wrong. His sixth sense about that was always amazing.”
Nathan didn’t limit his domain to the store’s interior, but extended it to the sidewalks and streets outside. In late-night incognito visits, he would don a disguise—a slouch hat that came down over his eyes, perhaps a raincoat or sweater, at rare times a wig—and mingle with the customers. He’d eavesdrop, on the prowl for their comments, compiling a personal sort of pre-Yelp Yelp.
“It’s the spirit of a successful business that gave him pleasure, in terms of satisfying the customers,” said Sol. “If they were happy, he was happy. And that’s what he always tried to achieve.”
The hands-on boss never thought menial tasks were beneath him. He would often patrol for litter. Nathan’s obsession with cleanliness reached into all corners of the property. The other thoroughfares of Coney were stained dark with dirt, grease, and the tramp of millions of pairs of human feet, to the degree that area sidewalks often appeared black.
“When you came to Nathan’s, it was clean,” recalled one veteran employee. “You had light-gray sidewalks.”
As the volume of sales mounted, the store’s physical plant took a tremendous beating. Grease, sand, and salt combined to make cleaning a constant daily—or, as the business began to stay open round the clock, nightly—chore. When the portable steam-vapor Jenny washers came on the market, Nathan was an early adopter. Employees later marveled that the trash facilities at the back of the store were so well-scrubbed that the room never smelled of garbage.
Busy as he was with his constant attendance at the store, in the mid-1920s Nathan found time to complete the final steps to U.S. citizenship. Normally, applicants had to possess the ability to understand, speak, read, and write basic English. In that era, the literacy requirement was often waived, especially for immigrants who had been established in the country for a period.
Nathan tried to learn, anyway. He hired tutors to visit him at home and expand his rudimentary understanding of the English language. He progressed to the point where he could pretend to read a newspaper, becoming a lifelong skimmer, at least, of New York Daily News, a picture-heavy publication founded in 1919. But he could never claim to be literate. On the rare occasions that Nathan ventured out to a restaurant not his own, Ida would always have to read the menu to him.
“He didn’t read English,” his son Murray recalled. “He used to look at the Daily News for the pictures. Reading English was a whole different level.”
Nathan’s literacy cram course turned out to be effective enough. On March 12, 1925, thirteen years almost to the month after his arrival in America, Nathan Handwerker took the oath and became an American citizen. Ida soon followed.
* * *
Throughout the teens and the early twenties, members of the Handwerker family had been crossing from Europe to America, coming over in ones and twos. It was as though Nathan was importing his workforce. Soon eight of the thirteen sons and daughters were in New York: Israel, Joseph, Dora, Nathan, Anna, Helen, Lena, and Phillip. In Yiddish, the names were Yisrool, Yuske, Dinele, Nachum, Elke, Chaya, Leah, and Hervel. The only Handwerker sibling never to live in America was the fifth brother, Shmuel, whose brain had been damaged in a street brawl and who later died in a European mental hospital.
In the successive waves of Handwerker immigration, the matriarch of the family tragically didn’t survive the transatlantic voyage. Rose Handwerker died in February 1926 aboard SS Zeeland, the ship that was carrying her to America to join the rest of the family. She had left Jarosław a month before, traveling with Jacob and her four youngest children, Golde, Yitte, Moishe, and Herschel (in the United States, they would be known as Goldie, Yetta, Morris, and Harry).
The family headed for Antwerp, the same debarkation port from which Nathan had left for New York over a decade before. But at the dock, doctors employed by the shipping line deemed Jacob Handwerker too unhealthy to sail, quarantining him because of an eye infection.
The family was separated. Rose continued on board with her children but was “very much agitated from grief” over being separated from her husband, according to an account of her death printed in a Yiddish newspaper. After eating dinner one Friday evening, she simply “sat down and died,” as her daughter Anna Singer phrased it later. Rose was still fairly young, fifty-seven years old, but her hard life in Galicia had taken its toll.
Nathan always felt close to his mother. He didn’t get along as well with Jacob but was devoted to Rose. She encouraged him in his first forays into commerce, when the two of them banded together to sell fruits and vegetables in the markets of Narol. Her forlorn death, hundreds of miles away at sea, affected him greatly. Nathan afterward always felt the loss. He felt he never was able to say a proper good-bye to the woman who had meant so much to him.
A situation arose after Rose’s death. The children huddled around the lifeless body of their mother, unwilling to allow authorities to take her away. The policy on board the ship was to perform an ocean burial. This was a fairly common practice whenever immigrants crowded into steerage class died. It saved the cost of having to preserve the body until the ship reached landfall.
Anna recalled the family in America receiving a telegram from the ship urgently requesting $125, in order that Rose Handwerker’s remains would be duly transported to New York. Nathan and the other Handwerker siblings in New York pooled their resources and wired the requested funds. (“We sent them right away a bundle of money,” Anna recalled.)
The arrival of the ship into port in New York made for a tearful scene. All of Rose’s surviving children were present on the dock. Rose was eventually buried in the family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery, Queens. Jacob, still heavily bearded and limited in his speech to Hebrew and Yiddish, finally accomplished the crossing on a later ship.
Jacob’s presence in the New World provided a symbolic reminder of the Old. Nathan and Jacob never seemed a good fit, always seeming to butt heads. Jacob remained an extremely religious figure and because of his adherence to dietary rules would not eat in his children’s homes, only drinking water. He never got to taste the source of his son’s success, a Nathan’s Famous frankfurter.
Abroad in the fast-moving world of New York City, the shtetl patriarch could be childishly naïve. At one point, Jacob was taken in by a scam that would have never fooled his savvier son, buying “jewels” on the street that proved to be fake. He lived to the ripe age of eighty-five, marrying twice more before passing away in 1937.
The stop-and-start nature of the family’s immigration led to some unlikely pairings. Some of the younger cousins had never met their relatives. The result was striking, even among the unsettled standards of Manhattan’s Tenth Ward.
Joe Handwerker, the son of Nathan’s brother Israel, first encountered his aunt Goldie when he was already a young man of eighteen. She was Nathan’s much younger sister and was around the same age as Joe. The two met, fell in love, and married, with Nathan’s nephew thereby becoming his brother-in-law. Rosie, Joe’s sister and one of Nathan’s nieces, would marry her uncle Morris Handwerker.
It was young Joe Handwerker who would prove integral to the future of the business. In 1920, Nathan’s twelve-year-old nephew had begun to work for his uncle and future brother-in-law. It was the boy’s first job. He signed on for the summer season, working seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, for nine dollars a week. At that point, Nathan’s was not yet Nathan’s Famous.
Over the next two decades, Joe became much more than a relative twice over. He would eventually rise to serve as Nathan’s right-hand man. Among all the Handwerkers who worked at the store, Joe was the one who would stay the longest and have the biggest impact. All the other family members left, some after short stints, some after many years. A few started businesses of their own. Phil had a candy store and a bar and grill. Morris opened a restaurant-bar called H&H.
Because of his mother’s untimely death, Nathan never got to say good-bye to her, and Rose would never get to say hello to her new grandchildren. In March 1920, Nathan and Ida had welcomed their daughter, Leah, into the world. Sixteen months later, Murray came along and, after a lag of four years, a second son, Sol. (The family never used middle names.)
As oldest son, Murray was the obvious future head of the family and heir to the business empire. But he lived in the shadow of a praise-withholding father and grew up always trying to prove himself. Sol developed into the family’s Hamlet, prone to introspection and rebellion against the authority figures of his father and brother.
A daughter and two sons. The perfect nuclear family. They lived right in Coney or, a little later on, a few miles east in Brighton Beach, always near the store. Even after his children were born, Nathan continued to spend long hours at work. Ida did, too. She would hold a baby in her arms, turning frankfurters on the griddle. She had merely added a second shift to her long workday, taking care of the family as well as taking care of business at Nathan’s Famous.
Ida and Nathan would bring the children into the store, keeping one eye on them as they went about their duties. Oftentimes, Leah, Sol, and Murray would find themselves relegated to a makeshift playpen, as Ida plopped them down into the crib-like, three-by-three wooden bins in which the store’s hot dog buns were kept. The roll crate became the children’s second home.
“I observed a lot of things going on around me,” Sol remembered about his earliest days. “There was a lot of commotion, a lot of action, a lot of men working in the kitchen. I remember in particular there were a lot of Chinese men and some black workers, too. The employees were some of my best friends. They were always taking care of me and watching over me. I used to wander around in the kitchen and watch them cutting the potatoes.”
The process the store used to create its popular crinkle-cut fries fascinated the young Sol: the fat, yellow-gold spuds coming out of the electric peeling drum and fed, one by one, into the manual cutter. “One of the workers would throw a potato into this machine and with one hand bring down the blade of the crinkle cutter. He kept doing that all day long. I thought it was the most difficult job in the world.”
Leah, Murray, and Sol might not have realized it at first, but the new family had a dynamic that was different from most other households. The children were in competition, jostling for attention, vying not just with each other but with the family business. The store dominated the time, focus, and energy of their parents. Al Shalik, a longtime Nathan’s employee, put it this way: “Murray and Sol had another brother, and that other brother was Nathan’s Famous.”
Leah probably suffered the most being that she was the oldest and being a girl. She was born during a time when her parents were working the hardest at establishing their business. She was never going to have an identity connected to the business. It was a symptom of the “delicate flower” gender bias of the period. Females, even the oldest child in the family, were not considered next in line to run such an establishment as Nathan’s Famous. Though her mother worked there, the atmosphere of the store was probably considered too rough-and-tumble for a girl, especially when Leah grew to adolescence.
As kids, however, the Handwerker children had a perfect knee-high view of the goings-on in the store. “I used to walk around behind the counter,” Sol remembered. “I watched what the men were doing. I used to watch the customers—that was kind of fun. And I used to watch my father. As an employer, my father was a very, very tough man. He was a perfectionist. He was very demanding of his people. If they didn’t do the right thing, he let them know in no uncertain terms.”
For all of that, Leah, Murray, and Sol enjoyed pleasant, happy childhoods throughout the 1920s and 1930s. When away from the store, Nathan relaxed to a degree that wasn’t possible while on the job. Surprisingly, given his domineering ways with his employees, he did not serve as the family disciplinarian. Ida did.
“Although at work [Nathan] sometimes appeared to be a tough man, he really wasn’t,” said his youngest son. “He was a really soft man. It was my mother who was the tough one. She was the one who’d get angry at me.”
Ida’s method of punishment wasn’t the paddle, the belt, or even the raised hand. “She wouldn’t hit me as much as pinch me. She used to like pinching, and it hurt.”
The grown-ups were busy with work, but they also devoted themselves to the wider Handwerker family. Monthly get-togethers of the dozen brothers and sisters who had by then emigrated from Poland to America were marked by equal measures of joking and bickering. Nieces, nephews, and cousins took the opportunity to play. The meetings featured raffle contests and dinners, and the group named itself the Jacob and Rose Handwerker Family Circle.
Nathan took the time to attend every family circle meeting. “He was very family-oriented,” his nephew Sidney Handwerker recalled. “They had all grown up together as children in Europe.”
The family circle’s first item of business was always the funding, design, and arrangements for the family burial plot. Endless amounts of time seemed to go into the planning of every detail. But there was also time for socializing, playing cards, squabbling.
“They loved each other, but they fought all the time,” remembered Sidney. As he recalled them, the poker games at the get-togethers were marked by a lot of second-guessing. “Why didn’t you raise your hand with three aces?” one of the brothers would cry out to another.
“They were some nice people there but they just couldn’t get along,” said Jack Dreitzer, who married into the family and worked at Nathan’s Famous from the twenties onward. Dreitzer remembered Handwerker siblings in stark terms. “Each brother hated the other. Each one was jealous of the other. Each one was envious of the fact that he had one cigar and the other had two. They couldn’t get along together. They used to fight like cats and dogs.”
An increasingly visible presence at family gatherings, and at the store, was Nathan’s nephew and brother-in-law, Joe Handwerker. A small fireplug of a guy with a Jackie Mason accent, he was fast becoming a favorite of Nathan’s. He could match his uncle’s outbursts of volcanic temper. The family circle meetings featured a raffle. For some reason, the prize was almost always won by Ida. The one time Joe won, the prize for that month enraged him: a bun warmer. He had seen enough of bun warming at work to last him a lifetime. He threw the offending device to the floor and stomped on it.
Gradually, Nathan rose to take his position as first among equals in the family. This was the decade of the Roaring Twenties, when America’s prospects appeared limitless. The country boomed, Coney Island boomed along with it, and Nathan’s Famous boomed in turn. As Nathan put it, the twenties were a time of getting “larger, every year a little bigger.”
At the time, there was stiff competition in Coney, with over two hundred restaurants offering fare in the neighborhood.
One way Nathan sought to address his need for workers was by hiring family members. Nepotism wasn’t at all a negative concept around Nathan’s Famous. It came to represent a foundational principle of the business. Part of the incentive was to guard against employee theft. The idea was that while relatives might steal from you, they would be marginally less larcenous than strangers. But of course the motivation also stemmed from love, generosity, and simple familial feeling.
“I always want to have all the Handwerkers together,” Nathan said. “I want to create a business where all the Handwerkers can work together as a big family.”
The founder of the store cherished a vision for it. Nathan thought a great deal about his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He hoped that the business would go on forever in the family, so he surrounded himself with successive circles of relatives.
Closest to him was the core of his wife and children. Then came the wider spectrum of Handwerker relations, Joe Handwerker most prominent among them, as well as Ida’s sisters and their spouses. Sisters-in-law, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, cousins all found their way onto the payroll. The idea was to have the business serve as a coalescing force, bringing the whole clan together.
Practice often ran counter to theory. Yes, Nathan wanted his relatives around him. At the same time, he could judge them unworthy of his patronage. A relative could be fired as easily as a stranger.
“He didn’t like a lot of the people in the family,” recalled his grandson Steve. “Even though he always said he wanted to have a family business, he really didn’t. He saw them as lazy, as nonindustrious, or trying to get away with something.”
“My name is on that sign,” Nathan said. “So whoever is going to be here and on the job is going to do it right or they’re not going to be here. I don’t reject them as a family member, but I might reject them as employees working for my business.”
As the company grew, its manpower demands began to outstrip even the abundant supply of Handwerker blood relations. Nathan was forced to widen his circle. He did so by creating another sort of family, a fiercely loyal group of workers who would go a long way toward making Nathan’s Famous the phenomenon it was.