Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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.