Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Page B

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.
    â€œSell!” 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.
    *   *   *
    â€œSo 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