Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker Page B

with a job offer. “I want you to come work for me. In two weeks, I’m opening a new place.”
    Nathan jumped. He didn’t even ask the salary. “Why? Because I knew if I worked for him, I’ll learn the business, because he really knows the business, in and out. And Sam, the new boss, he was a tailor who wanted to try something new. I didn’t know how long he was going to last or if he’s going to last at all in the business, so I didn’t want the surprise.”
    Max Leventhal’s new place would be a franchise in the Busy Bee chain, founded by Maxwell Garfunkel, the Moldavian immigrant owner of more than a dozen luncheonettes located throughout lower Manhattan. Innovative for their period, every Max’s Busy Bee worked on the principle of slim profit margins and high volume, making money a penny at a time. The patrons were office boys, building workers, struggling young lawyers, businessmen, and the host of others who did not have much money to spend on their lunches.
    Maxwell Garfunkel had come to the United States at age thirteen from Chișinău, near Odessa, in 1888. Arriving in New York with all of fifty cents, Garfunkel toiled and saved. Eight years later, he had amassed a $7,000 bankroll—the equivalent of $164,000 today. He used the money to open his first restaurant, on Ann Street in downtown Manhattan. Everything in the joint—coffee, pies, lemonade, typical luncheonette fare at the time—could be had for two cents. Max’s Busy Bee would not vary its prices for twenty years.
    When Garfunkel retired in 1928, he offered a glimpse of the life of a hardworking luncheonette man. “For forty years, I’ve worked from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. I’ve never had a real vacation. I am going to retire. I am tired. Money is not everything. Frankfurters, coffee, lemonade, savings accounts, seven days a week, little sleep, bustle, shouts, profits, frankfurters, soft-shell crabs—these are my memories.”
    In his new job at the Eighteenth Street Busy Bee, and after only six months in America, Nathan would make $7.50 a week. When a competing luncheonette on Twenty-First Street offered essentially to double his salary, he turned it down. “I says, ‘Sorry, I’m working, and I’m not going to give up my job.’ Why? Because I didn’t know how long the Twenty-First Street place was going to last in the business.”
    During this period, Nathan posed for three photographs of himself at the luncheonette. A bright-eyed but serious twenty-two-year-old man stares fixedly at the camera. In two of the shots, he stands apart from his fellow workers. An accident of the situation? Or is he already separating himself out from the crowd?
    On the job, Nathan held various positions, including an early twentieth-century version of an advertising Mad Man. He used to post himself on the sidewalk outside the Busy Bee and loudly hawk its fare.
    â€œSo I was standing and working at the lemonade, a penny for a glass of lemonade. I took in fifteen dollars a day.” (Which, to stop and think about it, means he sold 1,500 servings! In a ten-hour day, that works out to be more than two sales a minute.) “And I was hollering, ‘Lemonade! Lemonade!’ And the cops used to come over, trying to stop me.”
    The former authority-cowed Galician immigrant had learned by then to stand up for himself. He told the police, “Don’t tell me, Officer, to stop. Go to the boss and tell him to stop me. If he stops me, I’ll be glad to help, to stop hollering.”
    For two years, the hardworking, full-throated young Nathan followed Max Leventhal around Manhattan, moving from the Eighteenth Street store to another at 99 Spring Street, between Mercer and Broadway. The luncheonette business was a movable feast. But a change was afoot. Awaiting Nathan was an introduction to a fabled realm that would