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made it a habit of dropping by Max’s Busy Bee every Thursday. Mr. Singer was romantically interested in Nathan’s sister Anna and soon struck up a friendship with her brother Nathan. Eventually, Nathan asked the man about employment, trying to fill his slack time when the Manhattan luncheonette traffic dwindled on the weekends.
    â€œMr. Singer, could you give me a job in the summertime, Saturday, Sunday? We close the place [Max’s Busy Bee] in the afternoon on Saturday. So I can come out and work for you on Saturday. I could work half a day on Saturday, until one, two o’clock in the morning, and then Sunday a whole day.”
    His current seventy-five-hour workweek wasn’t enough. Nathan wanted more. But Max Singer couldn’t do anything for him. He suggested that the eager beaver should go out to Coney Island himself and canvass the many restaurants that were springing up along Surf Avenue, catering to the growing crowds of visitors.
    It took him a while, but in the summer of 1914, Nathan finally went out to Coney Island to seek seasonal work in earnest. At first, he struck out. A certain Mr. Kissler, a contact given to him by Singer, was friendly but unable to help. “I’m sorry, I’m filled up,” he was told. “But go to this fella, across the street.” When that establishment also lacked openings, Nathan would return to Singer. “Can you give me another place to go?” he would ask. He was dogged, unwilling to take no for an answer, unafraid of bothering people again and again.
    Finally, Singer said the magic words. “Go to Feltman’s.”
    The restaurant complex first founded by Charles Feltman in the boom years after the Civil War was hard to miss. By the time Nathan visited, it sprawled over a full city block, West Tenth Street from Surf Avenue to the beach. The place hosted a million visitors during the summer season.
    Charles Feltman died in 1910, but his business continued to thrive under his family. When Nathan went to the restaurant looking for work, he approached Sam Land, a frankfurter chef at one of the grills. The man was a subcontractor of sorts, working for a percentage of the sales, and he hired out workers on his own.
    â€œMr. Singer sent me,” Nathan told him, not quite an outright lie. “I want to ask if you can give me a job.”
    â€œWhere are you working now?” asked Land.
    â€œI’m at the Busy Bee in Manhattan.”
    â€œWhat are you doing at the Busy Bee?”
    â€œEverything,” Nathan replied. “Selling frankfurters, cutting rolls…”
    â€œAre you a good roll cutter?”
    â€œExcellent.” That wasn’t a lie. He had enough experience to know he was a good roll cutter. After all, how bad can one be at such work? The real skill was speed. On a busy summer’s day, Feltman’s dished up forty thousand hot dogs to one hundred thousand customers.
    â€œI’ll give you a dollar and a half a day,” Land told Nathan. “But you have to pay if you eat a frankfurter.”
    â€œSo I worked,” Nathan remembered in his characteristically understated way. His summer workweek stretched to seven days. He returned home from Coney on Sunday at one or two o’clock. In those days before a subway connection, the commute into the city took him at least ninety minutes by trolley car. Monday morning, he had to show up at his regular job at the Busy Bee by 6:00 A.M.
    Hard work. Coney Island. Frankfurters. He might not have immediately realized what he had done, but Nathan had put together a winning formula that would propel him to success. There was just one more factor to the algorithm, and it would take him a little while to discover it.
    The nickel.
    *   *   *
    The Coney Island that Nathan first encountered was in the midst of a startling change, transforming from an elitist playground into a truly populist one. In the early years of the twentieth