by Susan Orlean
“Then I had my own printing outfit,” he went on. “That’s when I met my future wife. She was a little hundred-pound girl from Philadelphia. I helped her set up her own business, because she had been working for a terrible guy. I said to her, ‘Jean, you’re working for a terrible guy. He’s got an obsequious manner. You should go into business for yourself.’ She was going to be selling all discount goods—refrigerators, ovens, everything. I suggested the name Modern Supply, because we would be anticipating future needs. I’m good at anticipating booms. For instance, I anticipated the lawn mower boom on Long Island. Eventually, I was doing so much work for Jean that I said to her, ‘You can’t afford to pay me what all this is worth, so let’s get married.’ I didn’t have any silly romantic notions. We were absolutely the same kind of people, my wife and I. We both loved to work. It was almost an obsession.”
In the early sixties, Mr. Herschman said to himself that there was going to be a boom in ceiling fans. “We had been selling fans occasionally, and then I realized that we would be having a boom. When the price of electricity went up and air-conditioning became expensive, the whole thing skyrocketed. We now sell fans to a variety of, shall I say, characters, but I do not pay attention to anyone who comes in who is of a weird or unusual nature. In the old days, the men bought the fans, and they’d choose brown. Now women do most of the choosing, and four times out of five they pick white. They like white fans to go against their white ceilings, because it has less of a discordant effect. Some people come in here thinking a ceiling fan is the do-all and be-all of everything. It is not. It is a cir-cu-la-tor. It will cir-cu-late air and cool an object, including a person. People have asked me to build them noisy fans to drown out noisy streets. A psychologist who had, shall we call them, patients once asked me to build a device to block sound from traveling into his waiting room. We had a fellow named Slater, a hypnotist, who had me build one that made a sound that helped get people hypnotized. He didn’t want them to think there was anything unnatural going on, even though quite obviously there was.”
It is Mr. Herschman’s opinion that the world is going down the drain and that the ceiling fan business has been a reasonably good position from which to observe its downward direction over the last six decades. From time to time, he issues updates on the finer points of this opinion. That afternoon, among the matters he addressed were brands of ceiling fans besides the brands he sells (“Let us not concern ourselves with the fact that three-quarters of the fans out there are trash”), his career at present (“I prefer building and fixing things, which I used to do. I could still build things if I were compelled to, and sometimes I get sentimental”), most space shuttle experiments (“Very disappointing”), lawyers (“Robots”), accountants (“Robots”), and academe (“Maybe there are a few professors who know something, but that’s only because they had a job before they went to school. We are often approached by professors about ceiling fans, and they do not grasp the reality or realistic attitudes of the problem—that’s the fault of their college training”).
Mr. Herschman’s assistants, Theresa Carriman and Lindsay Noel, waited on the athletes, and then they told Leo that they were leaving for the day, and turned off the fans. The shop instantly became stuffy. “I don’t have any fans at home,” Mr. Herschman said, pushing his glasses up and squeegeeing the bridge of his nose. “I live in the Village, in a concrete building, and it’s as cool as can be.”
FISH WINDOW
SOME OF THE PEOPLE who admire Fernando Lara’s window displays at the Citarella Fish Company, at Broadway and Seventy-fifth, think the prehistoric-monster tableau he made one day last week was among his finest efforts. A plastic Godzilla clutching a real boiled lobster reared up on a slab of swordfish that had a face of black-olive eyes and a mushroom nose and was resting on a field of finnan haddie and jumbo shrimp. About half a dozen people stopped by to photograph the window that day. Others—purists, probably—prefer Mr. Lara’s nonrepresentational displays, which might feature a rosette of gray sole over a cascade of scallops; or concentric circles of brook trout, red snapper, sea squab, and stone-crab claws; or an elaborate mosaic of lobsters and clams and haddock. Mr. Lara’s windows—a spectacle of color and texture and fish forms—have become one of the most popular art exhibits on upper Broadway, and there is usually a school of appreciators trolling outside Citarella in the morning as soon as he finishes preparing the day’s display. Mr. Lara, who makes up a new window every day but Sunday, doesn’t publicly favor one of his styles over another, but he admits to liking to deploy a plastic prehistoric creature along with the fish whenever possible, especially if he can get dry ice for a smoke-pouring-out-of-nostrils effect.
“Sometimes, before I come to work, I sit and think of my design,” Mr. Lara said the other day. “I want the window to be nice every time. I just wish I had more time to do it.” As he was talking, he put two pails—one full of salmon steaks and one of halibut—on a shelf at the back of the window, smoothed the shaved ice in front, and calculated where to begin. He planned to edge the window with fish steaks, layer sea squabs and scallops beside them, put a pile of shrimp in the center, and poise melon boats on either side of it. He was also preparing a few mackerel for the next day, when he intended to prop three of them up like miniature porpoises leaping out of a sea of other seafood and balance a rubber ball between their noses. “Sometimes I’ll ride my train in from Astoria and I’ll have the design in my head, but they won’t have the fish I planned on,” he said. “Then I have to change my ideas really fast. I get ideas from watching television, and sometimes I see a picture in a magazine that I like, and I come to work and make it out of fish. Sometimes I can’t believe I can make all this just out of fish.”
Mr. Lara, who is thirty-two years old and came here from Mexico in 1979, had never done any artwork or arranged fish in any manner until eight months ago. He was working as an icebox man at Citarella then, and started getting ideas about the window display, so he asked Ricky Oviedo, the manager, if he could give it a try. His only relevant prior experience was a childhood habit of playing with his food. “We had a different sort of window before Fernando started doing it,” Ricky Oviedo told us. “We just sort of threw everything in.”
A tiny elderly woman made her way up to the counter, asked for a nice piece of white snapper, not too big, and then peered over the back of the window at Mr. Lara’s half-finished arrangement. “I come here every day to look at the fish window,” she said, “and I tell you, he’s an artist.” Her companion, a tall woman with a soft Caribbean accent, said, “We never miss a single day coming to see the fish. I loved it when he used the Godzilla.” The tiny woman waved her hands. “I don’t know about that one,” she said. “But I love the pretty way he arranges the fish.”
Mr. Lara grinned and turned back to his pails. He didn’t care for the way the salmon steaks were buckling, so he picked up a piece of wood he uses to shove the fish around and whacked the steaks with it. They stopped buckling. As it happens, salmon is his favorite material to work with, because of its good color, density, and form, and because it doesn’t smell bad after an hour or two in the window. “I like to go around and look at other store windows,” he said. “I like seeing how they arrange clothes and shoes and things. But I’ve never seen one with fish that I’ve liked.” He added that he was disappointed that the day’s delivery hadn’t included any good heads. He likes working with heads, and once stuck a salmon head on a sturgeon body. He also painted a lobster and a loaf of bread black once and constructed a giant spider out of them.
The display needed vegetation, so Mr. Lara made a trip to Fairway for eleven heads of green leaf lettuce, three red peppers, an acorn squash, two cucumbers, and a head of broccoli. He washed them all and whittled them into funny shapes and arranged them around the fish. “I’d like to paint,” he said, “but I don’t have the time. I’ve never really done it. I’m always thinking of new designs for the fish. The only thing I don’t like is when the customers come in
and want one of the pieces in the window. It’s like if you painted something, you wouldn’t want anyone to touch it.” He picked up a gooey sea squab and looked it over. “I don’t eat fish,” he added. “I don’t like it. My favorite meal is fried meat.”
A few months ago, Mr. Lara found that all he could think about, day and night, was his fish windows. It got on his nerves, so he told Mr. Oviedo that he thought he should stop doing the window. “I said to him, ‘Fernando, you do a good window. Stick with it,’ ” Mr. Oviedo told us. Mr. Lara capitulated, and returned to his morning routine. From eight to ten, he does the window, and the rest of the day he spends behind the counter weighing and wrapping fish for the customers.
This morning, he finished his design by spreading ten pounds of scallops alongside the salmon, crowned the whole thing with a starfish that had come in by chance with the fish delivery that morning, and stood back to survey his handiwork. One of his regular fans, a tall, freckled man, stood on the sidewalk admiring the arrangement. He nodded his approval to Mr. Lara, and hollered, “Fernando, wonderful texture today!” To a passerby he said, “Boy, what that guy can do with fish. I’m telling you, he ought to get an agent.”
THREE-DIMENSIONAL
ONE OF THE THINGS the new Steve Urkel doll says when you pull its voice cord is “Got any cheese?” We don’t know why he says this, because we are among the few Americans who don’t watch Family Matters, the allegedly warm, wonderful, hilarious television comedy featuring a character named Steve Urkel, who evidently spends a great deal of his time inquiring about cheese. One of the things that Wayne Charness, a vice president of Hasbro, Inc., says about the introduction of the Steve Urkel doll is “I hope you’re as excited as we are!” In this case, we know why he says this. Family Matters delivers the highest share of viewers aged two to eleven among all prime-time network programs, and this means that the Steve Urkel doll, which Hasbro will be bringing out this fall, is bound to be a very high-margin piece of entertainment hardware.
At a press conference at the New York Hilton the other day, we found out pretty much everything else about Steve Urkel and the official Urkel product line that we had been wondering about. We had been wondering, for instance, how the whole Urkel licensing campaign had been going. A representative of LCA Entertainment, the licensing company orchestrating the Urkel licensing campaign, was sitting behind us at the conference, and he provided this interpretative account: “For one thing, the apparel is blowing off the shelves. I mean blowing off. The boxer shorts are really hot. And the sheets, by the way, are incredible.” The people at LCA also wanted to mention this: If you yourself do not have a wild and wondrous neighbor like Steve Urkel, you will soon be able to make up for it by purchasing Urkel sweatshirts, T-shirts, twill jackets (screen-printed), belts, suspenders, pajamas, robes, sweaters, fleece coordinates in boys’ sizes 2 to 18, sleeping bags, backpacks, beach towels, bedding, trading cards, posters, handheld electronic games, video game watches, tabletop games, buttons, Lucite key rings, mini-stickers, poster books, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, 3-D reels, and Do the Urkel: The Risk and Roll Game That Lets You Be Urkel, not to mention the amazingly lifelike Steve Urkel doll.
Jaleel White is the fourteen-year-old actor who plays Steve Urkel. Like the Steve Urkel doll, Jaleel has big brown eyes, gigantic dimples, a pointy chin, and a sprightly body with rubbery joints. In character, he wears a nerdy shirt, nerdy pants, nerdy shoes, suspenders, and oversize eyeglasses on a nylon cord. In real life, he wears other outfits. Jaleel had this to say about becoming a doll: “A lot of very important people of our time have been dolls.” At the press conference, Jaleel made a short speech in the nerdy voice he uses for Urkel, embraced an Urkel doll, and demonstrated the Urkel dance to the adoring overflow crowd. (We have misplaced the dance instructions that were in the press kit, but we seem to remember that they began with the phrase “Hitch up your pants.”) Then Jaleel was introduced to Roseann Radosevich, a director of girls’ toys design at Hasbro, who supervised the development of the doll. “He skewed a little older than preschool,” Ms. Radosevich explained to us after the encounter, because we had, in fact, been wondering how Urkel skewed. And how about his adorability quotient? “He’s very, very three-dimensional,” Ms. Radosevich said. “It’s easy to see how he could be a toy.”
Here’s something else we’d been wondering about: What do seventeen eager press photographers say to a living doll? This much we could make out: “Jaleel, can you shuffle a little again?” and “Hey, Jaleel, redo the Urkel dance!” and “Jaleel, do the Urkel!” and “Jaleel, over here, babe!” and “This way, Jaleel.” Also, “Do the thing with your foot up, babe.” Jaleel’s reaction to the hubbub: “I’ve been in the business since I was three years old. I know how to communicate with the press. I’ve grown into the press. Also, I’ve been on Carson.” And how about describing his approach, as an actor, to the Urkel character? “To be honest, it was destiny.”
Basically, a press conference announcing the introduction of a multimillion-dollar product line involves a small hotel room filled with a lot of people in good moods about their upside potential answering questions from other people about that upside potential. This was the case with Urkel: The Press Conference. Someone from Teen Beat wanted to know whether the Urkel doll was likely to be bigger than the New Kids on the Block products, and whether Urkel was a multidimensional sort of thing, and what Jaleel’s dream date would be like. (We were wondering about the last item, too. She would be—this is direct from the source—“not a shallow person, who has ambition, and who would not be ashamed to ride around in a car that wasn’t a Mercedes-Benz.”) Iris Burton, Jaleel’s agent, wanted to know if she sounded too nasal in her interview. A reporter from Long Island wanted to know how long Urkel-mania was likely to last. Grace Garland, the gossip reporter from WBLS Radio, wanted to know if Jaleel’s father, a dentist who lives in Los Angeles, had done Jaleel’s teeth. Someone sitting beside us wanted to know if we had ever eaten fried dough. A reporter from a Philadelphia television station wanted to know if Jaleel had heard the rumor that he was more intelligent than all five New Kids on the Block put together. Someone without a name tag wanted to know whether a comparison between Jaleel and the young Jerry Lewis had been made before. We wanted to know how we should feel about getting a press release saying “Urkel-mania Takes the Country by Storm,” considering that until the press conference we had never heard of Steve Urkel. Grace Garland, when she had finished complimenting Jaleel’s teeth, wanted to know if we wanted one of her business cards, just because, as she put it, “you never know.”
ACCOMMODATING
REPORTER (which means us, entering a dry-cleaning establishment at the corner of Ninety-seventh and Columbus Avenue): Pardon me, I was just wandering by and saw the sign in your window that says:
ANNOUNCING NAT
OF VALETONE’S CLEANERS
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
EXPERT TAILORING
AND ALTERATIONS
HAS JOINED THE STAFF OF
MANHATTAN VALET
I was thinking that this Nat must be quite something. Most dry cleaners don’t announce their tailors with such enthusiasm.
PERSON BEHIND THE COUNTER (who turns out to be Gary Adler, owner and founder of Manhattan Valet): What can I tell you? He has an excellent reputation, and he was working up the street at a store that was closing, and I needed a tailor. So we both had needs that needed to be filled. I wanted an authority in the area, and that was Nat. He’s very known. After I hired him, I put up the sign, because we’re not too shy to say we have Nat now.
PERSON WHO JOINS GARY BEHIND THE COUNTER (who happens to be his sister Alisa, co-owner of Manhattan Valet): Actually, Nat came to work here because he’s been in love with me for years.
(Another person now joins Gary and Alisa behind the counter. This is their mother, who introduces herself as Mother Adler.)
MOTHER ADLER: Alisa, please! (To us) You can call me Rhoda or Mother Adler. The story of Nat is that we had
a tailor before Nat who was from Trinidad, a lovely man, but he wanted to do music. Calypso and cha-cha, and so forth. So he left.
NAT FREUND (who has stepped out from behind his sewing table and joined the conversation): What I can’t give them musically, I give them in tailoring. Musically, I can’t accommodate.
ALISA: Personally, I think he’s an incredible tailor.
NAT: (Embarrassed silence.)
MOTHER ADLER: Nat, I’m telling you, you don’t have to be modest. You don’t have to be shy. (To us) This is really my kids’ business. I’m just the mother. I don’t meddle. I don’t butt in. I just give suggestions. I just give advice.
GARY: Mother, enough already. On the subject of Nat, I’m not saying this to swell his head, but there are people who simply will not go to anyone besides Nat.
NAT: I used to work for His Majesty the King.
GARY: You’re joking. (Gary exits.)
NAT: What’s to joke? His Majesty King George VI. In other words, the British Army. I worked in a uniform factory. Then for thirty-four years in this neighborhood. I’m known on the avenue.
ALISA: I met a woman at a luncheon once—this is a true story and a really funny story—and I mentioned to her that we had hired a new tailor and she said, “Oh my God! Not Nat! He’s the best! I’ve been looking for him since Valetone closed!” (Commotion at the door. Gary reenters.) Gary, where have you been?
GARY: I went and got us a little something to eat. I thought to myself, We’re talking, we should have a little something. What does everyone like to eat? And then I thought, Butter cookies! Everyone loves butter cookies!