Jungle Jim & The Great Hot Dog War of 1956!

I imagine everyone is getting bored with Trumps’ on and off war and peace with Iran, and is at least somewhat familiar with many of the historic wars like The War of The Roses, The Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, etc.., etc.… or even the fictional H.G. Wells “War of The Worlds”. But how many of you have ever heard of “The Great Hot Dog War of 1956” that involved one of my dad’s cigar customers?” None of you? Yeah, I kinda thought so!  So, I’m gonna give you a history lesson free of charge! Now pay attention because 3 minutes after you read this it will self-destruct!

I’ve been working just about my entire life. My cigar career, so to speak, started at about age seven, helping my mom and dad in their luncheonette during lunch hour (yeah, in those days lunch hour actually lasted a full hour, not like today when lunch hour lasts thirty or forty minutes, or when a half gallon of Breyers Ice Cream now contains just a quart and a half, and a 5 pound bag of sugar actually weighs 4 pounds—back then it was a real lunch hour!) and then I worked after school… but this story is just about lunch hour.

I don’t really know what all the other kids did at lunch hour, but I would hustle back to my parents store, eat a superfast 5-minute lunch in one of the two telephone booths at the back of the shop (so I didn’t take up one of the eight stools at the counter where a customer might sit) and then deliver lunches to the various stores along Pitkin Avenue, and collect the money for the meals and hopefully get a few tips. Then I would bring all the money, including any tips, back to my parents.

Those were tough times for our family, and my parents both worked morning to night seven days a week. My allowance was 25 cents a week, probably not even 5% of the tips I got delivering meals. The only exception to forking over all my tips to my parents was a nickel tip I got every day from a guy named Jungle Jim… well… now that I’m 70+ years older than I was back then, and a teensy bit smarter, MAYBE HIS NAME WASN’T REALLY JUNGLE JIM!

Well, I’ve sold cigars (or in this case just delivered cigars) to a lot of interesting and famous people—Presidents, Movie Stars, Sports Legends, Politicians, and once I even sold a box of cigars to Fidel Castro himself. But, looking back over those many years and countless customers, the most memorable of all was this guy: Jungle Jim.

Time sort of blurs the memory, but I recall the year I ran into this Jungle Jim character very well. It was 1953 and I was in the third grade. One of the errands I used to run at lunchtime was to deliver a daily ration of three La Corona Corona cigars from my dad’s shop to Jungle Jim. Back then, Corona Coronas were “three for a buck” – a mighty expensive bonded Havana cigar that was by far and away THE singularly most prestigious cigar a man could buy. In fact, they were so popular that I can still clearly recall the salesman from my dad’s cigar supplier Faber, Coe, and Gregg, (while he was slurping down a free malted and pretzel rod at my dad’s counter- sort of a bribe) telling my father how many boxes of Corona Coronas he would be “allotted” in the coming month.

Delivering these three cigars to Jungle Jim was the highlight of every day. I would run at full speed the two intervening blocks from Amboy Street and Pitkin Avenue, to this little wooden shack that was just off the corner of Strauss Street: Jungle Jim’s Coconut Stand. Here, sitting in a little green hut that was somehow attached to the brick wall on the side of the Little Oriental Restaurant (one of the most expensive dining establishments in all of Brooklyn) was our “upscale” customer, Jungle Jim, dressed in some sweat stained manilla shirt and wearing a pith helmet!

Each day I would bring him his three cigars, and he would fork over the dollar payment and a nickel tip!  That little green stand sold exactly two items, slices of brilliant white coconut that were kept in ice-water, and glasses of ice-cold coconut milk (the cholesterol laden stuff that heart attacks are made of… but who knew what cholesterol was in those days?). The coconut slices were three for a nickel, and every day, I would hand Jungle Jim his nickel tip back in exchange for the coconut slices, and we’d talk baseball while I ate them. This daily activity continued even during “The Great Hot Dog War of 1956”.

Directly across the street from Jungle Jim’s Coconut stand was a place called Shapiro’s Delicatessen. For some reason that is a mystery to me to this very day, there was bad blood between Mr. Shapiro and Jungle Jim. Mr. Shapiro was continuously complaining to the city and health department trying to get Jungle Jim’s little green shack declared illegal, unsanitary, or Lord knows what, and conversely, Jungle Jim was always posting messages on the side of his shack (which could easily be read through the window of the delicatessen directly across the street) about how rotten the food at Shapiro’s deli was. Well, just so I don’t keep you in suspense, Mr. Shapiro was never successful in getting Jungle Jim’s wooden shack torn down or getting Jungle Jim evicted and you will soon find out why.

This feud came to a head in the fall of 1956, when the Little Oriental Restaurant, against whose brick wall Jungle Jim’s Coconut Stand was attached, went out of business! Somehow, and many said Jim’s brother was a famous mobster (which I am pretty sure is 100% true), Jungle Jim came up with the money to lease the vacant Little Oriental Restaurant and out of sheer hate for Shapiro, he turned the place into a Kosher Deli!

The going price for a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut in those days was fifteen cents, and I would imagine that fifty percent of all the business done in Shapiro’s Deli was the sale of Hot Dogs. The other fifty percent being Corned Beef and Hot Pastrami sandwiches, French Fries and Dr. Brown’s Cream or Black Cherry Soda. Mmmm! Now that was real food!

Well, on opening day, Jungle Jim had a great big sign plastered all over his window that read: FRANKFURTER & SAUERKRAUT 10 CENTS. The war had begun! The very next day, Shapiro also put a sign in his window: Frankfurter and Sauerkraut: 10 CENTS.

About a week later, Jungle Jim lowered the price to 5 CENTS!  At a nickel for a Hot Dog, the place was jammed all day, so busy that it seemed like everybody in Brooklyn had switched to a 100% Hot Dog diet!

Well, while all this was going on, I was still delivering Jungle Jim’s three daily cigars, and he still worked in that little green shack, never entering his own Deli.

When I asked him why he never worked in the deli, I was shocked to learn that he was disabled. He had been injured in the war, and I realized right then that I had never seen Jungle Jim other than through the little glass window of his shack. I also realized that the WWII injury was why Jungle Jim was the single solitary customer whom my father ever had me deliver cigars to. It was many years later that I learned from a newspaper article, that the City of New York had special laws for injured war veterans and blind people, allowing them to operate little stands like Jungle Jim’s even though they were in violation of city ordinances.

Within a few days of Jungle Jim’s price reduction to 5 cents, Shapiro’s Deli put up a great big sign: Frankfurter and Sauerkraut: 5 CENTS.  It was going to be a battle to the death!

Well, by the summer of 1958, my parents had sold their luncheonette, and purchased a United Cigar Store on 125th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem, so my days of delivering to Jungle Jim were at an end, but my dad told me that Jungle Jim had wiped Shapiro’s Deli out of business! He also said that once Shapiro’s Deli went out of business, Jungle Jim closed his deli too, because he had only opened it to spite Mr. Shapiro!

I never knew what Jungle Jim’s real name was, or where he got his cigars from after we moved, but he is certainly one of, if not the most memorable, of all the millions of people I have sold cigars to in my lifetime.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.