Benjamin “Barney” Weber

Born June 25, 1921 in Manhattan, New York. He married November 6, 1954, at 1661 St and worked as printing shop errand boy. He died April 13, 1980 in Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan, New York.

• Started out in 1940 as a printing-shop errand boy.
• One of Ben’s two namesakes.

New York Beginnings

Benjamin “Barney” Weber was born on June 25, 1921, in Manhattan, the son of the Galician immigrant tailor Harry Weber and Clara Zahler. He left school after the eighth grade and by 1940 was working as a printing-shop errand boy, forty-eight hours a week.

Army and Discharge

Barney enlisted in the U.S. Army on March 4, 1943, and trained as a private with Company C of the 19th Armored Replacement Battalion at Fort Knox, Kentucky. That July he was admitted to the Army hospital there for what the record calls a “constitutional psychopathic state” and emotional instability, and was discharged on those grounds the same month, after roughly four months of service.

A Life in Food Service

After the war Barney worked as a counterman before going into business for himself, running a series of Manhattan restaurants over the following decades — a coffee shop on Whitehall Street with a partner through the 1960s and '70s, and finally, from 1973, his own place at 140 West 55th Street, Ben's Sandwiches, also known as Helber Foods — the name a combination of his wife Helen's and his own surname. He married Helen Marvelle Rose on November 6, 1954, in Brooklyn.

Death

On the morning of April 13, 1980, Barney was driving his 1965 Buick west on a Manhattan street when a car driven by Young Kun Kim veered into oncoming traffic and struck him head-on; Kim claimed an unidentified vehicle had clipped his bumper and forced the swerve. Barney was killed in the collision. His widow, Helen, hired an attorney to pursue damages against Kim, and the following year the other car's passengers separately sued both Kim and Helen, as administratrix of Barney's estate, over their own injuries.