Benjamin “Barney” Weber

1920s

Born 25 June 1921 in Manhattan, the fourth son of Galician immigrants Harry Weber and Clara Zahler, less than a year after his mother and older brothers arrived from Rohatyn. His mother died when he was three.

1930s–1940s

Grew up on the Lower East Side and left school after the eighth grade; by 1940 he was a printing-shop errand boy. Served four months in the Army in 1943. Married Rhoda Elaine Korsower in 1946.

1950s

Married Helen Marvelle Rose in Brooklyn on 6 November 1954.

1960s–1970s

Lived in Rego Park, Queens, and ran Manhattan eateries: the Gold Chip Coffee Shop on Whitehall Street and, from 1973, Ben's Sandwiches on West 55th Street.

1980

Killed in a head-on collision on the Queensboro Bridge on 13 April 1980.

A Lower East Side Boyhood

Benjamin "Barney" Weber was born on June 25, 1921, in Manhattan, one of the two sons Harry Weber and Clara Zahler had after they were reunited in New York. His father, a Galician tailor, had come over in 1912. His mother and three older brothers, Julius, Samuel, and Lewis, spent the First World War in Rohatyn and arrived only in September 1920. His Hebrew name was David. Barney barely knew his mother: Clara died of heart disease in February 1925, when he was three, leaving Harry to raise five boys.

Barney grew up on the Lower East Side and in the East Village, at 272 7th Street in 1930 and later on East 6th and East 9th Streets. He left school after the eighth grade, and in 1940, at eighteen, he was working forty-eight hours a week as an errand boy in a printing shop. When he registered for the draft in 1942 he was five foot ten and 170 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes.

Army Service

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 the Armored Replacement Training Center at Fort Knox, Kentucky. That July he was admitted to the Army hospital at Fort Knox, where doctors recorded a "constitutional psychopathic state" and emotional instability, a broad label the wartime Army applied to many of the men it discharged. He was discharged on July 27, 1943, after about four months of service, and later appeared in the Veterans Administration's records as a veteran.

Marriages and a Life in Food Service

Back in New York, Barney went to work behind a lunch counter; in October 1946 he gave his occupation as counterman. On November 30, 1946, at 210 East Broadway, he married Rhoda Elaine Korsower, a typist, the daughter of Moe Korsower and Fannie Winkler. By the early 1950s he was courting Helen Rose; in July 1951 the two were photographed together at Sha-Wan-Ga Lodge, a Catskills resort. They were married on November 6, 1954, at 1661 St. John's Place in Brooklyn, and their son Robert is Ben's father.

Barney spent the rest of his working life in Manhattan food service. With a partner he ran the Gold Chip Coffee Shop at 27 Whitehall Street, near the Battery, listed in the phone book from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, until demolition around it forced the shop to close. The family also remembers a Dexter's Restaurant, somewhere in the Thirties, among his ventures. From 1973 he was proprietor of his own place, Ben's Sandwiches at 140 West 55th Street, incorporated as Helber Foods, a name that blended Helen and Weber. Helen worked beside him there. He bought his kielbasa from a Polish butcher in the East Village, and in 1980 the shop was paying him about $350 a week. From 1966 the family lived at 65-36 99th Street in Rego Park, Queens.

Death

On the morning of April 13, 1980, at about 10:20, Barney was driving his 1965 Buick west across the Queensboro Bridge when an eastbound 1978 Ford veered into his lane and hit him head-on. The other driver, Young Kun Kim, was driving Susan and Kisuk Han in their car, and he said an unidentified vehicle had struck his bumper and pushed him across. Barney suffered fractures to nearly every rib and a torn aorta, and he died at Bellevue Hospital that day, at fifty-eight. Helen pursued a wrongful-death claim against Kim, and the following year the Hans sued both Kim and Helen, as administrator of Barney's estate, for their own injuries.

Barney was buried at Knollwood Park Cemetery, where his gravestone reads "Beloved Husband and Father." He is one of the two people his grandson Ben is named for.