THE JIM'S STORY

Reprinted from Ira Berkow’s “Maxwell Street, Survival in a Bazaar”:

Jimmy Stefanovic, owner of the thriving hot-dog stand on the northwest corner of Halsted and Maxwell, was born on July 11, 1901, in Gostivar, North Macedonia, Yugoslavia. He came to America in 1939, landing in New York harbor with seven dollars in his pocket. The customs official said, ‘Lucky seven.’ Jimmy, who spoke no English repeated respectfully, ‘Lucky seven. Lucky seven’. Jimmy traveled first to an uncle in Detroit. He asked his uncle, ‘What means this, Lucky seven?’ The uncle explained. Jimmy took it as an omen.

Jimmy is husky, pouchy, pale, mild-tempered. He arrives at the stand each morning at about eleven and enters at the rear where the bags of onions are plopped, the Polish sausages and Vienna hot dogs and hamburgers and pork chops are stored, the barrels of pickles and peppers are kept, and the cases of soda pop are stacked. It is from here that he orchestrates his twenty-five employees at this twenty-four-hour-a-day stand which, at peak hours, may have forty or fifty customers jamming up to its steamy open windows. At seven-thirty each evening, he slips off his white apron, tugs into his jacket or coat, pushes a fedora on to his baldish head and walks out to the corner where his chauffeur-driven Cadillac awaits.

‘I grow up in Russia, in Kamenets Podolsky, where my father have candy manufacturing business,’ said Jimmy. ‘One old man named Faranya tell me: You young boy. You go over there to Chicago. Over there is future. And I put it in my head and I never take it out’.

Then came the Revolution in 1919. ‘When the Russians retreat, they rob the stores. Break the stores and everything. We want to travel to Rumanian border and get to Yugoslavia. It is twenty-five kilometers away, but we walk through forest for a hundred days’. During this time, his uncle’s dog, Dooruff, saved their lives. ‘My father take Dooruff, put message around his neck and with some gold pieces, and tell him: Go to friends in Rumanian town across the river and get bread. Dooruff swims back with basket of bread around his neck. He do this twenty, twenty-five times’. Tragically, Dooruff was shot during one of his runs. ‘Everybody was cry. We make grave, everything. Everybody was in his funeral. Italian man play the violin. Everybody was sorry for dog’.

Jimmy eventually crossed into Rumania in a canoe. He hid a letter in his boot given to him by a Frenchman, which almost cost him his life when Rumanian soldiers found it. ‘Shoot! He’s a spy! they say. But I am taken to the commandant. He says he knows my father. He let go of me’.

After years of waiting for a visa, Jimmy finally arrived in Chicago in 1939. ‘At first I sell on street corners Taffy Apples. Jimmy saved $280 in three months’. He bought the hot-dog stand from his sickly aunt and built a minor empire. ‘I build like this: Take care of the stuff; give fresh stuff; no put too much; no fry too much; be nice to people. I never buy cheap stuff’.

‘Ah, is too many reasons why we open all night,’ he said. ‘One time I closed, they steal a hundred twenty cases of pop. Nighttime here on the corner is dead when we be closed. When we open, traffic little bit is. You see, when I’m open, corner is life’.