Dan Remembers His Dad: A Montauk Pharmacist & Hamptons Hunk

When I was about 15 years old, I asked my mother why she had married my father. She thought about it for a moment, then smiled.

“He was a hunk,” she said.

And there was proof of this. Among his 400 classmates, a photo of him in his Brooklyn College yearbook had this caption:

“Voted the handsomest man in the senior class.”

Dad was born in 1911, the son of Franz and Margaret Rattiner, immigrants from Romania who earlier had fled Bucharest to escape a Jewish “cleansing” in that country.

My mom, a year younger than he, was the child of Jewish refugees fleeing Russia. She had a blind date with him. All dressed up, she came to the top of the stairs, took one look at Dad at the foot of the stairs, tripped and fell down the stairs. He caught her.

Dad’s passion was chemistry. In the home in Millburn, New Jersey where I grew up, he had a research lab in the basement. Earlier, during World War II, he worked on the team at Merck inventing penicillin. Later, as an executive at a pharmaceutical company, he created hair tonics and cosmetics, some of them becoming national bestsellers.

He and my mom raised me and my sister in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Millburn, New Jersey. He’d dress in a suit and tie and drive to work at the company’s headquarters every morning. I’d wait excitedly for him to come home.

Sometimes he’d arrive with candy bars in his pockets, one for me and one for Nancy. Also, as a complete surprise, he’d every two years come home with a new car. It was always a convertible.

During vacations he’d drive us to Niagara Falls, Cape Cod and, for two winters in the early 1950s, to Florida. I recall seeing the “Whites Only” signs in some stores along the way.

In 1955, my dad decided to change his career. He bought White’s Pharmacy in Montauk and moved the family there. It was a place we’d never been before. Personally I was astounded at how beautiful it was out here.

For 20 years, he was Montauk’s pharmacist. Sometimes, he’d get up in the middle of the night and drive to the store to fill an emergency prescription for, perhaps, a tourist staying at a Montauk motel.

The town loved this man, and I did too. He was gentle and kind. In our first two summers in Montauk, he put me in charge of the old-fashioned soda fountain in the store. I sold ice cream cones, malteds, sundaes and sodas.

In 1960, as a college kid, I told him I would start the Dan’s Papers newspaper in that town. He said it would be a big success, and at the end of that summer, when it was, he said he had a present for me. He drove me to an East Hampton car dealership and handed me the keys to a brand-new Ford Fairlane convertible.

That was my dad.