Whatever be the zipper you need,Eddie Feibusch is sure he has it. Its somewhere in his store,ZipperStop,at 27 Allen Street,New York,among three floors of shelves with boxes of zippers in 502 colours. How many zippers does he have? One million,millions,I dont knowmore than a million, said Feibusch,86,a zipper man going on 70 years. His website plays Sinatra singing New York,New York and says,Unzipping America since 1941. He sold a zipper for Margaret Trumans wedding gown when Miss Truman,the presidents daughter,married Clifton Daniel in 1956,he is proud to say. He sold zippers to Nike for Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. And a prison in North Carolina called for a zipper for Bernard L. Madoff. Feibusch,a prewar refugee from Vienna who overcame not just the Nazis but also Velcro,and opened his business on December 7,1941,says he is the last big New York zipper man standing,or at least the last to exclusively represent the Japanese-owned,made-in-America YKK zippers (slogan: Little Parts. Big Difference). Retail,the zippers go from 50 cents for a nylon dress zipper to $100 for a No. 10,350-inch brass zipper to wrap your hot-air balloon. They are watertight for deep-sea divers,airtight for NASA. Feibuschs parents owned a grocery store in Vienna,but after annexing Austria in 1938,the Nazis arrested his father. Relatives in Brooklyn helped arrange the familys emigration to America in 1939. Eddie was 16 then. He dropped out of school to become an errand boy in a grocery store,then a clerk in a garment shop. And then,in April 1941, he said,I got into the zipper line. He was coming to open up the first day when he passed a candy store with big newspaper headlines: Pearl Harbor Bombed. In May 1943 he was drafted into the infantry and joined the invasion of Italy. His mother took over. At Anzio he was shot in the stomach,groin and leg and spent a year in Europe recuperating and another year in a hospital in Atlantic City. One of his aunts had seen a pretty girl getting her hair done in a beauty parlour and impulsively asked if she wanted a blind date with her nephew. Which is how Feibusch met Susie Neugarten,who herself had fled the Nazis with her family. They married in 1950. In 1982,Feibusch lost his lease and moved around the corner to 30 Allen Street. In 1999,an upstairs tenant,irate over a lack of heat,sloshed gasoline over the floor and burned down the building,including all the zippers. Insurance covered the loss and Feibusch opened up across the street. He has a staff of 12,mostly Chinese,and his son,Jeff.
