There's a joke I've heard Niagara Falls Reporter Publisher Bruce Battaglia tell more than once.
"How do you make a small fortune in Niagara Falls?"
(Comedic pause.)
"Start with a large one."
No one really knows just how large a fortune John Prozeralik and his brother Nick built over the past half-century, or how much of it vanished over the years due to a withering economy, unscrupulous partners and attorneys and the world's unforgiving ways.
One thing is certain, though. The restaurant that made possible the hotels, airline, meat-packing company, chain of Stuckey's stores throughout the country, restaurants dotting Western New York and all the rest of the Prozeralik-run businesses over the years closed for good last Wednesday.
It was only fitting that John's Flaming Hearth, the Military Road business that begat the Prozeralik empire, was also the final piece remaining.
"It's a very end-of-an-era kind of feeling," said chef Paul Bunce, moments after sending the final meal out of the kitchen shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday. "The final day of when quality meant something."
Blame the smoking ban. Blame the exodus of good jobs from the region and the thousands of people who fled south and west. Blame the casino and its steakhouse, where you can pay for your meal with gambling losses, rather than cash. Blame the crummy chain restaurants and the crummier politicians who would rather lure them to the area than help locally owned businesses.
Whatever the causes, the resulting reason John's Flaming Hearth shut down is as simple as the basic rule Bunce learned in six years working for the Prozeraliks.
"You have to turn over every chair four times a day," he said. "The first two pay for your costs -- food, staff and all that. The third time is for taxes and the fourth time is yours."
For decades after John bought Swiezy's Grove and opened for business on Jan. 1, 1954, four occupants for each chair would have signified a slow day.
Offering a discount for customers willing to cook their own steaks and building a softball field that featured some of the finest fast-pitch teams and players in the area, John and Nick -- who followed his older brother from Pennsylvania that summer almost 52 years ago -- quickly made the Flaming Hearth the place to be. And not only for locals, but also for the celebrities who came through the area much more frequently in those days.
Like the night Liberace and his entourage stopped by after performing at Melody Fair in North Tonawanda.
"I asked him, 'Where are all your rings?'" remembered Nick's wife, Lu, who was the hostess that night. "He said, 'Oh, I put those in a safe after every performance.' Then he looked at me and said, 'You are such a beautiful woman.'
"I thought to myself, 'Oh, he can't be gay,'" she said, laughing at one of the memories filling the lounge Wednesday night.
Nick talked about building the lounge in 1962 and paying $125 for each of the red leather chairs that still look as if they were just delivered, surrounded by a time-warping interior at once dark and colorful. Debbie DiMarco talked about stopping on a summer Saturday night with her then-husband-to-be Vince, not for a steak or a cocktail, but a hot-fudge sundae.
"We'd been out for dinner, and maybe a couple drinks, and I wanted ice cream, but there was a line at Dairy Queen, so we said, 'Let's go to John's!' I'll always remember sitting there, eating ice cream, and looking at all the ladies with their mink coats.
"What are we going to do without this place?" she wondered. "Where are we going to go?"
With the neighboring Alps Chalet already shuttered, few similar options remain, particularly at that end of Niagara Falls. Both belonged to a genre rapidly disappearing from just about anyplace this side of Manhattan, places you could take Grandma for her birthday, your son for a graduation present, a date in order to make an impression or a client to talk business.
There's always Applebee's across the street on Military Road, but nausea tends to ruin a good time.
In between hugs and kisses from longtime customers, John talked about more than a half-century in business, at the Flaming Hearth and beyond, providing a reminder of just how far his influence stretched and how sharp his own memory remains for even the smallest detail.
He mentioned owning a restaurant in Batavia, near where I grew up, and I asked which one.
"The Engine House," he said.
I told him my aunt, Shirley Lathan, had worked there as a manager for years.
"That's right -- she ran the dining room for me," he said.
He said Pet Milk was looking to unload one of its holdings, an unprofitable hotel it owned in downtown Niagara Falls.
"They weren't making any money and a man came to the restaurant and asked to see me," John said. "He said, 'I've been here for a week, asking people all over town who I could trust to run that for us, and just about everybody said, "Go see John Prozeralik."'
"He told me I could take it over with no money down and just pay them a percentage of the profits. If I didn't make any money, I didn't have to pay them anything," he said. "They'd been losing money for years, so boy, were they surprised when I started sending them money."
The business became John's Flaming Hearth Motel. Several changes of ownership and affiliation later, it's known as the Days Inn at the Falls.
A couple years later, while in Ohio looking for possible locations for tourist-information booths to guide travelers to his restaurant and hotel, John said he stopped at a Stuckey's in Ashtabula, Ohio, figuring the roadside burger stand and store would make an ideal site.
He was told to call the owner. It turned out Pet Milk had bought a number of Stuckey's locations, and the same representative who'd made the deal for the hotel offered similar terms for stores in all 50 states.
John jumped at it, but for one of the few times in his epic career, he soon realized he'd overextended himself.
"I was never here -- I was on the road all the time," he said, sipping a bottle of beer. "I had to get rid of them."
It was quite an admission for a man who, like his brother, was at work in the kitchen on their last night in business. That was nothing out of the ordinary -- if you needed to talk to John while the Prozeraliks owned the Days Inn locations on Buffalo Avenue, you could usually find him cooking or doing laundry.
At an age when most people are well into retirement, John's not sure if he's ready for his. He talked about advocating for the changes needed to make Niagara Falls into a place that has a thriving tourist economy, rather than just talks about one. And he didn't rule out being part of the hospitality industry once again.
"I'm not sure if I'm going to do something," he said, with a little smile. "But if I do, I'm going to do it soon."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Feb. 28 2006 |