William F. Schapp II

William F. Schapp II, formerly known as Pinball Billy, is a Philadelphia businessman whose wealth comes from gambling machines and whose standing rests on a cultivated public respectability. In Philip Roth’s recollection, Schapp’s defining role is as Minna Schapp’s father and Alvin Roth’s prospective father-in-law: he offers Alvin a way out of the gaming-machine trade and into a prominent restaurant business, binding family care to a hard-headed business arrangement.

From Pinball Billy to William F. Schapp II

Schapp began in the 1920s as Pinball Billy Schapiro, a small-time hustler associated with rough neighborhoods and criminal company. After Prohibition ended and his interest in Waxey Gordon’s interstate bootlegging syndicate dried up, he established Original Schapp’s, a Philadelphia steak house popular with the city’s Jewish underworld. The passage presents this transition not as a clean break from his earlier life but as a change in the public forms through which his influence operated.

By 1942, the gambling machines and slot machines brought in more than $15,000 a week in unreported returns. Intercity Carting Company supplied a respectable public face for the gaming operation. Schapp’s growing wealth also supported a conspicuously established social identity: he belonged to Green Valley Country Club, the Jewish fraternal organization Brith Achim, and Har Zion Synagogue. Through the synagogue’s burial society, he bought a family plot in a landscaped corner of its cemetery. He presided over an eighteen-room mansion in suburban Merion and spent winters in a penthouse suite reserved for him each year at the Eden Roc in Miami.

Family wealth and the proposed marriage

Schapp’s daughter, Minna, was thirty-one when she arrived at the Roth family home with Alvin, eight years her junior. The narrator depicts her as deferential and tentative around the family, while emphasizing that her father—not Minna—was the force shaping the match. Schapp gave Alvin the money to buy Minna’s engagement ring and set out their arrangement plainly: Minna would care for Alvin’s leg, Alvin would care for Minna, and Schapp would provide for Alvin.

The bargain connected private support to a business opportunity. Schapp owned the Intercity Carting Company, the public-facing side of his gaming-machine enterprise, as well as a lobster house across from Steel Pier. He had established the steak house after his bootlegging income disappeared, and now used his resources to move Alvin from work transporting and installing illegal machines into the role of an Atlantic City restaurateur. In this family arrangement, care, marriage, and employment are closely joined; Schapp’s offer is both practical assistance and a means of securing Alvin’s place within his own commercial world.

The restaurateur’s public performance

As Schapp’s future son-in-law, Alvin began wearing tailored suits and taking on the visible duties of a prosperous restaurateur. He welcomed prominent visitors to their tables, including Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, boxer Gus Lesnevich, and racketeers Moe Dalitz, King Solomon, Mickey Cohen, and Meyer Lansky. Each September, he also greeted the newly crowned Miss America and her relatives. After the guests had settled in, Alvin could signal the waiter that the house would pay their bill.

That hospitality gives Schapp’s enterprise a polished public face, set against the illicit source of much of its wealth. The narration does not separate the restaurant’s social display from the gambling business that helped finance it: the suits, celebrated guests, and generosity at the table all belong to the same ascent from Pinball Billy to William F. Schapp II. Through Alvin’s employment and marriage, Schapp’s money also becomes a means of extending that ascent into the next generation.