Retail, they go from 50 cents for a nylon dress zipper to $100 for a No. 10 brass zipper, 350 inches long, to wrap your hot-air balloon.

Image “Nothing replaces a zipper,” Mr. Feibusch said. Credit... Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

How great are zippers? Don’t even get Mr. Feibusch started. They are watertight for deep-sea divers, airtight for NASA. “Nothing replaces a zipper,” he said. Buttons? He made a face. “A button is unpleasant,” he said.

O.K., a quick history of the zipper. Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, patented an “automatic, continuous clothing closure” in 1851. But then he dropped it. So that wasn’t the zipper. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Whitcomb Judson and Col. Lewis Walker showed off their “clasp locker,” a hook-and-eye shoe closure that latched two rows of jagged facing teeth together. But it took their head designer, Gideon Sundback, an electrical engineer, to increase the number of teeth from 4 to up to 11 per inch, to join and separate them with a slider, and to build a machine to manufacture continuous chains of the “separable fastener,” patented in 1917. This was the zipper.

B. F. Goodrich registered the term in 1925 when it added the fastener to its rubber boots. French fashion designers were won over in 1937 after the zipper beat the button in “The Battle of the Fly.” And Esquire magazine said the new zippered fly promised to end “the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray.”

Back to Mr. Feibusch. His parents, Isaac and Anna, owned a grocery store in Vienna, but after annexing Austria in 1938, the Nazis arrested Isaac and shut the business. Relatives in Brooklyn helped arrange the family’s emigration to America in 1939. Eddie, then 16, went to New Utrecht High School. For three weeks. He dropped out 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.”

With Europe at war, zippers were hard to come by. He worked for a shop in Brooklyn that reclaimed zippers from used clothes. Then he had a revelation: “If my boss can do it, I can do it.” He quit in December to open his own shop at 111 Hester Street. “I had a cousin across the street who could fix me lunch,” he remembered. The rent was $20 a month. 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 the store. 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. “I was one of the first ever to have a colostomy bag,” Mr. Feibusch said. He pulled up his shirt to show scars.