LG Sweet Shoppe owner Sam Yablonsky dies at 85
Operated cinema, ran for council, championed youth activities
By Dan Pulcrano
Former restaurateur and cinema operator Sam Yablonsky died at his Tait Avenue home Sunday evening. He was 85 and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
Before Los Gatos' tastes shifted to juice bars and foreign films, Mr. Yablonsky provided the town's residents with a steady diet of authentic Americana from the counter of the Los Gatos Sweet Shoppe and from the projection booth of the Los Gatos Cinema.
The son of Russian immigrants Isadore and Eva Yablonsky, Sam was raised in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Yablonsky served four years in the Air Force, and worked briefly in New York when he was discharged in 1946. He spent 15 years in Sacramento working for Blumenfield Theatres, then moved to Los Gatos in 1961 to operate the town's only movie theater. He wed the former Jacqueline Jorgenson of Fond du Lac, Wis., in 1963.
The opinionated Mr. Yablonsky was outspoken and feisty and quickly became disenchanted with what he viewed as the town's insider, backscratching political culture and the council's spendthrift ways. He wrote frequent letters to the editor and ran for Town Council four times. A crusader for youth activities, Yablonsky thought that the town needed bowling alleys and skating rinks, as well as "block parties for entire families instead of wine festivals for adults only."
"There's nothing to do in this town for kids," LGPD officer Bill Walker remembers Yablonsky saying to him as a youth.
Following a fire at the theater in the 1970s, Yablonsky opened Sam's Sweet Shoppe in an adjacent storefront. Renamed the Los Gatos Sweet Shoppe when wife Jackie joined him at the grill, it served hamburgers, fries, sundaes and milk shakes. With a backlit menu of sliding plastic letters and a mechanical cash register that went "ka-ching," it embodied the type of Main Street ambience celebrated in movies like American Graffiti, and in knock-off establishments like Johnny Rockets.
That era came to an end when the Yablonskys sold the restaurant in 1982 to Ergad and Gilley Jacoby, after which it was renamed Gilley's and redecorated. The grill and shake mixers, however, remain to this day. Mrs. Yablonsky succumbed to cancer in 1984, and John, a son from a previous marriage, died in 1991. The senior Mr. Yablonsky was also predeceased by his sisters Clara, Sunny and Iris.
Mr. Yablonsky is survived by daughter Eva, a Harvard- and Santa Clara University-educated attorney at the Redwood City office of Ropers, Majeski, Kohn & Bentley.
He remained active in the Los Gatos Lions Club, which he joined in 1962, until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease three years ago.
Services will be held Thursday at 1:30pm at Darling Fisher's Chapel of the Hills, 615 N. Santa Cruz Ave. Donations in Mr. Yablonsky's memory may be made to A Place for Teens.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
