Katella Deli was opened by Sam Ratman and his sons in 1964. It was originally located in what was then called The Rossmoor Medical Park but is now the Rossmoor Village Shopping Center (where Polly’s Pies is now located) but around 1985 it moved just over a mile east to its present location at the corner of Lexington and Katella Avenues.
Sam was born in 1926 in Eastern Europe. During World War II, he escaped from the Nazis en route to Auschwitz , then joined the Partisans. He married after the war and his oldest son, Larry, was born in a DP camp in Europe.
He emigrated to the United States and founded the Bagel Bakery in the Fairfax District of Los Angels in 1952. He moved to the Long Beach area in 1964 (where his younger sons attended Millikan High School) and very soon after that, leased the new building at the medical park and opened the Katella Deli. He also helped his sons Allan and Larry build the South Street Deli in Cerritos. His son Harold began Bloomfield Bakeries, which at first supplied goods to the local Baskin-Robbins (and later getting a national contract) and then turned the bakery into a huge business baking goods for other brands. He opened the Los Alamitos Fish Company in 1981 at the former Park Pantry site. Sam died in late June 1984 at the age of 58.
Sources: News-Enterprise June 28, 1984. Sam Ratman obituary.