The Long, Unlikely Journey to Ablitt’s

Just when we’re lulled into thinking Life© is all about appliance sales, iceberg lettuce, and printer paper, something will remind us that it’s really about heraldry. Each and every thing we lay our fool eyes on is part of a story – a pageant, really – that reaches into the past like the tail of a comet. And so we come to the matter of Ablitt’s Fine Cleaners & Tailors of Santa Barbara: an émigré’s story, a love story, and a family legacy so prototypically American it squeezes the heart. And yes; there is laundry. 

When 13-year-old German immigrant Albert Schneider came through Ellis Island, he surely had a jittery teen intuition that something crazy and momentous lay ahead. Picture now the gee-whiz German kid shipboard as his ride pulls into New York Harbor. He is goggle-eyed at sky-scraping Manhattan and standing on tiptoe in his knickers to catch a portside glimpse of Lady Liberty’s raised torch and unambiguous 305-foot welcome. As nutty as a kid’s feverish imagination can be, could little Albert have wildly imagined planting a seed whose borne fruit would land on the sun-kissed shores of a California hamlet called Santa Barbara? Let’s go with “no.” 

But he was in motion, and destiny has always favored the guy with the cardboard suitcase and expectant expression. At 18 years old, Albert made the big move out west, boarding a train for Portland, Oregon, and just incidentally falling in love on the noisy, bone-rattling journey over. He and his sweetheart married in their new hometown, and as the promising 20th century got underway, opened a dry cleaning business there. The formerly dirt-caked “Frontier Spirit” was giving way to bowler hats, watch chains, and clean undershirts. Albert’s business grew apace. In the 1920s he opened a second dry cleaners in Seattle, hiring a guy there named Gordon. Last name? Ablitt, of course. Gordon Ablitt was not only an enthusiastic and innovative talent in the shop – he quickly became smitten with Albert’s daughter, Alberta. Gordon and Alberta tied the knot in 1930. Times were tough. The country was in an economic depression, cold soup and coffee were the national meal du jour, and Gordon soon bridled at working for his father-in-law. Branching out on his own, Gordon opened several successful dry cleaning outfits, one of them in Ellensburg, Washington. It was there that a business partner pitched a fork in the road, murmuring to Gordon of a stunning Shangri-La whose mountains, beaches, and red-tiled je ne sais quoi recommended the little-known place to those seeking a new start – and anyone else interested in outlandish natural beauty. “Say, you ever hear of this place called Santa Barbara? They say it’s really swell!” The Fates handily arranged to have a dry cleaning business – the St. Paul Dye Works – up for sale right around then, and moving to sunny Santa Barbara in ’49, Gordon and June snapped it up. The couple continued building the biz up through Santa Barbara’s marvelous 1950s, arguably a golden age for the as yet unheralded beach blanket bastion. We’re talking hot rods cruising State Street, drive-up burger joints with waitresses on roller skates, and young men with enough pomade in their hair to lube a
Buick Skylark. 

In 1960, Gordon and June decided to retire and finding no takers in the Ablitt’s clan sold to a former automotive engineer. Then who should appear in 1984 but a certain Neil Ablitt, whose opening of Ablitt’s Fine Cleaners and Launderers would put the dynastic Ablitt name back on the local dry cleaning shingle. When Neil’s daughter Sasha assumed ownership of the business in 2002, it would actually mark the first successful inter-family transfer in the company’s storied history. Today, Ablitt’s Fine Cleaner and Tailors uses the non-hazardous and non-toxic GreenEarth dry-cleaning process, offers a concierge service, and has instituted a regular series of film plastic recycling events to reclaim and repurpose a formerly troublesome byproduct of the cleaning process. Sasha Ablitt is right where she wants to be, and has taken her place in the ongoing adventure begun by a lovestruck German teen on a train to Oregon. Sasha Ablitt has but one concern. “Now it’s my turn to get a family member interested in the business,” she says. “Always a challenge…”