Mr. Jonas attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where, according to his own accounts, was an apathetic and often truant student. After graduating, he enrolled at the University of Richmond in Virginia, but he dropped out as a freshman to return home after his father died of a heart attack at a local family store. property on 14th Street in Manhattan.
While helping to take care of his mother, Mr. Jonas worked in the family business, founded in 1895 by his grandfather Samuel Jonas, a Polish immigrant who started out as a miller before when expanding into selling other types of women’s clothing.
After learning a retail trade and serving in the Marines during the Korean War, he founded his own company in 1953. He sold inexpensive women’s clothing from rental spaces inside stores. department stores and other stores.
Operating under the name Barbara Lynn Stores (for his wife), Mr. Jonas navigated the ups and downs familiar to discount retailers over the next two decades. At its peak, the company operated more than 140 women’s apparel divisions and 19 stores of its own, according to a 1992 article in Forbes. He is also the chairman of a successor company, Belscot Retailer.
Eventually, big discount chains like Kmart began to dominate the sector, prompting Mr. Jonas to try what proved to be his most famous venture: a partnership with Albert Lechter, who ran the homewares business. used in Mr. Jonas’ stores.
With department stores shrinking kitchenware divisions, Mr Jonas and Mr Lechter, who died in 2017, planned a store that would sell pots, pans, vegetable peelers, slotted spoons, aprons and almost anything else a home cook could want. They called it Lechters Housewares and opened their first store at the Rockaway, NJ, mall in 1977.
