Cameron Park was once known as the home of "Sam's Town", where a great many travelers along Highway 50 stopped on their way to and from Lake Tahoe. This restaurant and amusement complex was started by Sam Gordon (born Sam Richter in 1907) in the 1960’s. The property was originally The Stage Coach Inn before being purchased by Gordon in 1957. This was one of the few hangouts for local kids during the 70’s, and was a great place for good old-fashioned family fun.
The building, which from the outside was made to look like a collection of buildings from a frontier town, housed a huge arcade with acres of video machines, air hockey and other games, a steak-house restaurant, a fried chicken/burger restaurant, an ice cream counter, a gift/general/old-fashioned candy store, an extensive museum of California/Nevada/Gold Rush Era/cowboy memorabilia, an antique store, a peanut-shells-on-the-floor bar with live Dixieland music, and the largest tour bus parking lot ever. This mecca was literally sitting out here by itself for many years.
As you walked to the front door, you were greeted by the original jail cart movie prop which held Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes (1968). Inside there were old stereo-scopic viewing machines with black and white video histories of events such as the San Francisco Earthquake. There was a fortune teller that moved and ‘told’ your fortune to you for a quarter. Also for several coins, you could face off with an antique ‘one-armed’ bandit, that actually was a cowboy figure that paid off in ‘Good Luck’ tokens. A photo of one such token, recently for sale on E-bay, is included in the gallery. Often the sounds of the resident Dixieland jazz band invited you to stop and listen. For over seven years, Bob Ringwald (the father of actress, Molly) played the piano in this band. After his run at Sam’s Town, Ringwald re-joined the Fulton Street Jazz Band. A photo of Bob, with one of his musical crews, is included in the gallery. Part of the Sam’s Town Americana Museum collection was the Abbot-Downing Stagecoach #185. This Concord Coach had been a long-featured attraction. An example of a similar restored Concord Stagecoach can now be seen at the Wells Fargo History Museum in Old Sacramento.
At its peak, the Gordon’s restaurant empire also included 11 eating establishments in the greater Sacramento area. A chain of these were called “Sam’s Hof-Brau”.
As a philanthropist, among his favorite charities was the Sam Gordon Washington Neighborhood Center in Sacramento, which offers underprivileged children a place to play baseball and other sports. It has been reported that much of the proceeds, from the sales of the museum pieces, from the Sam’s Town closure, were donated to charities, and the ‘Sam’s Town Collection’ provenance can be seen in books on many important pieces that were once on display here.
Gordon, a baseball fanatic, got his biggest claim to fame when he paid $5,000 for the ball that broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in July of 1961. This was a heated contest between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. When Maris got his 61st home run, Gordon awarded the money to New Yorker Sal Durante (a 19-year old who caught the homerun ball) at the Sam’s Town location, and then Gordon gave the winning ball back to Maris. It is now on display in Cooperstown, New York, at the Baseball Hall of Fame. A photo of Sam Gordon and Roger Maris is included in the gallery. Gordon did not live to see Maris’ record broken.
Mr. Gordon died in 1998, at the age of 91, and was laid to rest at the Palm Springs Mausoleum, in the town where he lived the later part of his life. Sam’s Town was torn down in 2002, and is now a shopping center. There is a very nice bronze plaque honoring the former business to the right of the entry doors of the grocery enterprise that was built on the site. This plaque, as well as the memories of many El Dorado County residents and 1000’s of tourists, is all that remains of this once very lively place.
If anyone has any photos of the Sam’s Town building, inside or out, that they would like to send to me, I will include them in the gallery. I was, unfortunately, unable to discover any on the internet, in my own collection, or from a former long-time employee of the establishment.
This is a small pill bottle with the appropriate cammo. CONGRATS to ImageArt for the FTF!
BE SURE AND PICK UP THE CLUE (4 DIGITS) FOR THE SOON TO COME PUZZLE CACHE IN THE Remembering... SERIES!
UPDATE 1/8/17 Check the web page link (at the top of the page) for the story and photos of Sam's Town in its glory days...take a look and enjoy!