Le Van Ba was a successful businessman in Vietnam when war forced his family to start over from scratch in a foreign country. Arriving in San Jose in 1980, Le and his children within three years had launched Lee’s Sandwiches, a chain that now has more than 30 Vietnamese sandwich shops in California, plus locations in four other states.

Le Van Ba, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 79, was the patriarch of a creative and industrious clan that includes his wife, Nguyen Thi Hanh, and their five sons and four daughters. The family landed in San Jose as refugees, with Le becoming the Ray Kroc of Vietnamese sandwiches by adapting the American fast-food restaurant principles of Kroc’s McDonald’s to the delicious meats, pates and spices of Vietnamese cuisine, all served on freshly baked French-style baguettes.

With seven shops in San Jose, a growing footprint in Southern California and across the Southwest, the chain launched by Le Van Ba and his family is among the first Vietnamese enterprises to cross over into mainstream malls and shopping centers.

“His most important contribution was taking something that was a mom and pop concept of a Vietnamese sandwich and mainstreaming it, using the McDonald’s or Burger King model and popularizing it,” said De Tran, publisher of VTimes, a Vietnamese language newspaper in San Jose. Le was also known in the Vietnamese community for his philanthropy, Tran said.

Before the war, Le Van Ba was a self-made man who owned a successful sugar plant in southern Vietnam. “Everybody used to call him the ‘King of Sugar,’ ” his oldest daughter, Annie Le, said Thursday. “He was very famous at the time in Vietnam.”

So when Le and his family came to San Jose 30 years ago after short stays in New Mexico and Monterey, Annie Le said her father was determined to work for himself, not as an employee in somebody else’s business.

That meant family members had to teach themselves a new business, with the two oldest sons, Chieu Le and Henry Le, working with their father to operate a Vietnamese lunch wagon that ultimately grew into a successful catering business, Lee Industrial Catering.

After his wife phoned a relative in Vietnam who had been a chef to get some recipes for meats and pate, the family worked hard to refine those recipes. The first permanent Lee’s Sandwiches opened in June 1983 at 264 E. Santa Clara St.

“I think he’s very open-minded,” Annie Le said of her father. “He kept saying to us, ‘We can always learn something new from other people.’ It’s the same thing with our recipes. In the beginning, we didn’t know much, so customers would come in and say they wanted to eat a certain item, and they told us how to make it. And we listened to the customers, and then we’d add that item to our menu.”

About a decade ago, Minh Le, a grandson of Le Van Ba who was then a 21-year old business student at San Jose State, suggested the family adapt the principles of American fast-food companies such as McDonald’s to its ethnic Vietnamese fare.

Since then, the Lee’s Sandwiches chain has expanded rapidly across the Bay Area and Orange County and even to places as far-flung as Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston and Chandler, Ariz.

Annie Le said her father was open-minded enough to listen to the ideas of his U.S.-born grandson, and the first modern, American-style store opened in 2001. Tragically, Minh Le was killed in a traffic accident a few months before that first modern store opened.

Through it all, Annie Le said Le Van Ba was the leader of the family. Laughing at the memory, she said he used to counsel his sons and daughters with a Vietnamese saying that, roughly translated, means that if you let somebody else get ahead of you in business, you might not like the smell emanating from them. A more polite translation, Annie Le said, is ‘When you think something will be good, you better jump in and do it right away.’ “

“I think he had a strength of will. He’s very determined, and when he wanted to do something, he would just go ahead and do it,” she said. “Almost up to the day he passed away, he’d go to work, because when he was younger he was very poor, so he’s very scared of being poor. He enjoyed working. We told him, ‘Dad, now you have money, and you can travel wherever you want. Enjoy your life.’ “

But, she said, “working at the store, that was his happiness.”

Even as he submitted to radiation and chemotherapy treatments in recent months, he generally would still check in on the same day at one of the laundromats he owned.

Le Van Ba is a former president of an association for people who came to the South Bay from the An Giang province in Vietnam.

“I think he was known as a kind and generous person,” Tran said of Le Van Ba, particularly his philanthropy around organizations close to the Hoa Hao sect of Buddhism.

In addition to his wife and children, Le Van Ba is survived by 20 grandchildren.

The family is planning a public viewing at Oakhill Funeral Home & Memorial Park on Curtner Avenue from 3 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Dec. 3 and from 9 a.m. to 10:45 a.m., Dec. 5, prior to burial.

“I think the most important thing we learned from him,” Annie Le said, is that in business, “you have to be honest and trustworthy. You have to keep your promise — whatever you say, you have to do. He was successful in the past because whatever he said, he had to do it.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.