Linehan was the middle of three children born to James, a machinist, and his wife, Minnie. Her first and only beau, Charlie, then came into the picture.įour years older than Gloria, Charles L. She also Anglicized her surname to Stevens, which was common among young adults with European-born parents. She helped her parents with their $50 monthly rent by working at the "Plain Dealer," for which she sold advertising space and subscriptions over the telephone until 1932. Gloria still lived at home until she was nearly 30 years old. The neighborhood tavern gave his daughter her first glimpse at the kind of living that selling alcohol could provide. But he ditched his confectionary business in 1922 and opened a shot-and-a-beer saloon in the same spot. The next year, he expanded his operation to include chocolates and penny candies. The Stefanski family maintained a relatively quiet, blue-collar lifestyle until 1918, when Anton converted the storefront below their second-floor home into a soda fountain at 16101 Arcade Ave. Her father worked as a pipe fitter on the railroads while her mother stayed home with her and her brother, Henry (“Hank”), who was four years younger than she. That was her style.”īorn in the spring of 1904 on Cleveland’s East Side, Estelle Gloria Stefanski was the elder child and only daughter of Polish-Catholic immigrants Anton and Anna Rutkowsky Stefanski, who arrived in Cleveland in 1896. “In Europe, the owner sits at the far end of the bar to watch what the bartender is doing,” he said. When she wasn’t policing her patrons, she held court on her favorite stool to keep an eye on the cash register, as retired professor Bill Fairchild remembered her. The club’s policies came courtesy of its matronly owner, Gloria Lenihan, who demanded decorum and civility in the first-ever openly gay nightclub in Cleveland history. You had to wear a shirt and a tie and a jacket to get in there.” “We used to refer to it as ‘General Motors,’” Len Barnhart said as he chuckled at the memory. On the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, gay men treated the two-story Cadillac Lounge as their personal playground in the midst of dozens of straight clubs that lined Cleveland’s busiest thoroughfares. The city’s LGBT population was no exception. In the 1950s, when Cleveland ranked as the country’s seventh largest metropolis, the city’s downtown district buzzed with theatergoers on Playhouse Square, music aficianados on Short Vincent and clubhoppers everywhere in between.