Gloria’s Golden – And she’s celebrating a half
century too
by Dylan Gibbs
Stagecoach stop. You don’t
hear those two words together much anymore, outside of a John Wayne movie on
AMC. But the innocuous-looking building at the corner of Kratzville Road and Allens Lane was in fact a stopover for
horse-drawn carriages; before the days of convenience stores, such places
served many of the same purposes: A place to stretch one’s legs, fill up the
vehicle, grab a bite to eat and quench one’s thirst.
Many years later a young woman took on the task of
running a business out of this former stopover for dusty folks jostled about on
crude roads. In 1959 the roads were paved, the horses were long put to pasture
and stagecoaches were indeed a fixture of Hollywood westerns instead of the
real roads of America.
Gloria was her name, and she had a sharp learning curve
in how to run what had by then become a tavern. With kids to raise, a business
to run and more, Gloria Altman worked the bar, cooked in the kitchen, counted
the money at night, cleaned, ordered supplies, and above all else, became an
expert on human nature through her relationships with customers of the bar.
Before staking her own claim as proprietor, the business
had been in her family for about fifteen years. “My brother started it back
whenever that year was,” Gloria says. “He ran it for a couple years and then my
dad took over; he bought the property and ran it for seven and it was out of
the family for… well, he maintained the property but he leased it out for five
years.”
During that time she got married and well, as she puts
it: “I had a couple a little boys
and their dad had a heart attack and my oldest one was five when he passed away,
so I was working two jobs. I was working at Wick’s Steakhouse. I went to work
there nights and I was the very first employee ever hired at North Park Shopping Center
at the grocery store there in the daytime. And [I worked at] Wick’s at night; this
place came up for sale again in 1959 so my dad helped me buy it.”
Gloria remembers the history of the old building: “This
was kind of a shotgun place; there were four rooms upstairs and when the
stagecoach came by the people slept upstairs,” she says. Altman has made
several additions to the building in the time since she first purchased it.
The bar isn’t just a bar; for Gloria it is a way of life.
“It raised my children and it is raising my grandchildren. Well, when I came
here, naturally I was very young and very naïve and I didn’t really know what I
was getting into but it was a job,” she remembers. “I had an apartment upstairs,
living up there with two little boys, I always told them that they just helped
me buy it ‘cuz they wanted me out of the house,” she laughs.
A nonchalant self-reliance found in so many people of
Altman’s generation comes through in her reflections: “You might as well be
working for yourself so that’s what I did, and it was a lot of hard work and I
added on three times and I had great employees over the years and customers.”
She recognizes than none of the fifty years she’s been in
business would be possible without the people who come through the door. “I
can’t say enough about my customers,” she says. “Without them I wouldn’t be
here. Over the years I’ve got generations upon generations coming in here… kids
getting married divorced and married again (laughs)
it’s something I thought would never last this long really.”
The uniqueness of such a long-standing, family run
business is not lost on her. “There are a lot of places that have probably been
in the family for that long but not the same owner ya know?”
All month long, Gloria’s celebrates 50 years of
entertaining crowds, serving thousands of thirsty working people (and maybe
more thirsty partiers), establishing, maintaining and spreading goodwill with
her many devoted customers and being one of the few remaining businesses
anywhere that can claim the same owner at the same location for so long.
From food and drink specials to lots of live music,
karaoke, and more, July’s a time when you should get to know Gloria if you
don’t already. Or if you haven’t been in a while, come back and say hello. And
if you’re a regular already, you know the most important thing about Gloria’s –
that Gloria Altman herself is what we simply call “good people.”
