Chapter 10: Doris Palmer

The Caretaker of Lost Souls

Doris Palmer
1936-2007

Cleveland’s LGBT community swarmed the Memoirs hotspot during a typical happy hour in the late 1980s. Inside the oak-paneled club, bartenders ran ragged as they tried to keep pace with each round of cocktails. And as businessmen in Armani suits hobnobbed with college coeds doused in Polo cologne, the bar’s five-foot-two-inch owner chatted up regulars while she chain-smoked Merit cigarettes and sipped Christian Brothers brandy from her personal shot glass.

Meet Doris Palmer, a former office manager whose reputation as a tough-talking entrepreneur belied her compassion for patrons infected with the new “gay cancer” of the era. By the time of her death, close comrades remembered her as one of a pioneering group of civic activists who were undaunted by the challenges that the AIDS pandemic posed in the early days. “When someone was diagnosed with the virus, it was a big deal,” said longtime friend John Katsaros, who eventually worked for and went into business with Doris from the late-‘80s to the mid-‘90s. “She knew everyone on a personal level. If you looked sickly, she went out of her way to help you. She was a generous lady.”

Doris Jean Thompson was born on October 18, 1936, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the same hometown as that of ultraconservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, St. Louis Cardinals baseball pitcher Mark Littell and 1970s country crooner Billy Swan. Known as “the City of Roses” for its prominent gardens and as the home of Southeast Missouri State University, the town provided a historical backdrop for her, as she undoubtedly listened to tales of its infamous Civil War battle in which dozens of Union and Confederate soldiers perished during a four-hour siege on April 26, 1863.

Doris’ family lived in a blue-collar world in “the Cape.” Her father, James Thompson, had worked in a shoe factory since he was 16 years old. By his 21st birthday in 1934, he had married Lillian Katherine Blakemore, a gregarious and witty 17-year-old with a charming Ozark drawl. The Thompsons raised Doris and her younger sister, Jo Ann (“Joni”), in a home on Merriwether Street a little more than a mile from the western banks of the Mississippi River and the Southern Illinois border. But their marriage collapsed by 1948, and Lillian wed another shoemaker named James, whose story was riddled with pitfalls and roadblocks.

An Arkansas native, James A. Southworth had muddled through a hardscrabble life. His dad died by the time he was 11; his mom supported her only child on a housekeeper’s meager wages. Dropping out of high school after his freshman year in high school, he crossed the state line into Missouri to work for the St. Louis-based International Shoe Company. In his early 30s, his first marriage had failed, although the four-year union produced his only son, James. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and served until the end of World War II. He returned to Cape Girardeau afterward and married Lillian.

The Southworths made a home on South Henderson Avenue while Doris attended Cape Central High School as a member of the Class of 1955. Some of her male classmates would make school history in the fall of their senior year, when the Cape Central Tigers varsity basketball squad handily defeated an all-boys’ parochial high school from St. Louis to capture its first-ever Class A state championship trophy in 1954. But Doris wouldn’t take part in the celebration in the school gym, where the faculty and student body cheered Coach Lou Muegge and his team for their victory.

Like many teenage girls of the ‘50s in the heart of the Ozarks, Doris chose the wedded life over an education. At the end of her sophomore year at the age of 16, she dropped out of school and married Rudolph G. Palmer, a 20-year-old laborer who eventually found work in Cleveland as a rigger and janitor at J & L Machine & Tool, which manufactured permanent molds and die castings at its plant on Miles Avenue. Lillian must have given her blessing to her elder daughter’s marriage since Missouri law required parental approval for any bride younger than 18 years old.

Rudy and Doris nestled into Apartment #1 in a three-unit building at 3131 W. 54th St. south of Clark Avenue. They rented the place for two years before they moved to more spacious living quarters at 1402 W. 58th St. near Detroit Avenue. In turn, baby sister Joni and her new husband, Harry G. Lawrence, took over the lease after they moved from Missouri, and Harry found a job as a security guard at Edward Blywise’s Grabler Manufacturing Company on Broadway Avenue. Doris’ marriage, however, wouldn’t survive another year. The Palmers separated by 1959.

Doris didn’t talk much about her relationship with Rudy in later years. On the rare occasion when she did, she told her friends that she adored him but blamed the end of their six years together on their immature decision to leap into marriage so quickly. Yet she kept his last name for the rest of her life. “She always said, ‘I married the nicest guy in the world. We were just too young,’” Katsaros remembered.

In 1961, Doris was renting half of a two-family home at 17600 Flamingo Ave. one block south of Puritas Avenue in the city’s West Park neighborhood. Dentists Sanford C. Frumker and Norman Arnold then hired her as an office secretary for their downtown practice on the seventh floor of the Rose Building at 2060 E. Ninth St. She grew especially fond of working for Dr. Frumker, whom she affectionately nicknamed “Frumkie.” Naturally, her paychecks helped keep a roof over her head throughout the ‘60s in a succession of apartments, from the Clifton Court complex at 11118 Clifton Blvd. on the West Side to the historic Park Lane Villa Apartments at 10510 Park Lane in University Circle. The latter, built as a luxury hotel in 1923, originally catered to avant-garde bohemians in the arts, music and science fields before it morphed into a popular concert venue in the ‘50s for the likes of folk heroes Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.

Doris ventured into real estate in 1970, when she bought her first two-family rental at 3259 W. 115th St. north of Lorain Avenue. She leased one half of the double to a string of tenants while she and her twice-divorced mother -- who moved to Cleveland to be closer to her daughters -- lived in the other half. Doris also left her job at Frumker, Arnold & Siegel (the firm brought on board Cleveland Heights dentist Burton P. Siegel as a partner in 1966) to manage a 27-member office staff at Mondie Forge, a parts manufacturer for the industrial-machinery market at 3001 W. 121st St.

Doris boosted her income by juggling her day job with a weekend gig as a barmaid for Leo Swingo and his gay son, Teddy, at the Nantucket club near the corner of Clifton Boulevard and West 117th Street on the Cleveland-Lakewood border. After playing traffic cop in the office during the week, she hustled on Saturdays and Sundays by pouring shots of booze and mugs of beer for the bar’s mix of gay and straight patrons. The club garnered even more popularity in 1976, when the state granted the Swingos the first Sunday liquor license for a West Side bar. The business coup allowed Doris to open the club on a day when most neighborhood imbibers had nowhere else to go to swill back their favorite libations.

The moonlighting allowed Doris to upgrade her home base. She sold the West 115th Street property in 1980 and traded her big-city lifestyle for the suburban comforts of Rocky River. In a respectable neighborhood at 1630 Northview Rd. east of Wagar Road, she, her mother and their yappy poodle lived in the lower half of the duplex. And for the next 20 years, another chain of renters occupied the upper half.

When the Swingos sold the Nantucket in 1983 to make room for a Rini-Rego’s supermarket, Doris often spent happy hours at the nearby Tick Tock Tavern. Owned by Katsaros’ father, Gus, the club served as a meeting spot for many gay men who partied in the Clifton-Edgewater neighborhood. It also provided Doris with a rendezvous to reacquaint herself with patrons to whom she had served cocktails for more than a decade. “She missed all the guys after the Nantucket closed,” Katsaros said. “She was out of circulation for awhile, and she was getting herself out there so that nobody forgot her. And she did a great job doing it.”

Doris’ self-marketing skills paid off in 1987, when she decided to plunge into the business world by opening her own gay bar. Although she no longer worked for him, her tight relationship with Frumker was no secret. Because of their mutual respect for each other, the doctor fronted most of the money to buy the Zeleznik’s watering hole at 11213 Detroit Ave. “But she paid him back in no time,” Katsaros said. “She worked very hard. And she was very smart because she saved a lot of money to repay the loan.”

Doris vigorously promoted her club before its grand opening. And Paul Trenkamp never forgot the time that led up to her first day in business. After she signed the papers to take over ownership of the building and bar, she marched into the trendy gay nightclub, Legends, five blocks down Detroit Avenue in Lakewood. She then rounded up 30 customers, inviting them for free drinks in her soon-to-open gay oasis. As they walked through the front door, she startled Zeleznik’s clientele with a stunning announcement. “She said, ‘Fuck you all! I own this place now!’” Trenkamp recalled. “It was one massive party after that.”

Doris named her new venture, Memoirs, as an homage to the fun times she shared with her Nantucket regulars. By no surprise, they celebrated by patronizing her new business. “It was a neighborhood bar where the doors opened at 10 in the morning,“ said Stan Kawecki, who resigned from a lucrative yet “stressful” position as a radiation physicist to work for Doris as a bartender from 1988 to 1995. “If you didn’t unlock the doors by one minute after ten, the regulars were pounding like crazy to get in.”

Business only escalated. On an average weekday, bartenders rang up $1,500 in beer and liquor sales. The cash-register tape often read more than $2,000 after last call on a usually bustling Friday or Saturday night. “Everybody went there to meet because it wasn’t just a weekend bar or a leather bar,” Kawecki said. “It had a cohesive staff with very little turnover. It was always packed, and the bartenders ran their asses off.”

Many customers credited Memoirs’ success to the innovations that Doris agreed to add to the club. For starters, she was the first owner of a gay Cleveland bar to hire a DJ to host weekly karaoke contests. She devoted an adjacent room to a full-scale restaurant. And she befriended down-and-out, unemployed patrons by hiring them for menial, yet necessary, tasks such as scrubbing the restrooms first thing in the morning. “Doris was always taking care of her regulars,” Kawecki said. “She’d find these lost souls and give them jobs.”

Doris’ activism in the war against AIDS and HIV also never wavered as long as her nightclub remained a vital component of the LGBT community. She welcomed an ensemble of female impersonators to perform as “the Dolly Express” six times a year to raise money for AIDS charities. And when the now-defunct AIDS Housing Council declined a customer’s grant application to help him pay for his basic necessities, she feuded with the non-profit agency until it caved in. “She went ballistic,” Kawecki said. “If she had to, she dipped into her own pocket to pay for mattresses or someone’s rent. That’s how she was if it was for the community.”

In July of 1991, Doris partnered with Katsaros to buy a Warehouse District bar that had been vacant for three years, after the original Blind Pig Speakeasy lost its liquor license because of unpaid sales taxes. Located at 1281 W. Ninth St., the two-story nightclub they christened Detour quickly rivaled Memoirs in popularity. The gay community’s admiration for Doris as one its straight allies also intensified to the point that she picked up the most votes as “Woman of the Year” in a 1993 readers’ poll conducted by the once-flourishing "Valentine News" magazine. She accepted the award in a glitzy ceremony at the U4ia nightspot on Berea Road.

But Doris also harbored an “alcoholic-crazy” side to her complex personality, Kawecki said. After she stuffed her bank bag with the day’s take and locked Memoirs’ doors for the night, she frequently accompanied him and fellow bartender Caesar Salas to greasy spoons like My Friends restaurant on Detroit Avenue or Dianna’s Deli on West 117th Street. The after-hours pit stops often resulted in the diners’ managers ordering the trio to hit the sidewalk because of Doris’ drunken outbursts. “She’d start yelling and swearing at people across the room,” Kawecki said. “She’d throw her pancakes if there was a drag queen in the restaurant that she didn’t like.”

Doris also exhibited goofy behavior at home because of her alcoholism. During a spring cleaning of her basement office, Kawecki discovered $3,000 in cash in a canvass backpack that she apparently forgot she stashed in the bottom drawer of her desk. He also learned that she stuffed her mattress with dollar bills. “You can bet that she made a lot of money in all her years in business,“ he said. “But she gave a lot of money back (to charity).”

Nevertheless, Doris’ enthusiasm for the bar business started to wane in 1994. She and Katsaros -- who, in 1992, opened the Cliffhangers nightclub on Clifton Boulevard -- were both burned out. She, especially, became “jaded“ by the club life, he said. So they sold Detour to a group of investors that included gay DJ Jerry Szoka, who helped revamp the club into the Grid. A year later, Doris closed the books on Memoirs by selling the bar and building to another set of backers led by a Cincinnati dentist, who subsequently changed the bar’s name to Sexx. Their ill-fated attempt in business lasted no more than a year after a series of building-code violations forced them to shutter the club. It eventually reopened under new ownership as the Edge, the third and final gay bar that took up the space until the first week of March of 2007 with the opening of the punk-rock club, Now That’s Class.

In her retirement, Doris retreated to her Rocky River home, where her mother’s health began to fade in 1997. So she put the Northview Road double up for sale, and she and the 80-year-old Lillian moved to the warmer climes of the Tri-Par Estates development in Sarasota, Florida. But the change of scenery didn’t help. In a two-bedroom modular home on Winged Foot Avenue, her mother died of emphysema on December 11, the result of a longtime chain-smoking habit that Doris imitated throughout her adult life. Lillian’s passing caused her daughter to slip into a severe mental and emotional funk. “(Moving to Florida) was the worst thing she ever did,” Katsaros lamented. “She was so outgoing that she surrounded herself with a lot of people who took advantage of her. And she was very lonely after her mom died.”

Doris tried to lift her spirits by keeping in touch with her Cleveland connections. An avid shutterbug, she sometimes mailed envelopes of photographs from years gone by to remind her friends of the good times they all shared at either Memoirs, Detour or the Nantucket. But like her mother, Doris died of emphysema on Monday, February 18, 2007, at the Tidewell Hospice and Palliative Care facility in Sarasota, where her cremated remains were shipped to Northeast Ohio for burial in the same plot with her mother’s ashes.

Many of Doris’ friends and former employees up north blamed her death not only on heavy smoking but an exascerbating combination of alcoholism and loneliness. Nearly three months later, on May 12, revelers spent their Saturday afternoon at Katsaros’ bar, the renamed Twist Social Club, for a festive “Celebration of Life” blowout in Doris’ honor. “She was an endearing character,” he said. “You don’t find many of them these days. She was the last of a generation that knew how to make the most of life.”

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Doris Palmer was buried in Section 39, Lot 400, Plot 1 of Sunset Memorial Park, 6245 Columbia Rd. in North Olmsted. She was 70 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser