Got the news last week that Rich Gloor had died. What a fine man and a good friend.
Likely you remember the Gloor Realty name on the bank building on Oak Park Avenue just north of the Green Line. The local real estate shop had been there for decades though it had an earlier long life on North Avenue in River Forest.
Gloor Realty went back to 1946. That’s when Rich’s dad founded the business. And it stayed in the Gloor family for three generations. In 2017, Richard C. Gloor sold it to Coldwell Banker.
I talked to Rich Jr. on Monday — did he hate it when his dad called him “Sonny Boy”? Not sure but certainly a term of affection. Rich Jr. reported that his dad died March 23, that he was 84, and that his death came from recently diagnosed heart issues. This all happened in Steamboat Springs, Colorado where Rich and his wife Pat retired a good many years ago.
Here’s a few thoughts and recollections about my friend. If you live in a house in Oak Park or River Forest there’s a very good chance Rich has been in it, maybe sold it once or even twice. He remembered every house in the villages. He knew all the blocks and who your new neighbors were going to be. He had a sense of these villages at a granular level, at a community building level.
When Mary and I were looking to sell the two-flat on Taylor we had shared for 17 years with my folks, we fell into an available house a block away on Humphrey. The house was wonderful, big and vintage. We came back with Rich and walked through it. Mary was in love. I was worried the place was too expensive and too big.
Rich got me in a huddle outside the tiny first-floor bathroom and said, “Dan, you have to buy this house. Mary wants it. You have to get it.”
And we did.
I first really met Rich when Lynn Kirsch and I began running May Madness, an annual rite of spring on Oak Park Avenue near Lake. We were all active in The Avenue Business Association. And what we invented as a gimmick to drum up business one year when the street was torn up for construction had grown into an enormous annual street festival. Three stages, carnival rides, a dozen restaurants, thousands of people, many of them teens, half the police force. It was always overwhelming and spectacular.
There was Lynn, who owned the fashion store, Rich the Realtor, Jim August from the Irish Shop, Val who booked the music, John Williams from township youth advising us on how to keep a lid on it all.
And Rich was always there to do whatever needed to be done. That always included breaking down dozens of tables at 12:30 in the a.m. when we about exhausted. It was a bonding experience for certain
Rich, of course, graduated from OPRF High School. He had his copy of the Tabula yearbook in his desk drawer and could tell you the story of each kid in his class. As Rich Jr. reminded me Monday, this also put his dad in the middle of Oak Park’s bold, controversial experiment with racial integration in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Remember, Realtors generally were not on the right side of history during the blockbusting, panic-peddling rapid resegregation of Chicago’s West Side. And there were Oak Park real estate leaders of the same mindset, too. So being among those who led Oak Park toward integration during those days took some guts and some ability to have the long view.
That’s how it came to be that Rich Gloor sold your house twice.
Rich Gloor is survived by his wife, Pat, and his two children, Richard C. Gloor and his daughter, Beth Shuter.
