Penny Morgan's Place on Elyria Avenue

I find the whole Penny Morgan story – about her brothels outside the Lorain city limits on Oberlin Avenue (the current Mutt & Jeff location) and on Elyria Avenue during 1937 and 1938 – very interesting, in a old-time, wild-west sort of way. It's a tragic story too; for a series of $50 bribes that she made to Lorain County Sheriff William F. Grall to look the other way, he was sent to prison and she ended up taking it on the lam to avoid prosecution. I don't think the authorities ever found her.

I don't mean to judge her, or ignore her crimes either here on the blog. She may still be alive for all I know. I simply find this affair to be a fascinating chapter in Lorain County history.

Anyway, last week fellow blogger Alan Hopewell made a comment on my post, asking if I knew where the Elyria Avenue brothel had been located. So I decided to do a little research and see if I could find out.

The same 1939 city directory that listed 3700 Oberlin Avenue as being the location of Penny Morgan's tourist rooms also had a listing (at left) for Penny Morgan's real name: Maxine Barbour. ("Penny Morgan" was just her alias.) There she was, listed as being on the east side of Elyria Avenue, between Harriet and N. Ridge Road.

Unfortunately, since that area was outside Lorain city limits, there were no addresses listed. So where along that stretch of Elyria Avenue was Penny's place?

I cross-referenced the list of east side residents against a newer book (1960) that included numerical addresses for the same area. I found a few residents that were still on Elyria Avenue since 1939, including one that was a few doors south of Penny.

So now I had a few actual addresses to work with.

According to the newspaper accounts of the Sheriff's trial, many of Penny's neighbors were called to testify, including the resident whose exact address I had. That resident is indicated on the map below with the blue dot (in the lower right hand corner).

So it looks like Penny had to live close enough to that blue dot to be a 'neighbor' – meaning she must have lived somewhere nearby, likely somewhere between the House of Praise church and the blue dot. A location farther away would hardly qualify her as a 'neighbor' to the blue dot house.

According to the Lorain County Auditor website, there are a lot of homes along that stretch of Elyria Avenue that were built before 1900, and a few from the 1920s. So it kind of makes sense.

Anyway, it really doesn't matter where the brothel was; it might have been torn down by now anyway. But as anyone who reads this blog knows, I love a good mystery.

Perhaps Penny is still alive out there – somewhere – and can help me fill in the blanks in her story.

When Mutt & Jeff's Was Penny Morgan's Place

I thought I'd done about a complete a history (here) as I could of the building that houses my favorite Saturday night eatery – Mutt & Jeff's – until I found this great article. It's by well-known Journal Staff Writer Hank Kozloski, and ran in the newspaper on April 2, 1989.

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Oberlin Avenue Tavern has colorful past
By Hank Kozloski

Except for the sign in front of 3700 Oberlin Ave., and maybe an occasional change in paint color, the building now known as Mutt & Jeff's hasn't changed much over the years.

But the building has a colorful and sometimes notorious past.

Today Mutt & Jeff's is a popular weekend haunt. To oldtimers, it will always be known as the Airport Tavern.

But during the Great Depression, when the building was still in Black River Township, it was called Penny Morgan's Place and was the site of a famous Lorain County scandal.

Lorain County Sheriff William F. Grall,who served three two-year terms as Lorain mayor (1920-24 and 1926-27), went to prison in late 1938 for accepting bribes in a sensational grand jury probe of a slot machine and vice racket which operated out of Penny Morgan's Place. Five other Lorain County men were also sent to prison for running the racket and giving bribes to Grall for allowing them to operate.

Grall, who was paroled from prison in 1941, moved from Lorain after being paroled to become editor of the Lake Union Herald, a weekly magazine published by the Lake Union conference of Seventh-Day Adventists at Berrien Springs, Mich.

Former Lorain builder Vlad Nickoloff, now living on Key Largo, Florida, recalled delivering newspapers to Penny Morgan's Place during the early 1930's.

"All the politicians went there," Nickoloff said.

He said Carl Finnegan, who replaced Grall as sheriff, put Penny Morgan's Place out of business.

The list of people who owned a building at that site dates back to 1928 when Celia Florence Chovik acquired it, then lost it to Cleveland Trust Co. in 1936. Gus Gailus Sr. bought it in 1937 and sold it to Alex Hormanski in 1943.

It was Hormanski who named it Airport Tavern, after Mills Airport located on Meister Road. When Hormanski was killed in a car accident, Nettie Sroka took over Airport Tavern in 1954. She later sold it to Bruno Dombroski, a local professional wrestler, in 1959.

The name Airport Tavern disappeared from the building when ownership changed five times since 1959.

Wilma George, the next owner after Dombroski, changed the name to Sherwood Inn. Then former County Commissioner Fred Ritenauer became the owner. He called it The Trademark. It wasn't long after that it became Scardi's under Guy Scardami's stewardship. And now, Mutt & Jeff's under Klaus J. Grm.

Whatever it is called, it will always be a part of Lorain history and Oberlin Avenue history.

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Hey, speaking of Mutt & Jeff's, here's a nice look at how it is today. After watching this, you'll understand why my wife and I are Saturday night regulars. (The only problem with the short video? It doesn't have Brenda, our favorite waitress in it. But it does feature her twin sister Becky.)

And before it was the Airport Tavern...

The very first topic on this blog (almost a year ago) concerned Mutt & Jeff's (one of my favorite restaurants) and how it used to be the Sherwood Inn. I followed that up a few days later with a second entry noting that before it was the Sherwood Inn, it was the Airport Tavern beginning around 1942.

Well, it took almost a year, but I can now add another nugget of information to the history of Mutt & Jeff's building. I discovered that the 3700 Oberlin Avenue address first showed up in the city directory in 1940 as a place where tourists could rent a room for the night. (See city directory entry at left.) It kind of makes sense, since at time there wasn't much on Oberlin Avenue in that neck of the woods, and besides, it was outside Lorain city limits. (The 3650 Oberlin Avenue address disappeared from the directory by the time that the Airport Tavern was in business, leaving just the tavern and the farmhouse on Oberlin Avenue near the city limits.