Gerri Oliver was more than a trailblazing owner of the Palm Tavern in Chicago. She was a passionate keeper of history. The Palm Tavern was at 446 E. 47th St. in the Bronzeville neighborhood. It opened in 1933 and became the meeting place for the acts that performed at the historic Regal Theater across the street. James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Duke Ellington, and the Temptations were among the many luminaries who frequented the Palm Tavern. Mrs. Oliver owned the Palm from 1956 until the City of Chicago evicted her on July 3, 2001. Mrs. Oliver died of natural causes on Dec. 7 in a Palo Verde, Ca. assisted living facility. She was 101 years old. “When I lock these doors for good, that will mark the end of an era,” Ms. Oliver told me in a 1987 conversation at the Palm. “People of the new era are not like mine. I don’t see anyone out here  who realizes the historical value of the Palm or has any inkling of history per se, and that’s kind of sad. You can close the door on bad times, but good times should live on.” The Palm was razed in 2004 to become an empty lot. The original Regal is a parking lot. That’s Chicago music history for you. Jim Knight was the first owner of the Palm Tavern. The former Pullman porter named his establishment after a roadside watering hole in the Virginia countryside. Ms. Oliver, a native of Jackson, Miss., was his  manicurist at Hal’s Barber Shop, across the street from the Palm Tavern. Mrs. Oliver and her husband James bought the tavern from Knight. The tavern was anchored by an ornate Brunswick bar and Knight designed the tavern’s beautiful wall mural that depicted palm trees, camels, pyramids and a roadside Palm Tavern in a desert. The  customers were dignified and elegant. Men wore fedoras and nice suits. The women were adorned in pearls and beautiful dresses. When needed, the Palm could be a faraway place from the south side of Chicago. Mrs. Oliver knew she was living in history. She kept dozens of old scrapbooks behind the bar and willingly shared her memories. She showed me photos of scat singer Eddie Jefferson and soul singer Chuck Jackson. An image of a young Harold Washington was on another page. A few pages after that, there was a photo of White Sox owner Bill Veeck checking out the Palm with his Cuban outfielder Minnie Minoso. The walls of the Palm were adorned with large black and white portraits of soul singer Dee Clark, jazz singer Dakota Staton and a picture of Sarah Vaughan. The minute artists arrived in Chicago, they would call in their dinner menu to the Palm. The Palm was known as a bar, but on occasion, Mrs. Oliver would cook for her clientele. Red beans and rice were the house specialty. Jazz singer Dorothy Donegan once astounded the regulars by downing three huge plates of them in one sitting. Jo Jones always requested black-eyed peas. Jazz vocalist Dakota Staton was a Muslim, so Mrs. Oliver prepared a meal without pork. Mrs. Oliver recalled that when the lakeways opened up for large ships, Africans arriving on the Black Star Line (Marcus Garvey’s ship line, adopted by Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of Ghana) would gather at the Palm. “When ships docked here, we would welcome them to Chicago,” she said in 1987. “They would come to the Palm Tavern and get to know us as Americans.” Dr. Martin Luther King had strategic meetings with the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the Palm. Longtime Chicago labor activist  Ishmael “Ish” Flory once told me about a meeting he had with author Richard Wright and Horace Mann Bond (Julian Bond’s father) at the Palm. Flory died in 2004 at the age of 96. He called the Palm one of the last important spots in the history of Black people in the United States. Mrs. Oliver was born Geraldine Willis in 1919. Her parents were successful seamstress operators in Jackson. “They made clothes and suits for all the elite people in Mississippi,” her son James Polk said in a Tuesday night conversation from Los Angeles. “My mother moved to Chicago in 1942, 43. I must have been four or five.” Mrs. Oliver attended Corpus Christi church in Bronzeville, where she became friends with Theresa Needham. Mrs. Needham (1912-1992) operated the legendary Theresa’s Lounge at 4801 S. Indiana, where Junior Wells led the house band. I tried to keep in touch with Mrs. Oliver over the years. One time I took “Saturday Night Live” actor and Harry Belafonte Folk Singer Garrett Morris to the Palm. He didn’t want to leave. By 1995, Mrs. Oliver sounded tired. “I made the goal I set for myself,” she said. “That’s 35 years. But last month I was robbed twice. I have to live here now. The first time they came through the roof. The second time they took the entire window of in the kitchen, bars and everything. Evidently they had a healthy respect for me, because both times they could have killed me. I got up and cussed at them. But it’s time for a new provider.” Ms. Oliver was 75 years old. And she stood 5’1”. In 1998 Chicago blues artist and educator Fernando Jones wrote an interactive play called “I Was There When The Blues Was Red Hot” that was based on the Palm Tavern and was presented in the bar. “My play  helped sustain its opening for an  additional two years beyond the initial plan to close it down,” Jones told me in 2018. In 2014 Chicago blues artist Billy Branch recorded “Going To See Miss Geri One More Time” with Sons of Blues for his Blues Shock album. In February 2019, Branch told Block Club Chicago, “So many of African-Americans contributions to U.S. history and culture have already been omitted, deleted or otherwise buried, that when physical evidence of something like the Palm disappears, you deny people a sense of pride that ‘we built this’.” Jones added, “A good day at Home Depot could have saved Gerri’s. It was important to the whole Bronzeville area. It should have been saved and it is a shame that it wasn’t.” A year after her eviction, attorney Gary Fresen helped Mrs. Oliver organize her artifacts so they could be reviewed and cataloged by the Chicago Historical Society. Other items have been lost or stolen. “I used to say, ‘Mama, why are you letting these people grab everything?,” said Polk, who has lived in Los Angeles since 1958. “She could never give me a good answer. I used to tell her she was running her business like it was her home. You can’t do that.”

In 2018, south side preservationist Mike Medina led an effort to get the city to name the section of 47th Street between King Drive and Vincennes Ave. named for Gerri Oliver.

That effort has gone nowhere, although now that Mrs. Oliver is dead she may finally earn her due respect from the city.

In 2018 I had Medina and Polk on my  WGN-AM radio show. Medina and his wife became loyal friends of Mrs. Oliver’s regularly visiting her in Los Angeles. Polk is a former commissioner for the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging.

“I remember Count Basie, Joe Williams, all of them, during their intermissions at the Regal, they would sneak out the back door come over, have a couple of drinks and go back to do their second show,” Polk told us. “It was the place to be. Being the son of Gerri Oliver, I enjoyed the whole scene.” And music helped bring comfort to Mrs. Oliver’s final years. ‘I used to play her jazz,” Polk said on Tuesday. “Sonny Stitt. Gene Ammons, a lot of Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. When she heard that music she would light up like she wanted to dance. Billie Holiday. She and Billie Holiday were close friends. There was a hotel on 46th and South Park. After appearing at the Regal, Billie Holiday  would come to the Palm Tavern through the back way and me and my Uncle Maurice used to walk her back to the hotel. There was (jazz  bassist) Paul Chambers. The Miles Davis group. “What can you say when you’re in the mix and you’re living with history?” Mrs. Oliver is survived by her son, who is her only child. She is also survived by three grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. Services will be private. Her son is planning a PowerPoint memorial –with music—to be shown in Chicago.