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Jerry Glenn has danced with Betty White, booked Jerry Lewis, partied with Jimmy Stewart and passed a kidney stone with the help of Milton Berle. Sort of.
“You know, in 80 years you get to do a lot of things,” he said with a smile.
Glenn has stories, tales dating back over his eight decades as a salesman, sales director, baseball enthusiast, antiques dealer and meeting planner, to name a few. His Main Street shop, Legends Sports Gallery, is like a Main Street USA version of his mind: It’s full of sports memorabilia, autographs, pictures, vintage posters and art. Stacked boxes of baseball cards line the shelves, some recent, some bearing names like DONRUSS 1988. Prints and posters of Ted Williams and Derek Jeter and Bob Feller (who appeared at the store’s grand opening 25 years ago) line the walls. “We ask people, ‘Do you have a favorite team? Favorite player? Tell us who it is, and we have it,’” said Glenn, who proceeded to recount four stories about doing just that the past week alone.
Born on the south side of Chicago (and a lifelong devotee of the White Sox as such), Glenn spent most of his career in sales with Nabisco, working his way from a starter position walking the not-entirely-safe streets to Director of Sales to Director of Promotion, where it was his job to wield million-dollar budgets in organizing events with the likes of Berle, Stewart, Paul Anka and Jerry Lewis. “I have no formal education,” he said. “I worked the day after I got out of high school.”
But his is one of those stories that has far more than one thread. He’s been an antique dealer in New York, he’s sold to the Estee Lauder family, he’s traveled on the Orient Express. He’s also, it goes without saying, something of a lifelong baseball guy, from his days playing semi-pro in Chicago to an assignment with the military. Glenn was assigned to the Panama Canal Zone, where, fortuitously enough, the soldiers had already organized a baseball team. “When I arrived I told my major I played semi-pro ball, and he says, ‘Our season starts tomorrow! Come on, let’s go down to the park!’ I’m in my combat boots, I just got off the boat! And the first pitch I hit over the fence.”
Glenn spent two years playing ball, “taking care of the library and the golf course,” he laughs. “Everybody’s feeling all sorry for me, and it was the time of my life!”
From there he found his way to Nabisco, where he spent 37 years. And it’s here that the stories start: The time that he and his wife found themselves hanging out with White (“She’s just the way you’d think she was,” he said), the time he got so mad at Berle about a booking that he said he literally passed a kidney stone. “I called him in his hotel room and said ‘Thank you, I just passed a stone being so mad at you.’ And he said, without missing a step, ‘I did it for the wife and kidneys.’”
The stories go on and on, and he’ll tell you more while you browse Legends. These days, his daughter, Lori, now runs the store. He’s been married to his wife, Audrey, for 55 years. “I met her when she was 5 and I was 3,” he said. And he’s got more proof of consistency: He handed over a sheet that says “124,800 hours worked,” 65 years x 48 weeks x 8 hours x days. “And counting,” he said, tapping the sheet and smiling.
