Starting with a small gourmet coffee shop in Long Grove that she and her then-husband bought as a hobby — and with no expectation of making money — Gloria Jean Kvetko went on to expand the chain first locally and then nationally, even before Starbucks became the coffee juggernaut that it is. “Gloria was a very determined person who knew what the customer liked, and she made sure the store provided it,” said Roger Badesch, the chain’s advertising and marketing director for four years. Kvetko, 82, died of complications from pneumonia June 14 at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, said her son, Tom Jaworski.
She had been a Long Grove resident since 1985. Born Gloria Jean Lehnert in Chicago, Kvetko grew up in the Northwest Side Irving Park neighborhood, in a house on North Bernard Street. She attended Roosevelt High School and Wright Junior College before marrying her first husband in 1962 when she was 21 and settling in Prospect Heights.
Though home raising a family, Kvetko showed plenty of entrepreneurial moxie, and she earned extra money for her family by babysitting, bookkeeping, working as a toy demonstrator and even selling Avon makeup. She eventually earned her beautician’s license, and with her children older, she began working at a Wheeling beauty shop. With the beauty shop set to be sold, Kvetko decided to buy it from the owners and began running Gloria’s Studio One, her son said.
Several years later, Kvetko and her then-husband, who was a h.
