Batavia's most famous madam

Edna Gruber's grandchildren Edna and Bill Miller. Edna, 63, is a retired high school English teacher who still lives in Batavia. Bill, 65, teaches electricity and computers at the Orleans County Correctional Facility.

“My grandmother was fanatically clean and neat,” Miller recalled. “Everything had to be orderly. The kitchen floor was scrubbed every day. The sidewalk was scoured with bleach every single day. She always wore an apron and claimed she would 'die with a scrub brush in my hand.'

“Bill and I did the dishes. She would pull a stool up to the sink and we'd wash dishes every night. On Saturday we cleaned the house. When we were done, she'd inspect it. If it wasn't done right, we'd clean it again.”

From stories told about her and from her own granddaughter's testimony, Edna Gruber appears to have had a blended personality. She did not separate her role as madam from her role as grandmother.

“You must get rid of stereotypes when you talk about Edna Gruber,” Miller said. “Not all madams have hearts of gold and not all grandmothers are kind and cuddly.”

Gruber was an alcoholic, Miller continued. “She'd be dead drunk for days on end. Bill and I pretty much took care of ourselves—and her.”

A petite 5 feet tall—and, it seems, every inch of her a contradiction—Gruber raised her grandchildren with very high morals. “We couldn't step out of line,” Miller said. “We were scared to death of her.”

Six o'clock was punishment time. “Whatever the infraction...if it happened at 10 in the morning, at 6 o'clock we went into the parlor and she'd put us over her knee and give us a terrible spanking.

“Once she went after Bill with a baseball bat. I'm younger, but I was very protective of Bill and I got into it and I got a few whacks with the bat. I still have a chip out of my neck where I got hit with a bag of change. But, back then, we didn't think of it as abuse,” she added.

Miller grew up, however, with the determination never to be physically abusive with her own children.

Violence seemed to be the diplomacy of choice at 101 Jackson St. It kept Charles Miller at bay, for one thing. Kept his kids in line, for another, but Gruber, herself, was not immune.

As proprietress, Gruber took half of the price of entertainment at the Palace Hotel for herself. Fifty percent went to the girls who shared their percentage with their pimps. Miller recalled coming into the kitchen one school morning to find her grandmother lying in a pool of blood on the floor. A pimp had taken revenge after discovering that madam Gruber had convinced a particularly pretty and promising prostitute to leave Batavia because “you deserve better than this.” The pimp completely destroyed the kitchen, Miller said, and Gruber was hospitalized with stitches.

'She tried very hard to save us from hurt. She didn't care if people respected her, but they had to respect her grandchildren.' Edna Miller

It was not her first experience with violence. Edna Gruber had divorced Joe Gruber in 1916 and married David Reeves in 1930. The union was stormy. Reeves' incredible physical fights with Edna even made the Daily News. In 1931, a year after their marriage, he severely beat Edna, who was hospitalized for two weeks, her eyes, lips and tongue swollen.

Edna Gruber's adopted daughter, also named Edna (see sidebar: Generosity, compassion marked Gruber), at that time 10 years old, reported that Reeves had punched Gruber to the floor and kicked her in the face. Reeves eventually left Batavia and was later reported to have been struck by a car in Illinois, where he died in December 1940.

Obviously, having Gruber for a grandmother was not easy for Edna and Bill Miller. The fact that granny managed a house of prostitution compounded the difficulty.

On the one hand, Edna Miller insisted that “we were never told what was going on” at the Palace Hotel. “We lived in a glass dome inside that house...Nothing in that house ever touched us...She kept that away from us.”

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