Skip to content
Obituaries
Link copied to clipboard

Ilona Keller, 86, owned Ilona Keller's Dugan's Restaurant

Ilona Tkach Keller fled her native Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and became a successful businesswoman here, but in 1980 she saw fire destroy her first Northeast Philadelphia restaurant.

Ilona Keller
Ilona KellerRead more

Ilona Tkach Keller fled her native Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and became a successful businesswoman here, but in 1980 she saw fire destroy her first Northeast Philadelphia restaurant.

After recovering from that loss, she opened Ilona Keller's Dugan's Restaurant & Banquets and, over the decades, watched it become a Roosevelt Boulevard landmark.

"I like to take chances," she told Inquirer columnist Tom Fox in 1981. "If I didn't take chances, I would still be living under Russian tyranny."

On Wednesday, Feb. 8, Mrs. Keller, 86, died at the Vitas Hospice Unit of Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia of complications from a restrictive lung condition.

Daughter Ilona Kane said Wednesday that "we decided to close the business a year ago, because of the economy," but that Mrs. Keller still owned the site and lived in its second-story apartment as she had for 30 years.

"As the family matriarch, she was very generous, and a caring mother and grandmother," her daughter said.

"She was a strong woman . . . a woman ahead of her time. . . . Her grandchildren always said she was one tough cookie."

News stories attested to her popularity.

In 1998, Ilona Keller's Dugan's hosted a high school prom. In 1992, it was the site of a Mayfair neighborhood reunion. In 1988, former Philadelphia double-decker bus drivers held their reunion there.

"She befriended Mayor Rizzo," her daughter said, "and he came to the restaurant quite often."

The site at Borbeck Avenue and the Boulevard had been an Acme Market that, her daughter said, Mrs. Keller converted into three ballrooms, which at capacity could seat 600 people.

In the 1981 profile, Fox described Mrs. Keller as "a dashing and stylish Czechoslovakian-born beauty with a delicious Marlene Dietrich accent."

And, he wrote, she "is a difficult woman to demoralize."

She was born in the town of Rachovo, she told Fox, and she and her husband, Martin, "owned a little delicatessen in Czechoslovakia, but the Russians took it away from us.

"The Russians put a government cashier at the register, and the cashier took all the money. My husband and I were paid a small monthly sum as owners, but the government took the rest of the profits. . . .

"We could not live under Russian rule. It was an insult to our intelligence."

Her husband was born in Philadelphia, she said in another interview, "but his parents returned to Czechoslovakia when he was a boy, and they died over there. And he was trapped when the war broke out."

Once they made it to the United States, she and her husband ran a Kensington taproom.

After they divorced, in 1966, she bought Dugan's, already a Northeast mainstay.

When fire destroyed it, she told Fox, "I did nothing for one year, and I was a nervous wreck. . . . I was slowly going crazy.

"So I decided to go back into the restaurant business," for which, she said, she went into debt. "I owe lots of money, and I am happy again."

Before long, her daughter said, she was prosperous again, too.

Besides her daughter, Mrs. Keller is survived by a son, John; a daughter, Theresa Lev; and nine grandchildren. Her former husband died in 1993.

A visitation was set from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, at the Lambie Funeral Home, 8000 Rowland Ave., immediately followed by a funeral service there. Burial is to be in Oakland Cemetery.