"COLORS` aka TONK DOMINOES

     Room owners were continuously trying to circumvent the law. Cards, Dice, and Dominoes were not allowed in poolrooms in Alabama, unless, the population was between 56,500 and 59,000, then dominoes were allowed. What? Are you serious? Yes Sir,! see, apparently there was one county in Alabama that fit this prerequisite and the senator from that county loved to play dominoes so he had a bill passed. That's why it pays to know a politician or two. These were store bought from Saunier-Wilhelm, and were painted black, red, yellow and green to denote the four different suits. Mr. James, would not let you play for more than 50 cents a game. Why, you may ask? So you could play from 8:00a.m. till 12:00 midnight,and the House would end up with all the dough, though by Alabama law, and it is still that way until this day, all poolrooms must close by 11:00 p.m. and no alcoholic drinks are allowed on the premises. I know  some of you out there saying oh, no, he's wrong, well, don't bet on it. They have just turned a blind eye to it and no opening on Sunday either. I was arrested for playing pool on Sunday with a friend. The police came in and started giving me a load of crap and I told them they should be out catching a real criminal instead of messing with me. I was young and thought I could beat City Hall. No Sir, No Way, No How! I finally learned after about 10 times. Oh, yeah, I catch on real quick. They left and I thought that was it. Two days later they are banging on my door with a warrant for my arrest. I kid you not. I asked if I could drive my truck to the jail and they said sure. I was in front and there is no way for me to get away and why try, they know me, but I couldn't resist stomping the gas to the floor like I was making a mad dash for the border and they were on my ass in a nano second, maybe a pico second. I did this all the way to the jail. My sides were killing me, I was having a ball. I got there and they are real serious like I'm John Dillinger or at least one of the Top Ten Most Wanted. There is this real young cop that fingerprints me and I can tell he's real new, so I say,"No, son, watch me, see how I roll it and get the whole print? Now you try, son." These cops are so pissed and I am eating it up. When he gets through, I say,"Hey,boys, aren't you gonna brag on the kid? Well, son, I think you did one hell of a job and I believe you will be one hell of a cop." While the rookie and I were doing prints they told me I needed two people to sign my bond. Now this is for playing pool on Sunday keep in mind, I tell them that most people can't find their deed, can I post a cash bond? Sure, he said smiling real big, but that will be $300.00. I said, "Fine, no problem." He walked out of the room for two seconds and said, no, that will be $850.00. You just said $300.00, why the raise? Oh, he forgot to add something to it he said. I had neglected to have posted what ALL poolrooms are required to have posted to this day, and that is a sign that reads, "You must be 19 yrs of age to play pool unless accompanied by parent or guardian." The Guardian part saved me because all my customers were kids under 19 so there parents, bless their hearts, all wrote me a note saying while their child was in my poolroom I was their guardian. They couldn't touch that and they didn't want angry parents on their asses either. $850.00 I say, $850.00 and the cop is really smiling now because he knows I am screwed, blued and tattooed. What he doesn't realize is that I have about $4000.00 in my pocket, don't ask me why because I never carried that much around with me in town. So I say $850.00, and he's going to have an orgasm if I don't do something and quick, so I say,"Load the wagon big boy, I can haul it!" I pull that wad from my pocket and the rookie says, "Gawlay, I ain't seen that much money since my daddy bought me that Mustang." I said, "Son," as I patted him on the back and let him feel the wad, "buy yourself a poolroom and overnight you will become independently wealthy". I had to give up $850.00 but I enjoyed it plus I got the $850.00 back as soon as I went to court. Nope, I liked to have never got that money back. I had to get a lawyer to get it for me. When I went before the judge I had my lawyer with me and the judge said it would be a $10.00 fine and $32.50 court costs and I said, "NO," I want a trial by jury." The judge laughed, my lawyer laughed and I thought oh, no! but he granted me one and when we got to court that judge looked at it and said,"Y'all settle this outside the court room, I don't have time for this foolishness," exactly what I had thought he would say. I didn't think they would waste the taxpayers money on a frivolous charge as this. I had those damned signs plastered all over my poolroom, even in the bathroom and front door. I asked the cop that  arrested me me if he could run me some copies off so I could put them up and he said no, get your lawyer to do it for you but this sorry bastard takes Kenneth James a handful to put up so that he is in compliance with the law. To this day I still believe something gay was going on between those two but Ken denies it. You have got to admit, it was pretty sweet of him.

Ye Olde Billiard Parlor of Days Long Ago

      I started hanging out in poolrooms when I was 14 yrs. old. Business was booming back then, standing room only. They were dark and dank, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and fermenting tobacco juice permeated the air. Spittoons or cuspidors lined the walls where the spitters failed miserably to hit their target. The pool tables legs would even have tobacco juice on them where a spitter went way off course. Cigarette butts went into the floor. You could judge how well a poolroom was doing when you walked in, by the number of cigarette butts that were on the floor. I'm not kidding, they never swept the floor until they closed.
     Every pool table had two cue balls. One you used to break with (it was heavier) the other to shoot with. If they caught you breaking with the shooting ball they would kick your ass out. They didn't need your business, they had more than they wanted anyway.
    Every table was racked for you. Even the smallest rooms had 4 or 5 rack men. Even way back then Mr. James, the owner, knew Time was Money. No pussy footing around, rack and break, rack and break. You played by the game, so the more games you played the more money the House made.
    Six Ball cost 15 cents, Nine Ball cost 20 cents, Eight Ball or Rotation, sometimes called 61 because that is the number of points it took to win, cost a Quarter. Snooker cost 40 cents and that was way too much to pay so Snooker was avoided like the plague. Bank and One Pocket were way too slow so they were not played that much. Six Ball and Nine Ball were the money makers. They were fast and were played all day long and half the night. I remember in "78"  I restarted my poolroom life after a 4 yr. stint in the USAF, and a failed marriage that lasted almost three years.   That's all the punishment I could take. My dad use to tell everyone before I got married that I was going to have a shotgun wedding. My little chest swelled until I heard him say, "I'll have to hold a shotgun on the damned girl." Sweet, huh? We would play $45.00 worth of pool each and there may a be 5 games difference. You Never paid any ones games, I don't care if you won 100, that was unheard of.
     Kenneth James, the son of the owner, was the young gun in town and would play any local kid and give him the 3,5,7,and 9 for a dollar and would beat your brains out. He played like it was a $1000.00. I have seen him give good players the 7 ball. He was a run out artist, break and run, break and run. When you were gambling you could rack your own and if you did playing him you would turn into a rack man because that is all you would do. RACKEM!
     Road hustlers came in often and left licking their wound's, Quite a few pros's came through, Terry Bell, Searcy, St. Louie Louie, Louie Roberts before he was known. He was probably 21 or 22 at the time. Kenneth played all three and beat all three in the same day. He had no idea how well Louie played or his elbow would have tightened up. He played a lot of champions that none of us had ever heard of and some we had, like Varner, Hopkins, and Mizerak to name a few. He didn't do to well with these cats. Was it because he had heard their names or seen them on TV, or was it because he was closing in on 50? I don't guess we will ever know. I see Kenneth about every day, I will see how many he remembers.
     Mr. James was a real entrepreneur, he really knew how to make money. He had hamburgers, I mean good hamburgers, Coke and Pepsi, milk, maybe a few chips but I don't remember chips, sex toys for the men to either elongate or tickle in a French fashion. I mean this man had it going on. All the tables were hand brushed every night and a cover put on them, the lights were all turned off. This protected the tables and kept them from fading. No one hand brushes their tables any more. He had four domino tables that were called "Colors'' way back then because you had four different colors for the four different suits. He bought them from Jerry Saunier of Saunier-Wilhelm in Birmingham at five Points if my memory serves me correctly. Jerry ran the business like it should have been run. He would go to every poolroom in the state and take orders if you didn't need anything he would stay and talk to you and you felt so damned sorry for him to make the drive for nothing that you would end up buying something you really didn't need. Jerry knew this but you didn't. He turned it over to little Jerry and he never made the drive to small rooms which lost a lot of business for Saunier-Wilhelm. They both were very nice people but his dad had more personality. If a man cared enough about my little rinky dink poolroom to drive to it to ask me if I needed chalk, spots, cues or whatever I'm buying from him if he is a lot higher than anyone else. He carried a lot of the small stuff with him and would give you things that were dirt cheap but no one else did it. Little things mean a lot.
      Every poolroom in the South had their floor covered with tar paper. It didn't matter whether the floor was wood or concrete. I'm talking about 10 or 15 layers. Why? I have never figured it out. Maybe they thought it protected the ball. I know when I bought my room in "84", I painted my floor with battleship gray outdoor paint because you could not keep the place clean. The tiny black dust particles covered everything. Everyone told me it would never work. It worked like a charm much to their chagrin.
     One thing every new room owner will find out is that everyone will try to tell him how to run it better. Some people are helpful and some don't have a clue what it costs or why you do the things you do. I would get so pissed at these guys who would give me this unwanted advice that I would say, "Hey, If that's how you want it done then go buy you a damned poolroom and run it like you want to then you will see it's not as easy as I make it out to be."  Walk a mile in our shoes and you will turn around.
     NEXT BLOG:  THE DOMINO  CRAZE!

The Miz ,The Master, Steve Mizerak's college days

BILL LOONEY

My experience as a poolroom owner in the South and amusing stories about hustlers and pool players in general.

 

  Steve Mizerak and the Misfits, is the name we in the quaint little town of Athens, Al. have given the exodus of these young men in "65" from New Jersey. They invaded our town to attend the small college called Athens College, now Athens State. Evidently they couldn't get into college where they were from and the college recruiter from Athens found a gold mine in New Jersey and hit the mother lode. Word spread and the small town in the South suddenly was inundated with kids from surrounding states of New Jersey. The halls of Athens College reverberated with the sound of Yankee brogue." Oh, Jesus Christ and a couple of By Gods" seemed to roll of their tongue with ease.
      Athens was a town that had been burned and plundered during the Civil War, not once but twice, so even though the "War" had been over for a hundred years there was still distrust for the "Yankee."  They let us hold on to that distrust by stealing Civil War veteran's grave markers and taking them back North. It's the same thing a Southern kid would have done up North so it was not a hate crime it was just juvenile.
     Steve was an adroit pool player who later went on to win several World Championships. Most of them were for 14.1, or Straight Pool, but he was also a One Pocket, Snooker and 9 ball champion. He met a formidable foe in a young man by the name of Kenneth James. Kenneth's dad, William James owned the local billiard parlor known as Pastime Billiards. Steve is professed to have said that Kenneth was the best damned dumb pool player he had ever met. Of course he did not mean this in a condescending way. It was a compliment. Ken had never read a book on pool, never seen a VCR tape on pool, or never had a teacher, a tutor, a mentor, or even a coach and Steve had all of these, if not more. Ken was a self taught player, having to rely on his keen sense of memory to store every new thing he saw for future reference. This astounded Mizerak. How could this guy play so well when no one had shown him anything about the game, especially in this small redneck town. They would do battle everyday for 4 years until Mizerak graduated.
     Sometimes Steve would get a buddy and play Kenneth and a local yokel some partner Poker Pool. Not many young people have ever played this game and I haven't seen a set of Poker Pool balls in ages. The game consisted of 16 balls, 4 Aces, 4 Kings, 4 Queens,and 4 Jacks. A special diamond shaped rack is required. The object of the game is to get the best poker hand. You only got one shot at a time so you better make it count. You would shoot in one shot rotation. You would shoot until the best hand won.  Steve never failed to try to pocket all of the Aces first, then a king or a queen for the best hand. Kenneth and his partner would always go after the 4 Jacks, then one of each of the other suits. Ken's team always won, Mizerak never really understood the game and of course you couldn't tell him anything about pool, he was the pro. He turned pro at the age of 13. He was the one that had the great Willie Mosconi as a coach and mentor. He was probably around 21 at this time.
     Mizerak suffered a stroke in 2001 and never played competitively after that. He had pool rooms in West Palm Beach and Lake Park, Fl. He organized the Senior tour for men over 50 in 2006. He died May 29, 2006.