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!
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