Chris
That's a very cool deal selling that old cue to Mr. Laube's daughter. I've sold several collectibles and many paintings to the heirs of the artist. I just last month sold a painting to a woman that, by coincidence, lived in the artist's house, which she is now actively filling with paintings he made in the 1940s.
I met Eddie Laube some time in the early 1970s. Dennis Dieckman was looking to start making cues and he and I traveled together to meet Laube and discuss buying his business. As I recall, Laube was looking to sell everything, name, patents and equipment, and offered to train Dennis as part of the deal and Dennis could come out of the deal making Laube cues. I think Dennis was more interested in making cues of the Hemstetter design. Carl Conlon was coming back from Japan with revolutionary Helmstetter 3-Cushion cues, and those were rather inspiring. However, Dennis may have subsequently bought some of Laube's equipment (for some reason I believe that the one lathe that Dennis has ever owned he may have obtained from Laube, but you should check with Dennis on that). If it is Laube's lathe, several great 3-Cushion player's cues were subsequently turned on it, as well the Predator design being invented on it.
Laube was the first cue maker I met. We sat around in his living room, drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I later moved to Los Angeles. Dieckman came out to visit and started going to Bert Schrager's place to apprentice the art of cue building. Schrager made me my first custom. Bert and I sat around drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups.
The 3rd cue builder I met was Tad Kohara. We hung out in his shop in Stanton in the late 70s, drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. At that point I thought it was Cue Maker 101, until I met Ernie Gutierrez. If Ernie drank coffee (he doesn't that I know of) it would be of some fresh-grown beans, hand-picked by some gentleman coffee baron that Ernie had made a cue for, brewed by some state of the art machine that he had tinkered with to make it better, faster and more precise and he'd be sipping it out of a silver hand crafted and bejeweled Pimp Cup with a perfectly milled Ivory handle.
Thanks
Kevin
