From Daly City, California, it was exactly three hours and forty minutes to the parking lot of Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Usually the run would launch at 2 or 3 in morning after a Friday night of pool and on more than one occasion we saw sunrise, rolling into Tahoe. We were so ate up with the whole thing -- we’d go with virtually nothing in our pockets, never planned on getting a room unless we hit "a streak," and just go and play until we dropped. One trip, Jerry, my wingman, and I literally played at one table for over 24 hours straight. In fact, we got there early one Saturday morning and were still grinding it out at the same $2 table when the dealer we’d been playing with the day before came back on duty. “You guys back for more?” ”Uh. No, we never left.” We’d run on free beer and the good cheer of whatever cocktail waitress could suffer us the best.
It was a Thanksgiving in the very early 70’s that ended up being one of our most memorable runs, though not for the reasons we anticipated. We were both still in high school but were already casino veterans. That the Nevada Gaming Commission insisted that you be at least 21 to walk into any casino in the state had never slowed us down, because all the kids in California learn early on that if you walk into a casino, buy in for $20 worth of silver dollars and walk around with the coins in your hand like you knew what you’re doing, you were absolutely fine and no one was ever going to bother you. I’d been going for years and was so at home I even had a Harrah’s “Players Card.” It wasn’t until one really bad run and I needed to cash my payroll check that I encountered a problem. I had walked up to the cage not realizing that when they asked me for my driver’s license to cash my check it was going to reveal I was 19 and expedite my removal from the premises. (No problem -- I got a loan from Jerry, whose luck had picked up, and we just moved over to the Sahara.)
Jerry and I had experienced several good profitable runs that year and on Thanksgiving afternoon, while at the pool hall, we hatched the idea that we’d complete the familial requirements of the day and scoot out towards the mountains. After my family’s meal I went over to Jerry’s house where they were wrapping up. Jerry announced our plans and his uncle said, “Well you know, they’re saying it’s going to snow up there tonight.” Jerry and I looked at each other -- silently wondering whether we could outrun a blizzard in the Mustang -- when his uncle eased whatever passing concerns we might have been marginally entertaining by saying, "Why don’t you take my snow chains? I think they’ll fit a Mustang.” Now we were good to go. We had snow chains. That we had no idea what you did with snow chains was not a problem -- we had them and we were going.
Well sure enough, three hours later, in the middle of the mountains, it started to snow. We’re approaching the summit around Truckee and the highway patrol is waving over all cars without snow tires or chains on into a rest area. Now we are really frantic. We are forty minutes up the hill from cards, and beer, and silver dollars, and cocktail waitress that think we are cute, and we don’t know what to do. So we pull into the rest stop and pull out our bag of chains and look inside for the first time. Inside the canvas bag are, to our surprise: chains. Big huge rusty chains. We pull them out and there are four sets of these interwoven sets of chains and we have no clue. None.
Finally we are saved -- by what we were later to learn was a “Chain Monkey." He’s like 6’6 and dressed in these heavy duty overalls and looks like the bug guy in the first “Men in Black” movie. He asks if we want him to put our chains on and it’s like someone asking us if we want to get into heaven and we’re like, “Yes.” And he says, “It’ll be $10.” Well, this was an unforeseen expense and would severely cut into our projected reserves, but there was no getting around it. So we hand him a ten and our bag of chains and he looks in the bag and says, “Where are your spacers?” Once again, we are worse off than clueless but he says, “Don’t worry, I have some in the garage. That’ll be another $5.” Spacers, it turns out, are rubber band type thingies with hooks on them that keep the chains on your tires. And so he lines up the chains, has me maneuver the Mustang a couple of times, and minutes later the Mustang is equipped with snow chains and the Chain Monkey moves on to help another motorist. Jerry and I are ecstatic. We have snow chains on the car. We are good for takeoff. Tahoe and cards and free beer and cocktail waitresses: here we come. And we blast off out of the rest area.
Now, no one told us that you could only do like 25 miles an hour once you have snow chains on your car. We thought it was all “business as usual” and I’m doing like 40 up the mountain when we suffer catastrophic failure of one of the rear chains. I mean, it sounds like someone is hitting the rear fender of the Mustang with a baseball bat, “BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.” Even as stupid as we were back then, we knew we were done and we slowly turned around on the mountain and drove back to the rest area. We wait our turn until the Chain Monkey can attend to us and he says, “Busted chain, uh. Yeah, they were pretty rusted out. I was wondering if they’d hold.” And so we pay our Chain Monkey another $10 to have our chains removed, we bid adieu to our Mr. Monkey, and silently ride back to the Bay Area, completing our 300-Mile Thanksgiving U-Turn.
My second pool hall was a ceaseless fount of knowledge and life lessons. We would play endless hours of tonk, gin rummy, or liar’s poker at a café table along the rail, or in the office behind the desk, or play $5 9ball until closing, sometimes under less than ideal conditions. And through all of this silliness, there was the constant undercurrent of serious, serious pool all around us. I’ve mentioned Tugboat and Dorothy, but over the years I spent there, there was almost never a Friday or Saturday night when I didn’t get to watch countless match ups or ring games involving such legendary players as Filipino Gene, Hawaiian Brain, Dalton Leong, Dee Hulse, Tony Annigoni, Steve Votter, Denny Searcy, Junior Goff, and Ronnie Barber. Occasionally there’d be breakfast at 4 am afterwards at Denny’s, or at a little diner up the street, and I was sometimes allowed to participate, quietly eating my eggs and soaking up the road stories. Eventually life, a wedding, and the military came calling. But at the time I just didn’t know that, in so many ways way back then, I was enjoying the sweet spot in time.
Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.
Lou Figueroa
It was a Thanksgiving in the very early 70’s that ended up being one of our most memorable runs, though not for the reasons we anticipated. We were both still in high school but were already casino veterans. That the Nevada Gaming Commission insisted that you be at least 21 to walk into any casino in the state had never slowed us down, because all the kids in California learn early on that if you walk into a casino, buy in for $20 worth of silver dollars and walk around with the coins in your hand like you knew what you’re doing, you were absolutely fine and no one was ever going to bother you. I’d been going for years and was so at home I even had a Harrah’s “Players Card.” It wasn’t until one really bad run and I needed to cash my payroll check that I encountered a problem. I had walked up to the cage not realizing that when they asked me for my driver’s license to cash my check it was going to reveal I was 19 and expedite my removal from the premises. (No problem -- I got a loan from Jerry, whose luck had picked up, and we just moved over to the Sahara.)
Jerry and I had experienced several good profitable runs that year and on Thanksgiving afternoon, while at the pool hall, we hatched the idea that we’d complete the familial requirements of the day and scoot out towards the mountains. After my family’s meal I went over to Jerry’s house where they were wrapping up. Jerry announced our plans and his uncle said, “Well you know, they’re saying it’s going to snow up there tonight.” Jerry and I looked at each other -- silently wondering whether we could outrun a blizzard in the Mustang -- when his uncle eased whatever passing concerns we might have been marginally entertaining by saying, "Why don’t you take my snow chains? I think they’ll fit a Mustang.” Now we were good to go. We had snow chains. That we had no idea what you did with snow chains was not a problem -- we had them and we were going.
Well sure enough, three hours later, in the middle of the mountains, it started to snow. We’re approaching the summit around Truckee and the highway patrol is waving over all cars without snow tires or chains on into a rest area. Now we are really frantic. We are forty minutes up the hill from cards, and beer, and silver dollars, and cocktail waitress that think we are cute, and we don’t know what to do. So we pull into the rest stop and pull out our bag of chains and look inside for the first time. Inside the canvas bag are, to our surprise: chains. Big huge rusty chains. We pull them out and there are four sets of these interwoven sets of chains and we have no clue. None.
Finally we are saved -- by what we were later to learn was a “Chain Monkey." He’s like 6’6 and dressed in these heavy duty overalls and looks like the bug guy in the first “Men in Black” movie. He asks if we want him to put our chains on and it’s like someone asking us if we want to get into heaven and we’re like, “Yes.” And he says, “It’ll be $10.” Well, this was an unforeseen expense and would severely cut into our projected reserves, but there was no getting around it. So we hand him a ten and our bag of chains and he looks in the bag and says, “Where are your spacers?” Once again, we are worse off than clueless but he says, “Don’t worry, I have some in the garage. That’ll be another $5.” Spacers, it turns out, are rubber band type thingies with hooks on them that keep the chains on your tires. And so he lines up the chains, has me maneuver the Mustang a couple of times, and minutes later the Mustang is equipped with snow chains and the Chain Monkey moves on to help another motorist. Jerry and I are ecstatic. We have snow chains on the car. We are good for takeoff. Tahoe and cards and free beer and cocktail waitresses: here we come. And we blast off out of the rest area.
Now, no one told us that you could only do like 25 miles an hour once you have snow chains on your car. We thought it was all “business as usual” and I’m doing like 40 up the mountain when we suffer catastrophic failure of one of the rear chains. I mean, it sounds like someone is hitting the rear fender of the Mustang with a baseball bat, “BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.” Even as stupid as we were back then, we knew we were done and we slowly turned around on the mountain and drove back to the rest area. We wait our turn until the Chain Monkey can attend to us and he says, “Busted chain, uh. Yeah, they were pretty rusted out. I was wondering if they’d hold.” And so we pay our Chain Monkey another $10 to have our chains removed, we bid adieu to our Mr. Monkey, and silently ride back to the Bay Area, completing our 300-Mile Thanksgiving U-Turn.
My second pool hall was a ceaseless fount of knowledge and life lessons. We would play endless hours of tonk, gin rummy, or liar’s poker at a café table along the rail, or in the office behind the desk, or play $5 9ball until closing, sometimes under less than ideal conditions. And through all of this silliness, there was the constant undercurrent of serious, serious pool all around us. I’ve mentioned Tugboat and Dorothy, but over the years I spent there, there was almost never a Friday or Saturday night when I didn’t get to watch countless match ups or ring games involving such legendary players as Filipino Gene, Hawaiian Brain, Dalton Leong, Dee Hulse, Tony Annigoni, Steve Votter, Denny Searcy, Junior Goff, and Ronnie Barber. Occasionally there’d be breakfast at 4 am afterwards at Denny’s, or at a little diner up the street, and I was sometimes allowed to participate, quietly eating my eggs and soaking up the road stories. Eventually life, a wedding, and the military came calling. But at the time I just didn’t know that, in so many ways way back then, I was enjoying the sweet spot in time.
Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.
Lou Figueroa
