Sure did!
Ha Ha, more old memories brought back to life. Using the whole rack on a bar table (to save a quarter!) was common back then. Same when the nine ball was made out of turn, early in the rack. We would rack them up and use the extra balls to make a full 9-Ball rack. The money ball might be the twelve ball or even the fifteen, whichever ball was the highest one in the rack.
Tell the truth, you did the same thing! :smile:
All to save that extra quarter.
I jumped at the chance to build another nine ball rack. Aside from anything else they couldn't make up a six ball rack then!
I don't remember ever playing bar room nine ball for over fifty a game but even at fifty a game they didn't want to waste those six balls!
In the eighties it was costing us fifty cents a rack of balls too. Inflation must have hit early around here. I have to admit after staying gone so long I still flinch at jamming four or six quarters in a bar table.
Room owner scam would be to sell tokens. When I looked into car washes guys were selling tokens that were never used. Tokens cost eight cents back then and sold for a dollar or dollar and a half. Some car washes were netting $20K or more from unused tokens. Of course buyers could make a big score and buy them for a dollar one place and use them where they sold for a dollar and a half!
My junior high school buddy turned me on to a life of crime. A coin shop opened up in the shopping center. They had a big box of coins, your choice for fifteen cents. Some coin from south america was the same size and weight as a quarter. Buy them up when the guy restocked and then go to the laundromat and buy cokes from the machine, get the coke and a dime change for a fifteen cent coin!
He showed me the straw trick too. All the bottles laid down in those machines so you could open them with a church key while they were still in the machine. Lose about three-fourths of the drink but the rest was free by joining a few straws together to suck it out. Made a heck of a mess! He was into shoplifting too. I was working making big money, thirty-five cents an hour, so I decided all of the stuff he was doing wasn't worth getting in trouble for. Last time I heard of him he was killing bugs for a living. I suspected he was gonna end up making license plates.
Speaking of scams, a guy that worked for me would go out every night and score a few bucks playing the twenty hole machine(just like a twenty-five hole machine but less holes) then drink beer and tap the first fat ugly broad he could get ahold of! A pretty fifteen year old wife at home but he was out getting the strange, very strange, stuff!
What was wild is that when he couldn't beat the machine he would stomp on some book matches and flatten them out a bit and stick them under one leg of the machine. It would be frowned on anywhere but he was doing it in a good hands people ran joint. The Mississippi River and bridge were only about a mile away and I used to joke that the reason they had to dredge around the pilings every few years was because of all of the old jukeboxes and cigarette machines down there with chains still attached to them!
Hu