(insert flashback music)
Shortly into my high school years I procured a car, a well used ’65 forest green Mustang, and I broke free of the room within walking distance of my home, The Billiard Palacade, in San Francisco. Swimming upstream (almost literally) to my new home-away-from-home “up the hill” on Mission Street, I began to frequent “Town & Country Billiards.”
It was an old bank building that sat on its own corner, sort of like a miniature Flatiron Building in New York -- it had that sort of triangular shape. Walking in, a black iron railing on your left curved around up to the front desk on the right. It was a pretty gaudy looking place, with red velvet wall paper, white-sided National Shuffle Board tables covered with beige cloth, and Tiffany-style lamps over each 4 ½ foot by 9 battlefield.
Arriving at the desk you’d usually be greeted by the owner, Stan Cleaner, a New York transplant who had seen it all and done it all. On one of the first evening forages I made into the room I was challenged by a young short-haired blonde guy, playing with a Gina. He wanted to play 9ball. I went up to Stan and asked, “Do I have a chance?” And Stan, who had somehow already divined my place in the substrata of pool players in his room said in a very non-committal but totally committal way that my challenger was, “the best in house.” That I had no chance was left unnecessarily unspoken. I passed on my opportunity to play Steve Votter, probably at the time one of the best players in California.
One day I was playing on a table near the center of the room and was surprised to see the legendary Tugboat Whaley walk into the room. Ancient, slightly bowed, but still rosy-cheeked, with pure white hair, suspenders in place he confidently shuffled in, opened up a beat up old black cylindrical leather case, pulled out his brass jointed cue and start hitting balls with a soft easy grace. Shortly thereafter, I was again surprised when I saw Dorothy Wise, then several times Women's U.S 14.1 Open champ come in. Trim, grandmotherly, and coiffed, she put her own cue together and they began to spar, stopping occasionally for Tugboat to impart some bit of wisdom to Ms. Wise. I probably made two balls that afternoon, as I strained to listen in above the juke box and glean whatever crumbs of knowledge floated from their table. On other days a fellow named Dennis and Tugboat would play a refined game of 14.1 for hours on end. Watching these two elegantly manage and dismantle rack after rack was possibly the incipient start of my love affair with straight pool.
As time went on, I came to know and assume my role amongst the whole cast of motley characters, most near my age, that choose to rush to the pool hall each day, rather than participate in other more serious life-endeavors. Well I remember being overjoyed to be at the pool hall the Saturday night of my senior prom. After all, pool was a lady whose company you could enjoy, savor, and didn’t have to buy a corsage.
Jerry, Dale, Devlin, Rico, 10-Speed, Bob Babba, Dennis, Vince, Steve, Jeff, Eugene, Bob Langstrom, and the rest now lost to memory... It seemed that for several years of my life it all revolved around getting to the pool hall as soon as humanly possible, being heartily hailed by my compatriots, and staying up until I could put off sleeping no more, or the demands of real life -- school, family, job -- could no longer be held at bay. Without any doubt I can categorically state that my major source of calories for more years than I now care to recall was the Landshire sandwich company. In particular, their “Special Hoagie,” cooked to perfection in the pool hall mini-oven, slathered with golden brown mustard, and chased with an ice cold cup of root beer. Life could not possibly get any better.
Over the eight or so years I spent living there, the troupe that hung together survived countless adventures and, statistically, many of us should be dead or permanently maimed now (or at least done serious jail time). I remember the afternoon Crazy Bob Langstrom came into the pool hall, ecstatic that he had just purchased a brand new “Sterling Moss Green” Triumph 6. Now basically, this British vehicle is a tin metal soap box on wheels with an engine with enough torque to get most cars airborne. Bob wanted to take someone (it was a two-seater) for a spin and show them what the car could do. Everyone just sort of looked at each other, studied their feet for what seemed like an eternity, hands in pockets, until I finally, innocently chirped, “Sure. I’ll go.” Now maybe it was because I hadn’t hung out at the pool hall for long enough at that point, or maybe I was just being stupid again (a frequent state of mine in those days), but somehow, for just that moment, I had failed to recall that there was a reason Bob Langstrom was known as *Crazy* Bob Langstrom. We took off from the pool hall at about 70 miles an hour through a mixed residential/business neighborhood and hit highway 280 doing 80. This is when I started to get a little concerned. Bob took it up to 110 on a rather busy public highway up through the Sierra Hills until I pretty much looked about the same color as his shiny new car. The coupe de grace was coming down the off ramp at 90 miles an hour and having to decelerate fast enough to not fly through the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp (and cross-traffic), which is about when I actually, physically, felt the blood totally drain from my face from the negative G’s.
But, through the grace of God or pure dumb luck, we survived intact and without judicial punishment all the countless late night runs though the mountains to play blackjack in Lake Tahoe or Reno. You have to remember: this was before the advent of “boats” in many cities. Going to Tahoe, or Reno, or Vegas was special. Free non-stop booze; single deck blackjack (double deck was rare); friendlier game rules and machine odds; you were paid off in real no-kidding silver dollars; and the cocktail waitresses always seemed happy to flirt with you a bit. For whatever reasons, it was a richer, more exotic experience than going to a casino five minutes away from your house.
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 and 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. In fact, I’d been going for years and was so at home I even had a Harrah’s “Players Card.”
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 waitresses who 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. And finally we are saved -- by what we later were to learn was a “Chain Monkey” who comes over to us. 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 be let 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 then 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: 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 Mr. Monkey, and silently ride back to the Bay Area, completing our 300-Mile Thanksgiving Day 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. 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 Pilipino Gene, Hawaiian Brain, Dalton Leong, Dee Hulse, Tony Annigoni, Steve Votter, Denny Searcy, Junior Goff, or Ronnie Barber. Occasionally there’d be breakfast afterwards at 4am 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
Shortly into my high school years I procured a car, a well used ’65 forest green Mustang, and I broke free of the room within walking distance of my home, The Billiard Palacade, in San Francisco. Swimming upstream (almost literally) to my new home-away-from-home “up the hill” on Mission Street, I began to frequent “Town & Country Billiards.”
It was an old bank building that sat on its own corner, sort of like a miniature Flatiron Building in New York -- it had that sort of triangular shape. Walking in, a black iron railing on your left curved around up to the front desk on the right. It was a pretty gaudy looking place, with red velvet wall paper, white-sided National Shuffle Board tables covered with beige cloth, and Tiffany-style lamps over each 4 ½ foot by 9 battlefield.
Arriving at the desk you’d usually be greeted by the owner, Stan Cleaner, a New York transplant who had seen it all and done it all. On one of the first evening forages I made into the room I was challenged by a young short-haired blonde guy, playing with a Gina. He wanted to play 9ball. I went up to Stan and asked, “Do I have a chance?” And Stan, who had somehow already divined my place in the substrata of pool players in his room said in a very non-committal but totally committal way that my challenger was, “the best in house.” That I had no chance was left unnecessarily unspoken. I passed on my opportunity to play Steve Votter, probably at the time one of the best players in California.
One day I was playing on a table near the center of the room and was surprised to see the legendary Tugboat Whaley walk into the room. Ancient, slightly bowed, but still rosy-cheeked, with pure white hair, suspenders in place he confidently shuffled in, opened up a beat up old black cylindrical leather case, pulled out his brass jointed cue and start hitting balls with a soft easy grace. Shortly thereafter, I was again surprised when I saw Dorothy Wise, then several times Women's U.S 14.1 Open champ come in. Trim, grandmotherly, and coiffed, she put her own cue together and they began to spar, stopping occasionally for Tugboat to impart some bit of wisdom to Ms. Wise. I probably made two balls that afternoon, as I strained to listen in above the juke box and glean whatever crumbs of knowledge floated from their table. On other days a fellow named Dennis and Tugboat would play a refined game of 14.1 for hours on end. Watching these two elegantly manage and dismantle rack after rack was possibly the incipient start of my love affair with straight pool.
As time went on, I came to know and assume my role amongst the whole cast of motley characters, most near my age, that choose to rush to the pool hall each day, rather than participate in other more serious life-endeavors. Well I remember being overjoyed to be at the pool hall the Saturday night of my senior prom. After all, pool was a lady whose company you could enjoy, savor, and didn’t have to buy a corsage.
Jerry, Dale, Devlin, Rico, 10-Speed, Bob Babba, Dennis, Vince, Steve, Jeff, Eugene, Bob Langstrom, and the rest now lost to memory... It seemed that for several years of my life it all revolved around getting to the pool hall as soon as humanly possible, being heartily hailed by my compatriots, and staying up until I could put off sleeping no more, or the demands of real life -- school, family, job -- could no longer be held at bay. Without any doubt I can categorically state that my major source of calories for more years than I now care to recall was the Landshire sandwich company. In particular, their “Special Hoagie,” cooked to perfection in the pool hall mini-oven, slathered with golden brown mustard, and chased with an ice cold cup of root beer. Life could not possibly get any better.
Over the eight or so years I spent living there, the troupe that hung together survived countless adventures and, statistically, many of us should be dead or permanently maimed now (or at least done serious jail time). I remember the afternoon Crazy Bob Langstrom came into the pool hall, ecstatic that he had just purchased a brand new “Sterling Moss Green” Triumph 6. Now basically, this British vehicle is a tin metal soap box on wheels with an engine with enough torque to get most cars airborne. Bob wanted to take someone (it was a two-seater) for a spin and show them what the car could do. Everyone just sort of looked at each other, studied their feet for what seemed like an eternity, hands in pockets, until I finally, innocently chirped, “Sure. I’ll go.” Now maybe it was because I hadn’t hung out at the pool hall for long enough at that point, or maybe I was just being stupid again (a frequent state of mine in those days), but somehow, for just that moment, I had failed to recall that there was a reason Bob Langstrom was known as *Crazy* Bob Langstrom. We took off from the pool hall at about 70 miles an hour through a mixed residential/business neighborhood and hit highway 280 doing 80. This is when I started to get a little concerned. Bob took it up to 110 on a rather busy public highway up through the Sierra Hills until I pretty much looked about the same color as his shiny new car. The coupe de grace was coming down the off ramp at 90 miles an hour and having to decelerate fast enough to not fly through the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp (and cross-traffic), which is about when I actually, physically, felt the blood totally drain from my face from the negative G’s.
But, through the grace of God or pure dumb luck, we survived intact and without judicial punishment all the countless late night runs though the mountains to play blackjack in Lake Tahoe or Reno. You have to remember: this was before the advent of “boats” in many cities. Going to Tahoe, or Reno, or Vegas was special. Free non-stop booze; single deck blackjack (double deck was rare); friendlier game rules and machine odds; you were paid off in real no-kidding silver dollars; and the cocktail waitresses always seemed happy to flirt with you a bit. For whatever reasons, it was a richer, more exotic experience than going to a casino five minutes away from your house.
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 and 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. In fact, I’d been going for years and was so at home I even had a Harrah’s “Players Card.”
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 waitresses who 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. And finally we are saved -- by what we later were to learn was a “Chain Monkey” who comes over to us. 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 be let 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 then 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: 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 Mr. Monkey, and silently ride back to the Bay Area, completing our 300-Mile Thanksgiving Day 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. 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 Pilipino Gene, Hawaiian Brain, Dalton Leong, Dee Hulse, Tony Annigoni, Steve Votter, Denny Searcy, Junior Goff, or Ronnie Barber. Occasionally there’d be breakfast afterwards at 4am 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
