Memory Lane...

Tramp Steamer

Tramp Steamer

One Pocket enthusiast.
Silver Member
How old were you when you first stepped foot into a poolhall?

I was fifteen. The place was called Joe's. It was long, narrow, and small with a billiard table up front, then a snooker table, then four, web pocket pool tables.
 
N & N Pool Hall, New Orleans, LA

Slipping in late at night, when old man Nick (the owner) had already gotten himself snockered for the night, in hopes that he wouldn't recognize my underaged face. I was 17 and looked 15. It didn't last too long for him to isolate me from the rest of the players in spite of his condition but he permitted me to play a few games before he ran me off. :grin: When, I hit 18I played regularly for the next year and a half until I joined the marines, then quit until I got out of the Corps. It was bar rooms for the next two decades. I never really made it back to the pool rooms until I was about 35 years old.

JoeyA
 
memories

I was eight years old when my father took me to Longo's in Philly. I'll never forget how fast my heart was beating when we entered that room. My father passed on, bless his soul, it's fifty years later, in my heart I'm still thanking him for that wonderful day.
 
I was around 21 when I first started playing, mostly in bars. At 23 I was hooked. Then I played at Carlos Billiard acadamy in Downers Grove IL. Nice room the house pro was Don Feeney (aka The Preacher). I miss those days.
 
long time ago

I was 14 when I skipped school to enter that hallowed room in Wilkinsburg, Pa. (Just next to Pittsburgh) Sands Cue & Cushion. Knobby Sands ran the pool room . Next door was the Casino Bowling Alley. Knobby's brother( I forget his name) managed it. They bowled duck pins there.
The pool room was wood floors, Stamped tin ceilings with slow moving fans. I think their were two rows of six, 9-footers with a 10-ft. billiard table in the back. Everybody smoked. Knobby was a short , red-faced
Irishman who always had a stub of a cigar in his mouth. He'd keep our
favorite, adopted house sticks for us behind the counter. He sold me my first stick when I was about fifteen. I don't know what kind. It had a black and white plastic? joint and the points of a house stick. $20. I wonder what it was? Knobby racked for us every game . He brushed every table down every night by himself. Money games were always on table # 1 near the counter. I watched Bubbles Cardon beat Dickie Bye(sp), the house favorite, soundly on table # 1. No contest . Billie was the best.
My parents never objected to my going to Knobby's and I never thought about it. When I got older I realized that my mother and step father were in a duck pin bowling league, knew Knobby and his brother and that Knobby was sort of watching out for me. Now I know why he was always good for a fiver when I needed it. A wonderful experience. Those old guys knew how to run a pool room.
 
I was thirteen years old. I walked into Razz's pool hall in Everett, Ma. Located on the second floor above the Everett Sporting Goods Store. On one side was ten, candle pin bowling lanes on the other side was the pool room. It had ten pool tables and one billiard table. Kids under sixteen needed a pool permit, at the time to enter the room. I don't know what scared me more. Going to the police station to get the permit or presenting it, to Wayne, the man behind the counter at Razz's.

I'll never forget the first words out of Wayne's mouth as he handed me the rack of balls. He said, as he pointed in the direction of the back wall of the room. "Do you see that wall back there kid. When you get there , turn around, that's your table. I better not hear a peep out of you or your friends. If I do your out of here."

I turned and walked to the back of the room. I was shaking as I carried the rack of balls in my hands."
 
I was 13, maybe 14, and it cost a dime a game to play. The guy that ran the place had one of those little aprons on that carpenters use for nails that he kept change in. When the game was over, you hollered "Rack" and pitched a dime on the table and the guy racked them for you. Coke was a nickel out of the machine in those small bottles and it was so cold it burned your throat.
 
Good thread

I was 11 and my dad took me to a bar called "The ChatterBox' on a visitation day. It had a bar table and I bumed some change from somebody and threw the balls around the table. I don't know what it was, but I was hooked.

From then on, all I did was either shoot pool, shoot guns or box. Never played or liked football, baseball, etc. I remember getting a subscription to "The National Billiard News" and taking each issue to school every day until the new issue arrived. Even though I had read it, I wanted my buddies to know that I was a pool player! :grin:

This is bringing back some silly memories.....I remember taking a strip of masking tape and putting it on my cheap vinyl cue case. I scribbled in magic marker "I accept cash or credit" on the tape. This is when I was about 14 and had started playing for money.

Pool has been a love affair ever since that day way back when....:)
 
i was 12 when i first stepped into glass city billiards in toloedo ohio. My parents had been divorced for a couple of years and my mother would always ask what i did well pool halls were like going out back and doin drugs to her anyway so my dad said say we went to the arcade and so that was my story to her. and then i watched as my dad played one pocket for cheap but still raking in the dough so i o f course wanted to learn and the rest is histoiry
 
I was 13 and had been bugging my old man for weeks to teach me to play pool. He finally took me to Charlie Latorre's pool room in Pittston, PA. This was in 79. The place was nondescript, as illegal gambling establishments usually are. Tiled floors, cheap paneled walls, high ceilings, no pool equipment/accessories for sale, nothing flashy - a very old school pool room that was serving as a front. A half wall separated the main room with the pool tables from a card room in the back. The place had 2 tables - one made in 1961 and one made in 1929. Don't recall the makers, but they were probably Brunswick's. Always crowded with older Italian men with mob-like nicknames. It was typically hot as balls. Although the old guys always had on turtlenecks and wool cardigans under winter coats, they were always yelling for the heat to be turned up - go figure. Paper cups and a gallon of red, a gallon of white and a fifth of Black Velvet on the counter every Christmas season - no charge of course. Completely mobbed up - raided and closed by the fbi in the early 90's. Spent 7 of the best years of my life growing up there playing straight pool and .25/.50 9-ball.
 
Started playing at 8 on a 3 x 6' table.

Villa Park Bowl (Il.) when i was 11 and started beatin the chumps out of their lunch nickles, dimes and quarters shortly thereafter.
 
It wasn't a pool hall it was a VFW.. in northern Nevada

my grandfather was the volunteer bartender on Sunday mornings

I sat and watched .. then later played 14.1 with a few old WW2 vets..

musta been about 9 when it started in the mid 70's and I went almost every Sunday until I started high school..

every one of those men are dead now..

but I still remember a few gems they taught me
 
My first pool hall was a place called side pockets in Minneapolis, Mn. I was maybe 16 years old then. I'll always remember that place, it was the first time I had ever seen a table with the headstring and rack markings on it. I remember thinking to myself "wow professionals must play here." Ahhh those were the days.
 
I was 12 or 13 when I started playing at Slippery Rock University Student Union that had 12 gold crowns. I could play alright, maybe run 1 or 2 out of 10 nine ball at age 15. Anyways, a college friend of mine had a game lined up for him and he talked me into skipping school and going to Youngstown Ohio to play some. Now I remember being nervous driving up to Youngstown because I heard that there was some pretty bad areas and me being blonde hair, blue eyed, uncultured kid had a lot to do with it. So we drive up there and met up with (Ernie) his opponent at the Youngstown University Union and then left there to go to State Street Billiards because they were too strict on the no gambling at the Union. Ernie asked me before we left, "did you come up to play some" and of course I said "yes". and then he asked me "does it matter what kind of person you play?". Well at 15, I thought he was talking about if race mattered so I gave him the open palm hands out crazy look and told him that "I don't care who I play".

So we arrive at State Street, As soon as I walk in the door an older (40's) African American (Ray) walks right up to me and says, "So you don't care who you play huh". Well as soon as he said that I knew I was in trouble, but I'm 15 and had a little ego so I replied "It doesn't matter to me, I will play anybody". Of course he had the table racked and waiting for me, so we played races to 7 for 50 and I won three games in four sets and that was with him playing three rail shots for the heck of it and just drilling them. It was a good $200 lesson that I will never forget, one, be careful how and what you say, two, dont let your ego get the best of you. Oh, this all happened back in 1987 and the pool hall was an old style place, 12-16 tables, dark, dusty, wood floors, and the only thing there to do was to play pool, no music, no video games, just pool.
 
I was 14 when I stepped into this poolhall in Toulouse, France with a school friend. We played a little pool, but I found myself irrestibly drawn to the 2 carom tables at the back of the room. Not so my friend, so he left and I stayed to push balls around on the carom table.

I just loved the peace and quiet, the soft low-pitched tic-tic noise of the balls, and the amazingly difficult simplicity of the game.

The next day at school, I was talking about it with a friend in math class, in low hush-hush voices so the teacher wouldn't hear us. But he did hear us, and after class, he called me to his desk. He said "so you like billiards uh? How about following the lesson instead?" I said sorry, then he said "Nevermind the lesson. If you like billiards, come to the municipal club next wednesday at 5pm. Now get the hell out of here!"

When I arrived at the club, there was my math teacher. Uh oh I thought, that's not good... Turns out, he was a local champion and he was the one who taught me how to play and tutored me for 2 years :)
 
I snuck into the Red, White and Blue poolroom in downtown Dayton when I was 12 years old. There was a crowd around one table watching a money game. I climbed on a window sill to see. I quickly figured out that they were shooting in numerical order and trying to make the highest numbered ball (the nine). I was amazed at how they could control the cue ball and make it roll close to the next ball. I wanted to learn how to do that.
 
I was 15 and my friend and I were playing hooky from school. We went to a pool hall called "Lads and Ladies" on South Broadway in Yonkers, NY. We gave a few bucks to an older guy to say he was our uncle, and we were allowed to play. The pool hall is long gone, but my memories of the times I spent there will always be with me.
 
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