Stories from "The Rack" in Detroit

H

huckster

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Freddy, Jay, or anyone else,
Please chim in about any stories about the famous rack. I wish I would have paid more attention as a youth to my grandfather when he told me stories about the mythical place. I found them very hard to believe. He told me that sometimes it took longer to count the money then it did to play the games. What was Cornbread's connection to the place. He told me that Red was a mainstay there and no one had to like playing onepocket with Red at the rack. Does anyone remember Don Willis there? It was past his prime, but he laid it down good his first trip there and bought a new car when he got home. I can not believe the games that were told to me.
 
memories of the Rack

I use to go there in the 60s, you had to know someone to get in, the door was always locked. Big betters were Cornbread, Freddie Salem, Jew paul, thats what I remembered. Really had a lot of action, I am sure someone else could add a lot, I would play a little $20 banks, but that was nothing compared to what was going on. Several of the sweaters go to the Hall of Fame Billiards in Warren, Mi, if you are ever up in the Detroit area, go there on Mon. or Thur for 9 ball tourney and there will be a lot of people who remember the Rack.
 
Stories about The Rack

huckster said:
Freddy, Jay, or anyone else,
Please chim in about any stories about the famous rack. I wish I would have paid more attention as a youth to my grandfather when he told me stories about the mythical place. I found them very hard to believe. He told me that sometimes it took longer to count the money then it did to play the games. What was Cornbread's connection to the place. He told me that Red was a mainstay there and no one had to like playing onepocket with Red at the rack. Does anyone remember Don Willis there? It was past his prime, but he laid it down good his first trip there and bought a new car when he got home. I can not believe the games that were told to me.
Click to expand...
The best source I know of for stories about this pool hall is the book "Cornbread Red" by Bob Henning. The book is not exclusively about The Rack, as it tells the story of Cornbread's life, start to finish. But there are some stories in there about action at The Rack. Literally millions changed hands in that place over a period of a few years. Probably the highest action ever. A friend of mine (Pete Zehnder) worked there for a spell and can tell story after story about the place, most of them true. I know that Freddy will confirm the level of the action there.
 
The Rack in Detroit

There are enough stories about the Rack to make 4 full-length movies. It would be too voluminous a task to detail them. Suffice to say I've registered a few of them in my new book, "The GosPool According to the Beard." Let me just say that whatever you heard was probably true.

Ok, one little tid-bit. I was playing single-handed pinochle in the card room at the Rack. We started out playing 25 cents a hand! I wound up winning about $4500! The sucker kept going out to his car to get new decks of cards that he had stashed there, in a move designed to protect himself from marked cards. What he didnt know was that the "crew" led by the infamous Al Sherman had secretly broken into his car earlier, and replaced all his decks with doctored ones. The same guy was later dying in the hospital from heart failure (he was very old) and Al Sherman would visit him and rob him playing cards while the guy was hooked up to life support.

the Beard

Buy the book for more.
 
the rack

I remember Dave Piona telling me some stories about the Rack in Detroit...He said you had to be there to believe it......something like just about every table was in action and for mostly big stakes....I think he said they used to call him "Cadillac Dave" because he won enough there to buy himself a Cadillac....
 
Grady parked it up there for awhile, he assuridly has some interesting stories.
 
wahcheck said:
I remember Dave Piona telling me some stories about the Rack in Detroit.something like just about every table was in action and for mostly big stakes....I..
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One time ,as I heard it, Mike Massey was playing a guy 1000.00$ sets.He was asked by another player to get out of that table because he had a game for bigger money and Mike gave up the table.

By the way Dave piona had major back surgery a year ago.:cool:
 
The Rack

There has never been or will ever be another RACK! Thanks to big money men like Jew Paul, Freddie Salem and Al Sherman, the action started at $500 a game and $1,000 a pop was considered small action. And this is in 1970's dollars.

There were many games for five and ten thou a rack One Hole, with much more being bet on the side. My first time there in 1976, I went to the door and some guy looked at me thru a little peephole. He asked me who I was and I told him. No response. So he calls out, "Anyone know a Toupee Jay"?
Lucky for me, Cornbread is there and he says let him in.

There is a $2,000 a game One Pocket match going on between Jimmy Reid and Jew Paul on the Snooker Table (Paul's favorite game). I sweat a couple of games and decide to bet on Jimmy. I was driving a new Eldorado and had close to five grand on me. So I ask if anyone wants to bet $100 on Paul. Some guy looks at me and laughs. He tells me you can't bet $100 here, you must bet at least $500. That was my wake up call.

I was only there twice but I saw tens of thousands of dollars change hands. It was out of my league and I admit it. Up till then, the biggest game I had ever played was Ten Ahead for $1,000. People came in there with grocery bags full of money and bet it all. Huge scores were made there on a weekly basis. The former rack boy (whose name I forgot) parlayed a few good side bets into a million dollar bankroll in a year.

Quite a few players came thru and won in excess of 100K, and left Detroit very happy. Cornbread was in the center of everything and seemed to have his hand in every big game. He may have won millions over the years at The Rack. When it was all over, he was set for life. Even some shortstops (the ones with more heart than me) made some huge scores.

Dave Piona told me the story about going in there with a couple thousand dollars and leaving that night with over 40K. He got back to his motel room and dumped it all on the bed. He had never seen that much money before. The amount of money being gambled nightly at The Rack dwarfed everything else that had happened before (or since for that matter).

I had seen One Pocket played for five to ten thou a game one time before. When Jack Perkins robbed St. Louis Suts at the Stardust in the late 60's. And I had heard about a couple of Jack Cooney's monster scores for 80 and 100K. But never anything like this on a nightly basis, and it went on for several years.

To put it in perspective. If there was a place with action like that today, it would be the biggest in the country by far. And this is 30 years later. Derby City comes the closest, and it is still way way behind what we saw at The Rack.
 
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Jay,
Thanks for the look back. Your a great asset to this board a lot of us appreciate you and Freddy's war stories. That is why I learnt to play pool not get involved in tournaments but to get in the trenches and bet it all.
 
A reprint

This is a reprint of a post in a thread back in August. It's worth repeating here because it highlights an old warrior named Glen Knowles.

"I was in Detroit at the Rack when I witnessed a memorable turnaround. Glen Knowles was playing, I forgot who, for big money. He was getting staked by the black dope dealer Red Fox. Glen sh*t all over himself, and was shaking like a leaf. He dogged his brains out, and ended up losing about 10k. Red Fox, unperturbed, gave Glen $600 more to take home, and said they would play again the next day. Red said Glen might stop dogging it if he could go to bed with some money in his pocket. Glen went home with the feel of a bankroll to calm his nerves. In the morning, Glen, as was his custom, fired the $600 off to the wife via Western Union, went back to the Rack and played the same guy. A now becalmed Glen pounded the guy for about 20k."

the Beard
 
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