I went on to do graduate work in 3-Cushion Billiards and Bar-Box 8-Ball, but I began my study of cue sports at a pool hall in a small Southern California town during the late 1960s.
I learned the game on archaic equipment and I experienced a pool hall culture that has now all but vanished. Click through if you're interested in an old man's reflections on a misspent youth.
The room was called Dale's Rack and Cue. Dale was the owner and also the counter-man.
I don't think he ever hired anybody to work the counter for him which is probably how he managed to stay solvent. Dale was a Korean War Vet; a big guy with a crew cut. We never saw him play. It would have been hard for him to make a bridge because he was missing two fingers on his left hand. We all assumed he had lost them in the war. He polished the balls, they were still made of clay back then, and ran the all-important clock. Sometimes he would give one of us kids a break on our time if we would brush down a table or two. The clock was a clock face set flat in the counter with a lever sticking up vertically on each side of it. The levers stamped the time on cards, In & Out, there was a board on the wall with a slot for each table. We would always yell, "time," as soon as we finished our game to save the 1 or 2 cents that we would have been charged as we walked up to the counter. We though we were pretty clever that way.
The Rack and Cue was an Okie pool room. You could tell that by the types of tables it had. Dale bought the business from the original founder who had no doubt come to California during the Dust Bowl Migration. There used to be a lot more regional variation in pool than there is now. Bank Pool is still popular in the South and not played much anywhere else, but these days most people play 9-Ball or 1-Pocket. 8-Ball is the gateway game. In Texas and Oklahoma they used to play a lot on 5x10 foot American snooker tables. These are the tables I learned on. Dale had a bunch of 4½x9 foot regulation-size pool tables and one billiard table but the three 5x10s were the most popular. Snooker balls are smaller than pool balls. American snooker balls were the same size as English snooker balls only they were numbered like pool balls, in the American colors. The pockets on the 5x10s were cut with round corners like an English table. This makes pocketing balls more difficult. It's very hard to run a ball down a rail with English pockets, you have to use the right speed. If you hit 'em too hard they'll bounce out every time. Sometimes the hot shots among us would check out a rack of the larger pool balls and play on the 5x10 with those. That was a real challenge.
The first thing you'd see, and hear, when you walked into Dale's place were the Moon games. There were domino tables to the left and right of the front door. Players rented the "rocks" from Dale at the same hourly rate as a pool table. They played a three-handed game called Moon. Moon, and the four-handed version Forty-Two, were very popular at one time in Texas and Oklahoma. They're card games really, almost like Auction Bridge played with dominoes. A domino, say the 4-2, could be the 4 of Twos or the 2 of Fours depending on what was led and what was trump. As you walked in a few feet you'd have seen the counter to your left, where Dale was polishing balls or reading US News and World Report, and to your right table No.1, the Golf table.
In olden times, almost every pool hall had a least one snooker table reserved for Golf. Golf was mostly played by the older guys. Each player has his own ball which he must pocket in all six holes in order, first player to make his ball in the six-hole wins. There was a regular Golf game at Dale's. The players were older, in their 40s and 50s, and had jobs that finished early in the day. The postman, the milkman and a couple of Basque sheep ranchers were in there every afternoon after work. The game broke up at supper time. All us kids were banned from the Golf game. A couple of us were good enough to run two or three holes at Golf and take all the money. This pissed the regulars off to no end which, in turn, pissed Dale off since they were his best regulars and, after all, they had actual jobs. I went in to a local pool hall the other day was surprised to find that there was no snooker table and no old farts playing Golf. Then it occurred to me I am now one of the old farts and I and my cohort don't play Golf.
Oh, did I say there was money involved ? Like all pool halls back then, there was a sign on the wall that said, in big bold letters, NO GAMBLING. Moon and Golf were always played for stakes and loudly right under Dale's nose. He never enforced the rule against gambling. There was also a sign that said, NO MASSE SHOTS and this one Dale did enforce. A tyro trying to shoot a masse is a dangerous thing, they will often damage the cloth. Whenever Dale saw anyone elevating their cue high enough to turn their wrist over he would say in a booming voice, "No masses back there!" Unless it was old Tony. Tony was the only guy in town who played 3-Cushion billiards. Anybody skilled enough to play that game was assumed to be safe with a masse.
I guess this is a good place to talk about the culture of an old-time pool hall. It was an all-male culture. Women didn't go in pool halls much back then. It was sort of a male refuge. Whenever a wife or girlfriend would call the pool hall looking for their SO, Dale would put his palm over the mouthpiece and say, in a high-pitched, whiny voice, "Phone call for so-and-so." The unfortunate recipient of the call would trudge up to the counter, head held down, amid the jeers, catcalls and laughter of his fellows. A lot of guys believed in the Amazon myth in those days too. Legend has it that when an Amazon girl became a warrior, she had her right breast amputated. The reason was that it would interfere with drawing her bow. The same myth was widely believed about pool, that a woman could not be good at the game because the presence of breasts would interfere with her stroke. The real reason that very few women were good at pool was that, like I said, pool halls were a male preserve and women were discouraged from spending time in them. Jeanette Lee does not seem to have any trouble with her stroke.
The most popular game among us young guys, especially the upper-classmen who had graduated from Stripes & Solids, was a game called Brooklyn. It was a short-rack rotation game played on the 5x10 snooker table with American snooker balls. It could be played with as many as 5 players. I don't know why it was called Brooklyn instead of Lubbock or Tulsa, but it was. The 9 through 14 balls were racked in a triangle with the 15 spotted on the foot spot below the pack. Each player shoots the lowest numbered ball on the table, pocketed balls are scored at face value. Two points were awarded for a billiard, that is, causing the cue-ball to hit first your object ball and then the 15. Whoever has the highest point total when the 15 goes down for the last time is the winner. What made this game so demanding was not just the longer table and tighter pockets, but the rules. English snooker rules apply. This means that the incoming player must not only hit the lowest numbered rail, but drive it or the cue to a rail after contact. Failure to get "a-ball-and-a-rail" means 15-point penalty and a "hickey," the latter being an asterisk by your score on the chalkboard. After pocketing any ball, player may shoot at the 15. If he makes it he gets 15 points and another shot. If he misses, minus 15 and a hickey. It's possible to have a negative score in Brooklyn, e.g. minus 45. It's also possible, with careful position play, to run multiple 15 balls, alternating between the two corner pockets at the foot at the table. When the 15-ball is the only ball on the table, the game ends after somebody shoots it in. High score wins, everybody else pays the winner, say a dollar for the game and 25 cents a hickey. Hickeys don't count if you win. After playing Brooklyn for a couple of years, the pockets on a 4½x9 foot pool table look huge and the ones on a 3½x7 foot bar-box become veritable black holes, sucking in any ball that comes anywhere near them.
So that's how I learned the game, way back when. I play mainly 3-Cushion now, it's a tough game and very rewarding. It's a great game to play as I get older too since a good stroke can be more important than good eyes. If you ever get a chance to play pool with me you'll notice that my cue is about 4 inches longer than a standard pool cue. I have my shafts made extra long. It's a lingering reminder of the snooker tables at Dale's all those years ago. Snooker cues are longer, and lighter, than pool cues.