Nobody was ever sure what the age limit was for the pool hall in Springhill, but every boy in town looked forward to the time when we could hang out at that alluring parlor on Main Street.
It is not likely that the mayor or city council had any say-so in who could come and go at the pool hall. Those decisions were made by Shorty, the appropriately named fellow who ran the place in the 1950s.
We had heard stories most of our lives about the nefarious activities that took place in the pool hall and could hardly wait to get in on the action or at least witness it first-hand.
I got glimpses a few times of the inside of the pool hall when I walked by it with my dad on the way to the barber shop. The door would fly open when people went in or out, and you could see the cigarette smoke, hear the racket and smell the beer.
It was interesting to me that even as my dad was discouraging me from ever going into such an undesirable place, everybody in the pool hall was waving and calling him by name as we passed by.
Many of the upstanding people in that community obviously did not consider the pool hall a proper or acceptable place for young folks or even adults for that matter.
Brother Peyden, our pastor at Calvary Baptist Church, referred to the parlor as “the devil’s den.” One of our English teachers, Mr. Olive, said we should never go in such a deleterious place. We had to look up deleterious in the big dictionary at the school library.
All of that titillating criticism just made the thought of going to the pool hall more appealing to us teenagers. We were outgrowing sock hops and the skating rink and needed more excitement.
Maybe we should have realized that if the pool hall had been the kind of wild and rowdy place that we were expecting, it wouldn’t be right there in the middle of Main Street among all those quiet and respectable businesses.
There was a bank next door, Mr. Robinson’s jewelry store, a photography shop across the street, Shurtleff’s Sewing Center, The Toggery clothes store and Tennyson’s Drug Store on the corner.
The reserved and refined ladies who visited Shurtleff’s to buy thread and fabric and admire new sewing machines would not have taken kindly to the kind of activities we envisioned were going on at the poll hall.
During a parade and pep rally for the high school football team one morning on Main Street, Shorty spotted some of us older teenagers and invited us to the pool hall.
It was sort of a rite of passage for us to accept the invitation, so we made our way through the fog of cigarette smoke into the dark parlor where we heard dominoes rattling and billiard balls clanking.
We recognized bankers and lawyers with their coats off and ties loosened, farmers in overalls and paper mill men in their work clothes. They were drinking beer at the bar and gambling at the card tables, and a couple of them were playing pool.
Shorty told us we were not allowed to drink beer or stand at the long, wooden bar or to bet money on card games or dominoes. He told us we could play pool for 40 cents a game or three games for a dollar and had a guy explain the rules for snooker and eight ball.
We went back a few times and played a little pool. We didn’t recognize any of the songs on the jukebox, and the men at the bar and the card tables seemed to frown on us being there.
Girls in our classes at school were curious about what went on at the pool hall, and we had to conjure up some stories to make the place seem a lot more interesting than it was.
We kept dragging Main Street on Friday nights, going to sock hops at the recreation center, movies at the Spring Theater, Louisiana Hayride shows in Shreveport on Saturdays, to the Dothl House for hamburgers and to Tennyson’s Drugs for cherry cokes.
But we always tried to convince the girls who were with us that none of that stuff was nearly as exciting as going to the pool hall.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES