The Stories We Tell Between Shots
By Dan Fernandes
Almost (Sam), Smooth (Dan), Scratch (Don), and Special K (Kevin), at Kick’s before the weekly match in the basement, where history is shared.
This Star Hitchers story is about history lessons learned over a pool table. Tell your story at StarHitchers.com. Subscribe FREE at starhitchers.substack.com.
The Story
I am the first of my family born in America.
My first language is Portuguese, and my early life was spent doing chores on the dairy farm my family owned in Northern California. My parents came to America from the Madeira Islands, an autonomous region of Portugal, just after World War II.
My parents told stories of Madeira, but they had no stories of American history. I learned some American history in school, but mostly from life in America.
Recently, I realized the value of an experience that continues to teach me about the people and places that make up this country of ours. This story is about that experience. Let’s get started.
Four old guys walk into a bar.
You think this is a joke, but in fact, it is the beginning of a history lesson. History can often be found right in your own backyard—or, in some cases, in your basement.
But back to the four old guys.
Once a week, I drive the Party Bus, my vintage Toyota Camry, to the bar with two of my neighbors. The bar is called Kick’s, and it sits next to the junkyard along Old Route 66 in Towanda.
The fourth crony joins us there. He lives in Towanda.
Celina (“with a C,” she reminds us) spots us getting out of our cars in the parking lot and has our drinks waiting when we walk in the door—one Sprite, two Diet Cokes, and a Diet Cherry Coke (with a cherry floating on top). Mine is the cherry on top, something a little special from Celina.
We grab the same table each week, a low one where we can all bend to sit comfortably. Our ritual begins.
I have a wisecrack ready for Celina, the waitress. That’s my role, and I am darn good at it. Kevin, the youngster of the group at 68, scrolls through the night’s scores on his phone.
Don, 92 and counting, the elder statesman and theologian of the group, sports a new (or different) cap, T-shirt, or sweatshirt, always bearing the name of a team or a place he has been. He grins at Celina.
We order our meals. We can see the cook flipping burgers behind the counter. We catch up on the news, mostly sports. We avoid politics. Before we know it, Celina arrives with our food.
Sam, 80 and the Towanda resident, is usually the one who violates etiquette by touching his food before grace. That means he gets the honor of saying grace. Sam married a Lutheran, so he says the standard Lutheran table prayer.
When no one violates etiquette, we rotate the privilege. Don, a retired Methodist minister, ad libs. Kevin and I, Catholics, make the sign of the cross and recite the standard Catholic table prayer.
Already the history lessons begin, as we invariably share some of our past church experiences. Sam claims to have been, at one time or another, a Methodist, a Quaker, and a Baptist, in addition to a Lutheran. We are curious. Do Quakers drive cars and use electricity? You’re thinking of the Amish, Sam explains.
Don is a retired Methodist minister from a Catholic Czech family. Don’s religious odyssey adds another thread to our knowledge of American history.
Kevin is a convert to Catholicism, a Nebraskan of Presbyterian origins who became a Catholic after the loss of a close friend. Needless to say, my background has been Roman Catholic since Christopher Columbus met his wife on Madeira Island. Or before.
We dig in. We rib each other. We review the week’s game results, whether football, basketball, or baseball. Sometimes it’s soccer or women’s basketball. Depending on the season, it might even be track or swimming. Cricket? Probably not.
I am an avid Raiders and Dodgers fan. Kevin roots for the Rams, Cardinals, and Cornhuskers. Don and Sam back the Pack, although Sam pretends to cheer for whichever team Big John, his granddaughter’s husband, is playing for at the time. Don is a lifelong Cardinal baseball fan, and Sam supports whichever team is best positioned to win.
The last century of American history can be traced through the histories of professional sports teams. No, the Athletics were in Kansas City before Oakland, and in Philadelphia before Kansas City. Are you sure? Yes, and Kansas City had a team in the old Negro League: the Kansas City Monarchs. Right! Remember Satchel Paige, the best baseball player ever? What about Sandy Koufax and my Dodgers? Now there was a team. And so on. A little baseball, a little history.
Lunch finished, at least a couple of us make our way to the restroom before saying goodbye to the fetching Celina and returning to our cars.
We drive the mile to Sam’s house, also known as The Manor, and get out. Show time!
The game: pocket billiards, also known as pool. We pass through the garage and kitchen, call hello to Sam’s wife, Jane, and dog, Lucy, and slip into the basement, our arena.
I don’t think I’m boasting when I say that I am the premier connoisseur of the cue ball, master of the green felt. The three who aspire to my level of play call me simply “Smooth.” The name fits, I must admit. I virtually glide across the floor as I bend low to the table and, with a motion as silent and smooth as silk, drop a ball into a pocket. Or maybe two. Or so they tell me.
Enough about me. For now.
Before Don breaks for the first game of 8-ball, another ritual comes into play. For the past week, I’ve been assembling a playlist of tunes to fit a theme. Each week, there’s a new theme and a new playlist to load into Amazon Music and play in the background while we go nose to nose, toe to toe, cue to cue, in the heat of competition.
Game on!
One week, the theme might be songs with girls’ names in them: anything from “Hello, Dolly!” to “Suzanne” to “Mary Lou” to “Help Me, Rhonda.” Another week, it might be songs by bands. Whatever the theme, one constant is the national anthem. I always include “The Star-Spangled Banner” somewhere on the list. I scramble the order of the songs, so we never know when the anthem will pop up. When it does, we lay down our cues, remove our caps, face the flag mounted on a bookshelf, put our hands over our hearts, and stand in attentive respect for the red, white, and blue. Politics aside, this is our country, the country we love.
Let’s pause here. Some of the group think the music is more important than the pool. We all engage with it, trying to outwit each other by naming the tunes and artists and sharing little-known facts about the songs. Kevin, the guy we call Special K, is a mediocre pool shooter but a storehouse of musical knowledge. His twin brother Kurt is a better pool player but not as musical. When Kevin gets hot, we call him Kurt.
In fact, Kevin has heard every major rock group in concert since, well, since he and his wife, Teresa, started dating back in Nebraska. Kevin not only knows the words to the songs; he can pick out the instruments. Amazing what that guy knows about music. His taste leaves something to be desired, unless you’re into AC/DC and Judas Priest. But he does know his stuff.
Don, called Scratch (for obvious reasons, if you know pool) or The Professor, lights up when the music turns to Benny Goodman or Bing Crosby. He gets bleary-eyed with Louis Armstrong. He swoons with Frank.
Sam, known as Almost because of the usual outcome of his pool shots, was the proprietor of a record store in the ’60s. He tells us again, for the twentieth time, that his store was the first in central Illinois to carry the Top 20 Soul Survey. And that his biggest-selling album was the soundtrack from The Graduate. Who cares?
But, in fact, Sam now favors country artists—Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, Waylon Jennings, the early LeAnn Rimes, and the current Ella Langley. The hick stuff.
Oh, me, you ask? Well, Dr. Smooth tries to be an impartial master of music, assembling the weekly playlists and taking everyone’s recommendations into consideration. But I favor an eclectic mix of music across the decades, especially, I might add without prejudicing future selections, the ones suggested to me by Google.
What does any of this have to do with history, you ask?
Think about it. Our ages span four decades—Kevin in his 60s, me in my 70s, Sam at 80, and Don in his 90s. Our lifetimes cover the years from 1934 to today, with plenty of overlap. That’s a lot of history. That’s a lot of songs. That’s a lot of personal stories to swap.
We hear a song, and a memory pops into someone’s head. A story surfaces.
Yes, a lot of history emerges and converges in Sam’s basement every Friday. We chat about music and comment on each other’s missed shots, fouls, scratches, and duffs. Mingled with all that, one of us offers an anecdote from his past. American history unfolds.
Each of these little stories is a piece of history: a time, a place, an experience unique to each of us in some way, but always touching something common in us.
One week, we each brought pictures of ourselves from our college days.
I, of course, was the guy with the long hair, tapping out a rock beat on the bongos, too cool for school. What was it like in California in the 70s, you ask? Well, let me tell you.
In Kevin’s picture, the young trumpeter is sporting a seed corn cap, back in the day when he was trying to impress a farm girl, Teresa, now his wife. Teresa came from a farm? Yes, indeed. What did they grow? What do you think they grew in Nebraska, the Cornhusker state? I thought Illinois was the . . .
Sam was on the swim team in college and worked summers on highway construction, building an interchange on Lake Shore Drive in the ’60s. He brought a picture of his crew. Or maybe it was a chain gang; we didn’t press him for details.
Don surprised us the most. Handsome in his Air Force uniform after college, before his years at Princeton Theological Seminary (where he crossed paths with Albert Einstein), Don had apparently been quite the charmer. Back in his college days, he squired half a dozen beautiful girls and had a picture of each one to prove it. Of course, he also kept a picture of the most beautiful one of all: Doris, the typist he met in Princeton, who has been his wife all these years. Einstein, you say? Yes, I passed him each day on a walking path. Incredible.
Stretch out each of our stories. Give each more air, room to expand, to add branches and offshoots, to grow into the story of a lifetime. The Air Force navigator who earned a doctor of theology degree and found a wife at Princeton spent sixty years building churches. The Nebraska trumpet player, sports enthusiast, and faux farmer raised three daughters and dotes on two grandsons. The Towanda kid who never lived far from home worked in every state and territory, and on a bunch of Indian reservations, making schools better.
The Portuguese dairy farmer from California who met Cathy, thrived in Texas, and now hustles pool in Illinois. So smooooth.
Ah, the history we could share. And each week, we do.
Threads to Follow
Threads to Follow are questions to prompt further discovery, conversation, and discussion.
What songs take you back to a particular time, place, or person? What might those memories reveal about the history you lived?
The four friends span generations and bring different backgrounds, faiths, and experiences to the same table. How have those differences shaped the stories they share?
Professional sports teams often move, change names, and reflect the communities around them. What local or national history can you trace through a team you have followed?
What ordinary gathering in your life—a kitchen table, a garage, a neighborhood bar, or a basement—has become a place where stories are passed along?
Choose one memory from your own life. What people, places, music, work, or public events could help you place that memory in its larger historical setting?
The Madeira Islands must have had their own fascinating history. What can you discover about it?
Sources
My sources for this story are my memory and my observations of four old guys doing what old guys do.