Word: billiards
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...generally depleted club revenues from food and drink. Says Lieut. General Milton G. Baker, superintendent of the Valley Forge Military Academy and a longtime member of Philadelphia's century-old Union League Club: "These days you won't find 15 men in the League's card, billiard or game rooms, or the libraries on any one night, and the ones that are there are old and bent. Thirty or forty years ago the place was jumping every night...
Pool, as a national pastime, has long been behind an eight ball of its own making. Main Street's billiard academy allowed itself to become a gathering place for grifters and idlers, then was run out of town. The shark-infested pool halls of the big cities retreated into one-flight-up locations, shrinking into such shabby anonymity that parents no longer bothered to warn the young against them. And the era has passed when every self-respecting millionaire's mansion was big enough to include a billiard room, where even a lady might join the gentlemen...
Bowling alleys, which have transformed themselves into highly respectable meccas of organized togetherness (don't say "alleys," say "lanes"), are featuring billiard rooms (don't say "pool," say "pocket billiards"), where Mom and the kids can click away in an air-conditioned, Muzaked atmosphere as wholesome as mah-jongg...
Jackie Gleason, the massive Minnesota Fats in The Hustler, once observed that poolrooms have a "dirty antiseptic look-spots on the floor, toilets stuffed up, but the tables brushed immaculately, like green jewels lying in the mud." The Brunswick Corp. of Chicago, largest commercial U.S. billiard equipment manufacturer, is determined to change all that, has produced some innovations aimed straight at Mom; e.g., tables have been contoured along Detroit lines with chrome doodads and two-tone coachwork. But the feature that will bring the loudest howls from Gleason and other reactionary cue sticklers is the new look of the table...
Thompson Jr., Salinger was rushed to Khrushchev's riverside dacha near Ogo-revo, 20 miles from Moscow. This walled, mustard-colored stone pile, built in 1956, boasts numerous balconies, a movie theater, a billiard parlor and five dining rooms-but only one bedroom (Khrushchev's). Salinger...