Word: roach
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roke it in nine places," Eugene Roach was saying. He hitched a pant leg up to show his shin and the jagged evidence upon it, a scar that resembled a map of Central America. "They had to set it six or seven times before they got it back straight...
...turning point in Roach's life. One car had sideswiped another on the road out front of his gas station and fruit stand, and before the cars could come to a stop, Roach was flattened. One of the first things he did when he got out of the hospital was to supervise the construction of a fortified fruit stand at a right angle to his gas pumps, thereby shielding himself from the side of the road that sacked him. "Those pillars are sunk four feet deep, and each one is set in a wheelbarrow full of concrete," he explained...
That is because Eugene Roach knows his checkers. As a child, he was casually interested in the game. But when he went into the Army in 1953, in Fort Benning, Ga., one of his bunkmates was a checkers master from New York, and the champion's influence "got me to scratching them books" (he now possesses more than 250 manuals on checkers). Roach went on to make it himself as a master in tournament play and to earn the nickname "Double-Trouble" Roach, and to antagonize his wife Laura. "I don't play with him any more," she allowed...
...Roach stayed in the Army twelve years, then drifted into other occupations, including the junk business, and in 1972 he found his calling with the gas station and fruit stand. They are situated about 17 miles southwest of Mobile on a two-lane blacktop bleached by the sun to fish-belly white, in a community called Fowl River. After the accident in 1975 gave him a limpy leg, his physician told him to assign his hurt limb to as few chores as possible. So Laura Roach took over the fruit stand, as well as a barbecue pit in summer...
Thousands of happy games followed. Occasionally, Roach would be held to a draw, but he was never beaten. Now and again he would bring out eight or nine more checkerboards and play all his opponents at once, never losing. Whole tour buses, making the Southern azalea-magnolia-plantation circuit, were made to wait while their drivers lost to Double-Trouble Roach. And then, early last fall, the Roach gas station and fruit stand had the rug pulled out from under them--by the highway department, of all things...