Champs Take Their Cues From Mr. Clean of Billiards

Terrible things can happen to billiard cues. Their tips become worn and the wooden shafts collect old wax, dirt, grime, chalk and the residue of smoke that lingers in billiard halls. At that point, champion players call on Leonard Bludworth, 46, of Houston to put things right. “I’ve got about 40 professional players on the world tour as regular customers,” he said at a recent tournament in Atlantic City. Some of the top billiards players tell promoters they won’t enter a tournament unless Bludworth is on hand, and he chalked up about 70,000 miles this year, traveling to various competitions. After he cleans a cue, he adds a fluid that smells like oils and nail polish remover. “It’s got some goodies in it, that’s all I’m going to say.” His main secret, however, is the custom leather tips, “soaked in my own solution, and then cooked and cooked and cooked some more in my wife’s oven.” He’s now training his 19-year-old son, Donald, in the art of cue repair. “We don’t have any other employees,” Bludworth said. “We don’t want anyone lousing it up.”

--She’s Grandma to the runaways and troubled teen-agers that she shelters at her home in Garland, Tex. And, she’s been doing it for 20 years. The trouble is, Edie Lewis, 60, has problems of her own. For one thing, there’s the $57,000 mortgage she owes on her three-bedroom home. But somebody up there must have taken a liking to Edie, whose husband died 16 months ago, because she says that an anonymous person phoned to tell her he was going to giving her $3,700 to make back payments on the mortgage--just in time, it turns out, to avert foreclosure. “When I got off the phone, I broke down and started crying,” she said. “I was so relieved for these kids. I don’t want to quit. I have such a good success rate with these kids. I just don’t have enough money now, so if I want to keep doing it, I guess I’ll have to learn how to beg.” Right now, she said there are 11 young people staying with her.

--Philippine President Corazon Aquino is Time magazine’s “Woman of the Year” for 1986, and she said in an interview that restoring her people’s belief in government was an important achievement. But she added: “I don’t want to say that this is my achievement. It is the Filipino people together who were able to believe in themselves because of what they were able to do in the election and then in the revolution.” Aquino, who succeeded Ferdinand E. Marcos as president in February, is the third woman to occupy Time’s cover alone as person of the year. The others were Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 and, in 1936, Wallis Warfield Simpson, the American divorcee whom Edward VIII married after abdicating the British throne.