Revamping a Parlor Game : Pool Halls Chalk Up a Victory by Creating a New Image, Attracting Different Clientele

Paul Newman and Tom Cruise had nothing on Patsy the Pool Shark except, maybe, for the color of their money and the help of professional pool players hired to double on the hard shots.

“Patsy” is what they call Patricia Laudisio at the Plush Pocket pool hall in Sepulveda, where the 46-year-old librarian and amateur herpetologist racks ‘em up after a hard day stacking books at the Northridge Public Library.

It ain’t quite “Cuban Joe” or “Wally the Weasel”--to name a few of the nicknames adopted by some of Los Angeles’ more colorful cue-wielding characters--but it’s a genuine pool-hall moniker, and Laudisio, who shows up for nine ball nearly every night, worked hard to get it.

A Changed Clientele

A grandmother, Laudisio isn’t anyone’s idea of a pool-hall regular. But then, most of the pool halls and billiard rooms still operating in Southern California no longer fit the image reserved for them in movies such as “The Color of Money” and “The Hustler.” Nor, for that matter, do the patrons.

Typical of the new breed of pool-hall frequenters are Dora Whitaker, a 22-year-old talent agent from San Fernando, and her companion, Fred Baughman, a 32-year-old orthopedic technician at Kaiser-Permanente Hospital in Panorama City.

The couple met six months ago, when Baughman tended to Whitaker’s ankle, fractured playing softball. After she got back on her feet, the two discovered that they neither drank nor liked bars, but both shared an odd feeling of satisfaction each time they heard the distinctive “plock” of a ball falling into a pocket. Most Saturday nights, after dinner, they shoot a few games at the House of Billiards, on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

“When we first met,” Baughman explained, “we went to movies a lot. But after a while you’ve seen everything worth seeing. This is something we can do for a couple of hours on a Saturday night.”

Whitaker grew up in San Fernando and began honing her skills on her father’s table at age 5.

“I was the pool shark of a family of eight,” she says, but she wore the table out, and it was finally carted off to the trash about three years ago. She hadn’t held a cue until meeting Baughman.

“Fred and I are pretty much at the same level,” she said. “We play slop ball; that means you don’t call your shots. It doesn’t matter how your color gets into the pocket.

“It kind of gets into your blood. The more you play the better you get. If I don’t get a few games in at least once a week, I find myself missing it.”

Local pool halls have--thankfully, some say--largely avoided the gentrification that has afflicted some rooms in Chicago and Boston, with their hardwood floors, gourmet dining, well-stocked fern bars and unusually steep $10-an-hour table rates. But, however resistant to yuppification, they have not been able to escape the gradual elevation of pool into more of a mainstream game--something akin to bowling--played by ever-increasing numbers of entertainment-hungry, middle-class Americans.

Neither upscale nor downscale, pool in Southern California occupies a middle ground where suburban women or their mates can grab their cues, leave the kids with a sitter and safely brush elbows with hard-core hustlers, blue-collar beer jocks and young couples looking for some inexpensive Saturday-night action.

In Los Angeles, recent years have witnessed the closing of a number of older, inner-city pool halls due, mainly, to incremental urban blight.

Hollywood Billiards, believed to be Los Angeles’ first pool room, almost folded last year after the death of Arnie Satin, one of its owners. Business no longer was booming, and if Jeffrey Bey, a pool-loving international lawyer from New Jersey, hadn’t bought it out and set about refurbishing the hall, the city might have lost one of its more distinctive landmarks.

In the end, it was the suburbs that saved pool in Los Angeles. The cost of floor space in reasonably attractive regions of the city had spiraled to the point that $4.50 an hour--the going rate for a table at most local establishments--no longer paid the bills.

In the suburbs, however--in fringe areas like Sepulveda and Simi Valley, in Montclair, Bellflower, Lancaster--rentals remain sufficiently reasonable for the pool hall, albeit a more wholesome version of the traditional wood-floored, smoke-choked, sawdust-littered establishment, to thrive.

Increasing national interest in pool in recent years--assisted no doubt by its ubiquitous depiction in film, television and advertising--helped improve the game’s image.

Lou Butera, a past world champion and movie consultant who owns Lou Butera’s Billiards in Simi Valley, noted that “when ‘The Hustler’ came out in 1961, the sport experienced a tremendous surge that lasted for years. Now we’re still getting a younger crowd brought in--I’m sure of it--by Tom Cruise’s performance in ‘The Color of Money.’ You can’t watch a TV these days without catching a glimpse of people shooting pool.”

Safer Environment

But pool-hall owners like Butera learned that to properly exploit the public’s readiness to rehabilitate pool by treating it like any other leisure pursuit, they would have to provide a safer, friendlier, more comfortable environment in which to play the game, one in which both men and women could enjoy themselves without having to deal with overt gambling, rowdiness, harassment and what Bey of Hollywood Billiards somewhat wistfully calls “the grunge factor.”

Ross Bradley, who manages the Plush Pocket, says the trick to running a successful pool hall in Southern California is as much a matter of policing as remodeling. The Plush Pocket opened in 1963 but closed after becoming a haunt for teen-agers. When it reopened under new management in 1970--replete with carpeted floors, wood-paneled walls and new tables with Tiffany lamps overhanging--the owners vowed to keep the wilder elements out.

Bradley works the room like a cop. From behind the bar, which serves beer and soft drinks, he is on the constant lookout for potential trouble spots. At the first hint of unwholesome behavior, he intervenes: “We have a rule here: You get out of hand, you don’t come back.”

Bradley’s tactics, which appear to have been adopted universally by most of the successful pool rooms in and around Greater Los Angeles, have made today’s pool halls havens for the most unlikely pool lovers. Each Tuesday during the lunch hour, for instance, the 30-woman Litton Industries Nine-Ball League commandeers the Plush Pocket’s 15 tables. Says Jean Smith, a 73-year-old Woodland Hills resident and former Litton Guidance and Control employee who stayed with the league after retiring: “If you had seen this place only 10 years ago you’d have wondered how we ever agreed to come. Now it’s almost like playing in your own basement.”

‘Weeding Out’

Butera recalls engaging in a great deal of selective “weeding out” when he bought out the then-troubled room in 1985.

“I made it clear to a number of the regulars that I was going to run the place my way and that they probably wouldn’t like it,” he said.

What Butera started to see, he says, was a sight that would have made Fast Eddie Felson shudder. “We began getting a lot of couples--married and single--which suited me fine. I wanted this to be a place you could bring a date.”

For Carol Valaedez, her visit to the Plush Pocket wasn’t quite her first date with Gerry Green. Indeed, the two Midway Ford employees were betrothed. But this was her first time at a pool hall, and it didn’t put her off.

“He’s been nudging me to come for a while,” she says. “I had no idea what a pool hall might look like. Actually, I think it’s nice--dark and cozy.”

A pool hall can get too cozy, however. Bey, who came to Los Angeles two years ago, actually likes the grungy ambiance of the old-style pool hall. The challenge he set for himself when he bought out Hollywood Billiards last December for $360,000 was to somehow preserve the room’s down-at-the-heels mystique while ridding the place of the things that deterred most people from walking in.

Grunge Appeal

“I think there’s a grunge factor that appeals to people of my ilk,” he explains.

Bey admits that there are easier, faster ways to turn a profit than renting out pool tables. He likes pool, though, more than he does practicing commercial international law. For Bey, a pool room is one of the few real social levelers left in America.

“Within the confines of a pool room,” he says, “it doesn’t matter what you do outside. There’s something about having your world confined to an 4 1/2-by-9-foot plane of green felt that makes all the rest unimportant.”

Since buying the hall, Bey has discouraged many of its former patrons from showing up. He has provided attendant parking, arranged for the pay phones to refuse incoming calls and has added a number of new tables. Next month, he says, he hopes to open a kitchen and a wine-and-beer bar.

And Billy Kenyon, a four-time California straight-pool champion known as “Dollar Bill,” has been hired to give free pool lessons to all comers. In fact, most pool halls today offer free or cut-rate lessons and clinics to entice those who might otherwise be too intimidated to try their hands at this now-gentlemanly sport.

An Arcane World

“A pool hall should be an arcane world,” Bey says. “You descend a flight of steps and find yourself in another world, another time. They have a special character, their own mystique. If pool halls turn into homogenized versions of Mrs. Fields Cookies stores, which look the same in San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong, we’ll have lost something priceless.”

Here’s a sampling of places to shoot pool:

Hollywood Billiards, 5504 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood.

The Plush Pocket, 16950 Parthenia St., Sepulveda.

The House of Billiards, 14622 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 1901 S. Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica.

Butera’s Billiards, 2261 Tapo St., Simi Valley.

Sharkey’s Billiards, 801 W. Avenue L, Lancaster.

Yankee Doodle’s Billiards, 4100 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach.

Hard Times Billiards, 17450 Bellflower Ave., Bellflower.

Shooters, 5710 North Plaza, Montclair.