Guest Post by Carl Weese
Mike's post on Saturday about pool reminded me of something I still continue to process. My maternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland to Canada as a child with his family, then at 16 crossed into the U.S. on a bicycle. At thirty, John Francis Duggan had become a vice president of the Gimbel Brothers department store chain, known as Gimbels. It wasn’t because of his executive skills. It was because the Gimbels were Jewish and were excluded from the country clubs and after-hours watering holes where some important business networking was done. Jack Duggan wasn’t. He played golf in Greenwich and the resort town of Deal, New Jersey. But most important was a prestigious private club he belonged to in New York City. The center of the networking. Through the decade of the Roaring Twenties he was the reigning billiards champion there, and God knows how many business deals for Gimbels he secured in the pool rooms. This was during prohibition of course, so I love that I’ve inherited several of his many trophies—engraved sterling silver hip flasks.
This sucker is big, too—it holds a full pint!
Flash forward to the late nineteen-thirties. He had been clobbered by the 1929 crash. When my father was courting my mother, the family had (very unwisely) not yet dealt with the sunk cost and moved out of the mansion in Greenwich. But the pool room was still there and Dad told me it was the most frustrating thing in the world to play with Jack. He was more or less recovered from his first nervous breakdown (as they were called back then), but playing the game you described today, he would insist you take the first break. You might sink a ball and get another shot or two. Then you’d miss, and he’d clear the table. And the next. And the next….
Dad said it wasn’t boring, because he could closely observe what Jack was doing, but the frustration was that he couldn’t try to replicate the moves and learn to do them, because the table was never relinquished. Bear in mind, at this moment in history my father held all the world records for tournament archery. It was one master, or champion if you will, observing another.
Bowling
I’ve almost never thought of this connection before, but when I was maybe twelve or so I asked Dad if we could go bowling, because I’d heard it was this neat thing to do that other kids were doing with their parents. I also knew that in the shoe rack in the closet there were these weird-looking narrow black shoes. I had been told, oh, those are Dad’s bowling shoes. Kangaroo leather and smooth soles. We went to a local place and found shoes small enough for me (I hadn’t had my growth spurt yet). For the first line he was mostly teaching me to get the ball, in my rented shoes, down the lane instead of in the gutter. Then he’d toss one down. Then he started throwing strikes, looking kind of happy at remembering the skill. So we did another line. I managed to knock down some pins on my turns instead of going in the gutter. Dad bowled strike after strike. A peanut gallery formed. Then management came down to look—while Dad bowled a perfect 300. He was in his early fifties and hadn’t bowled in at least twenty years. There was no video to prove it, of course, in that long-ago time, but when we turned in my shoes and went to pay, the counter guy just said, "Are you kidding? You don’t pay after a perfect game!”
I’m not the physical genius my father was. But I’m a bit better than your average bear, and have tried to make the most of it.
—Carl
Our friend Carl, who has written for TOP many times and held several prints sales here of his platinum/palladium large-format prints, was a champion archer in his youth. You can see all his TOP articles under his name in "Categories" in the right-hand sidebar—scroll through and you'll realize how many gems there are.
Book of Interest this Week
Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past. TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced.
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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