THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 27, 1997 TAG: 9701250058
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 101 lines
WELL, HERE'S hoping they build a pool room in downtown Norfolk that Wimpy would have liked.
There was a story in last Saturday's newspaper about two renovations in the Granby corridor costing an estimated $2 million.
Turns out the largest project - $1.5 million - will be renovation of the building at 112 Brooke Ave. that once housed the St. Elmo billiard parlor.
The building, which had been vacant for seven years, will house garden and town house apartments along with a first-floor restaurant and billards room.
Robyn J. Thomas of the Norfolk architectural firm Burkhart and Thomas said the pool room will be an old-timey one of the kind seen in Norfolk during World War II.
Sounds good to me.
The yuppification of billiard parlors and bowling alleys is one of the saddest trends of our time, leading to gender confusion among males who have no place for male bonding. The average billiard parlor has carpeted floors, caters to ladies and gents, has a dress code, and offers sacrileges such as designer water in flavors and coffee machines that dispense hazelnut latte.
Very trendy. And if a pool hustler walked into one of those billiard boutiques, the manager would phone the police.
The sissification of pool parlors is gut-wrenching for those who remember when they were boisterous hangouts for colorful hustlers with a sense of style in their dress, deft movements around the table, and killer eyes calculating the triangulations of the sport.
Not as gut-wrenching as the torture St. Elmo endured. But close.
St. Elmo (also called Saint Ermasmus) is the patron of sailors and those with bowel troubles (he was martyred by having his intestines wrapped around a windless).
A billiard parlor named for the saint played an important role in male bonding in Norfolk, beginning in 1909. George Tucker, historian-columnist, remembers the St. Elmo from his youth when it was a few blocks from the Brooke Street location.
``It had a lighted sign that showed two men shooting pool, and the ball moved across the table when struck with a cue stick,'' he said.
During the 1940s, Norfolk was the pool-shooting hub of the United States. World War II brought tens of thousands of sailors to the city who had money in their pockets and found the pool room a great place to hang out with their shipmates. A few bets on the side simply made the game more interesting.
Those parlors also attracted pool hustlers. Men with names like Big Al, Little Willie, Wimpy and Minnesota Fats.
However, Luther ``Wimpy'' Lassiter, who was to become a six-time world billards champion, was the man who put Norfolk on the billiards map.
Raised in Elizabeth City, Wimpy took a room at Norfolk's Thomas Nelson Hotel in the '40s but lived at the Tuxedo billiard parlor nearby. During that time, he won as much as $15,000 a week - and once made $11,000 in a night.
Willie died in 1988. He reflected on those days a short time before he passed away, saying: ``I mean I came out of Norfolk, which used to be the pool-shooting hub of the world, I swear, and they had more gambling there than there's ever been. But they also produced a generation of gentleman pool sharks.''
A gentleman pool shark. Yep, that was Wimpy. A pool shark is like a traveling salesman, he's out there on the road in the drab motel rooms of dreary towns without much going for him except faith in himself and a little psychology.
In the 1970s, before they gussied up St. Elmo's to make it respectable, Wimpy would sometimes appear in that smoke-filled emporium with fly-specked windows where the sun filtered through in rectangular patches to the fishy grayness of the wooden floors. I sometimes dropped by to watch the Wimp on cold winter afternoons. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and a black Navy watch cap. He didn't bother much with shaving in those days. But he was a handsome man with a leonine head, silver hair and a pair of expressionless eyes beneath a slab of high forehead.
It looked so easy for him. He would stand with the stick held like a shepherd's crook in his large hand. Leaning back from the waist, he surveyed the balls scattered over the table, his head cocked to the side as he measured angles and distances.
He inhaled before every shot. A sniff . . . sniff. Then he planted his feet and propelled the stick between thumb and forefinger with the sureness of a piston.
``It's the hardest kind of work,'' he used to say. ``The toughest damn sport on Earth.''
Wimpy was a master of psychology. There was a nice piece about him in Sports Illustrated years ago entitled ``Wimpy Was a Sleeping Beauty.'' The setting was a dingy poolroom in Vineland, N.J., where Wimpy was playing in the World Championship Pocket Billairds Challenge Match.
Wimpy's opponent had the audience agog as he pocketed ball after ball to the oohs and ahhs of the spectators. He ran the table once, then twice, never missing.
His opponent was on the third run of the balls when he turned his gaze to the place where Wimpy had slumped earlier, wearing an expression on his face that said, ``How do you like them apples.''
To his opponent's astonishment, Wimpy's head rested on his chest as he snored softly into the fuzz of his turtleneck sweater.
His opponent, unnerved, missed the next shot.
You didn't get a second chance with Wimpy. He won the match. Down in Elizabeth City, they've named a street for Wimpy Lassiter. But there's not much here to show he was in town.
Maybe they could hang a nice photo of him in that World War II poolroom.
Yep, that would be nice. ILLUSTRATION: File photo
Luther "Wimpy" Lassiter put Norfolk on the billiards map.