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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cpm9ball, post: 1624208, member: 24633&quot;]First, no one in my family ever played pool nor did any of them collect coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>On a late summer day in 1956, one of the older neighborhood boys asked me if I wanted to go to the poolroom with him. I had never even seen a poolroom before, so I went along. The local poolroom was on the main street of town in a basement beneath a county newspaper. We walked down the concrete steps into the poolroom. Inside, the walls were cinderblock, and there were five tables from front to back with a wooden bench seat running the length of each side wall. The owner, who I later learned was Ray Weddell asked me how old I was, and when I told him that I was 9, he told me to get out. As I was leaving I couldn&#039;t help but hear the &quot;click, click&quot; of the balls as they were struck echoing off the walls.</p><p><br /></p><p>I couldn&#039;t get that &quot;click, click&quot; out of my mind, and so the next day I went back to the poolroom alone. Seeing that Ray was there, I sat down on the end of the bench closest to the door just in case I happened to get run out again. Ray looked over at me, but this time, he didn&#039;t say a word. I was watching an older man shooting balls on the front table. His name was Billy Sipple, in his mid-30&#039;s and he worked at the poolroom part time for Ray. After a while, he asked me if I wanted to play some, and the first game that he taught me was straight pool. It turned out that I had a natural talent for pool, and by the time I was 13, I could run 100 balls in straight pool practically all of the time. I fell in love with pool, and I spent every possible moment I could at the poolroom.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, when I was 10, I was playing 9-ball with a 16-year old named Joe Clement, and we were gambling......a nickel on the 5-ball and a dime on the 9-ball. In those days, you didn&#039;t throw money on the table after each game. We kept score on the &quot;wire&quot; that was used for straight pool. It was a 125-point scorekeeper with wooden discs for each point, or in this case each disc represented 5c. After a couple of hours, Joe finally quit, and he had lost $5. He paid me with four $1 bills and a silver dollar, which I later learned was called a Morgan.</p><p><br /></p><p>I had never seen a silver dollar before, and since the bank where I had my savings account was only a block away, I walked to the bank to see if they might have some more. I went to the only teller who wasn&#039;t busy and asked her if she had any more of these, showing her the silver dollar. She took some out of her drawer and spread them on the counter, and I had to jump up and support my weight with my forearms on the edge of the counter in order to see them. I remember that one caught my eye. It was an 1893 (turned out to be a CC), and I took it because that was the year my maternal grandmother was born along with three others in exchange for the $4 I had just won.</p><p><br /></p><p>This pretty much turned out to be a ritual for me. Every time I won any money gambling at the poolroom, I would go to the bank and exchange a good part of the winnings for more silver dollars. I rarely lost at pool, and as I got older, it became harder and harder to find anyone who would want to gamble with me. It took me about 6 years to accumulate 800 Morgan dollars, but pool was taking up so much of my time, that I sold this first collection to a local dealer for $4000.</p><p><br /></p><p>I played pool for 55 years and still have a love for the game, but I finally had to quit because I developed an intention tremor in my stroke hand. I guess it doesn&#039;t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you don&#039;t need a good stroke to collect coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the way, to this day, I still hear that &quot;click, click&quot;!</p><p><br /></p><p>Chris[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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