Pool Hall

The eight balls ricocheted and rolled along the green felt pool tables, dropping into pocket after pocket.It was a demonstration of geometry in motion at the Champions Billiards Cafe in Laurel last week when 100 Atholton High School students visited the pool hall with math teachers Kevin Giffhorn and Nancy Holly for a little applied mathematics."

Deep in the cellar beneath the Recher Theatre , Buddy Hilsberg curates a museum of sorts. He's got boxes filled with the silly rider demands of every band that's headlined the Towson club. He's saved pieces of wall signed by everyone from Paul Reed Smith to the English Beat to Dick Dale. He's even got the autographs of bus drivers who brought all these musicians to play. "It's history to me," said the silver-haired manager who's been with the York Road concert hall since it opened 17 years ago. And it's history for everyone else now, too, as the Recher, one of Maryland's smallest but best known live music venues, held its last concert Sunday.

THE AIR is smoky. Twenty or 30 folks, mostly middle-aged men in jeans or sweat pants, stand casually around the tables between the occasional family and, always, the several elderly regulars who spend most of their waking hours here. Teens sometimes show up to play, but generally the pool hall feels like Adults Only. Pool is a game for thinkers. The pool ball, depending more or less on the age and condition of the walls of the table (and the presence or absence of spin), will bank in a line that is symmetric to a line perpendicular to the wall.

When Wild Willy's Rock House & Sports Saloon opened in Annapolis last year, it promised to be the wildest party in town. In the promo pictures, waitresses wore microscopic tops and jean shorts, holding on to pool cues and flashing come-hither looks. Called the Wild Girls, they sometimes performed choreographed dance routines on the bar's two stages. Willy's looked like it came out of "Coyote Ugly," or in a more familiar analogy for Baltimore readers, like the spawn of PBR Baltimore and Angels Rock Bar. I've been dying to go. Vampy waitresses and dance routines?

An Ellicott City pool hall's owners were fined $1,000 for allowing drinking after the legal closing time, and a Jessup tavern owner got a $400 penalty for allowing an underage patron to drink. Sue Yim, Hyon Lee and Haeng An, the licensees of the Centennial Que and Karaoke Club in the 10000 block of Baltimore National Pike, received the larger fine from the county's Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board for an incident March 17 in which five county police cars and liquor inspector Detective Martin Johnson responded to a fight on the parking lot just before closing time.

When is a pool hall not a pool hall?When it's a billiard parlor.Have a look around Nottingham's, the swank new billiard parlor in Columbia, and you'll realize the difference is no mere semantic distinction.If your sense of this sport is still mired in squalid macho movie images out of "The Hustler," Nottingham's is a bracing reminder of just how upscale pool has become. Not only does the parlor's name evoke an English gentleman's club, but its fin-de-siecle decor and well-mannered showcasing of the sport have also been drawing quite a few gentle ladies, too. So the pool shark who beats you might well be a sharkette.

A 31-year-old Pasadena man was sentenced Friday to 18 years in prison for shooting a patron in an Annapolis pool hall six times, in a hail of gunfire the judge compared to the St. Valentine's Day massacre.Judge Lawrence H. Rushworth sentenced Tony M. Horne of the 7800 block of Willings Court after a two-hour hearing in which the defendant denied committing the crime and referred to his two children in the courtroom in an emotional plea for leniency."I want to make sure and see that my son and my daughter do not follow this miserable trail," he said.

Anne Arundel County police are looking for a man who shot and killed a 16-year-old Bowie girl outside a Crofton pool hall Monday night.Catherine Elizabeth Webster died at Prince George's Hospital Center late yesterday morning. She had been shot once in the head, police said.Miss Webster and two Bowie men, ages 18 and 19, drove to Crofton Billiards about 11 p.m., but found it was closed Mondays. The pool hall, in the Priest Bridge Center in the 2100 block of Defense Highway, also is known as Chalk Talk, police said.

A group playing cards at a Pasadena pool hall were robbed early Monday when masked gunmen crashed the game and took their cash, Anne Arundel County police said. About 3:45 a.m., four men brandishing a machine gun and several pistols walked into Star Billiards and began barking orders at the group and a few others playing pool, said police spokesman Lt. Joseph E. Jordan. After cash, cell phones, jewelry and other personal property were taken, the victims were moved into the rear of the hall, where they were told to lie on the floor or to get into a closet, Jordan said.

Two Carroll County men are facing multiple charges stemming from an argument that began in a Westminster pool hall Saturday night and ended with gunshots and a car crash.Westminster police officers arrested Scott I. Hayes, 31, of the 100 block of Franklin Ave. in Sykesville, and Brian E. Jahnigen, 19, of the first block of Sullivan Ave. in Westminster.In charging documents, police said two men began arguing with three men and a woman at a pool hall on Route 27 and that all six were ordered to leave.

A 54-year-old businessman, found bound by zip ties inside his Canton vending machine business last month, has died after being taken off life support, and police said Wednesday that homicide detectives are investigating. Constantine "Dino" Frank of Baldwin, who also owned pool halls and shopping centers in Baltimore County, was discovered July 29 in the vestibule of Precision Vending, in the 1000 block of S. Lakewood Ave., face-down and bound. He had managed to get one hand free, but suffered a stroke during the ordeal, according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

An Ellicott City pool hall's owners were fined $1,000 for allowing drinking after the legal closing time, and a Jessup tavern owner got a $400 penalty for allowing an underage patron to drink. Sue Yim, Hyon Lee and Haeng An, the licensees of the Centennial Que and Karaoke Club in the 10000 block of Baltimore National Pike, received the larger fine from the county's Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board for an incident March 17 in which five county police cars and liquor inspector Detective Martin Johnson responded to a fight on the parking lot just before closing time.

Peter A. Palaigos, former owner of the popular Pete's Place pool hall in Annapolis, died Monday of Parkinson's disease at his Annapolis home. He was 84. Mr. Palaigos' establishment started out as Brunswick Billiards but became widely known as Pete's Place during the 40 years he ran it at 163 Main St. In a 2000 article in The Sun, former patrons recalled a diverse clientele of local teenagers, lawyers and midshipmen who enjoyed games of pool and kosher...

Man fatally shot in West Baltimore An unidentified man was fatally shot in the 1600 block of Vincent Court in West Baltimore yesterday morning. Police responded to a call about a shooting about 2:30 a.m. Officers arrived to find a victim suffering from multiple gun shot wounds. The victim was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was pronounced dead at 2:52 a.m. Police said yesterday that they had no suspects or motives. Madison Park Fire damages Dundalk pool hall A two-alarm fire seriously damaged a popular pool hall in Dundalk about 9:30 p.m. yesterday.

Baltimore County police are searching for a woman they say tried to kill two men at a Rosedale pool hall, authorities said yesterday. Monnek Hall, 24, of the 1400 block of E. Federal St. in Baltimore was involved in an argument between two men inside Hot Shots Billiards in the 8100 block of Pulaski Highway on March 3, according to police. She is accused of cutting the men with some type of sharp object, authorities said. Police have obtained a warrant for Hall on attempted-murder charges.

Former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts, clad in a straw cowboy hat with a sweat-drenched red bandanna around his neck, commands center stage at the Recher Theatre, frenetically soloing as his band rolls though his timeless "Jessica." Tie-dyed teenagers and older fans in polo shirts sway as a unit to the dips and peaks of Betts' effervescent guitar work, which fills the converted movie theater's expansive concert hall. Betts, who with his band Great Southern played the Recher last weekend - followed a night later by Nils Lofgren of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band - is among a roster of music legends and rising stars who have performed there in recent years.

Jurors convicted a 31-year-old Pasadena man yesterday of shooting a patron in an Annapolis pool hall six times two years ago, in a hail of gunfire described as a scene "out of the Old West."Tony M. Horne, of the 7800 block of Willings Court, was convicted of assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to maim and assault.On Nov. 29, 1990, he and two accomplices walked into Brown's pool hall, in the 200 block of Clay St., and shot up the place.Assistant State's Attorney John Robinson said Horne was the trigger-man, using a silver handgun to shoot Melvin Gatling of Annapolis three times in the back, twice in the ribs and once in the chest.

A group playing cards at a Pasadena pool hall were robbed early Monday when masked gunmen crashed the game and took their cash, Anne Arundel County police said. About 3:45 a.m., four men brandishing a machine gun and several pistols walked into Star Billiards and began barking orders at the group and a few others playing pool, said police spokesman Lt. Joseph E. Jordan. After cash, cell phones, jewelry and other personal property were taken, the victims were moved into the rear of the hall, where they were told to lie on the floor or to get into a closet, Jordan said.

THE AIR is smoky. Twenty or 30 folks, mostly middle-aged men in jeans or sweat pants, stand casually around the tables between the occasional family and, always, the several elderly regulars who spend most of their waking hours here. Teens sometimes show up to play, but generally the pool hall feels like Adults Only. Pool is a game for thinkers. The pool ball, depending more or less on the age and condition of the walls of the table (and the presence or absence of spin), will bank in a line that is symmetric to a line perpendicular to the wall.