by Al Drinkle
There's aromatic confusion out there as blossom season crescendos. Intoxicating florality competes with nauseating wafts of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, and it's nice to walk past a few houses in a row that forgo the poison—especially if they have lilacs to sniff. I’ve been wandering my neighbourhood, delighting in the olfactory fireworks and thinking about my recent meeting with Esther, the proprietress of Fort McMurray's first pool hall.
In the mid-1970s, and along with her husband and five of her six children, Esther relocated from Edmonton to Fort McMurray. She was in her 40s and the mere fact that she was a woman placed her in a significant minority in this northern outpost. She and her husband were not without their financial difficulties, and they hoped to capitalize on new opportunities in the booming town. Establishing a pool hall was the latest concurrent venture among many in an attempt to eradicate their seemingly perpetual pecuniary woes.
The pool hall was open from 9 a.m. until late into the night. The evening clientele was much as you'd imagine it, including the roughest characters of a rough town. Beneath a low-hanging cloud of interminable cigarette smoke, they'd drink beer and whisky, rebuking this and that as the pool balls cracked and rolled into the small hours. Mercifully for Esther, fistfights and other altercations were surprisingly uncommon.
The daytime patrons largely consisted of class-cutting teenagers, setting Esther at constant odds with the mothers of the community. She would remind them that it's not her job to ensure that their kids attend school, and that having selected their own days off, the teens could certainly be engaged in far more delinquent activities than shooting pool in an establishment with adult supervision. In actuality, a juvenile betting ring was operating in full force, within which the most skilled players were undoubtedly questioning the validity of school when such immodest winnings could be obtained morning after morning. Esther declined to sell the minors alcohol or cigarettes, despite the fact that they seemed to be in constant possession of the latter.
Esther's youngest daughter, at this point around two or three years of age, was omnipresent with her at the pool hall. Naturally this could become rather boring for the daughter and tedious for the mother. When financially star-crossed teenagers would run dry of billiard funds, Esther would make a deal with them. If they would take her daughter out for some fresh air, or play some sort of game with the bantling, she would allow them a free hour of pool. This proved to be mutually beneficial and Esther wonders if her daughter recalls any of these unlikely babysitters.
At some point, Esther's husband noticed that hunger would occasionally eclipse some of the clientele’s attention span for billiards. The couple devised the idea of keeping sandwich materials and other snacks on hand so that patrons wouldn't have to terminate their activities in order to seek nourishment elsewhere. Esther has since retired from cooking (not to mention the operating of pool halls), but her culinary skills were such that the provisions she sold to her customers found success for reasons that transcended mere convenience.
Some years passed. Perhaps there was a general cooling of enthusiasm towards billiards, or perhaps the fact that every dive bar in town began to devote space to a pool table or two eroded the attraction of a pool hall tout court. Either way, Esther and her husband foresaw the waning of popularity, and decided that they should be the first to provide the denizens of Fort McMurray with another entertainment destination—a bowling alley.
It's time that I reveal that Esther is my maternal grandmother, and although the pool hall was before my time, some of my earliest childhood memories are of my grandparents’ bowling alley. Based on visits from infancy all the way through my mid-twenties, its story is one that I can tell firsthand… but it's a story for another week, and probably not next week. The lilacs and honeysuckle are out, and I plan on spending my foreseeable spare time sipping wine amongst them. But stand by for the sequel…
