Not Vent, but wood related and a very cool Christmas story...

Palm Coast dad chalks up one of the best gifts ever

Every gift has a giver and a receiver. The best gifts also come with a story.

By DEREK CATRON, Staff writer
December 25, 2011 12:05 AM

Steve Harrison was worried about his father.

George had been battling diabetes for more than a decade, and at age 58 the fight was turning against him. Since George had been told he faced an imminent need for dialysis, there'd been a change in his mood. He put on a brave face when one of his six grown kids called -- and they call just about every day -- but the kids could tell how much the news weighed on him.

Steve, 34, came for a visit in September, bringing his girlfriend, Nicole DeFrance, and George's mood immediately brightened. He'd met Nicole just a few months earlier and reveled in the chance to show her "the greatest movie ever made." It was "The Hustler," with Paul Newman as the upstart pool shark who challenges Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats.

Gleason had always been George's favorite actor, in part because he, too, was a big pool player and used only Willie Hoppe model pool cues. George had owned a Hoppe cue for more than three decades.

On that visit, George told them the story of how he got that pool stick -- and how he lost it. He told them how rare the sticks were, how he had tried to find another one over the years but either couldn't find one or couldn't afford the ones he found. As he told the story, his dark eyes lit up with an enthusiasm Steve hadn't seen in years.

Alone with Nicole later that night, he turned to her and said, "I don't care what it costs or how hard it is to find, Dad's going to have one of these sticks for Christmas."

They started looking the next day.

...


George was a teenager when his family moved to Sanford. He was already in love with the game of pool, and at the old civic center on Lake Monroe he could play for eight hours a day when he wasn't in school. There were two pool halls in town in the early '60s, and George worked out a deal where he could vacuum and clean up before one of the places opened and earn a couple of hours of free playing time, back when it cost a penny a minute to play.

On weekend nights, he'd hang out and rack balls and watch the hustlers. To this day, he swears he can identify the real players just by their manner or the way they hold their stick. The hustlers never competed in tournaments; they didn't want anyone to know how good they were until there was serious money on the line.

"That's not their thing, to get a trophy," George recalled.

There was an older fellow everyone called "Farmer" because he always wore overalls to play. One night after George won a tournament, old Farmer came over to him.

"You're a good shooter, kid," he told the teenager. "Every good player needs a good stick."

Farmer handed over a Willie Hoppe model pool cue. It was the equivalent of giving a Babe Ruth baseball bat to a Little Leaguer, and George cherished it.

He carried the stick in a leather case with a sheepskin lining. At night, he hung the stick in his closet with fishing line to help keep it straight. He never broke a rack with that stick, using a house stick to save the Willie Hoppe the punishment of that hard opening shot.

And in the shop class at Seminole High School, he carved "GFH" onto the inside of the upper end of the stick, where it screwed into the bottom.

...


George was a good pool player but no shark.

"I was never a hustler hustler," he said.

He was good enough to give up the job he had as a teenager, pumping gas for 25 cents an hour, so he could spend his weekends winning spending money in pool halls across Central Florida.

After finishing high school, he moved back to New Jersey and got a job in a union as a maintenance engineer at a department store. He got married, started raising a family, had a divorce, another marriage. Pool had become a hobby, something for his spare time only. His son remembers nights when his father came home with a wad of cash and an even bigger smile. "I whacked 'em," he would say proudly.

But his dreams of playing pool were replaced with other ambitions. He'd take vacations in Florida and imagine the life of the tanned men who owned the motels where he stayed. When he retired from the union after more than 20 years, he bought the old Pelican Shoals in Daytona Beach Shores. Owning a motel wasn't the lifestyle he'd imagined.

"You want to talk about a humbling experience. It (the work) just never ended," he recalled recently. "You never even got to go to the ocean - and I lived on the ocean!"

He sold the motel in 2001 and retired to the Palm Coast home where he lives now. By then, he'd been divorced a second time, and it wasn't an amicable split. His ex-wife sold the pool stick.

...


Within three days, Nicole had tracked down a few sticks. Willie Hoppe (rhymes with "poppy") won more than 50 world titles between 1906 and 1952, and Brunswick Billiards created a stick in his honor, but there aren't many still in use. Online prices can exceed $2,000.

Steve, who works as a salesman for UGG shoes in the New York area, thought he'd won an online auction for one of the sticks, then was horrified to learn he'd lost at the last minute. He kept trying, and eventually found one in the possession of Alan Ende, an avid collector from upstate New York. Ende, 56, had owned as many as three Willie Hoppe sticks but was down to his last one, which he described as a "Picasso of pool cues."

"I kept this one because it was the most classic," he said in a recent telephone interview. "I can't swear by it, but I think it was all original. You don't see that too often."

Ende is always adding and selling from his collection, so he was willing to let this one go, particularly after Steve told him the story. Ende even included an original copy of Hoppe's 1925 book, "Thirty Years of Billiards."

Steve was thrilled, but his work wasn't done. After a few days of waiting, the package still hadn't arrived at his New Jersey home. He and Ende eventually tracked the package through various sorting facilities to an address where Steve hadn't lived in five years. He jumped in his car and drove 40 minutes to pick it up, then rushed to the nearest FedEx office.

Steve had written a letter to his father, telling him all the things he'd never managed to say even though they talk as often as three times a day, things about how much love and respect he felt, how much he owed his father for the man he had become. Steve's older brother had written a similar letter that his father had framed on a wall in his home. Steve wanted his father to get this letter along with the gift, and there would be no waiting until Christmas this year.

He called his father to tell him to expect a package the next day. ...


Like a kid at Christmas, George couldn't wait to open his package and play with his new toy.

The stick had a familiar feel, and George felt like he was 16 again as he stroked his shots. It was uncanny how much this stick felt like the one he'd had for so long. Even the markings and notchings looked the same, though he told himself it was his imagination.

Nearly an hour later, he couldn't dismiss the feeling any longer. He unscrewed the stick, his hands a little unsteady even as he told himself how ridiculous his suspicions were.

It had been more than four decades since he'd carved his initials into his stick, and he had to carry it to the sliding glass doors to see it clearly in the afternoon light. Even when he saw the faint but familiar scratchings, his head doubted what he saw with eyes already blurring from tears.

"It's just not possible," he said, not for the last time.

...


In the rush of work and leaving early to pick up his twin daughters from school, Steve had lost track of time and at first didn't recognize the voice of the caller on the phone.

It was a cry he'd never heard before from his father, the type of cry he'd expect from someone who'd just lost a loved one. It was a minute or two before he could understand a word, and then all he could hear was "I can't believe you did this" over and over again.

Steve was touched and managed to say some of the things he'd put in his letter and how happy he was that his father appreciated the gift. He started to tell the story of the problems he'd had with the online auction and the mix-up with the package, but his father interrupted him.

"I can't believe this is my stick."

"Yes, Dad, this is your stick," Steve said, in a voice he'd use with a child. "It's a present from me."

His father was not soothed. "Stephen, you don't understand. This is my stick! This is my stick!"

...


Even weeks later when they tell what's become known in the family as "the pool stick story," father and son have trouble believing it.

"It's impossible," George said, his voice rising almost to a crack. "It's impossible."

Even more amazing to Steve is the effect the gift has had on his father. He shoots pool every day for a few hours now, and he sounds different on the phone. He even played pool at a couple of bars recently, telling his son he beat the players who were supposed to be the best in the place.

George is still loathing the idea of dialysis. ("It kind of rots," he said), and Steve knows a pool stick isn't going to somehow miraculously restore his father's health.

But it's restored something to him. Steve called it hope at first, but there's more.

In "The Hustler," Newman's Fast Eddie was dismissed early in the movie as "a loser" because of his character. Every time George sees the movie, he can't help but identify at least a little with Fast Eddie, to wonder what life would have been like on the road as a pool hustler.

But it's only a momentary escape. As the movie makes clear, the world of a pool shark held little room for a man of integrity, the type of man whose character put family ahead of a dream, who could help raise six children whose bonds would only grow stronger as their years advanced.

This was the real gift. And it had never been lost.


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© 2011 The Daytona Beach News-Journal.