Author’s Note: The following narrative about Vince Magruder’s pool room during the late 1940s comes from memories shared by my maternal uncle, Willie James Magruder.
During the late 1940s, my maternal grandfather, Vince Magruder, owned a pool room next to his Blue Moon Café. At this time, he was in his mid-to-late 40s, stood about 5’10” tall, had a medium build, a clear and very smooth brown complexion, and sported a toothbrush mustache, much like the silent film actor Charlie Chaplin. He combed his black hair from right to left across his head to cover a bald spot. In addition to running the Blue Moon Café and the pool room, he would later take over a barber shop and own a service station at the corner of Church and Mill Street.
Someone else owned the pool room before my grandfather acquired it. My uncle, Willie James Magruder, mentioned that he did not spend much time in the pool room and only went inside to ask his father if he could borrow his 1947 Pontiac. The building itself was wooden and rundown, measuring approximately 12 to 14 feet wide and about 20 feet long. The pool room had one or two pool tables, a crap table, and a poker table. No meals or alcohol were sold, and no music was played. According to my uncle, there wasn’t much pool being played because the uneven pool table sat on a wooden floor. Walking across the floor caused the balls to roll, disrupting the game. He said the pool table was heavy and needed to be placed on a cement floor. There was another pool room down the street, next to the drug store, with three pool tables where young Black men preferred to hang out.
In my grandfather’s pool room, the pool table was located in the front, while most of the gambling took place in the rear, where they shot craps and played poker. There were two tables—one for craps and the other for poker. He employed two Black men to run the tables: one for the card table and one for the crap table.
Only Black men frequented the pool room, and
Black women entered only when looking for their husbands or searching for someone. Anyone who didn’t gamble or play poker had little reason to enter the pool room, as it was solely for gambling.
The regular clientele consisted mainly of older Black men and those who hung out on the streets. Throughout the week, local Black men from town visited the pool room, while Saturday nights drew Black men from the country and nearby plantations.
