Recently I was cleaning out some stuff from storage, and came across a mailing tube, dated 1988, sent to me by my father, who, it seems, was doing some cleaning out of his own when he found this, and sent it along to me.
Prior to that, the last time I saw this was on the day it was done, way back in 1962, while I was still in college, on a vacation to Ocean City, Maryland. There, while walking along the boardwalk, I stumbled into a caricaturist's shop and tried unsuccessfully to talk my date into memorializing the moment with a drawing. She thought that instead that I should be the subject. And so it was. While the artist was doing her work she asked what I like to do, and of course pool was the big thing in my life at the time, and there you have it...
When I got back to the school dorm, I filed it away where it remained undetected for a quarter of a century, until my father found it in some pile of stuff in his storage. I suppose I didn't know what to do with it then, so I relegated it to my storage locker, with all the other stuff that is somehow too important to discard, but not important enough to keep handy, and there it remained for another 22 years.
When I re-opened the mailing tube recently, and removed the paper, it crumbled into several pieces. It had dried out and become brittle to the point where I feared it might just go to dust in my hands. But luckily, with the help of someone who has experience with saving ancient paper artifacts, it was unrolled, pieced together, and mounted on a foam board, where hopefully it will last a bit longer.
The wonderful advantage of having the internet is that now we can scan stuff like this and send it into "The Cloud" where it will stay fresh for all eternity. It's like a bit of immortality.
Even reviewing my math for accuracy, I can not really grasp the fact that it has been 48 years since that event, almost half a century.
Many things have changed in that time, but my love of the game of pool has remained strong.
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