What a long, strange trip It’s been…

When I started building a timeline of the 40+ bars and restaurants I’ve helped design, build and operate, the path seemed linear—start back in 1992, fill in the blanks up to present day, add a few pics, stir vigorously and serve. How hard could that be?

Then I started pouring through photos of the bars filled with young faces that are now older, many that are no longer here, and hundreds of smiles that belong to the friends I’ve accumulated along the way. The true reward for this journey is easy to identify; it’s the people, the laughter and the silliness that we had together while building a few iconic bars in Washington DC and elsewhere.

I stumbled into the bar business when one of my cousins married a pool shark named Jim Pennington. Jim was a boy-howdy kind of guy from Indiana who led with a smile and an “Aww gee whiz” before decimating his opponents on the felt. He took me to Baltimore’s grittiest pool halls, taught me the basics of nine-ball, introduced me to legends of the game, including Baltimore pool cue-maker-legend Tim Scruggs, and infected me with a fascination for the game of nine-ball.

Up to that point in my life, I ran a small contracting company and cabinet shop in DC, had married Meg, an amazing partner who also loved playing pool, and at the age of 30, generally had no game-plan. But that changed after Jim showed me the beauty of pool and I began to imagine building a funky neighborhood pool room in DC— the kind of place that warmed you in winter and kept you cool as ice during DC’s humid summers-- the kind of place where our friends and neighbors could hang out in the rec room that few apartment dwellers enjoyed in the 1990’s.

We subscribed to Billiards Digest and visited dozens of pool halls near and far in search of ideas. With no Google to lean on, we cobbled together bits and pieces from restaurants and bars that we liked, clipped magazine photos from Elle Décor, Architectural Digest and other publications, and asked everyone who seemed the least bit curious, “What would you want in a neighborhood pool hall?”

The result was Bedrock Billiards and its cozy vintage lounge chairs, a jukebox we curated like a museum exhibit and an espresso machine (a serious novelty back then). Local art was on the walls, vintage radios were tucked into nooks and crannies, crazy retro lighting was everywhere but left intentionally soft to create shadows. Customers felt at home as they came off bustling Columbia Road and down the flight of stairs into our little oasis. I knew we nailed it when one of our first customers let loose in a staccato New York cry “Oh my god! This is just like my grandmother’s basement in Brooklyn.”

And the crazy thing about Bedrock’s first year? We served no alcohol because neighbors feared the combination of pool and booze—you know, Trouble in River City. Our customers would come in, sign up on the waitlist, sprint up the stairs and down the block to Café Atlantico, and knock back a few drinks before returning to play pool. That lack of booze made us focus like laser beams on details that we would have lost otherwise and, I would argue, helped us create the atmosphere that still exists 31 years later.

Bedrock Billiards, 1992, Photo by Geoff Dawson

With the taste of that first success, we built Atomic Billiards, Buffalo Billiards and then CarPool. We were successful and profitable and didn’t pause to realize that far beyond the dollars and cents of business, we were altering the course of our lives and eventually, the lives of thousands of others. We created important communities of lifelong friends for us and for our customers. We were a part of something that lived and breathed in the neighborhoods around us, important hubs of happiness and joy. That is the success I treasure most.

Yup. I look mostly at the faces as I pour over the photos of my career. Our smiling craftsman Chris Bebell who helped build dozens of our bars, our neighborhood pal David James from Nanny O’Brien’s, our co-worker and fellow pool aficionado Ben Kao at Bedrock, and my dear friend and fellow bar-maker Joe Englert; they are all gone. But they live on with us and our many friends and co-workers as we keep delivering fun, happiness and a little break from the day-to-day world outside.