The Dart: Pockets full of dusty charm

A place to shoot pool, meet old pals and snack on pickled eggs

Not much changes at Baynie’s Pool Room

Thursday, February 22, 2007

By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer

LENOIR - Bumper stickers line the walls at Baynie's Pool Room, where dozens of cues have permanently marked blue chalk across the battered white, green and pink paint.

Some of the pool sticks, secured to a wooden shelf with tiny padlocks, belong to regulars. Others, the ones slathered with paint at the base, are house sticks that anyone wanting to shoot a game or two can use.

Today, the 40-year-old pool hall, where The Dart recently landed, is a dark and dusty room with video and pinball games lining the perimeter, but since her husband Baynie died in 1981, owner Elaine Sipes has made it her own.

Take the stickers, for example. Every time Sipes visits a gas station, she said, she looks for a new clever phrase to add to the walls or to paste across the side of a table.

"Save a cow, eat a vegetarian," she said. "I love that one."

Four worn pool tables rest on the room's unfinished concrete floor as Sipes, 77, flips on the single overhead light. It sputters on, casting a dim glow on the hundreds of decorations she and Baynie have plastered throughout the hall.

"I think that's one of the best signs I've ever seen," Sipes said, pointing to a piece of paper hanging from the doorframe of her makeshift office.

The disclaimer, posted near the snacks and where customers pay for rounds of pool, reads: "Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite."

For Sipes, running a poolroom isn't a bad gig.

She gets to set her own hours and take as much vacation as she needs. She lives in apartment above the hall and can show up wearing the same sweater she had on the day before.

Business has been slower in recent years, as unemployment rises in the county and furniture factories continue to close, but Sipes said she'll keep coming to work. The 50 cents she charges for a game of eight-ball, combined with the 25-cent video games, juke box fees and snack sales, pays the bills, she said, and that's enough.

But Sipes didn't always think she'd be running a business where pool tables, video games and pickled-egg sales were the main source of income.

The Pittsburgh native met Baynie, a former engineer from Lenoir, while he was taking electronics training classes in Pennsylvania. They married in 1955, and, after having the first of their five boys, moved to Lenoir in 1963.

The couple bought a small store a few miles from Hibriten Mountain and began selling groceries to neighbors.

Then, in 1967, Sipes returned to Pittsburgh for her mother's funeral, leaving Baynie to watch the shop. When she returned a few days later, the boxes of cereal and cans of food had been moved and four green felt-lined pool tables were scattered throughout the store.

Her husband had opened "Baynie's Pool Room."

In the hall's early days, Sipes said, things were a bit more wild and her husband didn't discourage patrons from drinking before coming into the hall. Now she's a bit more strict and likes thinking of the hall as a family place.

"I don't allow drinking," Sipes said. "If there were 30 men drinking in here, and just one female. Uh uh."

The regulars are OK with that, said 48-year-old Brian Swanson, who used to play at the hall and later married Baynie's niece. If someone tries pushing Sipes' rules, Swanson said, she has built-in enforcement.

"The group always protected Miss Baynie," he said. "She never had to have a bouncer because every boy in there was a bouncer for her."

Though Swanson hasn't shot pool at Baynie's for close to a decade, Sipes said she is certain he'd find it exactly the same.

"Some people come back after 20 years and will say, `Oh, you haven't changed at all,' " she said.

It's that consistency, Sipes said, that has made Baynie's what it is today.

"It's home to a lot of people," she said. "That's how you make friends and keep customers."


The Point of The Dart

The idea behind The Dart is simple: We're looking for the kind of news the media don't usually report. We throw a dart at a map of one of the counties in the Catawba Valley, and we'll write about what's happening at that spot. We hope this feature will bring out stories that too often are ignored and will help you meet some of your neighbors in the region.


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