George Jansco's Land of Opportunity

George Jansco was the mastermind behind many of the richest and most infamous pool tournaments of the 1960s. But his first career in sports was as a shortstop for a minor league baseball team in Ft. Worth, Texas. (Photos courtesy of Joann McNeal)

First, let me touch upon five key moments in Georgie Jansco's life:

1) He was born on a small farm in Heron, Ill., on Aug. 8, 1915. His parents were Hungarian immigrants; his father a bootlegger by trade.

2) At age 17, he started playing shortstop for a minor league baseball team from Fort Worth, Texas.

3) He married childhood sweetheart Sadie Lokotich. His daughter, JoAnn, was born in 1940 in Mississippi, during a stop there for one of George's ballgames. He had a son, Jan, born in 1937, who later died.

4) In 1961, George Jansco hosted the first of several massive "hustlers" pool tournaments in Johnston City, Ill. By attracting network television coverage and prominent sports writers like Fox, the tournaments became among the nation's most famous. Brother Paulie Jansco helped run the jamborees beginning in 1962, and then lent a hand with the Las Vegas Stardust tournaments, which George began in 1965. At the time, the Stardust tournaments were considered the richest in professional pocket billiards.

5) George suffered a fatal stroke in 1969 at age 53.

Somewhere between Moment 3 and 4 (JoAnn puts the year at about 1950), George Jansco went to Evansville, a town that started in 1812 as a single log cabin, but which today includes about 300,000 inhabitants. Oil was discovered there during the 1930s - a fact that would lessen the impact of the Great Depression, and which would also lead to a bona fide boom during the 1940s. Likewise, the establishment of the Evansville Ship Yard in 1942 and the conversion of factories for the construction for World War II aircraft swelled employment from 21,000 to 64,000 in a matter of months.

"There was money just flowing, flowing everywhere," said Beaumann, who attended the first Johnston City tournament as a photojournalist. "They'd punch a hole in the ground, and the oil would spray out by itself. ... There was great train service between this part of the country and Chicago, and so it was a wide-open area. I'm sure there was a ton of bootlegging. … Small towns that had 500 people suddenly had 50,000."

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