Rainmakers: Feeding the Pool Food Chain

Staton joined the feeding frenzy for Vaughn.

"And so Cleo rented this place, out in the middle of nowhere, and he told everybody to meet up there, and they hired a policeman to keep guard on the whole thing. It was behind a gas station. It was like a car port, and they had a pool table and a card table. So we started playing out there, and it was around-the-clock action."

It was there, out behind a filling station, that Weenie Beenie played Cleo Vaughn for 56 straight hours. Beenie said it wasn't that Cleo couldn't play pool - he could, he played tough - it's just that Cleo was, well, a bit on the chunky side. "At the end of 40-something hours, we were dead even. But I was slim, and he had a bit of extra weight on him, and he just ran out of gas. I beat up on him pretty good for the next 13 hours. I won, and I beat him pretty good. … And I remember I said, 'Who's next?' After 56 hours, I said, 'Who's next?'"

Beenie also played one of the world's most renown cheats out in Blytheville: Titanic Thompson.

"I never will forget this: I would play this proposition game that I could make 20-something balls. ... And Titanic, he was racking the balls, and he put glue on his hands. You know, he was a cheater. And so I'm trying to run the balls, and they wouldn't break up. There was fuzz on the table, and they were sticking on the balls. He put the glue on his hands - it was just enough to make the balls stick together when you tried to break.

"I like to say I made over a million dollars [in Blytheville] because I won $27,000, and I went home and wanted to invest it. I told my lawyer that I won this money, and he said, 'Bill, you have to declare that on income tax.' So, I declared it on my income tax, and then I build a little hotdog stand. It was 12 feet wide and 20 feet long. And it's still located in Alexandria, Virginia. The way I figure I made $1 million is from the rent I've been collecting all these years.''

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