Wife fills owner's shoes at Sanger pool hall

Published online on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2008

SANGER -- Alex Gonzales, daughter of a pool hall owner, can't shoot pool.

She doesn't even know how to rack the balls.

Her father, Juan Enrique Gonzales, never felt a pool hall was a proper place for his daughters or his wife, Angela.

"He would always say, 'There's too many men here. This is no place for ladies,' " recalls Alex, 20. "And my mom never worked."

Now, Angela, 58, runs Sanger Pool hall with the help of her two youngest daughters, Alex, and Maria, 21. Gonzales lost his memory, but this small pool hall is filled with memories of him.

"We love the pool hall. This place is my father," says Alex.

The business has no sign outside -- it doesn't need one.

For decades, farmworkers and other laborers looking for a place to socialize learned about this place by word of mouth. They still do.

Gonzales, a tall Texan who always wore a white cowboy hat -- except on holidays, when he wore his special gray felt with two feathers -- kept the jukebox going, the beer flowing and was willing to cash a check or give an interest-free loan until payday.

He had simple criteria for lending money:

"If you paid him back, he would loan you money again. If you didn't, the second time you asked he'd still think about it, but maybe not. The third time, never again," says his son Angel Gonzales, 31, of Fresno, who works for Coca Cola during the week and helps in the pool hall on the weekends.

"He built relationships with all these people. Everyone knew him and he knew everyone. My father was a respected man."

Gonzales knew something was wrong before anyone else did.

Three years ago he told Angela to come to the pool hall; he needed to teach her everything about the business.

Shortly after that he started getting confused and forgetting things. Today, Gonzales, 81, is in the final stages of dementia. When they drive him past the hall on holiday visits from an assisted-care facility in Fresno, he doesn't recognize the place he ran for 45 years.

They visit him at least three times a week and bring home his laundry. Angela won't let anyone else wash his clothes.

The story of how Gonzales came to own a pool hall is family lore. Angela speaks limited English. Angel is at work. Maria is at classes at Fresno State. So youngest child Alex, a Fresno City College student, tells the tale:

"My father's mother died after he was born. He was just a baby. When he was only 8 years old, he went away to Michigan to work. He worked really long and hard and saved all his money."

He lived with different relatives, moved from being a farmworker to a labor contractor. In his thirties he went looking for his father and found him in California. He tried to give his father the money he had saved to help with the rest of the family.

"His hair had grown long. His dad looked at him and said, 'Son, go get a haircut. I won't take your money, it is yours. Get a hair cut, then take this money you saved and buy something you really want.' "

Gonzales wanted a pool hall. He loved music and company.

"This is the very place he bought," Alex says. It was the early '60s.

You might think that a dusky pool hall on the poorer side of town, filled with hard-working men mostly far from home, would have been a magnet for trouble.

But no one on the Sanger Police Department recalls going there on any regular basis.

Roberto Mares, 81, a longtime customer, says Gonzales had a way of quelling tensions with just a look. He can't recall him ever raising his voice or physically kicking anyone out. When there were problems, Gonzales would get red in the face, stare, and men would quiet down.