Friends of Vilna Pool Hall Society
Martha Taschuk sunning herself on the back porch, 1937. Bill and Lilly Taschuk beside the porch at the back of the house, 1949. When the restoration started, the house addition was half its original size. It had been partially demolished after the family moved out in the 1950s. The remaining part of the addition had been used for storage.
The barber could do 35 cuts a day; every man and boy got a regular haircut. The barber chair was in the storefront window and the pool tables were in the back. Tall benches made it easy to see whatever action there was: lots of fights in the hall, girls seldom entered. Men used chewing tobacco and spitoons extensively and the walls and ceilings are yellow with nicotine. Two pre-WWI 12-foot Brunswick Balke Collender snooker tables and two 8-foot Samuel May billiard tables, one from 1947, are still in use. The original cue racks, coal stove, benches and scoring devices, as well as the original front counter, are still intact. The original fir 1x4 tongue and groove flooring was treated with used crankcase oil and it had been repaired around the tables with plywood, attesting to an important economy of means. Both the pool hall and the residence were heated by coal stoves, eventually replaced by gas. Vilna didn’t have electricity until the early 1950s; before this electric lights were run off a generator. Life in the back was a domestic contrast to the pool hall. While the pool hall was roofed with sawn cedar shingles, the house just had asphalt roll roofing. Both were clad in spruce drop siding over 1x6 sheathing, uninsulated, no eavestroughs. John and Sandra raised their children here until the 1950s when they built a house nearby. The attached living space fell into disrepair, used as storage and was eventually taken down. As a restoration project, we proposed that the Pool Hall and Barbershop should feel like a step back in time, about 1946 and 1947, when life was getting back to normal after a long interval of war. The Alberta economy was just starting to boom and there were still no signs of the social changes to come in the 1960s and 70s when the fortunes of the pool hall began to decline. Restoration, cleaning and repairs should not remove the scrapes, scratches and wear that marks the life of the pool hall
david murray
over its lifetime; repairs simply to extend the life of the building and its functioning equipment. It won’t be heated by coal, but by a high-efficiency furnace in the crawlspace, a functional acknowledgement that this is the 2010s, not the 1940s. The front building was structurally stabilised and restored in 2003. The foundations are new: there can be a very high water table in Vilna, and one year recently it was just below ground level. Consequently, the foundations were in terrible condition – rotten, as there was almost no crawlspace. The entire floor structure was replaced. Because the adjacent buildings are so close, the pool hall was lifted up, joists were replaced and it was dropped back down onto its new concrete foundation. The façade was rebuilt to its original configuration – it had been changed from the original in the 1960s when a car ran into it. Many of the changes to this building had occurred in the 1960s, including replacing the outhouse by a inside toilet. The interior, with all its furnishings, has been carefully preserved. The Friends of the Vilna Pool Hall Society owns the building and it is now open to the public for a game of pool or billiards. The charges for using the tables and for the haircuts by an experienced volunteer go towards maintaining the building.
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