Column: Why playing cards is guaranteed to get you shot

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, April 24, 2002

I do not play cards. I really do not know how to play cards. Oh, I have tried shuffling the hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades into respectful piles, but I have never really caught the card playing bug.

I liked collecting baseball cards, not playing cards. My mother’s sister, Helen, used to give me automatic card shufflers in the hopes that the labor-saving devices would cause me to take up card playing in earnest. My Aunt Helen thought that playing bridge was one of the best ways a person could fritter away his or her time.

As a child I played &uot;War&uot; and &uot;Fifty-two Card Pick-up,&uot; and as a teen I joined in some spirited penny-ante poker games, but I much preferred playing ball in my free time. Playing cards is just not in my genes.

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My Grandfather Batt was but a young boy when he found himself working in the coal mines. He was working in the mines at an age when I was barely able to get myself onto the bus in time to make it to school. He was working in the coal mines at an age where I found tying my shoelaces a great challenge. My Grandfather was helping to support his family at an age where I was busy whining about having to eat beets. On occasion, Grandpa and a friend of his, another boy about his age who also worked in the mine, would walk from the coal mine to a nearby saloon. The reason they went to a saloon had nothing to do with the reason most people go to a bar. Grandpa and his buddy went to the saloon because the saloon served free peanuts and sandwiches to its patrons. The boys visited the bar for the sole purpose of helping themselves to some of those peanuts and the delicious sandwiches. The saloon was usually so busy that no one either noticed or cared that the boys were freeloading.

It was a welcome change from what the young fellows usually ate. They carried lard pails that served as lunch buckets to work each day. The normal fare found in those lunch buckets often included such choice morsels as lard sandwiches. Lard sandwiches! There is a reason why lard sandwiches are not served in most restaurants today.

While they were eating the complimentary peanuts and sandwiches in the tavern, the boys occupied themselves by quietly watching the men in the bar playing poker. Grandpa said that it was a learning experience. They would listen to the stories, the jokes, the news and the gossip. They did not understand all that they heard, but they found it an educational process. The saloon was like the local barbershop was for me while I was growing up. In Hartland, the clip joint was a place of higher learning. I learned things there that I could not have learned anywhere else.

One day, my Grandfather and his friend were watching a group of men playing a high stakes poker game. As the boys enjoyed their free vittles, the card game became more and more heated as the piles of money on the table increased in size. Money makes men mad. The boys munched on the goober peas and gobbled the sandwiches as the poker players glared at one another. The participants folded one by one until there were only two men left in the game. One called the other. They threw down their cards. The winner, with a loud laugh, began to pull all the money across the table toward him. His opponent, anything but a good loser, swore and called the winner the lowest kind of a cheat. The winner continued to laugh his fiendish laugh. This drove the loser so crazy that he pulled a gun from his coat and shot the laughing man right between the eyes. He was dead before his head hit the money lying on the table.

My Grandfather paused just long enough to see the pool of blood forming on the table and then he and his friend dashed back to the mine. Did they ever have a story to tell their fellow miners. My Grandfather vowed at an early age that he would allow no card playing in his house. He would not even permit a deck of cards to cross the threshold of his home.

Grandpa worried about the consequences of playing cards. He knew that card playing could only lead to one thing &045; being shot to death. And that is why I do not play cards today.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.