Early Life and Career
Rudolf Walter Wanderon, Jr. was born in New York City to Rosa and Rudolf Wanderon, Swiss immigrants. He was born in 1913 but sometimes hinted he was born earlier, even as early as 1900. The surname was later changed to Wanderone.
Known as "Rudy" to friends and family, Wanderone started playing pool as a child while living in Washington Heights, Manhattan. In 1923, he traveled to Europe with his father where he received training from German balkline billiards champion Erich Hagenlocher. His first prominent match was in 1926 when he competed against former nine-ball champion "Cowboy" Weston (Wanderone won, handily). Wanderone left school in the eighth grade and became a traveling pool hustler, spending much of the 1920s playing at a pool hall called Cranfield's in New York City. It was there that Wanderone received his first nickname after beating another hustler known as "Smart Henry". The intensity of their competition led Wanderone's friend, Titanic Thompson, to dub Wanderone "Double-Smart". By the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, Wanderone had become a manager of a pool hall, owned by a friend, in Anacostia, southeast Washington, D.C. He had acquired more notoriety and nicknames, including "Triple-Smart Fats", "New York Fats", "Broadway Fats", and "Chicago Fats", attracting action from other hustlers, including the then unknown Luther "Wimpy" Lassiter.
In 1941, Wanderone and friend Jimmy Castras arrived in southern Illinois—major hustling center on a fast track to televised tournament play—and settled in Du Quoin, Illinois, where he continued hustling. Eventually he met Evelyn Inez Graff; they married two months to the day later, on May 7, 1941. Following their marriage, the Wanderones settled in Dowell, Illinois.
In 1942, the couple moved to Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk had become a key mustering point for US soldiers, as well as a shipbuilding center. The growing population led to an enormous interest in gambling; Wanderone, in partnership with fellow hustler Lassiter, quickly recognized the financial possibilities. Following World War II, however, the action "dried up" soon, and the Wanderones returned to Little Egypt. For a period throughout the 1950s, Wanderone entered semi-retirement, making only occasional hustling trips to New York City.
Read more about this topic: Rudolf Wanderone
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,—
One old jug without a handle,—
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,”
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)