Daddy Warbucks -- Hubert Cokes

January 1966 issue with an article about Hubert Cokes and Harold Worst


Minnesota Fats and Hubert Cokes

Daddy Warbucks
By Tom Fox

Hubert Cokes is one of those larger than life mortals who seem to step off the pages of history onto the wide, wide screen of life.

When Hubert Cokes was a rambling gambling man in the rowdy 20s, the guys and dolls of that romantic era called him The Giant. It was a simple, almost childlike endearment and yet it implied singular distinction. It wasn’t that Hubert Cokes was a massive hulk of a man, although he was, nor that he performed Himalayan feats, albeit sometimes he did. They called him Hubert Cokes The Giant because of his indomitable scorn for protective cults. The only protection Hubert Cokes ever needed was Hubert Cokes.

Stories of the derring-do with which the freelancing Giant defied powerful gang lords are legend and they are retold, and perhaps embellished, wherever floating crap game alums gather. Once they say, Cokes was running a rich dice game somewhere and a benevolent arm of a protection society announced it was muscling in. Cokes looked down his leathery nose at the ultimatum and when a couple of dockwallopers were dispatched to his tables, The Giant whipped hell out of the toughs with his bare fists. Hubert Cokes was always the master of his house. Then there was the Southwest Incident: Cokes was operating a posh gambling casino in a booming oil town. The handle was a robust $40,000 a day but in the same town Pretty Boy Floyd was knocking off banks and post offices for $800. Floyd, the aficionados claim, thought the law offered better odds than The Giant.

You hear all sorts of stories about Hubert Cokes. He is one of those larger
than life mortals who seem to step off the pages of fiction onto the wide,
wide screen of life and some of his intriguing stirrings have been dramatized
with exaggeration. In truth, the man’s image is part myth.

The Hubert Cokes I know is a gentle, brown-eyed man of 67 who wouldn’t harm a miller moth. He is a huge, bald man of 6’2 and 220 pounds and he has cold, piercing eyes that might frighten lesser men but he smiles easily and he walks softly and dignity is his big stick. He has tone, as they say. He likes the simple things in life. He enjoys playing golf with his wife, Frances, a former nurse, and he delights in teaching kids, and sometimes women, how to shoot pool. Once I saw him up to his ears in housewives in one of those carpeted billiard rooms in suburbia. He was instructing les girls on the proper technique in making a bridge. A salty old sandbagger like Texas Guinan, who knew Hubert Cokes when he had hair, would have laughed out loud.

Hubert Cokes is a wealthy Evansville, Indiana oilman-sportsman who takes the sun in Florida in the winter and spends the summers golfing in the Midwest. He shoots in the low 80s ("In the fall when the ground is hard") and he’ll wager on his drives and putts on the drop of a tee. He was, for the record, one of those country club hustlers who had a hand in sending ex-heavyweight champion Joe Louis to the poorhouse just beyond the 19th hole. Hubert Cokes also loves to bet on his pool game because he is an excellent pool player, in fact, one of the best around, bar none. When he is in the dashing, chancy world of the pool hustlers, Hubert Cokes is known as Daddy Warbucks, a nom de guerre that needs no explanation. He looks like Daddy Warbucks -- the bald head, the big ears, the tiny deep set eyes, the taut mouth, and the ever present cigar. He is also very rich and extremely generous and so he is a soft touch for the luckless, down and out pool hustler. Of all the picturesque pool hall sobriquets, Daddy Warbucks, perhaps, is the most poetic.

When Hubert Cokes is in Evansville, almost any night you can find him in the game room of the Elks Club, a stately old ante bellum mansion that stirs thoughts of another day. It’s a massive beige brick building with large white columns jutting up from the front porch and in those hand fan days of the late, late, 30s, the Elks used to sit out there in their big rocking chairs with the stiff starched white slip covers and watch the oil men come and go at the old McCurdy Hotel on the other side of First Street. The Elks have long since retired to the clubhouse, now air-conditioned, thank you, and the oil men still stop at the McCurdy but it’s not like it was when Hubert Cokes first came to town.

He was younger then, fortyish and newly wed, and had just made a strike in the oil fields around Centralia in Southern Illinois and he was thinking about a place with a mailbox and a lawn and a flower garden. For 25 years he had been a rambling, gambling man, a rover with the soul of a gypsy and the roots of a sparrow. Life had been one glorious high roll after another and for a quarter of a century Hubert Cokes had been running to where the action was -- In Joplin, or Tulsa, New York or Chicago, Miami or New Orleans. But in 1939 the action was around Evansville, IN where new found oil spilled over like a spring flood and riches awaited the free soul with the bankroll and guts to dare chance. It was a gambling man’s Brigadoon, a big lusty wheel of fortune with no sheriff to fade, and as legal as the Bill of Rights. And so they came from all over -- storied Ray Ryan, the highest roller of them all; fabled Titanic Thompson, the prototype of all proposition men; solemn Preacher Du Buford, who wore dark suits and spoke softly like a man of the cloth but bellowed invectives when he struck a dry hole; crafty Jimmy the Greek Castras, who made book on anything, once on how many cups would break at a DAR party; and a carload of other blithe spirits, Hubert Cokes among them, with nerves honed over crap tables and the daring to risk it all on one more roll. They were all out of Runyon, by gosh, an they checked into the old McCurdy and fortunes were made and lost right there on the marble floor of the lobby; and out on the sidewalk this flamboyant new breed did things with money that had the Elks holding hard to their rocking chairs across the street.

In those freewheeling days before World War II, Evansville was a lethargic little river town on the northern shores of the beautiful Ohio and back then, as it does today, the scene suggested the best of two worlds -- the tranquil grace and charms of the Old South, coupled with a bustling, yet cautious and prudent Yankee enterprise. There’s a special grace about Evansville, a low-keyed horse and carriage pace that makes the living relaxed and easy. A visiting Elk might miss it but it’s there and you feel it after you’ve been there a while. And there’s a devilish, almost Janus-like fascination about the town at night, around the witching hour when the old wildcatters like The Preacher and The Colonel and Ladies Man Louie and Young York and Abie The Oakie stroll into the McCurdy lobby for the morning paper and a cup of coffee and a slice of nostalgia; and the past becomes the present when these Night People weave stories about the Runyon crowd that swept onto the scene and loved and sinned and hoodwinked and lived high and hard and put a splotch of rouge on Evansville’s haughty old face.

In 1939 Hubert Cokes, with a new stake and a new bride, took it all in and liked the odds. Evansville, indeed, was his kind of town. So he settled there and after a few more gushers poured in he went into the oil business on Main Street. He built an elegant home on the fashionable East Side and joined the Elks Club and the Petroleum Club. He might have been a pillar of the community too, except that in Evansville, Indiana pillars of the community come from a select circle of old-line families, the old rich, as it were, as opposed to the new rich, who are mostly oil people like Hubert Cokes who stayed on after the boom.

He is one of them now but after 26 years he is still a heavy who sits below the salt at the dinner table. And that’s how it will always be with Hubert Cokes, for as he defied the town bosses and their strond boys, so too, has he stuck out his tongue at the Sunday social mores of the Midwest. He remains the gambling man because it is in Hubert Cokes’ blood to take odds and give odds and protect himself in clichés.

Because of his wealth, Cokes is constantly singled out for the big hustle and sometimes the propositions, not to mention the stakes, are staggering. Several years ago on a sabbatical from the oil derricks, Cokes was vacationing in Las Vegas and between visits to the roulette wheels and blackjack tables he got to playing a "little money pool -- just for kicks." He had not picked up a cue in eight years ("it felt like a broom," he remembers) and his stroke and his eye showed it. The Giant looked ripe for a toppling. Word spread quickly and overnight hustlers seemed to walk right off the desert. Everybody came to get a piece of Hubert Cokes, including one of billiards’ all-time legitimate champions who flew west to propose a $50,000 summit meeting on the Vegas Strip. The cunning Cokes smiled and said he was, indeed, interested providing of course, he could name the games -- left-handed, one-handed and jacked-up. Indignant, the champion termed Cokes’ proposal "debasing" and grabbed the next plane East. Cokes chuckled all the way to Evansville but the hustlers, sensing a bonanza, trailed him like bloodhounds. "They knew my game had fallen into a rabbit hole," Cokes said, "and they all wanted odds, even the ones who could play me straight up."

Nonplused at having to sidestep such action, Cokes bought a second hand pool table and moved it into a vacant room above Joe Larvo’s Restaurant in Evansville and for a few months he worked at his rusty game, honing it to a stiletto sharpness. Then he took on all comers and took might be too mild a word. "I busted one of the country’s best players, smack down to his car and then I won the car, too." Cokes said. "I thought about getting in the used car business for a while."
A few years ago Larvo’s Restaurant was gutted by a pre-dawn blaze and Cokes’ table was lost in the mound of rubble. Since then he’s switched his training camp to the game room at the Elks Club and there he and his "sparring partner" play five nights a week to see that Daddy Warbucks’ game remains respectable.

His partner is tall, slender, blondish and 32 year old Larry Meyer who grew up in Louisville, KY and moved to Evansville a few years ago. By ordinary standards Larry is a good pool player but he doesn’t belong on the same table with Cokes. "I’m Mr. Cokes’ punching bag," says Meyer. Cokes gives outrageous odds in the game room sessions, yet, he says it’s necessary. "I’ve got to protect myself from those rascals (the hustlers)," he explains. With a $5 wager on each game, the Elks Club training sessions go something like this: (1) eight or no count one-pocket, meaning Cokes must drop eight straight balls in one pocket without a miss or start again from scratch. (2) one-pocket even, Cokes shooting left-handed. (3) one-pocket even, Cokes shooting WITHOUT his glasses. (4.) One-pocket even, Cokes shooting with one hand. (5.) Banks even. Despite the la Russian Roulette rules under which Cokes chooses to play, over a nine-month stretch, Daddy Warbucks led the long series by 24 games going into September.

Like most men his age, Cokes is myopic. He reads the newspapers, even the fine print on the stock market page, with the naked eye, but on a pool table he is helpless without glasses. He tried bifocals but cue ball and object ball never seemed the same size and Cokes’ game suffered markedly. "That’s when I got these," he said, picking up what he called his "pool cheaters." The glasses are extra large. The black frame and prescription treated lenses are about the size of a cue ball and when Cokes puts them on they cover his eyes, his eyebrows and a goodly portion of his forehead. They arouse memories of old fashioned racing goggles, the kind Sunday drivers used to wear at the wheel of the old open touring cars, and when Cokes stares out of the thick lenses he looks more like a Mad scientist than a tired businessman relaxing at the club.

The game room is one of those long, narrow, masculine looking clubrooms where cigar smoke and spilled beer are part of the "men only" decor. Four outmoded ceiling fans hang overhead and although they haven’t been used in years they are part of the decor too, fossils of another age. The six pool tables get a good play from the membership and so does the bar which is on the other side of a swinging door at the far end of the room.. There is nothing special about the bar except that it doubles as the music room for the regular Monday night vocalizings of the 23 voice Elks Club Chorus and on occasion the assorted tenors, altos and baritones provide amusing background music.

One night last summer Cokes, in deft stroke, ran a quick eight balls to win an eight or no count version of one pocket and as he pocketed the last ball, as if on a prearranged cue, from the bar the chorus sang out lustily:
"Be my little baby bumble bee... "Buzz around, buzz around, buzz around and ‘round."
Tenors: "Baby...baby...baby...baby..."
Baritones: "....Buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz...buzz."
"The maestro out there," said Cokes, acknowledging the musical salute, "must have bet on me."
Later, when Cokes’ game was less stimulating, the chorus burst forth with a solemn, throaty version of the old tent revival hymn, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord." Cokes smiled and Meyer, shooting surely, ran out another game.
"Damn," said Cokes, "this boy’s getting good enough to take on the road."

The road...the road...the road. Any pool player who has broken a rack in a serious money game has at one time or another found himself on the road. It’s the only place to go when the action slows down, which is the way it was for Hubert Cokes in 1913. He was 16 and attending high school in Hot Springs, AR, and during a long hot summer things were slow, even in Hot Springs. Young Cokes had heard tall tales about the "money action" up in St. Louis and one night when things were slower than usual. Cokes and his pal Hubert Bray, the police chief’s son hopped a freight train for St.. Louis.

"We told them we came from Hot Springs and we wanted action," Cokes said. "And we got it --nine ball at 25 cents a game. We played all day and all night. We were $22 ahead when we hopped a freight back home. After that I was a rolling stone."

The hobo ride to St. Louis convinced the teenage Cokes that a cotton farm was no place for a young gambling man and soon the took to the road for good. His wanderings were to last for 25 years and take him across the country a dozen times, living out of suitcases and earning his keep in grubby horse parlors and chandeliered casinos. When he ran short of capital he headed for the nearest pool room. His game was always good enough for eating money.

"I played pool as a boy in Hot Springs and I thought I knew the game," he said. "But I was educated in 1916. That’s when I met Jack Hill in Tulsa. He originated one pocket out there around 1912. He liked me and took me on as his protégé. He taught me the fine points. That was my college education in pool." And Cokes graduated with honors for today, almost 50 years later, he remains one of the best one pocket players in America, especially if the stakes are high.

"I never felt like a complete player until 1925," Cokes says, "and I think I played my best around 1945. I was 47 and at my prime. I could have handled anybody in the country back then. I busted everybody who came through Evansville, everybody but Willie Hoppe but he was out of my class in cushions. I played him an exhibition at the Elks Club and he gave me a good lesson. But 20 years ago I owned the hustlers. I broke ‘em all."

Cokes insists he was never a hustler himself. "I never said I was a bus driver or a traveling salesman," he says, "They always knew who I was. Today if somebody calls me a hustler I say, "No, I’m a producer of hustlers." This hustler image came out of Hollywood hustlers and I’m their producer. I back ‘em all with cash is the proposition looks good.

Among the early hustlers backed by Cokes resources was a roly-poly, nonstop talking fat boy the oil man met on Broadway in 1930. His name -- Minnesota Fats (nee New York Fats) is a household word in any pool room today but in 1930 the Fat Man (Rudolph Wanderone, of Dowell, IL) needed backers. "Fatty looked the same as he does now, a little lighter perhaps, and he talked, talked, talked, the way he babbles now. I backed him in some $500 nine ball in New York. He was walking all over the place, talking to everybody, spilling powder all over the floor and not paying attention to what he was doing. I walked up to him and said, "Look Fatty, that’s my money you’re playing for. Concentrate on the game." He laughed and said, "Don’t worry Hubert," and without looking at the table he shot and pocketed the nine ball. If Fatty couldn’t run off at the mouth he wouldn’t run six balls."

One of Cokes’ inseparable road companions was the incomparable Titanic Thompson, a legend himself. Thompson once won $10,000 by throwing a peanut atop a Chicago building (the peanut was filled with mercury). He gathered a fortune shooting golf right-handed, losing a small bet on a close game and hiking the wager by boasting he could beat his score left-handed. Thompson a natural lefty, was a par golfer from the port side and his list of pigeons was long and impressive. He once propositioned Cokes out of a tidy sum, though not on a golf course.

In the 30s, when hard times fell on everybody, Cokes worked as a pharmaceutical salesman. In writing endless order, the spelling of medical and drug terms became routine and when the foxy Titanic wagered Cokes couldn’t spell asafoetida, Hubert plunged heavily. "Hell, I know how to spell asafoetida," says Cokes, "but I lost the bet. There are actually four different spellings so any way I spelled it Ty said it was wrong and showed me a different spelling in an old dictionary. I paid off but later I found out Ty had hustled me good. I can laugh about it now but back then I felt like a sucker." Cokes laughed. He likes to laugh and does often. There’s a Katzenjammer side to his personality. He likes a good joke, even if it’s on him, or on his father for that matter. His father was once an unsuspecting victim of the son’s levity.

The father was from Arkansas and Hubert’s mother was a Mississippi farm girl. The elder Cokes, a barber by trade, put down his clippers and tried his hand at cotton. But both marriage and the crop were failures and when Hubert, an only child, was still a toddler, his father quit the farm and opened a barber shop in San Antonio, TX. The years raced on and Cokes was a grown man before he saw his father again. It was in 1921, when Cokes was 24, that he wandered into San Antonio. He found his father’s shop, walked in and said he would have a shave.

"The old man," said Cokes, "was a pleasant, easy going sort but he was very proud about his trade. He claimed he was the best barber in the whole state of Texas. Well, he started shaving me and I drew back. I made a face and said," Damn man, can’t you sharpen that razor?" He made all sorts of apologies and tried another razor and I yelled, "That’s worse than the first one-- are you trying to slit my throat?" Now he didn’t know me from a load of hay but he gave me a cold look and said, "Sir, please get out of my shop, I don’t care to serve you." I jumped up and hollered, "Well Mr. Cokes, you’re not only a bad barber, you’re not much of a father either -- don’t you know your own son?" He was so glad to see me he shut up the shop and we had dinner together."
Cokes, laughing heartily, took a long pensive draw on a cigar. "That was a long, long time ago," he said, "a long way back."

Hubert Cokes looks back on 67 years filled with vigorous, hard-nosed, no- holds- barred living It would make a hellova novel but there are too many blank pages and that’s the way Hubert wants it. "I did a lot of brawling and scrapping," he says. "I don’t know if I could take it again. I’m just sure of one thing -- I’m a lot wiser than I was when I left the farm."

The knuckle-dusting Giant who captivated the myth-makers of the 20s has mellowed and sweetened with age. He has acquired the poise of a diplomat and the soft tenderness of a doting grandfather, yet beneath the lordly, dignified demeanor resides the jugular instinct of the Giant of old. Hubert Cokes can still be a ruthless brawler is someone pushes him
You hear all sorts of violent sagas about Hubert Cokes but when you sit over a late cup of coffee with the man and he smiles softly and tells sentimental stories, somehow the twains don’t meet. Some people have a let down when they meet him because there is a vast grey area between Hubert Cokes the Man, and Hubert Cokes the Myth.

"When I first met Hubert I was terribly disappointed, "say Evelyn Wanderone, the tall strikingly beautiful wife of Minnesota Fats. "I had heard all those stories about the Giant and I expected to meet someone nine feet tall."

"Evelyn," said Cokes, sounding very much like Daddy Warbucks lecturing Little Orphan Annie, "your trouble is you’ve been married to Fatty so long that you believe everything he says."