Growing Up a Pool Hustler's Daughter
King of the Jungle
My Dad, Fred Bentivegna, always enjoyed talking about Bushman, Lincoln Park Zoo's famous gorilla from the first half of the twentieth century. I kn...
To All The Jewish Godmothers I Loved Before: By The Pool Hustler's Daughter
I am not the most religious person, but I do believe in a shared, universal god. I also prefer to consider myself a "Transcendalist" Catholic. I le...
Freddy and Food
In regard to food, my father baked his own bread, roasted his own hot, red pepper flakes that he kept in his pocket, made his own sausages(in his p...
Growing up a Pool Hustler's Daughter by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
When I was a kid in Chicago in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, Sundays were spent at the pool room alone with my father.
If my Dad had...
Why Pool Hustler's Are Important by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
Neophyte or not, when one thinks of the game of pool the names that come to mind are usually Fast Eddie Felson or Minnesota Fats. The former is a f...
Sunday Mornings on Maxwell Street by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
Sometimes I wake up on Sunday mornings wishing my Dad was going to take me to old Maxwell Street in his white Camaro to buy socks, blues records an...
Freddy, The Porn Producer and The Outfit Guy by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
The Subterranean world of America is a mixed bunch, but for the most part, it's a group of people who don't earn a living "on the square." In perha...
Brooklyn Pancho hosts Freddy's 50th Birthday
Brooklyn Pancho(a man with many names) and my father fought constantly - in Italian, Yiddish and Jive - about ridiculous topics only important to h...
Chicago's "Black" South Side by: Catherine Bentivegna Adami
If Freddy Bentivegna hadn't been brave enough to show up to the all black pool rooms on 63rd and Cottage Grove, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ...
Dickie Betts and Road Music by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
When my father went "on the road" it was always in an American car -a Camaro, a Caprice Classic, and then after he turned forty - it had to be a Ca...
Where the Boys Are by: Cat Bentivegna Adami
"If a girl doesn't make out with a man once in a while, she may as well leave campus." - Where the Boys Are, 1960 Part of being an American folk he...
World's Best Pool Rooms Past and Present
A very happy photograph of Freddy the Beard with his granddaughter, Francesca aka "Ceca" at Red Shoes Billiards. I'm so glad both his grandkids wer...