William A. Spinks
Encyclopedia
known professionally as or (in the initialing practice common in his era) , and occasionally also referred to as ), was an American
professional player of carom billiards in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to being amateur Pacific Coast
Billiards Champion several times, a world champion contender in more than one cue sports discipline, and an exhibition player in Europe, he became the co-inventor (with William Hoskins) in 1897 of modern billiard cue chalk. He was originally (and again in retirement from the billiards circuit) a California
n, but spent much of his professional career in Chicago, Illinois. At his peak, his was a household name in U.S. billiards; the New York Times labeled Spinks "[one] of the most brilliant players among the veterans of the game", and he still holds the world record for points scored in a row (1,010) using a particular shot type. Aside from his billiards playing career, he founded a lucrative sporting goods manufacturing business, and was both an oil company investor and director, and a flower and fruit farm operator and horticulturist
, originator of the eponymous Spinks cultivar
of avocado
.
s used by players on the leather of their cue stick
s.
(used since at least 1807) helps the tip better grip the (very briefly) on a and prevents , as well as permitting the player to impart a great deal more to the ball, vital for and for spin-intensive shots, such as . In the 1800s, true chalk
(generally calcium carbonate lumps, suspended from strings), and even plaster
was often used, but players experimented with other powdery, abrasive substances, since true chalk had a deleterious effect on the game equipment, not only discoloring the billiard cloth but also allegedly actually causing damage to the fabric.
In 1892, Spinks was particularly impressed by a piece of natural chalk-like substance obtained in France, and presented it to chemist and electrical engineer William Hoskins (1862–1934) of Chicago for analysis, who determined it was porous volcanic
rock (pumice
) originally probably from Mount Etna, Sicily
. Using the rock as a starting place, the two experimented together with different formulations of various materials to achieve the cue ball "" that Spinks sought.
They eventually narrowed their search to a mixture of Illinois-sourced silica and the abrasive substance corundum
or aloxite (a form of aluminum oxide, Al2O3), founding with a factory in Chicago after securing a patent on March 9, 1897. Spinks himself later left the company as an active party, which retained his name and was subsequently run by Hoskins, and later by Hoskins's cousin Edmund F. Hoskin, after Hoskins moved on to other projects.
While regular calcium carbonate chalk had been packaged and marketed on a local scale by various parties (English player Jack Carr's "Twisting Powder" of the 1820s being the earliest recorded example, although considered dubious by some billiards researchers), the Spinks Company product (which is still emulated by modern manufacturers with differing, proprietary compounds) effectively revolutionized billiards. The modern product provided a cue tip friction enhancer that allowed the tip to better grip the cue ball briefly and impart a previously unattainable amount of spin on the ball, which consequently allowed more precise and extreme , made miscueing less likely, made and shots more plausible, and ultimately spawned the new cue sport of artistic billiards
. Even the basic and shots of pool
games (such as eight-ball and nine-ball) depend heavily on the effects and properties of modern billiard "chalk".
Spinks made a "fortune" from his co-invention and the company that sold it to the world.
(arguably the most difficult of all cue sports aside from artistic billiards
), especially 14.2 and later 18.2 balkline, and skilled enough at the even more difficult 18.1 variant to hold his own against World Champions.
On December 19, 1893 in Brooklyn, Spinks played in an exhibition
that also featured the great Maurice Daly and young champion Frank Ives, and gave demonstrations of fancy shots (see illustration). He also played a 14.2 balkline match against World Champion Jacob Schaefer, Sr.; Schaefer won, 250–162, with a high and average of 88 and 20 (respectively) to Spinks's 33 and 13.
In 1894, he was living in Cincinnati, Ohio
, and in January of that year offered a convoluted challenge to veteran Edward McLaughlin of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
, to play him either a single 14.2 match to 600 for US$
500 each (a substantial amount of money in that period for someone to put up personally on a bet – approximately $ in current dollars) in New York City
, or one in New York and one in Philadelphia, one in Cincinnati and one in Philadelphia, whatever McLaughlin preferred, and even offered to pay travel expenses to Cincinnati.
Spinks issued an even more curious challenge in November 1894, to play 14.2 balkline against (almost) any challenger to 600 points for a $1,000 pot again, and while including French champion Edward Fournil, the bet specifically the top-three names in that era of the sport, namely Shaefer, Ives and George Franklin Slosson. The challenge was accepted by well-known Chicago pro Thomas Gallagher (in a match that future champion Ora Morningstar traveled all the way to Chicago to see).
Spinks was apparently not a fan of upstart cueist Ives in particular. Days after issuing his caveat-laden challenge, Spinks was described by an onlooking journalist as "very uneasy until the seventeenth inning" as a spectator at the 14.2 balkline World Champion challenge between Ives and incumbent Schaefer; the latter's point total had been trailing, sometimes badly, in all sixteen previous until he rallied in the final inning of the . Spinks, along with Gallagher, even helped Schaefer train in 14.2 for another match against Ives, in October of that year; though Spinks lost this practice match 600–369 (averages 23 vs. 14), he had a high of 109, to Schaefer's 102 (and Gallagher's 157 ).
Spinks was reported in the press in 1895 to be specifically desired as a competitor in an upcoming seven-man invitational tournament for "second class" professional players (i.e., not the top 3), organized by Daly, and with as much as $1,200 (approx. $ in current dollars) .
Spinks had moved to Chicago by 1896, and was perfecting his billiard chalk with Hoskins. That year he was noted for besting McLaughlin at 14.2 by a comfortable 2500–2300 margin (with averages of 11 vs. 10) in a five-evening, $250 (approx. $$, in current dollars) 14.2 match, December 8–12, in Slosson's New York City billiard hall. At one point he had trailed rather badly, 1500–1880, after McLaughlin pulled off a stunning run of 140 (Spinks's highest recorded run of the match was 69).
By 1897, the year of the launch of Spinks & Company, he had evidently overcome his seeming reluctance to face World Champions again (perhaps from having several years' experience with his own product prototypes). Spinks competed in (but did not win) a December 3 open tournament.
The next month in New York City, a January 15–21, 1898 double-elimination
, five-man invitational 18.2 balkline tournament was arranged, again in Chicago. It was a handicapped
event, featuring the five top players from the previous event – Schaefer and Ives, as World Champions, had to reach 600 points to Spinks's, William Catton's and George Butler Sutton's 260. Without having to rely on the 600-point handicap, Spinks beat Schaefer flat-out, 260–139 (with a high of 48 vs. Schaefer's 38) in his January 18 second game. Spinks (with a high run of "only" 44) was himself defeated in a very close 249–260 third game a day later by Catton (high run 56) – by way of comparison, the same night Ives trounced Sutton by a whopping 400–160. By January 20, Spinks seemed to be running out of steam, as Sutton took him 260–118, (high runs 73 vs. 30), and he lost again 154–400 (with another high run of 44) to Ives a day later. (In Spinks's defense, he not only did better against Ives than Catton had, but Ives also had a very impressive high run of 136, making it virtually impossible to catch up.) This loss put Spinks out of the tournament at 4th place.
On January 11, Spinks (with a high run of 51) beat former amateur champion and then-pro Calvin Demarest
, 250–199, in only 15 innings – despite scoring 0 points in 4 innings and only 1 point in another – by building several solid runs in the innings in which things went his way. For all intents and purposes it was a 10-inning win. Demarest took his revenge only days later, defeating Spinks in a close 250–225, 23-inning game on January 13, despite Spinks's high run of 78 (his highest 18.2 run on record in publicly-available sources, and considerably higher than Demarest's 52 that night). Spinks lost to him again the very next day, 175–250, in an exhibition game
, despite Spinks's solid high run of 69, and also beat veteran pro Tom Gallagher.
In January 1909, just prior to an 18.1 balkline championship at Madison Square Garden (in which Spinks was not competing), he and Mauricy Daly were observed playing practice games with Sutton for the latter's pre-event training, in Daly's billiard hall in New York City, on multiple occasions over a several-day stretch. While Spinks lost all but one of the recorded matches of this series, one loss was by a hair, at 400–399, another was 400–370, and his victory was a surprising 300–194 – and 18.1 was not his preferred game.
Many articles of the era stress that Spinks was a Californian, because during this period American billiards was completely dominated by East-Coasters
and a few Midwesterners.
In August 1915, Spinks was tapped to join a consultative panel of notable players and major billiard hall proprietors to help develop a new handicapping system for balkline billiards, organized by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company
, at that time the organizers of the World Championships. The inspiration for the new system was simply making it possible for the newly ascendant Willie Hoppe
to be meaningfully challenged (his near-unassailability was hurting billiard tournament revenues, because the outcome was considered foreordained by many potential ticket-buyers), although the system was expected to level the playing field in other ways, especially making it easier for skilled amateurs to enter the professional ranks.
Well into the 1920s, Spinks was still a well-respected figure in the billiards industry, and wrote articles for publications such as Billiards Magazine, in which he sometimes focused on rather esoteric topics such as in his January 1923 piece on "Ventilation of Billiard Rooms".
Spinks described himself as a director of an oil company as of 1900. He invested money from his billiard equipment corporation in the petroleum industry
in California.
Canyon, near Duarte
, California, where Spinks resided at the time. He described himself as a flower farmer (among other such specialists in the area) in 1910, and later as an "avocado rancher". As a pomology
horticulturist, he developed the Spinks avocado cultivar. Spinks was active in the growers' community, and in 1922 hosted a large regional farm bureau meeting of avocado farmers at his ranch-land "mountain estate". Although active as a floriculturist
, Spinks made no known lasting contributions to that field.
Considered "famous" by 1918, the Duarte-based Spinks avocado orchards were contracted to supply seedlings in 1919 for the palace of Xu Shichang, the President of China before communism
, and other prestigious gardens in Asia. The Spinks varietal was eventually supplanted in popularity by the Hass avocado, the dominant commercial strain today.
, California, to struggling farmer William, Sr., and wife Cynthia J. (Prather) Spinks. He had blue eyes, dark hair and a ruddy complexion, and was 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall by adulthood. His education is obscure.
On September 1, 1891 he married Clara Alexandria Karlson (b. December 12, 1871, Gothenburg, Sweden, immigrated 1872; d. October 4, 1949, Los Angeles
); they were to remain together for over 40 years. They returned to California from Chicago before the turn of the century. After a period in a San Francisco apartment (ca. 1900), they lived in the then-rural Los Angeles suburbs of Duarte (ca. 1910) where their farm was, and Monrovia
(later, by 1920) where they maintained a modest house. After William's business success, the couple became extensive world travelers.
William Spinks died January 15, 1933, aged 67, in Monrovia, California. In Los Angeles County's San Gabriel Valley
, Spinks Canyon, its stream Spinks Canyon Creek, and the local major residential thoroughfare Spinks Canyon Road (running through Duarte's northernmost residential area, Duarte Mesa), are named after him.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
professional player of carom billiards in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to being amateur Pacific Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
Billiards Champion several times, a world champion contender in more than one cue sports discipline, and an exhibition player in Europe, he became the co-inventor (with William Hoskins) in 1897 of modern billiard cue chalk. He was originally (and again in retirement from the billiards circuit) a California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
n, but spent much of his professional career in Chicago, Illinois. At his peak, his was a household name in U.S. billiards; the New York Times labeled Spinks "[one] of the most brilliant players among the veterans of the game", and he still holds the world record for points scored in a row (1,010) using a particular shot type. Aside from his billiards playing career, he founded a lucrative sporting goods manufacturing business, and was both an oil company investor and director, and a flower and fruit farm operator and horticulturist
Horticulture
Horticulture is the industry and science of plant cultivation including the process of preparing soil for the planting of seeds, tubers, or cuttings. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, crop production, plant breeding and genetic...
, originator of the eponymous Spinks cultivar
Cultivar
A cultivar'Cultivar has two meanings as explained under Formal definition. When used in reference to a taxon, the word does not apply to an individual plant but to all those plants sharing the unique characteristics that define the cultivar. is a plant or group of plants selected for desirable...
of avocado
Avocado
The avocado is a tree native to Central Mexico, classified in the flowering plant family Lauraceae along with cinnamon, camphor and bay laurel...
.
As an inventor (1892–97)
While Spinks was a world-class player, his lasting contribution to cue sports was the innovations he brought to the game and the industry resulting from his fascination with the abrasiveAbrasive
An abrasive is a material, often a mineral, that is used to shape or finish a workpiece through rubbing which leads to part of the workpiece being worn away...
s used by players on the leather of their cue stick
Cue stick
A cue stick , is an item of sporting equipment essential to the games of pool, snooker and carom billiards. It is used to strike a ball, usually the...
s.
(used since at least 1807) helps the tip better grip the (very briefly) on a and prevents , as well as permitting the player to impart a great deal more to the ball, vital for and for spin-intensive shots, such as . In the 1800s, true chalk
Chalk
Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....
(generally calcium carbonate lumps, suspended from strings), and even plaster
Plaster
Plaster is a building material used for coating walls and ceilings. Plaster starts as a dry powder similar to mortar or cement and like those materials it is mixed with water to form a paste which liberates heat and then hardens. Unlike mortar and cement, plaster remains quite soft after setting,...
was often used, but players experimented with other powdery, abrasive substances, since true chalk had a deleterious effect on the game equipment, not only discoloring the billiard cloth but also allegedly actually causing damage to the fabric.
In 1892, Spinks was particularly impressed by a piece of natural chalk-like substance obtained in France, and presented it to chemist and electrical engineer William Hoskins (1862–1934) of Chicago for analysis, who determined it was porous volcanic
Vulcanism
Vulcanism may refer to* Volcanism or volcanic activity.* Plutonism, a scientific theory of the Earth....
rock (pumice
Pumice
Pumice is a textural term for a volcanic rock that is a solidified frothy lava typically created when super-heated, highly pressurized rock is violently ejected from a volcano. It can be formed when lava and water are mixed. This unusual formation is due to the simultaneous actions of rapid...
) originally probably from Mount Etna, Sicily
Mount Etna
Mount Etna is an active stratovolcano on the east coast of Sicily, close to Messina and Catania. It is the tallest active volcano in Europe, currently standing high, though this varies with summit eruptions; the mountain is 21 m higher than it was in 1981.. It is the highest mountain in...
. Using the rock as a starting place, the two experimented together with different formulations of various materials to achieve the cue ball "" that Spinks sought.
Corundum
Corundum is a crystalline form of aluminium oxide with traces of iron, titanium and chromium. It is a rock-forming mineral. It is one of the naturally clear transparent materials, but can have different colors when impurities are present. Transparent specimens are used as gems, called ruby if red...
or aloxite (a form of aluminum oxide, Al2O3), founding with a factory in Chicago after securing a patent on March 9, 1897. Spinks himself later left the company as an active party, which retained his name and was subsequently run by Hoskins, and later by Hoskins's cousin Edmund F. Hoskin, after Hoskins moved on to other projects.
While regular calcium carbonate chalk had been packaged and marketed on a local scale by various parties (English player Jack Carr's "Twisting Powder" of the 1820s being the earliest recorded example, although considered dubious by some billiards researchers), the Spinks Company product (which is still emulated by modern manufacturers with differing, proprietary compounds) effectively revolutionized billiards. The modern product provided a cue tip friction enhancer that allowed the tip to better grip the cue ball briefly and impart a previously unattainable amount of spin on the ball, which consequently allowed more precise and extreme , made miscueing less likely, made and shots more plausible, and ultimately spawned the new cue sport of artistic billiards
Artistic billiards
Artistic billiards, sometimes called fantasy billiards or fantaisie classique, is a carom billiards discipline in which players compete at performing 76 preset shots of varying difficulty...
. Even the basic and shots of pool
Pocket billiards
Pool, also more formally known as pocket billiards or pool billiards , is the family of cue sports and games played on a pool table having six receptacles called pockets along the , into which balls are deposited as the main goal of play. Popular versions include eight-ball and nine-ball...
games (such as eight-ball and nine-ball) depend heavily on the effects and properties of modern billiard "chalk".
Spinks made a "fortune" from his co-invention and the company that sold it to the world.
As a player
Spinks was a formidable specialist and professional competitor in straight rail billiards (early on), and balkline billiardsBalkline and straight rail
Balkline is the overarching title of a large array of carom billiards games generally played with two and a third, red , on a -covered, 5 foot × 10 foot, less table that is divided by on the cloth into marked regions called...
(arguably the most difficult of all cue sports aside from artistic billiards
Artistic billiards
Artistic billiards, sometimes called fantasy billiards or fantaisie classique, is a carom billiards discipline in which players compete at performing 76 preset shots of varying difficulty...
), especially 14.2 and later 18.2 balkline, and skilled enough at the even more difficult 18.1 variant to hold his own against World Champions.
1890s: Rise as a professional contender
He began his competitive professional playing career in Brooklyn, New York, ca. 1892, at about 27 years of age.Exhibition game
An exhibition game is a sporting event in which there is no competitive value of any significant kind to any competitor regardless of the outcome of the competition...
that also featured the great Maurice Daly and young champion Frank Ives, and gave demonstrations of fancy shots (see illustration). He also played a 14.2 balkline match against World Champion Jacob Schaefer, Sr.; Schaefer won, 250–162, with a high and average of 88 and 20 (respectively) to Spinks's 33 and 13.
In 1894, he was living in Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio. Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located to north of the Ohio River at the Ohio-Kentucky border, near Indiana. The population within city limits is 296,943 according to the 2010 census, making it Ohio's...
, and in January of that year offered a convoluted challenge to veteran Edward McLaughlin of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
, to play him either a single 14.2 match to 600 for US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
500 each (a substantial amount of money in that period for someone to put up personally on a bet – approximately $ in current dollars) in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, or one in New York and one in Philadelphia, one in Cincinnati and one in Philadelphia, whatever McLaughlin preferred, and even offered to pay travel expenses to Cincinnati.
Spinks issued an even more curious challenge in November 1894, to play 14.2 balkline against (almost) any challenger to 600 points for a $1,000 pot again, and while including French champion Edward Fournil, the bet specifically the top-three names in that era of the sport, namely Shaefer, Ives and George Franklin Slosson. The challenge was accepted by well-known Chicago pro Thomas Gallagher (in a match that future champion Ora Morningstar traveled all the way to Chicago to see).
Spinks was apparently not a fan of upstart cueist Ives in particular. Days after issuing his caveat-laden challenge, Spinks was described by an onlooking journalist as "very uneasy until the seventeenth inning" as a spectator at the 14.2 balkline World Champion challenge between Ives and incumbent Schaefer; the latter's point total had been trailing, sometimes badly, in all sixteen previous until he rallied in the final inning of the . Spinks, along with Gallagher, even helped Schaefer train in 14.2 for another match against Ives, in October of that year; though Spinks lost this practice match 600–369 (averages 23 vs. 14), he had a high of 109, to Schaefer's 102 (and Gallagher's 157 ).
Spinks was reported in the press in 1895 to be specifically desired as a competitor in an upcoming seven-man invitational tournament for "second class" professional players (i.e., not the top 3), organized by Daly, and with as much as $1,200 (approx. $ in current dollars) .
Spinks had moved to Chicago by 1896, and was perfecting his billiard chalk with Hoskins. That year he was noted for besting McLaughlin at 14.2 by a comfortable 2500–2300 margin (with averages of 11 vs. 10) in a five-evening, $250 (approx. $$, in current dollars) 14.2 match, December 8–12, in Slosson's New York City billiard hall. At one point he had trailed rather badly, 1500–1880, after McLaughlin pulled off a stunning run of 140 (Spinks's highest recorded run of the match was 69).
By 1897, the year of the launch of Spinks & Company, he had evidently overcome his seeming reluctance to face World Champions again (perhaps from having several years' experience with his own product prototypes). Spinks competed in (but did not win) a December 3 open tournament.
The next month in New York City, a January 15–21, 1898 double-elimination
Double-elimination tournament
A double-elimination tournament is a type of elimination tournament competition in which a participant ceases to be eligible to win the tournament's championship upon having lost two games or matches...
, five-man invitational 18.2 balkline tournament was arranged, again in Chicago. It was a handicapped
Handicapping
Handicapping, in sport and games, is the practice of assigning advantage through scoring compensation or other advantage given to different contestants to equalize the chances of winning. The word also applies to the various methods by which the advantage is calculated...
event, featuring the five top players from the previous event – Schaefer and Ives, as World Champions, had to reach 600 points to Spinks's, William Catton's and George Butler Sutton's 260. Without having to rely on the 600-point handicap, Spinks beat Schaefer flat-out, 260–139 (with a high of 48 vs. Schaefer's 38) in his January 18 second game. Spinks (with a high run of "only" 44) was himself defeated in a very close 249–260 third game a day later by Catton (high run 56) – by way of comparison, the same night Ives trounced Sutton by a whopping 400–160. By January 20, Spinks seemed to be running out of steam, as Sutton took him 260–118, (high runs 73 vs. 30), and he lost again 154–400 (with another high run of 44) to Ives a day later. (In Spinks's defense, he not only did better against Ives than Catton had, but Ives also had a very impressive high run of 136, making it virtually impossible to catch up.) This loss put Spinks out of the tournament at 4th place.
1900s: World-class competitor
Spinks was still considered a newsworthy contender over a decade later, for the World 18.2 Balkline Championship of 1909, being enumerated in "a fine list of entries" anticipated for the March event.On January 11, Spinks (with a high run of 51) beat former amateur champion and then-pro Calvin Demarest
Calvin Demarest
Calvin W. Demarest of Chicago, was a national amateur and professional carom billiards champion from Chicago in the early 20th century known for an open, crowd-pleasing style of play. He later gained notoriety for stabbing his wife and injuring his mother during a suicidal psychotic episode...
, 250–199, in only 15 innings – despite scoring 0 points in 4 innings and only 1 point in another – by building several solid runs in the innings in which things went his way. For all intents and purposes it was a 10-inning win. Demarest took his revenge only days later, defeating Spinks in a close 250–225, 23-inning game on January 13, despite Spinks's high run of 78 (his highest 18.2 run on record in publicly-available sources, and considerably higher than Demarest's 52 that night). Spinks lost to him again the very next day, 175–250, in an exhibition game
Exhibition game
An exhibition game is a sporting event in which there is no competitive value of any significant kind to any competitor regardless of the outcome of the competition...
, despite Spinks's solid high run of 69, and also beat veteran pro Tom Gallagher.
In January 1909, just prior to an 18.1 balkline championship at Madison Square Garden (in which Spinks was not competing), he and Mauricy Daly were observed playing practice games with Sutton for the latter's pre-event training, in Daly's billiard hall in New York City, on multiple occasions over a several-day stretch. While Spinks lost all but one of the recorded matches of this series, one loss was by a hair, at 400–399, another was 400–370, and his victory was a surprising 300–194 – and 18.1 was not his preferred game.
Many articles of the era stress that Spinks was a Californian, because during this period American billiards was completely dominated by East-Coasters
East Coast of the United States
The East Coast of the United States, also known as the Eastern Seaboard, refers to the easternmost coastal states in the United States, which touch the Atlantic Ocean and stretch up to Canada. The term includes the U.S...
and a few Midwesterners.
1910s–1920s: Setting a record and leveling the field
Spinks was noted in 1912 for a still-unbroken world record of 1,010 continuous points at 18.2 balkline using the "" (a form of ), and could have made more, but stopped, before rules were instituted especially to curtail the effectiveness of the chuck nurse. The use of such repetitive, predictable shots by Spinks, Schaefer Sr. and their contemporaries led to the development of the more advanced and restrictive 14.1 balkline rules (invented in 1907, but not played professionally until 1914), which further thwarted the ease of reliance on nurse shots than the older balkline games already did.In August 1915, Spinks was tapped to join a consultative panel of notable players and major billiard hall proprietors to help develop a new handicapping system for balkline billiards, organized by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company
Brunswick Corporation
The Brunswick Corporation , formerly known as the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, is a United States-based corporation that has been involved in manufacturing a wide variety of products since 1845. Brunswick's global headquarters is in the northern Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois...
, at that time the organizers of the World Championships. The inspiration for the new system was simply making it possible for the newly ascendant Willie Hoppe
Willie Hoppe
William Frederick Hoppe , known predominantly as Willie Hoppe , was an internationally renowned American professional carom billiards champion, who was posthumously inducted into the Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame in 1966.-Biography:Hoppe was born in Cornwall on Hudson, New York on...
to be meaningfully challenged (his near-unassailability was hurting billiard tournament revenues, because the outcome was considered foreordained by many potential ticket-buyers), although the system was expected to level the playing field in other ways, especially making it easier for skilled amateurs to enter the professional ranks.
Well into the 1920s, Spinks was still a well-respected figure in the billiards industry, and wrote articles for publications such as Billiards Magazine, in which he sometimes focused on rather esoteric topics such as in his January 1923 piece on "Ventilation of Billiard Rooms".
As an oilman
Spinks described himself as a director of an oil company as of 1900. He invested money from his billiard equipment corporation in the petroleum industry
Petroleum industry
The petroleum industry includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting , and marketing petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline...
in California.
As a farm operator
While Spinks was not operating a farm as of 1900, the W. A. Spinks Ranch was a large enough operation by 1909 to employ a staff of farmhands, and included land in BradburyBradbury, California
Bradbury is a small, affluent city in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is located in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains below Angeles National Forest. Bradbury is bordered by the city of Monrovia to the west, and Duarte to the south and...
Canyon, near Duarte
Duarte, California
Duarte is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 21,321, down from 21,486 at the 2000 census....
, California, where Spinks resided at the time. He described himself as a flower farmer (among other such specialists in the area) in 1910, and later as an "avocado rancher". As a pomology
Pomology
Pomology is a branch of botany that studies and cultivates pome fruit, particularly from the genera Malus, Prunus and Pyrus belonging to the Rosaceae. The term is sometimes applied more broadly, to the cultivation of any type of fruit...
horticulturist, he developed the Spinks avocado cultivar. Spinks was active in the growers' community, and in 1922 hosted a large regional farm bureau meeting of avocado farmers at his ranch-land "mountain estate". Although active as a floriculturist
Floriculture
Floriculture, or flower farming, is a discipline of horticulture concerned with the cultivation of flowering and ornamental plants for gardens and for floristry, comprising the floral industry...
, Spinks made no known lasting contributions to that field.
The Spinks avocado
In 1920, Spinks provided a supply of his avocados for a University of California at Berkeley and California Avocado Association comparison of avocado strains. The Spinks avocado fruit was shown to be more resistant to freezing than other avocados. They also proved to be the second-longest-lasting in storage out of the ten varieties tested.Considered "famous" by 1918, the Duarte-based Spinks avocado orchards were contracted to supply seedlings in 1919 for the palace of Xu Shichang, the President of China before communism
President of the Republic of China
The President of the Republic of China is the head of state and commander-in-chief of the Republic of China . The Republic of China was founded on January 1, 1912, to govern all of China...
, and other prestigious gardens in Asia. The Spinks varietal was eventually supplanted in popularity by the Hass avocado, the dominant commercial strain today.
Private life
William A. Spinks, Jr., the youngest of five children, was born July 11, 1865 in the then-small township of San JoseSan Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
, California, to struggling farmer William, Sr., and wife Cynthia J. (Prather) Spinks. He had blue eyes, dark hair and a ruddy complexion, and was 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 m) tall by adulthood. His education is obscure.
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
); they were to remain together for over 40 years. They returned to California from Chicago before the turn of the century. After a period in a San Francisco apartment (ca. 1900), they lived in the then-rural Los Angeles suburbs of Duarte (ca. 1910) where their farm was, and Monrovia
Monrovia, California
Monrovia is a city located in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The population was 36,590 at the 2010 census, down from 36,929 at the 2000 census...
(later, by 1920) where they maintained a modest house. After William's business success, the couple became extensive world travelers.
William Spinks died January 15, 1933, aged 67, in Monrovia, California. In Los Angeles County's San Gabriel Valley
San Gabriel Valley
The San Gabriel Valley is one of the principal valleys of Southern California, United States. It lies to the east of Los Angeles, to the north of the Puente Hills, to the south of the San Gabriel Mountains, and west of the Inland Empire. It derives its name from the San Gabriel River that flows...
, Spinks Canyon, its stream Spinks Canyon Creek, and the local major residential thoroughfare Spinks Canyon Road (running through Duarte's northernmost residential area, Duarte Mesa), are named after him.