HERCEK FINE BILLIARD CUES
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Burton Spain was one of the most influential cue makers ever. His  influence on cue making is far reaching,  and is as evident now as it was 30 years ago.   As information on cue making in the 1960s and 1970s  becomes more readily available,  the importance of Burton Spain's  contribution becomes increasingly evident. This short biography will  give you a glimpse of Burton Spain the cue maker,  the person,  and the  MENSA member!  His legacy lives on in the work of Joel Hercek, who was  his friend and student until his death in 1994.

Burton Spain Biography   

Burton Spain was a Chicago native who enjoyed  the game of pool. In 1964, at  the age of  24, he began playing at  Howard-Paulina Billiards in the city. It was there that  he met and became  friends with Craig Peterson, who  was making cues at the age  of 18. At  Craig's shop, early in 1965, Burton saw a Titlist forearm that was split  down the middle, and became  fascinated in the construction of the splice.  He could see how it was  made, and convinced himself that he could make a  splice, also. Burton started going to a public wood-working shop at a Chicago  park every  evening, and, before long, he  made his first four point spliced  blank.  He kept turning it down, trying to  make it perfect. When he was  done, he had a blank that was thinner than a shaft,  and only thirteen  inches  long. But he knew he could master blank making. On June 1, 1965, he  rented a  storefront in Chicago and set out to make  cues. Very soon, he was making blanks for his cues that were superior to what was available from  Brunswick. At this  time some custom cue makers did not make their own  spliced blanks, they purchased them from  Brunswick.  When "Tex" Fitzgerald and  "Whitey" Stovall, of Ace Cue Service in Chicago  saw that Burton was making his own high-quality blanks, they wanted to buy  them.  Burton had intended to use them only in his own cues, so he did not  know what to say.   Soon afterwards, Tex  went down to the Jansco Jamboree tournament in Johnson City, He told some cue makers about what  Burton was doing and soon they wanted blanks too.  Before long,  Burton  was selling  blanks to some of the top cue makers of the time,  including  Frank  Paradise, Gordon Hart, Craig Petersen, and George Balabushka.

In June of  1970  Burton had the opportunity to buy and  restore some Graystone Row houses in one of the better neighborhoods in Chicago. He sold  his equipment to John Davis, a tool and die maker who had been  helping  him for  a few years.   John moved the business to a building that he  owned on  Division Street in Chicago.   In 1974, Burton returned as a  partner, and  bought back the business and building a couple of years later.   Burton kept his shop at this location until the end of his career.

Burton had  experimented  with several joint designs for his own cues over the years, and in 1977,  he found one he stuck with.  Although cues made before 1977 may feature a  variety of  joints, Burton Spain cues made after this time have a unique joint with the screw in the shaft.  In the late '70s, Burton called Craig  Peterson who had been living in California for years and convinced him to come back to Chicago to  help him.  Craig worked off and on for Burton for the next several years. Through the late seventies to mid-eighties,  Burton continued to make blanks for other cue makers along with making  cues of his own.  In 1987, Burton stopped all  cue work, except for  servicing cues that he had already made and went to school to learn computer programming.  Burton finished school in 1988, and although he quickly discovered that  he did not like computer programming, he  was unable to return to serious cue work until 1991.   When he did, he set out to make full spliced blanks that were to his  satisfaction.  Although his early blanks featured a full splice, they  were not long enough to continue all the  way into the butt sleeve. This was because the ebony in the points and  lower section of the blanks were to heavy and to expensive.  Burton solved  this problem in 1992 with an  ingenious full spliced blank featuring ebony  points that were  spliced into maple for the handle area. For blanks with points lighter than ebony,  the lower splice simply continued to the butt  sleeve. Burton Spain was truly a gifted cue maker, infact he has been called a cue maker’s cue maker in the industry.  Burton was inducted into the ACA Cuemakers Hall of Fame in 1993 and  into the International Cuemakers Association Hall of Fame in 2005.  Building cues however was not Burton’s only gift,   Burton had a very high IQ and was a member of Mensa and the ISPE  (International Society of Philosophical Enquiry)  To be a  member of ISPE your IQ must must into the top  .1% of the  population.   In 1982 during a mid-month meeting of  Mensa,  Burton gave a speech titled  “Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Billiard Cues And Were Afraid I’d Tell You”   The following is the text of that speech: 


When I  was a teen-ager, one of my haunts was Sheridan Recreation, a bowling  alley and  pool hall in the heart of Uptown – sleazy, down-and-out  Uptown.   Back in 1920 or so, when the building was new, it had been called Leffingwell’s and  it had been large and rather grand.  In the  late 1950’s, it was still  large, but time had eroded much of the
grandeur.   To give you an idea:  the  billiard rooms were on the third floor and entered by a staircase that came from the street to offices on the second floor, then on to the 
billiards on the  third.  In that rough and ready neighborhood it was  impossible to leave that downstairs door open after  the offices had closed and  so, in the evening and on the week-end, the  pool and billiard players went  through the bowling alley and up an inside staircase to the third floor,  and  from there through the only  room that connected the landing with the billiard  rooms.  That connecting room was one of the foulest smelling men’s toilets in God’s creation – and it gave you a pretty good idea of what  you were getting  into. At  least it gave you an idea of what the poolroom was like, but beyond  that was a separate room where three-cushion billiards was played.  Played by old-timers – men who had been boys when  Willie Hoppe, Jake  Schaefer  and Welker Cochran were boys, men who had  learned the game when this  had been Leffingwell’s and the grandeur had been intact.  Now the game had been in long decline, and there were few such as  myself just  learning the game new.  But I didn’t mind. I was  charmed  by those old-timers, Runyonesque as they were.   Steeped in a lifetime of billiard room etiquette with their ritual phrases,  worn and polished  banter, sly witticisms – I thought them grand.  My  special heroes were the  men who played best – performed the sleight -of- hand  that makes ivory billiard balls do magic.  As the royalty of  this ancient kingdom, they had special privileges.  They could  swagger; they could speak small sarcasms;  they could carry their own private  two-piece cues.  Cues with style and elegance; four prong  inlaid cues; cues with mother-of-pearl designs and cues with ivory butt  plates.  Cues engraved with the owner’s name, and cues  bearing the name of some prior owner, some Johnny Layton or Otto Reisalt,  legendary  names they were.  Cues made of Ebony and Brazilian Rosewood by the great Herman Rambow.  Cues in tooled leather cases with small brass nameplates.  Magic instruments no less than those created by Stradivarius and Guarnerius long ago in Cremona.  Years passed from that  first introduction to billiards, and I presumed to own a cue or  two of my  own in that time.   But mine were new-bought  and meager.  The cues that had  fired my magination had been  made in the glory days of billiards.  They had been made at a time when the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co. could  boast  that their consumption of maple for cues was so great that if  would  deplete the open market, and for that reason, they had bought  their own  forest.  Now quoting  from their 1923 catalog:  “Following this purchase, we erected  a saw-mill and lumber camp, consisting of a  little city, including  dwelling-houses, general store, boarding house, a hotel for  superintendents,  repair shops, standard railroad locomotives, freight cars  for logging many miles  of railroad track, steam derrick  and innumerable incidentals, such as horses, oxen, log-truck and steam launch.”  Now those  were times –  times when the making of billiard cues got the respect it  deserved.  Well,  in 1965 my father gave me some money to get started.  I rented  a store, bought some equipment and began to teach myself what I needed to know.  It was hard going for a long time, but everything is   good now although I still own neither forest nor oxen, either  one.


Burton Spain Died in 1994 at the age of 54 from complications of Cancer.     Before Burt passed, he sold his cuemaking  business to Chicago area  cuemaker Joel Hercek.  Along with the sale of the  equipment,  Burton stayed on as long as he could to train Joel in all  aspects of Cue making.  Burton Spain Truly was a cuemaker’s cue maker.

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