In 1974, a small group of Houstonians started playing darts at three local bars that put up British style bristle dartboards. (Soft-tip hadn’t been invented yet.) The original impetus came from a small group of British expats, along with a couple of people who had played darts in Bob McCloud’s recently formed New York darts league. (That’s another story about those early days.)
From my own recollection, Houston’s first darts pub was Zithers, owned by Jeffyx Talbot and located in a near-falling-down house in the Heights. Two dartboards hung on the west wall, across from a rustic bar made from a wooden ship’s hatch.
Furniture consisted of a few bar stools, some ancient easy chairs, and a couple of couches that had apparently been rejected as too decrepit for front-yard use. Lighting was minimal, not excepting the black light bulb over the bar. There was no air conditioning (or central heat) and there was no front door. The last customer to leave at closing time had to help the bartender carry & padlock a heavy wood panel over the door opening.
This was long, long before “gentrification” of the Heights. Gilley’s was bringing “Country” to Pasadena in the early 70’s, but the Heights was mostly still livin’ the 60’s.
Two other bars put up dartboards around the same time, High Noon also in the Heights, and the White House Pub above the motel of the same name, on South Main.
We all got together on Tuesday nights for informal league play, with 301 & 501 as the main games, plus a little Cricket to encourage beginners. Cricket at the time was played on numbers 10 -20, plus the Bull. The throw line was set at 8 feet, although a couple of Brits insisted on throwing from their “official English” distance of 7’ 6”. (There was no official world standard distance, or dartboard, until formation of the ADO & WDF in 1978.)
My throwing form was awful, but I was proud of my first good darts set.. fat 25 gram gold-plated brass darts with “Darrow” shaped turkey-feather flights.
Typical board lighting was a painters clamp-on reflector lamp hanging from a nail in the ceiling. “Lobbed” darts regularly hit the lamps’ aluminum shrouds due to low ceilings at both Zithers & High Noon. Zithers’ floor also had about a 6” slope toward the wall, so the boards appeared higher than normal. Board height is set in reference to the darter’s floor elevation, so one darter brought a surveyor’s transit to the bars to properly set the board height.
High Noon was a cross between biker-bar and hippie-hangout. The band was unique, and rarely sober. The aroma was distinctively hippie era. (Yes, well, you just had to live through the 60’s & 70’s to understand).
I recall one memorable evening playing darts while listening to a musical group consisting of saxaphone, sitar, and bongo drums, alternating PP&M with Tibetan chants. Periodically, the bikers would jump up, run outside for their hogs, and do a biker Conga line through the front door, out the back & around a couple of times. Then everyone would settle down again to the music, bike exhaust fumes, and smell of hmm.. “incense”.
The two dartboards were located on the back wall next to the bathroom door and pay phone. Visiting the bathroom or making a 10 cent pay phone call could be hazardous to one’s health, ‘cause darters didn’t stop their game for anything except the Harleys driving through.
The White House was a fairly normal neighborhood bar of the era, upstairs above a B-grade South Main motel. Except.. it had six (!) bristle dartboards on opposite walls of a long narrow dart room, along with two beat-up pool tables and a few pinball machines near the bar. Stories told at the time hinted that the mob owned the vending machine contract and wasn’t too happy about the introduction of non-coin-op games like darts.
Anyway, about the attached photo. After a couple of years, the group was starting to grow a bit. I’d started my darts business and needed both new customers and places for them to play darts, so for several years spent nearly every night visiting bars, hunting down bar owners, and talking them into putting up dartboards. With help from a couple other darters who helped me build backboards, setup boards & demonstrate the game, by 1977 we had 50 darts bars in town.
Our little group had just been playing league for the fun of it, but we now had enough members to form “divisions” of players having different skill levels. Some teams were getting pretty serious & wanted trophies. Also standard written rules, elected officers, etc. It was also apparent that we were going to need a source of income other than the donations that a few of us occasionally made to cover printing scoresheets & other incidentals.
Darts leagues were starting to grow in New York, Boston, Dallas, SoCal, etc. If we wanted darts to really grow in Houston, it was time to consider a more formal organization. Also, some bars were reluctant to host league play unless there was a legal group for them to deal with.
So, we formed a board of directors, wrote off to some other leagues for copies of their rules, got an assumed name permit, and picked a formal name. We’d generally referred to our group as Houston Darters, or Houston Darts Association, but it had all been pretty informal. At the advice of an attorney, we chose a slightly different name to be “legal” under: Houston Area Darts Association, or H.A.D.A.
(That became Houston Darts Association when the group incorporated in 1980, and then changed to Harris County Darts Association in the early 2000’s. I believe the group is now once again legally named Houston Darts Association.)
Since I was one of the main proponents of growth & becoming a “legal” organization, I was assigned the task of writing up the original versions of most of the new organization’s regulations. That led to my also writing the first formal version of league rules, donating a Dome Book financials ledger, designing the first membership cards, buying receipt books, etc. (I regret that I no longer recall who drew up the H.A.D.A. logo for the membership cards & trophies. Possibly Karen Brown..?)
I think that Jeffyx was president that year. League secretary Jackie Holleschau typed up all of the rules & forms for duplication (remember purple ink?) because she was a professional typist and owned an IBM Selectric typewriter with really cool type fonts. Her husband Alan was Statistician, and I handled promotion & membership recruiting.
As I had a business address that the group could use and had printed up all of the paperwork & forms, a few of us got together at my store one night to setup the books and membership.
That night I paid our new treasurer the $3 annual dues for the newly official H.A.D.A.. Although my membership card was #14, I was the very first paid member of what eventually became the Houston Darts Association.
