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NASHVILLE BILLIARD & PATIO
EVERYTHING FUN THERE IS FOR THE FAMILY, SINCE 1953
B STORY BY HOLLIE DEESE PHOTOGRAPHY BY REEVES SMITH
Brothers Ronnie, Glenn and Cliff Gilchrist run Nashville Billiard & Patio, a business started by their father, Ray, in 1953. You will almost always find at least one of them in the shop.
efore Ray Gilchrist moved to Nashville from New Orleans in 1953 to work at a glass plate company, he had spent some time in the 1940s working at the Saunier-Wilhelm pool table plant in Alabama. So when he wasn’t at his day job, Gilchrist began traveling to the surrounding towns to recover the tables at pool halls. His side hustle grew, and soon Ray’s Billiard Supply was in business — a small shop at 51st and Charlotte, with a pool room upstairs and a little showroom down below, where he displayed new pool tables. In 1982 Ray bought the old Steepleton store on Eighth Avenue, and the business has been in the same location ever since. And it was there his three sons — Ronnie, Cliff and Glenn — practically grew up. “We’d go out on the weekends, help him work on pool tables, refelting them, delivering them, whatever,” Glenn says. Slowly the inventory built. First there were a few pool
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tables. Then they added some card tables, and then bar and kitchen stools — which exploded for them. At one point they had about 250 on display. “We had the largest selection in the state,” Ronnie says. Ray retired in 1997 and passed away in 2002, but his sons have carried on the business and the mission to help create spaces for whole families to gather and enjoy each other. And now their 10,000-square-foot showroom is filled with items their father never would have dreamed they would stock, including theater seating, arcade games, patio furniture and music-synchronized fire pits. The brothers say Nashvillians’ needs go way beyond pool tables now, too, and include arcade games, Skee-Ball, pingpong, golf games, theater seating and shuffleboard. “The game room has really evolved because there are so many options to use that entertainment space,”
