Former pool player, Pladium owner dies, remembered as 'bigger than life'

Former professional pool player Jerry Lee Priest, who founded the iconic Pladium bar in Cape Girardeau, died Thursday at Chateau Girardeau Health Center at the age of 87.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Priest, who began playing pool when he was 7 years old, won three national billiards championships in the senior division.

The Pladium opened Oct. 15, 1959, when Priest put up eight pool tables in the building at 1127 Broadway. Initially, no alcohol was served.

But in 1964, he began selling beer and later on liquor by the drink, according to Southeast Missourian archives.

Its proximity to the university brought a younger crowd in to mingle with the older group. All of them came to socialize, drink and shoot pool.

“People from different walks of life just kind of blended in there,” Priest told the Southeast Missourian in 2004. “It just evolved.”

Gradually, the pool playing was reduced to three tables, leaving more seating and standing room for the other customers.

The Broadway establishment brought in more than frat boys and factory workers. Priest remembered a few famous patrons, including good friend and pool legend Minnesota Fats and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc.

“I remember Kroc sitting in the bar in a tux,” Priest recalled. “He was watching a snooker game and waiting to go goose hunting.”

Over the years, The Pladium served everyone from mayors and prominent business people to Southeast Missouri State University students and football tailgaters.

Priest later sold the bar to Mike Schmidt, and eventually sold the building to Mark and Paul Dirnberger, resulting in the closure of the longtime bar in May 2004.

“I sure am sorry to see it close,” Priest said at the time. “I thought it would be there long after I was gone.”

But in August 2004, the bar reopened as D’Ladiums, which is still in operation.

Cape Girardeau resident Vicki McLemore was a good friend of Priest.

“I met him when I was 21 and started working at The Pladium,” she recalled Friday. McLemore said she worked there for a couple of years.

She said she met her future husband at the bar and her first accounting job interview took place there, too.

McLemore said Priest’s friends regularly showed up to play pool.

“I would just sit on the beer cooler and watch,” she remembered.

“He was bigger than life for me,” she said.

“He was quick-witted,” McLemore said. “He didn’t put up with anybody’s crap.”

McLemore said “tons of very, very influential people” visited the Pladium. “That is where a lot of business deals were done,” she said.

She described Priest as kindhearted.

“He would give you the shirt off his back,” McLemore said.

“Jerry was a real upstanding gentleman,” she said.

A visitation will be held from 9 a.m. to noon Aug. 24, followed by the funeral service at Ford and Sons Mount Auburn Funeral Home. Burial will be in Russell Heights Cemetery in Jackson.

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