A couple of days every week, a group of old friends gets together on the second floor of the Ingram Senior Center to swap stories, tell jokes and shoot pool. For Joe Swift, a retired police officer, the morning sessions are an opportunity to reminisce and spend time playing a game with some good friends that he has loved since he was a schoolboy.

“We used to play hookey to play pool,” said Swift. “That’s when you could play pool for a nickel.”

“We had nothing else to do,” Nick Sambataro, a postal worker for 30 years before retiring 26 years ago, said as he interrupted Swift. “There was no such thing as going any place.”

Swift and Sambataro are part of a group that changes in size from day to day, but has as many as 12 regular members.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday they get together and shoot pool on an old, worn table from about 8:30 in the morning until 1 p.m. Flipping coins to divide up into teams of two, they take turns trying to outplay each other.

“We get a lot of laughs and have a lot of fun,” said Ronald St. Amand. “We enjoy it.”

On Aug. 6, St. Amand – who practices on his own pool table back home in Hampstead, but doesn’t enjoy it nearly as much as playing with friends – and the other members of his group will challenge the town employees in a tournament.

In the meantime, their greatest challenge is remembering whose turn it is to take a shot.

“We’ll argue for hours on who is partners, who’s got high or low, whose shot is it,” St. Amand said. “We talk for 15 minutes and nobody knows whose shot it is.”

They began playing together about six years ago when the senior center first opened in Salem and have kept the weekly tradition alive since then. For fewer than five hours three times a week, they talk pool, drink coffee and eat pastries.

“I really enjoying being with my friends here every week,” said Lou Alterisio. While he has been playing pool with the group for most of the six years they have spent on the second floor of the senior center, Alterisio just retired as a truck driver and mechanic in July.

“I’ve been playing here since the place opened up,” he said. “I never played pool before. When I was a kid, maybe. Some of these guys are pretty good.”

“I started at 12 years old and I’m still lousy,” Sambataro said with a smile and a pool cue resting across his knee.

Some of them have known each other since their childhood days. Sambataro is joined regularly at the pool table by his cousin, Sam Laudana. Together they’re known as “the Italian stallions” by the others.

Childhood friends Joe Swift and his partner, Joe Perrotta, remembered playing high school basketball together.

“(Joe Swift) was the only one who could make a basket,” Perrotta said, laughing. “As soon as you got the ball you passed it along to Joe.”

“We were friends as teenagers, but we don’t talk about that,” Swift said with a smile. “All of us were born during the Depression. We were juvenile delinquents. We learned to steal hubcaps at a young age.”

As senior center officials begin to move forward with plans to expand the second story before the end of the year, Swift, St. Amand and the others are hoping they might end up with a new pool table or two. The current table – worn and dented from so many years of use – has been at the senior center since it opened. But for the time being, they are happy just to shoot the breeze, and pool, with one another.

“We take on all comers,” Swift said with a grin from his seat next to the table.