Bowling for Memories

Tomorrow we are doing something I can’t remember doing for a long time…we are going bowling with a group of neighborhood friends. Growing up in Wisconsin in my elementary school days, bowling was a regular activity. I recall it was 35 cents per game, a dime to rent shoes and free to use any of the bowling balls you could find to fit your fingers. We would regularly roll three games and try like hell not to get a blister on or near your throwing thumb. The choice of ball was key and I would spend a good deal of time selecting several balls that felt like they might work. We were not sophisticated fingertip bowlers who needed that special touch to put a wicked hook on the ball to come into the 1-3 pocket like a champ. We were ham-handed bowlers that just wanted the holes to be big enough not to stick to our fingers (particularly the thumb) and be spaced out well enough to make the throwing somewhat comfortable. it was important not to get a ball with any defects in the thumb hole since that would surely irritate after a few rolls. The choice of shoes was far less sensitive since bowling shoes, in all their colorful glory, were laced in such a way as to accumulate most any size foot with approximately the right size length. The key to a good bowling shoes was that the bottom leather was smooth and would slide easily over the boards on the lane. One of the important preparations I recall was getting that slide just right so that you could guide the ball properly down the lane and not have your foot stop abruptly and send you cartwheeling head over heels out onto the boards as you flung the ball.

Once you got all geared up you would find a spot on the molded plastic seating around your twin lanes and decide who would be the scorekeeper. Sometimes the scoring was just Dornbush and paper affair and sometimes there was an overhead projection that required a grease pencil. One way or another, it was ten columns for each player (usually up to four on a team) with twin boxes for strikes and spares and a space for the frame score total. We all learned how to score bowling pretty quickly and knew that the key was that you got to add two balls worth of pins to a strike and one ball worth of pins to a spare. A perfect first frame score was therefore 30 if you got three strikes in a row (a turkey), and you certainly wanted to get into double digits at least, which meant that you started with a spare and then one more second frame roll pin count. The last or tenth frame was clutch, since a strike would give you two extra rolls that other non-styling players didn’t get. A spare in the tenth frame would at least net you an extra ball. Not marking in the tenth frame was something akin to a bowling tragedy. If you scored less than 100, it was an embarrassment and you were a clear novice. A score of 130-170 was always respectable and meant that you got more strikes and spares than open frames. A good game would be one that Sturdivant’s or exceeded 200, which was the mark of excellence. Among regular league bowlers, a 700 series (three games) is a notable achievement, meaning you had average 233 in three games. Obviously, a perfect score is a 300, but among us juvenile bowlers, that was something like a hole-in-one in golf, an exceptional rarity.

Wisconsin and the Midwest in general, are big on bowling and I would say it was a weekly activity with many of us playing in leagues. That four years in Wisconsin gave me a decent bowling baseline. When I moved to Maine, things got weird because there, it was more popular to go Candlepin Bowling where the pin share was odd and the balls were small and more like Bocce Balls than Bowling Balls. I can’t say that I ever took to Candlepin Bowling, so I feel those three years in Maine were lost bowling years for me. When I moved to Rome, surprisingly enough, even though not a European sport by any means, there was one decent bowling alley in the northern part of the city (near where many of the American community lived). We didn’t bowl every week, but as high schoolers who mostly had our own transportation (motorcycles and scooters) we played once or twice a month with kids from our schools. Like most adolescent games, the emphasis was less on the actual competitive aspects of bowling and more about the socializing and being as cool as possible…something that bowling only allows you to do so well.

Bowling was a part of college life, but only occasionally. It was a big winter sport in Ithaca for the local community. I remember my aunt and uncle being in a league for years and taking they bowling very seriously. My the time I moved to NYC after school, I skipped on bowling until I had kids. Then it stated up again, both in the suburbs, where it was, once again, a pretty normal weekly recreational activity, and even in the city, where Chelsea Piers and several other Manhattan venues made bowling viable family activity. It was at Chelsea Piers where I first saw mechanical bumper buddies for kids, having only seen inflatable bumpers before that. It was also where I first saw the use of magical neon lighting to spice up an otherwise routine Saturday morning bowling event. Bowling birthday parties were quite popular, but I have to comment on the cost of the sport in an urban setting. When I was a kid, bowling was very affordable and even economical as an activity. But by the time I was going bowling in Manhattan, it was a much more expensive and therefore privileged activity that I doubt the kids in Harlem were engaging in. Since those days when I went with the kids at Chelsea Piers, I don’t recall going very often to bowl.

But given all of my bowling memories, when the subject came up at a gathering this weekend, I was all-in right away, as were most of the others in our group. I think bowling holds a special spot in the memories of most Americans my age. One of our group was even married to a professional bowler at one time, and that opens up a whole Big Lebowski subject that we can probably all relate to in some manner. So, tomorrow, we will go and take up our two hour, two-lane time slot at some local bowling alley. It will cost $33 per person, which does not seem excessive. Let’s see how the shoes and balls are and what renting them will add to that cost. I’m looking forward to it and hope it will live up to all my fond memories of bowling.