The Memory Lane

In a small measure, I have resumed bowling, and the experience seems rather surreal to me. As a result, I have decided to chronicle this much for my own analysis and amusement, and, as so much of my writing, share it out with those who might be interested. (Although I cannot conceive of anyone who would be.)

Much of the first quarter of my life — and a little beyond — in a bowling alley. For whatever the reasons for our likes and dislikes, it was an activity that I was drawn to at an early age, but it must be placed in the proper perspective. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the entertainment activities were far less diverse (at least it appears so looking back) than they are in the more electronic and modern age. Especially in the northern climates, where long and bitter winters hold the population captive until the initial thaws of spring. Primarily there were, or are, two activities one could choose from: bowling in the winter, and golf in the summer. That limited selection for the northern population meant that generally meant those were your options unless you counted shoveling snow, and I can’t think of anyone who would classify that as ‘entertainment.’ As a result, the bowling allies were always packed with leagues, and if you wanted to bowl you would be forced to join one because the window for just showing up to the lanes for ‘open bowling’ customers off the street was acute in nature.

In high school I bowled every day of the week. Monday thru Thursday was dedicated to the varsity team, and if the school didn’t have a match against a local rival there was practice after school — that small window between the afternoon leagues and the evening leagues which would scatter in after work given to high school students and whatever ‘open bowlers’ who would come in off the street. There weren’t many adults at that hour as most were at work. So the lanes were for the most part the domain of energetic teenagers alternating between bowling, bubble hockey, and video games in the bowling center’s arcade room. Fridays were the intramural leagues, and there was an expectation that if you were on the varsity team you should also bowl in the school league as a socialized mixer with your fellow students. This too was after school, during that sliver of availability, for the bowling house to capture some extra money between the adult leagues that would flood in after work and continue on well past midnight.

Saturdays were the junior classic leagues and, if you were a teen kegler of any standing, you participated in — and had to maintain a substantial average. These leagues were also an opportunity for local college bowling coaches to review who were the best junior bowlers in the area to recruit. These leagues generally took up late mornings into the afternoons before, again, the adult leagues would pack the house. Beverly Lanes had sixty-four lanes, and they were almost all fully packed with leagues.

Then came Sundays, and unlike the bible, it was never a day of rest for junior bowlers. Having competed all week against each other in varsity, in classic, and in intramural, none of it involved their parents. So it was left to Sunday mornings to check that box with Mother and Daughter and Father and Son leagues so they could bowl together on the same team — technically. It was usually an opportunity for the mothers and the fathers to socialize with other parents while the teenagers kept score on the heated overhead projectors with those yellow grease pens beaming the scores and the line ups on those rectangular screens located just above the lane approach. As many adults went to take their turn they would place their cigarette or cigar into the embedded ashtray on the scoring table, and if I close my eyes I can still smell the stale tobacco. If I open my eyes I can still see the smoke drifting across the table to whomever I was keeping score with. A couple of the fathers (thank goodness my own didn’t smoke!) seemed to enjoy the cheroot variety which had one of the most pungent and caustic of aromas which became infused into the cement walls — particularly inside Beverly Lanes. It was always an odd mix of tobacco and the traditional Sunday morning breakfast ordered by parents and their offspring — french fries doused in beef gravy from the snack bar. It kept cardiologists in business for most of the 1980s.

At the time Beverly was structured at the time of having four different lane bays — two on the west side of the bowling house, two on the east — containing sixteen lanes each. The adjacent bays had large concrete structural walls separating each other. The leagues, adult or junior, were generally assigned to one of the bays for the entire season — September through April. Over at Thunderbowl it was a little different — a simple long strip of thirty-two lanes with no such bay separation, but they also didn’t have as large of a structural footprint. Beverly Lanes was generally the hub for bowling in the county with its size. When it suffered a fire in early September of 1986 it cast out all leagues into the autumn wilderness causing great havoc. The fire repair and further renovations caused it to be shut-down for the season. Beverly eventually re-opened, remodeled, in spring of 1987, but towards the end of that season making it too late to save it. Most all the leagues scrambled to find another house, but this was no small task as Beverly was roughly double the size of any other location. My Parents’ league, which usually began roughly at 7:00 p.m. on Fridays, were pushed to 9:30 p.m. Fridays at Island Lanes. Naturally, all of the remaining area houses had their own Friday night leagues, and thus, the migrate bowling leagues at Beverly had to squeeze in where they could.

Then the 1990s happened. Or perhaps more accurately, life happened. This is usually the case for everyone. For me, that meant college, and then later graduate school. I went from bowling seven days a week to three, and then two, and then one. Work, school, sleep, repeat, is the mantra of us all, but even through it, I had maintained bowling which for a while was my only social interaction with my close friends.

So what does all this have to do with that?

Well, simply put, that is the world I left. When I threw my last bowling ball at the end of April 2000 there wasn’t any kind of formal finality to it. I had fully expected to start back up at some point. You know — once I was firmly established in my career with a stable job (at this point I was working part-time at the university and a couple of other positions while searching permanent employment). Famous last words. It is almost a cautionary tale that if you set anything aside for more than six months there’s a good chance you will never revisit again. For me, that was my bowling bag. It went into the basement, and was never brought back up. While it is true I continued to golf with my Father during the intervening years, for whatever the reason — mostly laziness I suspect — I never brought the bowling bag back up.

Then one evening, I came across the local television show, “Beat The Champ,” and I found myself becoming engrossed in both the revamped format and an activity that I had set aside for more than two decades. It also made me ponder my bowling bag in the basement collecting dust, and once again a desire churned in me that perhaps it was time to return to the lanes. Still, I procrastinated on the matter. I had a few more things to work through which included, regrettably, setting my Parents to their final rest. Then there were more responsibilities in my life that needed to be addressed, but several weeks ago I once again came across our modest local bowling show BTC and the interest in me was rekindled. There was also a ‘night of bowling’ sponsored by work — a socializing event. I was asked if I would attend, and I respectfully declined. At this point I still hadn’t thrown a bowling ball in the better part of twenty-five seasons and my inner vanity made me petrified to do so in front of friends and co-workers that I knew. If I were to slide and fall flat on my face at the foul line I’d rather it be among strangers; not friends.

When I could not come up with an excuse last month I went into the basement, found that I had to take the leaf blower to clear the dust that had accumulated on my bowling bag, and lugged it upstairs. I was amazed that two sixteen-pound bowling balls weighed so much! Suddenly, my golf bag felt infinitely lighter. I dressed, and then carefully negotiated throwing the strap of the bag over my shoulder causing me to stagger a bit. Did I really do this back in the day?

After almost wrenching my back swinging the bag into the backseat I drove off to Rapids Bowling Center — the former Thunderbowl, the former Pine Bowl before that for those of us in antiquity — to make good on a personal promise to throw at least one game.

There seemed to be at least one small league taking up about a half-dozen lanes when I arrived. For all the years the house interior was largely the same in structure as memory with the exception of the dull Peter Max pastel coverings over the pin-setting machines themselves. Gone were Brunswick racks and A2 setters of my memory now replaced by AMF, but interior was the same. Electronic scoring now replaced those old overhead projectors serving as a reminder that more than two decades have now passed.

I was completely confused when the desk clerk asked me how many games I was to bowl. The old method was bowl and then pay. Now it is pay, then bowl, all electronic, all controlled by automated scoring software. I get that, of course, but it was still an odd question to me because I didn’t know if I was going to survive my first throw let alone my first game or more. As a reflex and said, “Three” and paid in advance. If I have one complaint regarding the modern era, could the software be tailored to allow users to throw at least one or two warm up frames at the very beginning for those of us coming in cold off the street? By ‘those of us’ I of course mean everyone. The act of throwing an oversize sixteen-pound round shot put takes a few opportunities to get used to the weight and the environment — regardless of how many stretches and deep knee bends one does at the beginning.

I slipped on my bowling shoes (I had tried on both pairs at home to make sure they had still fit), and walked up to the foul line. With my back to the pins I simulated a small stepped approach. Twenty-five years ago I used to alternate between a four and five step delivery, but this was like learning to walk all over again. I was astonished that I found myself barely at the end of the ball return. How extraordinarily short. The dots on the approach typically associated with a four-stepped approach were still further up, and those for a five-step might as well be from the ‘tips’ on a golf course. I couldn’t fathom that, at one time, I had started from there.

With a deep breath I took up my old Rhino, and I am happy to report that at no time did I fall. Here are my results from 2/24/2025:

Shooting a 150 is nothing I would have ever been proud of twenty-five years ago, but after being out of it for so long, I couldn’t have been happier. However, there were definitely some distinct takeaways from the experience that I had never anticipated.

I found myself quite unsure on the approach, and that no doubt contributed to my taking small steps. The second, and perhaps the most noteworthy of everything, it wasn’t until actually bowling that I came to the realization of just how much strength I have lost in my legs. To push into the shot at the point of releasing a bowling ball requires a stable base, and when you don’t have strength in the core, and have lost muscle mass due to age and consuming large quantities of wings over the years, it becomes all the more noticeable. It made me realize just how much exercise, or lack there of, I had been missing in recent memory. Now, I had been swimming in the pool regularly, three to four times a week. That was abruptly ended last fall when the gym discontinued their pool offerings — presumably because they no longer want to pay and outsource a lifeguard. Had this not been the case I think I would have faired better, but under the current circumstances this only added to my lack of lower body strength. It is not an excuse mind you, but my lack of gym attendance because of the pool situation has stuck out like a sore them. Now that spring is breaking (although the warmth is still spotty) it means I will now have to start walking and being more conscious of building back up some of this strength. At my age I will never return to where I was a quarter-century ago, and that is not the goal. What is the goal is to return to the approach, and if nothing re-define or reboot my bowling ability to correspond to this older version of myself. As cliche as it sounds it really is a re-birth of sorts in that I am learning to ‘walk again’ on the approach.

When time permitted I went again on 3/21/2025:

I was completely amazed that the bowling alley was vacant on a Friday afternoon. Where was the intramural school bowling? Where was the packed house of teenagers? Where were the adults slowly filing in after 5:30 following work to begin their leagues? I know I probably arrived at an ‘off-time’ between the leagues, but the shocking part to me remained that this was the off-time.

So many things have changed. Beverly Lanes is, of course, long since gone the way Joni Mitchell described having given way to a parking lot. So is Suburban Lanes. Luchese Lanes (where it was best to arrive under police escort). Rose Bowl Lanes. Leisureland — most of the Section VI high school tournaments were held here. The aroma of beef gravy and tobacco is also dissipated, but the lasting memories persist. It is not my intent to return to such days of course, or suggest they were somehow better. They weren’t. Each era, each decade, is its own little time capsule for individual generations. The memories from this period are mine. My goal is only to resume something I have been neglecting. The first quarter of my life was largely spent in bowling alleys. The second quarter it was non-existent. Maybe the next will be a return — a moderate return not in excess — for no other reason than for the exercise and strength conditioning it can offer. Nine games into my return I am far from competitive mode. Perhaps that’ll change, but only if I keep after it, step by step, to the foul line.