Bowling, The Wright Way - February 9, 2004 by Don Wright
How Did We Ever Make It?

I was born in 1938 and as I get ready for social security I wonder how I ever made it this far.

I grew up in an agricultural and dairy farm area of Upstate New York. We drank milk directly from the cow. When we didn't get it directly from the cow our milkman would leave us milk on the porch only if our door was locked. Otherwise he simply entered the house, put the milk in the refrigerator and left.

The milk we got in the bottle had about three inches of pure cream on the top. My grandmother would scoop that off the milk and make one of the sweetest concoctions you ever tasted. She then poured that over the top of blueberries, raspberries, or whatever was in season.

We would take that out to the rockers on the porch, both of which were painted with lead based paint. Everything was painted with lead based paint in the '40s and '50s.

We had a hearty breakfast nearly every morning. We had eggs from the hen house, or from the ground where the ducks laid them. My brother in law was a pig farmer and we had plenty of smoked and honey cured ham as well as thick slabs of bacon.

Sunday was the formal family supper. It could have been called dinner because we usually had that meal earlier than the rest of the week. Sunday supper was always a pot roast, or chicken. The pot roast was bought, the chicken we had raised. There were large bowls of mashed potatoes, rich brown or chicken gravy and always enough to mop up with slices of fresh bread, or biscuits. There was corn on the cob dripping with melted butter, salt and pepper. And the best for last would be an apple pie, or a cobbler.

All of us kids rode bicycles without helmets, or ran everywhere we wanted to go. There were no soccer Mom's driving all the kids to play. Back then only kids who weren't any good at real sports played soccer anyway. Baseball was the game. We hooked our gloves over our bikes with no lights, grabbed our bats and balls and headed out. We had winners and losers. First place got a trophy and second place might get a smaller one. The rest had to learn how to deal with defeat and disappointment.

On the weekend we got some allowance money and went to the Saturday movie where we saw the violence of the cartoon with Elmer Fudd hunting that "wascally wabbet," or Yosemite Sam looking to kill the varmints. After that we saw a new chapter in the Superman serial. Then more violence as Roy Rogers, the Durango Kid and Gene Autry tamed the west. All of them shot more bad guys in the hand than in the heart. If we were lucky and it was a double feature we might see terrible horror shows with Boris Karloff as Frankenstein or Bela Lagosi as Dracula.

After a day of mayhem, we would leave get on our bikes with no lights and no helmets and head home.

So, what's this got to do with bowling? Well, I learned how to bowl with duck pins on two lanes in the basement of a Presbyterian church. When my Dad started taking me to his bowling alley for leagues I soon got a job as a pin boy. Nobody thought about child labor laws, or minimum wage. Pin boys were paid in tips by the bowlers on their lanes. A good pin boy could easily set two lanes and I have seen some do four. I could handle three fairly well. The manager would let us kids bowl when things were quiet and we set pins for each other. Dad, as well as everyone else, arrived with one bowling ball. It was neatly tucked in a one ball bag with his shoes wrapped around the side of the ball as they had been for so many years that when he removed them from the bag the toes pointed straight up in the air. The ball had two holes in it. One for his thumb and one for his middle finger. I was amazed at what he could do with it. Everyone smoked and drank beer. I recall there was chalk on the back of the ball returns and a towel was attached to each side of the return. Now if you want a towel you bring one from home, or pay the twenty bucks in the pro shop.

We kept score with a pencil and paper. Some basic math skills were required, but if you made a mistake you simply erased it and fixed it. Now days with every center having a different automatic scoring machine the bowler uses the intercom to tell the desk he needs scoring assistance. Of course the desk personnel can't leave their designated post, so he picks up a mike and yells to the porter, "Scoring assistance on lane 2." Dweezel, who's down on lane 42 with an MP3 player stuck in his ear trying to take a phone photo of the sixteen year old in low riders and a thong, slowly makes his way to lane 2. Once there he asks the problem and with speed learned after hours of Xbox expertise fixes it. You didn't learn anything and he didn't take the time to explain it, hell he's back on lane 42, so the next time it happens you go through the same drill.

Don't ask me about racks knocking over pins and the wait for tonight's mechanic to leave the snack bar and meander back there to re-spot it. Pin Boy's did it automatically.

When the pin boys were done they usually helped clean up and left the bowling alley late. If they had a bowling ball and bag, or just a pair of shoes they hooked them over the handle bars of that unlit bicycle, jumped on with no helmet and went home with change jingling in their pockets. Today there would be MAPP (Mothers Against Pathetic Pin boys); a social services team and the Women's Christian Temperance Union marching on the bowling center and the kid's home.

Well, here I am 65 years old, three heart attacks and triple by-pass later, still bowling. I don't know how I did it, but, I got to tell ya, if I had known I was gonna live this long I'd have taken better care of myself.