The Bowling Alley

 

The Brunswick Bowling machines

It was January 2020. I climbed the long steep staircase out of the Silver Mill restaurant dining room. A rush of cold air swirled as I stepped into a large storage room. Clutter filled the space, party decorations, tables, old beer signs. But behind all the junk I could see retro blue stripes disappearing into a false wall. I clambered over to a small hole and peered into the darkness. A large room sat hidden above the restaurant. In the gloom, I could read Antler’s Bar and Bowl on the dusty old machines. I was staring at my winter project, renovating the 1950’s bowling alley into employee housing for the restaurant below. 

In the late 1800’s, this upstairs had been built as a boarding house. But around 1956, someone had the brilliant idea to install a four lane bowling alley above the Antler Restaurant. For decades, it had been a town staple. Piles of old score sheets sat in boxes tucked behind the dormant machines. Dozens of local kids had earned a few quarters running the ball return. Their names were carved into the shiplap wall, dented by forty years of flying pins and rambunctious kids. Some time in the 1990’s, the building had changed hands, or interest waned and the bowling alley was closed and slowly forgotten. Someone had built a wall in front of the lanes, so the entire set up was hidden from view, inaccessible. They had cut up two of the bowling alley lanes to make table tops for the restaurant downstairs. But the guts of the alley were all still there, the giant machines lurking in the dark like cast iron monsters, waiting to come back to life. 

Some people dreamed of restoring the bowling alley to full glory, but it was impractical. The noise of the bowling balls was deafening. The layout of the alley made any living arrangements impossible while keeping a functional alley. Believe me, we tried to make it work, but eventually, the owner decided that the employee housing was more important. But before all of this antique equipment got removed, I felt that it was necessary to make sure it all worked. I wasn’t sure if these machines were valuable, but I figured that there couldn’t be all that many alleys like this left in the United States. Maybe there was a bowling museum that would like a functional Brunswick bowling machine and would preserve some of this fascinating history. How often do you find an old bowling alley from the 1950’s behind a wall?

I called in one of the old owners, one of the few people in town with knowledge of the bowling alley and the mechanical chops to tinker with it. We started poking around in the unlabeled electrical panel. We worked our way through, replacing bulbs, splicing wires, testing for continuity. One by one, the machines lit up, old bulbs flickering. Then the old electric motors started whirring. We replaced a couple drive belts and oiled various knobs and screws. The whole room started whirring, motors humming, cam shafts spinning, gears grinding. 

The bowling pins had to be handset into the machine. When a ball would knock pins down, they would fall into a pit behind the machine. The operator had to brave the flying pins from other lanes to toss the pins back into the top of the pinsetter, casually at a jaunty angle. Then they pulled a little string and the ponderous pin setter would swing into motion, deftly dropping the pins in the perfect location, then gracefully returning upwards, leaving the targets slightly wobbling.

The ball return was engineered perfectly. The operator would set the bowling ball on the top one of the curved wooden tracks between each lane. With a light push, the ball would roll down along the entire length of the alley and rise back up on a ball stand with the perfect momentum to arrive gently every time. If the bowlers were impolite, the ball boy would give it too hard of a push and the ball would bounce and get stuck in the middle of the lane, forcing the bowler to walk out and get the ball, slowing down the pace so the operator had time to take a breath or reset the pins. 

Giant leather pads kept all the balls and pins inside the machine, but every surface was dented and nicked from decades of flying objects. What wasn’t solid cast iron was old growth maple, laminated into absurdly heavy support structures. Piece by piece I dismantled everything, organizing it so that it could be reassembled. As I worked, I listened to the news. A new virus was popping up in China and on the west coast. Day after day, I climbed up into the bowling alley and set about removing the bowling alley and planning for apartments. 

The alley pieces were cut into twelve foot sections and prepared to sell off. People called from all over Montana to reserve a piece of history. The old floor joists and support structure boards were de-nailed and brought to the house I was building for myself, where they became floor joists and rafters. Everything that could be recycled was reclaimed. Literal truck loads of dust and garbage wrappers dating back to the 1960’s were hauled off to the dump. Soon, the old floor plan of the boarding house reappeared. Excitement was in the air. The owner was thrilled. And yet, the virus kept dominating the news. 

I scoured the internet and found a buyer for the old bowling machines. I sent them videos of the machines in action. They made plans to come out from Pittsburgh to take a look, thrilled at the archeological bowling discovery. I distributed dented bowling pins to various people around town who had worked in the pit as pinsetters. I took the shiplap paneling off the wall and reinstalled it in a new location so all those signatures could live on for another generation. And then one day, I got a phone call. All work was stopped. Everything was closing and the project was on hold. I covered the jobsite in plastic and pulled my tools out. It was meant to be temporary, but days turned into months, then years and then the building was sold. 

I am sitting beneath the old floor joists of the bowling alley at my writing desk. I still have a chunk of bowling alley leaning up by my workbench. As far as I know, all the old sections of alley and dismantled machines are still up there, waiting for the next bowling archeologist to come along and discover them, and maybe reassemble them.