Leisure: Alley Cats

It is a typical weekday in Dallas. Daddy is at work. Baby is having his morning nap. In an adjoining room, Brother (aged 3) is riding a new rocking horse and Sis (5) is watching TV cartoons. And Mommy? Mommy is just a few feet away, crouching over the foul line on Lane 53, her hip twisted sharply to the left to steer the blue-white-marbled ball into the strike pocket between the one and three pins. Mommy is bowling.

Whether in Dallas or Cleveland or Albuquerque or Spokane, energetic housewives are making the bowling alley their new all-purpose home-away-from-home. They have dropped dustcloth and vacuum and hauled the children off to the new alleys, where fulltime nurses stand ready to baby-sit in the fully equipped nurseries. The modern bowling establishment attends to all needs. In the alley dining room, the mothers have a little “coffee-and” to warm them up while they exchange the day’s gossip. Then out to the floor, where 24, 48 or 60 shiny, electronically controlled alleys are laid out for them. Thanks to the invention of the automatic pin setters, there no longer are elderly winos or jaded kids back in the well, muttering as they set up the pins. The decor is bright and comfortable, a sharp contrast to the smoky atmosphere that once made bowling nearly as disreputable as pocket billiards. Reflecting the new tone, alleys have become “lanes.” and even the gutters that line the alleys are now “channels.”

Strike. Mechanization, air conditioning and its respectability have made bowling big business. In 1955 there were only 6,600 bowling establishments with 58,000 lanes. This year there are 9,900 bowling places with 130,800 lanes used by 24.4 million bowlers. And all together, bowling and its associated activities this year will account for expenditures of about $1.5 billion, more than the combined gross national product of Iraq and Cambodia.

Though many of bowling’s new recruits are men, the biggest factor in bowling’s boom is women. The successful appeal to the ladies has meant that bowling alleys can keep making money in daylight hours. Women quickly learn that bowling can be fun straight from the start. Says Harold Vineberg, who runs five establishments in Florida: “I’ve seen a woman who had never tried any sport get a strike the first time she ever bowled. That’s pure luck. But, for that one ball, she is playing as well as the best bowler in the world. You can’t get more than a strike. It’s a big thrill, and it’s a thing that doesn’t happen in most other sports —where the beginner can’t do anything right for a long time.” Adds” Jack Vaughan, manager of Albuquerque’s Bowl-a-Drome: “Where else can a woman compete after she gets married? They need competition just like men do.”

Hooked. Many bowling establishments have gone farther than merely supplying baby sitters and nurseries. In California, for example, the Futurama Bowl near San Jose has a $2,600,000 layout that includes a five-acre parking lot, nursery facilities for more than 180 children, a restaurant-bar, a dressing room, semiautomated food and beverage service, free coffee, a “Glamorama Room” with physical therapist, body-building equipment and steam room. Says Owner Nick Bebek Jr.: “These women start to take inches off their behinds, build their bust up two inches. They go insane! Then their complexions start to get clearer and they wonder why, and then they realize it’s from the steam room melting off all that junk they put on their faces. They love it!”

Dallas’ Hart Bowl, run by Larry Hart, has so much daytime business that a piano player works in the lounge by day. (“The women have themselves a real ball. They like it. and it sure beats going home to do the dishes.” The Bronco, another Dallas bowling alley, features two restaurants, a four-chair barbershop, beauty shop and dance band, and is diversifying to attract nonbowlers by installing pool tables, table tennis and miniature golf. Eastgate Colosseum near Cleveland has a swimming pool. 18 billiard tables, indoor miniature golf and pingpong, and handles weddings and bar mitzvahs as well.

Naturally, every foresighted bowling alley offers free lessons for children. In today’s family-styled alley, parents no longer worry about evil companions, and the only childhood trauma is the gutter ball and a bad hook. And chances are that Mommy can straighten out these problems faster than Daddy.