‘This was our home away from home.’

A bowling alley died last week.

That may not be the kind of news to cause great public consternation, but it meant enough to a couple of hundred bowlers and other people of good cheer that they gave up a weeknight to party it out of existence. Some even gave up part of the next morning.

Though bowling is said to be enjoying a revival as a social sport of the young and prosperous, there was no hope for the Encino Bowl, the one in the mustard-yellow building on Ventura Boulevard, as the end of its 25-year lease neared. A one-story building with an expanse of wood flooring that serves as nothing other than a surface to roll balls over does not represent the most advantageous use of a piece of prime land on Ventura Boulevard.

Recognizing that, the owner of the property sold it. Along with the land, the buyer received rights to the lease owned by Harry Grant and Irv Miro, who opened the Encino Bowl in 1962.

The buyer offered the two men a choice of extending their lease until January or closing the business right away for a cash consideration, Grant said. That was an easy choice, especially since the bowling season runs from September to April.

“I really couldn’t do any kind of business,” Grant said. “No one would sign up here to bowl for half a season.”

Going out of business in the style with which they are reputed to have conducted it for 25 years, Grant and Miro threw a little party Thursday for their friends.

By 7:30 p.m. the cocktail lounge was animated and loud. All the tables were taken, and dozens of other people were milling about and dancing when two women in red waitress uniforms broke through the swinging kitchen doors carrying trays of steaming food.

“Look out behind,” they shouted futilely over the noise.

They made several trips and, on the way back, stopped to talk awhile.

One of them, Jan Tompkins, threw her arms around the shoulders of a man who was holding a beer.

“Let’s just get married and run away,” she said.

He was Dave Ruiz, a supervisor at a company across the street called Aratex Services, which cleans industrial laundry. Ruiz said he and other employees of Aratex spent a lot of after-hours time at the Encino Bowl.

“This was our home away from home,” he said.

It turned out that most of the people in the lounge were from Aratex, there for their last drink. Over the years, the bowling alley was the company’s unofficial meeting place. Employees would stop in after work and held an annual party there. Some even bowled.

“Now we’ll have to look for a new place,” one woman shouted above the noise.

Outside the lounge, where crashing bowling pins provided a quieter background, a second party was getting its music from the poignant trumpet of Stan West, whose wife, Rita, managed the alley’s coffee shop for five years.

West, a professional New Orleans jazz musician who said he used to play sets for Lenny Bruce but is finding it hard to get jobs today, played a creditable “Taps” for the sake of those who had come to bowl their last game and perhaps pick up a pin as a souvenir.

Most of the lanes were in use most of the night.

There were groups of collegiate-looking men, families with babies, middle-aged groups and even a young couple who might have been on their first date. The young man would take his turn with poised and elegant motions, often getting strikes. Then she would roll the ball into the gutter and step away, a coy wiggle flaunting her absolute lack of concern.

Knocking down pins with seasoned efficiency nearby was a foursome from the Post Office league. They came for the party, one of them said, but they started bowling and were having too much fun to stop.

They were distracted for only a minute when Tompkins, the waitress in red, appeared to give the two men in the group a lingering kiss goodby.

Behind the bowling lanes there was a small gallery of movie theater-style seats. A middle-aged man and an elderly woman who wore a black dress and a black lace bonnet sat in the last row, watching all this.

For Jim Hunter and his 89-year-old mother, Charlotte, bowling is a spectator sport. Hunter said he takes his mother out to dinner often and, for many years, they have been stopping in afterward to watch an hour or two of bowling.

With a slight English accent, Hunter said he used to bowl a bit.

But his mother had never rolled a ball.

“Oh, no,” Charlotte Hunter said in a primly British voice, seeming surprised by the question.

About 10 o’clock several friends of the owners brought out a homemade chocolate cake decorated with a plastic bowler and a set of pins.

Grant, a small, thin man with a George Burns voice and carriage, cut it and offered the first piece to his wife.

West played “Pennies From Heaven.”

The party went on until 2 a.m. And, when it was over, West played “Auld Lang Syne.”