He’s Ready to Set a Record That’s Right Down His Alley

Asports quiz: Identify the following sports figures and their endurance records.

Pete Rose? (Most hits in a career, 4,204.)

Kareem? (Most points scored, 38,387.)

Walter Payton? (Most yards gained, 16,726.)

And soon add to this pantheon, Joe Norris, 84, of Hillcrest: most pins knocked down, lifetime, at the American Bowling Congress tournament held each year.

Barring the most unforeseen of events, Norris should set the record at the ABC tournament next week in Corpus Christi, Tex. He’s within 41 pins of the record set by the late Bill Doehrman: 109,398.

It took Doehrman 71 of the annual tournaments to set the record. Norris figures to break it in his 63rd and looks to another decade of tournaments to pad his record.

Bill Vint, the editor of Bowling Magazine, calls Norris “a national bowling treasure, the Bob Hope of bowling, ageless.”

Norris, the son of an immigrant Lithuanian coal miner, started as a pin boy in Detroit when he was 14.

He bowled his first ABC tournament in 1926; won a silver medal at the championships held in 1936 in conjunction with the Olympic Games in Berlin, and was named to the Bowling Hall of Fame in 1954.

He was a member of perhaps the most famous team in bowling history, formed by Stroh’s Bohemian Beer as soon as Prohibition was repealed.

He retired from the Brunswick company (the bowling equipment maker) and moved to San Diego in 1966: “I’ve been fortunate. The good Lord gave me talent to be a good bowler. It helped open doors for me.”

He had a triple bypass in 1990 but still bowled in the 1991 ABC in Toledo, Ohio: “I was very weak.”

With a 196 average, he bowls at Premier Lanes in Chula Vista. Bowling is both his sport and his passion.

He remembers a guy a long time ago in Detroit who was finally just a few frames from a perfect game. Suddenly he gets a call that his house is on fire.

The guy hesitates and then decides, “What the hell. The firemen are already there, I might as well stay here.” He got his perfecto and only then went home.

“He was a good bowler,” says Norris, still full of admiration after all these years.

Pro Bono Crusade

Sometimes things are not what they seem.

* San Diego’s two new City Stores--selling old parking meters, street signs, etc.--report brisk sales.

The hottest sellers: “Swimsuit Optional” signs (used during that brief time when nudity was officially OK at Black’s Beach) and “Discharge of Firearms Prohibited” signs (dented by bullets, of course).

The stores sold out of the real signs real fast, and those now being sold are replicas.

To look authentic, the “Firearms” signs are taken to the police pistol range and subjected to target practice before being sold.

* In its fight to save the Mt. Soledad cross, the San Diego city attorney is being assisted by lawyers from a big-name San Diego law firm, pro bono .

But not all the firm’s partners side with the city on this red hot church-state issue. And, in a break with usual legal practice, neither the firm’s name nor the names of the lawyers appear on a brief submitted to the appeals court.

City Atty. John Witt declines to reveal the firm’s name, saying it prefers anonymity.

However, if you know how to read computer coding and legalese, you’ll know the brief was written by Kristine L. Wilkes from the firm of Latham & Watkins.

Wilkes says she and her colleague, Dan Butcher, are working on the case as individuals, and that the firm is not involved.

Things Are Picking Up

There are the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor’s, and the Wilshire index of leading economic indicators.

And now, the Jim Held Beer Money Index.

So named because it purports to gauge the nation’s economic health by the value of the coins that writer Jim Held finds during his morning walks in Del Mar.

In 1988-90, the living was easy, an average of $14 a year. But, as the economy fell flat in 1991, so did the value of the found coins: a measly $5.

This year, the take was been on the uptick, and Held thinks it’s a sign the recession is over.

“This morning there were three pennies, two dimes and a quarter,” Held said. “If there’d been a nickel, I’d have hit for the circuit.”