Mom-and-Pop Bowling Alleys Are Relegated to the Slow Lane : For the Holler House in Milwaukee, the clock has stood still for 86 years. Elsewhere upscale changes are transforming the sport.

Across the nation the lights are going out on the little mom-and-pop bowling alleys that once were the center of neighborhood life, but not so at Marcy Skowronski’s place, where the clock has stood still for 86 years.

Skowronski is a feisty 68 years old and as the proprietor of one of the country’s oldest bowling alleys--and one of only 65 two-lane alleys left in the United States--she has a certain disdain for the upscale changes that have transformed the sport of bowling over the last two decades.

“These days you get bowlers coming into those fancy new centers wearing so much equipment that they look like they just got out of an orthopedic hospital,” she said. “And the centers, they’re so big you half expect to find a washer and dryer in them. Of course, there’s none of that in the Holler House.”

Indeed not. The Holler House tavern on West Lincoln Avenue--Skowronski lives upstairs, the cozy bar where former Milwaukee Brewers Manager Harvey Kuenn was a regular is on the ground floor and the two alleys are tucked in the low-ceiling basement--hasn’t really changed at all since her husband’s father, “Iron Mike,” started the place in 1908.

Skowronski’s two grandchildren and a couple of neighborhood kids are the pin boys--a job that disappeared in the rest of the United States about 40 years ago--and the glistening lanes are made of the original pine. Scores are kept by hand on sheets tacked to two red bulletin boards. The wooden walls are starting to buckle a bit with age, but the facility looks as perfect as an exhibition at the Smithsonian, and business is as brisk as the wind that blows across Lake Michigan.

“Did we ever think of modernizing?” Skowronski said. “Nah, not really. Why would we do it? Oh, there were years when Gene (her late husband) and I were younger and we were going to do this or do that, but as we got older, we kind of fell in love with the place just the way it is.”

Skowronski knows that the Holler House, located in an old downtown Polish neighborhood, is the last of a breed. Like mom-and-pop grocery stores, the small family owned bowling alleys are closing down faster than afternoon newspapers, the victim of changing lifestyles, deteriorating neighborhoods and high real estate prices. Twenty years ago there were 10,839 bowling alleys in the United States; today there are 7,250. Manhattan has only one, Newark, N.J., has none.

In their place are multilane, high-tech, family oriented centers that have followed the urban exodus into the suburbs. Some, including land, cost $5 million to build. Scores are kept automatically on video screens; food and drink orders are placed on digital devices by each lane and instant replays offer coaching tips and the ability to track the speed and angle of the ball. To these new, sometimes-corporate operators conscious of image, alley has become the unspoken “A-word”; center is now the term of choice, and gutters are channels .

The sport, industry experts say, was hurt by overbuilding during the ‘60s, increased competition for the recreation dollar and the return of women to the work force, which cut into women’s morning bowling leagues. Membership in the American Bowling Congress is 2.6 million, down from 4.8 million in 1980. The industry is lobbying to have bowling included in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta--it was an exhibition sport at the Seoul games in 1988--as a means of increasing its visibility.

“Did bowling go away?” asked Arnold Fogel, president of Brunswick Recreation Centers, the owner of 126 bowling centers in North America and Europe. “In part, yes, measured against the boom of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when, it turned out, a lot of centers were undercapitalized, poorly managed or badly located. But it was never knocked out, just stunned a bit.”

Since 1981, Brunswick has closed or sold more than 150 geographically remote or unprofitable centers and opened 28 new centers in rapidly growing population areas. A well-managed facility, Fogel said, can be extremely profitable: It is a cash business with virtually no accounts receivables and no inventory.

On top of that, the National Sporting Goods Assn. said there are 42 million occasional bowlers in the country--twice the number of runners and joggers--and manufacturers and operators like Brunswick are finding a fertile new market in Asia where a love affair with bowling is just beginning.