Changing Lanes
The Lustre King is dead.
To inspect the corpse, just step inside Hollywood Star Lanes on Santa Monica Boulevard and look for the buffing machine, which in happier days polished balls for 15 cents a minute. That’s the Lustre King, and nobody is going to fix it.
The entire alley, in fact, is targeted for closure to make way for a new school. Owner Mike Barnese, who opened the 32-lane building with his father in October 1960, plans to retire.
If all these clues lead you to suspect that old-fashioned bowling is headed the way of the manual typewriter, you’re not the first.
But wait. There are at least two reasons to take the dim prospects on Santa Monica Boulevard in stride.
First, Hollywood Star Lanes will remain open, 24 hours a day, through Aug. 7, possibly longer if some longshot appeal gives the Los Angeles Unified School District pause. So if the mood strikes, a sometime bowler can wander in and once more be transported by the clamor of pins, the innocence of the old posters, the scent of $1.25 tacos on the grill--the same strange, faded atmosphere that led the Coen brothers to use Star Lanes in their 1998 cult favorite “The Big Lebowski.”
(Should that wandering sometime bowler take to the lanes, he might roll, oh, a 153 and a 131, failing to convert two or three easy spare opportunities in the second game.)
The second reason to remain calm, if you’re a nostalgic bowler or a historian seeking pop culture props, is the wealth of the marketplace. No matter what happens to Star Lanes, a whole Lustre Kingdom survives out there.
Depending on where and when you travel among Southern California’s bowling zones, you may find yourself at play among raging psychobillies in Eagle Rock, longtime leaguers in Mar Vista, bedazzled tourists in Universal City or elementary schoolers in Burbank.
You may pay $2 a game (probably midday, midweek) or $6 (probably Saturday night). You may pay by the hour or you may choose from among afternoon kiddie birthday packages (which have proliferated wildly in recent years, along with the use of shame-averting gutter guards). You may bowl to muted 1970s pop tunes under bright fluorescent light or to thunderous rock ‘n’ roll under cover of darkness. And probably you’ll snack a little.
After all, as AMF Bowling Worldwide notes in its literature for would-be bowling center operators: “Bowlers consume more food and beverages on site than participants in any other sport.”
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Think of bowling as a 16-ounce mug containing 8 ounces of beer.
You can argue that this mug is half-full. Though bowling often runs behind golf and tennis as a participant sport, industry surveys report that more than 50 million Americans bowled last year. The sport is amply exposed on TV by the series “Ed” on NBC and “Let’s Bowl” on Comedy Central. A trio of Microsoft alumni bought the Professional Bowlers Assn. in 2000, hired a couple of Nike marketing alumni, and made a deal with ESPN to pump up bowling’s profile.
Some in the fashion-forward set are donning bowling shirts and those trademark two-toned shoes. And many alley owners see great potential in the low-lights-and-loud-music evenings. Some call it cosmic or atomic or galactic bowling, some call it electric fog, some say rock ‘n’ bowl, some say bowlarama.
Whatever you call it, “it’s really helped the industry lately, with an influx of kids,” says R.F. Corderman, Garden Grove-based publisher of Pacific Bowler. “I’m sure some of those kids are going to become regular bowlers.”
Then there’s the half-empty aspect of bowling. The nation’s biggest operator of bowling alleys, AMF Bowling Worldwide Inc., which owns more than 500 bowling centers worldwide and about two dozen in Southern California, filed for bankruptcy reorganization in July 2001, scraped up about $350 million in financing and reemerged in March 2002.
One of the most-quoted works of pop sociology remains Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” (published in 2000), in which a Harvard professor makes the much-contested suggestion that declining bowling-league enrollment is just one symptom of a broader decline of community in America.
Furthermore, pro bowling hasn’t had a regular spot on network television since 1997, when ABC dropped its Saturday broadcasts after 36 years. And the number of bowling centers, now estimated at 7,000 in the U.S., has dwindled over the last two decades. The latest to die include AMF Bowlerland in Van Nuys and AMF Village Lanes in El Monte, both of which closed in early June. Clearly, all is not well in the Lustre Kingdom.
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Regal Lanes, the biggest bowling center on the West Coast, is a vast, vaguely Bavarian expanse that has stood on Tustin Street in Orange since 1975. Beyond its willkommen sign, it features 72 lanes, a pro shop, hofbrau, ratskeller, biergarten and two fully functional Lustre Kings. To find a larger bowling center, you have to cross the state line to get to the 106-lane Castaways Championship Bowling Center in Las Vegas.
“We’re a league house,” says Regal Lanes General Manager Cora Coffin, which is another way of saying we belong to the old school. Along with casual bowlers, corporate and birthday parties, and banquets, the venue hosted more than 2,000 league bowlers last winter.
Management encourages them with free child care and such old-school customs as handing out score sheets and pencils to those who like to keep score by hand.
When a sometime bowler steps up to the Regal Lanes counter alone on a lonely Tuesday afternoon, the clerk knows to ask, “One lane or two?” because this customer may be a hotshot looking to replicate tournament conditions. (If that sometime bowler is the unambitious, inconsistent kind who needs only one lane, he’s likely to score around 145 at Regal, improving to 196 in a second game on the strength of several strikes in later frames.)
Still, it’s a different business than it was 25 years ago, when Coffin first entered a bowling alley in a professional capacity. (She was a cocktail waitress, then a bar manager, then a league coordinator, then manager.)
“Back then, you couldn’t get into a bowling center Monday through Friday at 6 p.m. unless you were in a league,” Coffin says. “Eighty percent of the business 25 years ago was leagues. Now, I would say maybe 45% of your business is leagues. And it was a lot more aimed at adults 25 years ago, when I started. Bowling centers didn’t do birthday parties 25 years ago.”
Now birthdays are only the beginning of a recreational menu that stretches as far as--well, as far as All Star Lanes in Eagle Rock on a Saturday night.
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“Excuse me!” says a thoroughly tattooed man with slicked-down hair, taking a seat at the scoring table. “Do you know how to mark a spare?!”
He speaks loudly, because all around him, All Star Lanes--possibly the least reverent monument to old-fashioned bowling in Los Angeles County--has devolved into an orgy of kitsch, wailing guitars and profoundly unserious bowling. In the bar, a psychobilly band--one that fuses rockabilly and punk--is blazing through an up-tempo version of America’s “Horse With No Name.”
Crowded throughout the bar and the alley’s 22 bowling lanes, young men and women drink and laugh and holler in T-shirts, black leather jackets, metal studs, copious tattoos, buzz cuts and mohawks. Out in the parking lot, stragglers slouch with their cigarettes amid vintage vehicles.
All Star Lanes doesn’t get the attention that Hollywood Star Lanes does, but for the nostalgic bowler, the Eagle Rock venue, which dates to the late 1950s, offers an even stranger trip. Instead of charging by the game, management usually charges bowlers $8 to $10 per hour per lane. Besides offering only manual scoring, All Star Lanes also relies on ceiling fans instead of air-conditioning and uses a ball-return system that most alleys did away with before Lyndon Johnson reached the presidency: The elevated ball-return gutter is uncovered, so that as you approach the foul line to throw your own ball, somebody else’s is rushing back up the gutter at you.
It’s a setup that might throw off a newcomer. (In fact, it’s easy to imagine a sometime bowler rolling, oh, 114 in his first game, switching from one battered old ball to another, then recovering with a 179 in the next.) But the weirdness is clearly a draw, especially on those two Saturdays per month when live music is offered.
The entrance fee is $12, more if the bands are notable, which covers music, shoes and unlimited bowling, unless a line of would-be bowlers backs up. (You have to be 21 to enter the bar with the bands but can be any age to bowl.)
On this night, the polite, tattooed fellow with the spare question is 29-year-old Jeff Klinedinst of Simi Valley. As his wardrobe and presence here suggest, he is a big fan of all things of the ‘50s--in fact, he says he and two friends came here tonight for the nostalgic theme. But he has never seen a bowling alley without automatic scoring and has never been tutored in where to mark the slashes and Xs that mean spares and strikes or where to scribble a bowler’s running total.
“Ah!” he says, absorbing a brief lesson. He takes to the score sheet with a vengeance. And when their first game is done, around the time the band lurches into the theme from “Rawhide,” instead of heading over to the bar, he and his friends launch into a second game.
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The purist, who might run screaming from All Star Lanes, would head directly for someplace more orderly. Someplace that cultivates leagues and the sort of bowlers who take seriously the dilemma posed by the 7-10 split. Someplace like Mar Vista Bowl, where a Tuesday night finds Mark Bayers and his playmates settling in for a few hours of league play.
“Bowling is kind of a love,” says Bayers, who serves as secretary for the Teledyne Technologies summer league. He’s been bowling here more than 30 of his 44 years, with occasional breaks to work and raise children. As a 12-year-old, Bayers used to ride his bike here from home on Saturday mornings--balancing his bowling ball on the bike as he pedaled--and then roll 20 games or so.
Thirty-two years later, Bayers hops down to lane 19 when his turn comes, grabs his ball and freezes in a pre-approach pose, like a martial artist about to vent fury. Then he glides forward and rolls. A strike. Then another. He averages about 180 but stresses “we’re a fun league, not a money league,” with ages and averages all over the map.
League bowlers like Bayers have sustained the 28-lane Mar Vista facility since its opening in 1961. Phil Yoakum, who has run the pro shop since 1974, acknowledges that league membership has slipped but notes that between 6 and 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, the center still has virtually no room for casual bowlers, only league competition. (In the same way that tour operators insist on discussing motor coaches, not buses, people close to the bowling trade speak of centers, not alleys.)
Bayers can’t stay away, he says, because “it is a sport, and there’s the camaraderie of being on a team. And”--he glances down to lane 19--”Sorry. I have to bowl now.”
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No matter how many bowling al... centers you haunt, certain constants remain. Upon entering, you hear clatter. If you need to rent bowling shoes, you’ll probably need to hand over a shoe of your own as collateral. (Bowling, a wise man from Long Beach once said, is the only chance we ever get to truly stand in somebody else’s shoes.) You will then face the strange chore of choosing a house ball if you didn’t bring your own. Unless it’s a novelty model, the ball will weigh 8 to 16 pounds, and it must travel 60 feet to the pins across floorboards of oiled maple or something more durable that looks like maple.
But the future probably won’t look like Hollywood Star Lanes or All Star Lanes. For a peek at what may arise instead, just head to Jillian’s Hi-Life Lanes at Universal CityWalk. Open since April 2000, it’s a tiny place, with a restaurant and arcade (including virtual bowling) downstairs, 10 lanes and a bar upstairs. Everything is shiny, new and ultra-kitsch: the colors loud, the music louder, the monitors large, the upholstered seats designed to resemble those from a ‘50s Chevy.
On five large video screens above the lanes, clips from Spider-Man cartoons, Three Stooges shorts and “Barbarella” are in rotation. Real-time sports events fill four TV monitors below. And finally there’s the third row of monitors, where your score is displayed. (A sometime bowler, for instance, might roll a 131 and 146, troubled slightly by a sore arm and perhaps distracted by the crowd gathering downstairs for the red-carpet premiere of “The Bourne Identity.”)
Old-fashioned bowlers want nothing to do with the place, but for teenagers and tourists it’s a different story. Jilllian’s is part of a chain of upscale food-drink-bowling-- billiards-games joints that began in Boston in 1988 and now has outlets in about 20 states.
Prices run $4.50 to $6 per game, peaking on Friday and Saturday nights. There are no leagues. Also, in case the cost of parking, bowling, eating and tipping your server isn’t enough to command your attention, Jillian’s bills leave a line for adding a separate gratuity to your bowling fees.
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Basically, the bowling business is in a mad scramble for young customers. That strategy gets even clearer as you pass through venues such as the Montrose Bowling Center on Honolulu Avenue, Pickwick Bowl in Burbank and, to a lesser degree, Sports Center Bowl in Studio City.
The eight-lane Montrose Bowling Center specializes in private parties (frequently children’s birthdays) with no regular hours for open bowling or leagues. Instead of paying $3 or $4 per game, you pay $80 to $100 per hour for the whole place.
The larger Pickwick operation, neighbored by an ice rink and an equestrian center at the edge of Griffith Park, offers a battery of birthday party packages and keeps the ball racks filled with kid-friendly sizes. A sometime bowler, stopping in to roll a 127 and a 167 on a Friday afternoon, might find two or three private parties in progress but no bowlers over age 12. That changes dramatically on Saturday nights, when Pickwick’s “electric fog” specials pull in many teens and twentysomethings and the price per game jumps from $3 or $3.75 to $6.
Sports Center Bowl, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, is part Hollywood and part suburbia, and gets its share of kids, too. Neighbored by a Jerry’s Famous Deli (temporarily closed for repairs since a fire in May), it has long been known for attracting celebrities and features a high-caliber wall of fame (glossies include Kobe Bryant, Drew Carey, Helen Hunt and Rob Reiner). On request, you can get a gutter guard to keep kids encouraged, and of course there’s a long list of birthday party options.
To keep grown-ups encouraged, top scores from days gone by are posted by management over the lanes.
Anyone who looks up from Lane 29, for instance, is reminded that on this spot on Sept. 21, 1989, Rocky German rolled a 300. It’s a small thing, but might be the key to inspiring a youngster, or a sometime bowler, the sort of fellow who might struggle through a 139 game, then, despite an increasingly sore arm and twitchy back, stumble into a startling string of strikes in his second game. That bowler might wind up with a personal high of 217, and then, enjoying the approval of an unseen Lustre King somewhere above, he might pause to slowly enjoy a beverage while that score remained on overhead display for all to admire.
That wouldn’t make a bowler vain, would it?
