Author Topic: drowning in my nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Read 1230 times)

baltimora · « **on:** August 28, 2004, 03:06:41 PM »

i would bug my mom to let me buy all the new bowling gloves. i treasured the hard plastic earl anthony one that kept your wrist slightly angled. i loved the toys in the vending machines. i remember one being a monkey that puffed smoke from a fake cigarette. i enjoyed seeing all the different masking units and ball returns on tv and around town. the pba didn't obscure them with an ugly brown facade then. going to different houses meant seeing brunswick crowns & astro-lines, several different era amf magic triangles, above-ground ball returns, brunswick subway returns which spit the ball back on the rack towards the pins, and "t", "y" & circle shaped amf returns. newer houses with modern marvels such as the first amf automatic scorers (remember dialing in score by hand and hitting button to tally. each house looked different and had its own character. i would love to bowl at a house with old masking units and see the ball come back on above ground return. i remember strategizing on how not to kick return when shooting ten pin. i am sad to think that 1/2 the centers in my town are gone. time marches on....
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beauty is transitory, but it takes vision. the world's a playground, have fun. for those who think young....

baltimora · « **Reply #1 on:** August 28, 2004, 11:13:04 PM »

duh'oh this was meant to be in response to rag's "pie" nostalgia topic. hit wrong button. but hey i would like to see if anyone remembers.
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beauty is transitory, but it takes vision. the world's a playground, have fun. for those who think young....

SrKegler · « **Reply #2 on:** August 29, 2004, 12:46:24 AM »

I've always wondered if all this modernization has helped or hurt bowling. When we had to keep score by hand, the entire team became involved taking turns scoring, adding, sharpening the pencils, cleaning the overheads, etc.

Now everything seems so geared towards individual effort. Just doesn't seem like we have the same cohesion we used to.

Of course I don't miss hunting for my ball. All those black diamonds up there made it hard sometimes.

Biggest blow to me was when the automatic pinsetters were installed. Cost me my job as pinsetter. Had to start keeping score for the pot games. Didn't pay nearly so well.
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~~~SrK - Have balls, will travel

Spending the kids inheritance one tournament at a time.

da Shiv · « **Reply #3 on:** August 29, 2004, 01:04:47 AM »

This post reminded me of "stoppers." That's what we used to call the heavy black pencil lines someone would put on the plastic score sheet between a just completed frame and the next frame if they had just had a couple opens in a row. We also used to like to color in the whole upper score box if someone struck, and color in the south-east corner of the box below the slash line if someone spared. From an official standpoint, this practice was frowned upon, but it made it easier to see strikes and spares at a glance from the concourse.

What I don't miss is having to watch the sheet like a hawk because of all the errors made by the math-challenged scorers. With math skills being worse than ever today, I'm glad for the auto-scorers. Of course, I catch the auto-scorers making errors too, but at least it's less frequently.

Shiv
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Listening to the monotonous staccato of rain on my desk top

intergalactic · « **Reply #4 on:** August 29, 2004, 01:26:52 AM »

All this stuff is before my time and very interesting tell us more about the good ol days

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Faster than a laser bullet
Louder than an atom bomb
Brighter than a thousand suns

RSalas · « **Reply #5 on:** August 29, 2004, 01:59:13 AM »

quote:
This post reminded me of "stoppers." That's what we used to call the heavy black pencil lines someone would put on the plastic score sheet between a just completed frame and the next frame if they had just had a couple opens in a row.

We used to call them "fences" here. Some of the people I used to keep score for wanted their "fences" drawn in special ways--doubled up after two opens, dashed after a split, and so on.

I sometimes wonder if automatic scoring has played a part in the state of bowling today. I'll never forget what I learned from the adult bowlers when I was a junior keeping score for the big scratch leagues at my home center. Today's youth bowlers don't have that opportunity.
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Horrid in Doubles, torrid in Singles...
...that's The Curse of Dusty.

MSC2471 · « **Reply #6 on:** August 29, 2004, 07:57:35 AM »

When tournaments would come around my home house during my younger days, my friend and I would get the chance to keep score for a pair of lanes for the whole weekend. While I was only 8 or 9 at the time and I couldn't accept money, the owner of the house would give me the equivalent in free games for keeping score. I would walk away with 30 or 40 free games as a result. I did the same for the after school leagues during the week and my friend and I would get to bowl for a couple of hours for free after they were done and before we had to go home for supper.

I remember the fences when you had open frames. Sometimes if we were bowling really bad we would square off a section of frames (usually to the end of the game) and hope that psychologically this would influence our game in a positive way. I couldn't guess the odds, but I think for the most part I would only get one more open the rest of the game. We would also build a house for anyone on the team that was at 111 in the game, and we were also notorious for changing people's names in the middle or at the beginning of a game. We would play hangman as well if someone was hung for a frame, taking away their name and replacing it with a hang man.

Some of this still occurs today, as my Tuesday night league is in a house where there is no automatic scoring, so you have to keep score by hand...

Matt

LuvThatWhiteDot · « **Reply #7 on:** August 29, 2004, 09:33:21 AM »

quote:
I've always wondered if all this modernization has helped or hurt bowling. When we had to keep score by hand, the entire team became involved taking turns scoring, adding, sharpening the pencils, cleaning the overheads, etc.

When I bowled on my Monday league, I always would pray the automatic scorers would go dark and everyone would have to score by hand JUST ONE NIGHT, so I could watch them squirm trying to figure out how to keep score (you have to realize, these women couldn't figure out a handicrap based on 75% of a 775 team average, and I gave each team a handicrap sheet each season to figure it out all by themselves!).

I switched to Friday night, and I heard from a girl on my new league that also bowls on Monday (my old league) that the meeting went terrible. They wanted to change how the 50/50 was handled and a bunch of other stuff, and the secretary was telling everyone that if she didn't like the way the rules were going, someone else could have the job. Nice

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White Dot

It's not the arrow, it's the Indian.
http://bowlingfans.com/league

scotts33 · « **Reply #8 on:** August 29, 2004, 10:19:06 AM »

Auto scoring is probably a reason my team or I personally have won many matches/games because those that are math chanllenged and didn't learn how to score really don't know what they need towards the end of a game to win. Works for me though.

Scott

T Brockette · « **Reply #9 on:** August 29, 2004, 10:40:57 AM »

Inverted,

I used to do the same thing, especially if you got to
score a tournament. $Cha-ching!

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Tracy
If you want to play, train your body.
If you want to win, train your heart.

da Shiv · « **Reply #10 on:** August 29, 2004, 11:24:26 AM »

When I first started bowling adult leagues, four of the five of us on my team were beer drinkers. We bought a pitcher and had four glasses. To distinguish whose beer was whose, we would each drop a different denomination of coin into our glass. The coins would fizz and bubble as the various types of scum, slime, and microbial life on the coins reacted with the beer. Amazingly enough, none of us ever came down with the plague or any other noticeable diseases from this disgusting habit.

This reminds me of another thing--does anyone remember Fizzies? They were colored tablets something like an Alka-Seltzer. You'd drop one in a glass of water and it would bubble and fizz like mad until it finally dissolved and you were left with a somewhat carbonated, somewhat fruit flavored, semi-drinkable excuse for a beverage. We would have probably dropped those in our beer if they had still existed when I got to beer drinking age.

Shiv
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Listening to the monotonous staccato of rain on my desk top

Author Topic: drowning in my nostalgia ain't what it used to be (Read 1230 times)

baltimora

drowning in my nostalgia ain't what it used to be

baltimora

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SrKegler

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da Shiv

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intergalactic

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RSalas

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MSC2471

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LuvThatWhiteDot

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scotts33

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T Brockette

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da Shiv

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