This is in the late thirties, what I’m talking about, when I was just a little shit sneaking Drums I rolled myself with one hand because you had to know how to do that if you wanted any respect. And yeah, none of us wanted to be out of there last. We were all scared of the ghost of that choked kid.
Back then it was all local matches. People didn’t travel. They went for the town action. I’m talking mostly clubs—German Social, Polish, American Legion, VFW clubs, etc. And all kinds of leagues, singles, doubles, mixed doubles, or teams. My father was in the industrial leagues, because of his job. They weren’t pro, but they’d get cash prizes put up by local merchants. Quarries had their own leagues, for an example.
My father was a town hero back then. His team, the Sandusky Icebreakers, farmed for a professional team and traveled the Midwest for tourneys. The Register posted all their scores and standings—high single, high triple—from each night, and the team high singles and triples. He bowled in a few nationals, and one year he ranked tenth in the country. Not that he made any money for it, but that’s something to say, isn’t it? That’s something to say.
Most of the money was made in backroom betting. The manager’d put together a team or have a head-to-head and people would bet. My father got his cut. He let me carry his equipment, keep his ball polished, and I was proud to help him. I’d watch him and I’d think, That’s my dad. I learned my arithmetic chalking the scores next to his name. I made sure no one stiffed him and also tracked what he needed to win. He said not to worry about the scores, don’t get thrown off by anybody else’s game. Consistency was the key. He had it until the drinking caught up with him. There came a time anyway when I wasn’t so sure he was right. Winning was key. That was where the money was.
We pin boys got paid by the string—the manager would pay six cents a string, and the bowlers would tip. My father knew all the good tippers, and so he’d send them to me. On double league nights—like, say, the St. Mary’s teams would come in and bowl at six and another league started at eight or eight-thirty, scheduled back-to-back—you’d set up six hundred frames in a night, could hardly stand up after that.
Sometimes we’d bunch the pins for the customers we liked to see win. It was harmless. There weren’t all the standards back then, everything all precise. My dad could read where the ball broke into the pocket after three frames, tops.
Everybody talked about going on tour back then, but it wasn’t any great life. Living out of motels, driving all night, and sure, someone was sponsoring you, but if you didn’t do well you didn’t make any money. Meanwhile you’re paying your entrance fees and expenses. Some guys slept in their cars right there in the bowling center parking lot, ate beans and tuna out of a can, just squeaking by. When you’re cranking strikes all day long on your hometown lanes, everybody loves you, they’re all rooting for you. Then you get out on the road and you can’t read the lanes, and you’re not sleeping well and probably drinking too much. Nobody knows you, and they don’t care whether you win or lose like back home. Actually, they’re hoping you’ll lose because they’re rooting for their hometown hero. Guys get so nervous they throw the ball away. I remember it happened to my father once. It happened to Barry Asher. And I saw it happen to Joe Wycheski, like everyone else around here. But that came a lot later, and I made my peace with it.
And the point. The point is how I got back here. All this leads to it. My old man had gotten to like betting too much, not just on alley matches but anything. Track, cards, baseball. He’d get nervous when he lost bets and start drinking. The drinking ruined his game and then he’d drink more, depressed for losing.
After a while, he had people after him for money. Two big slabs came to our door one night. He was on the road, and I wasn’t with him that time because I had the pin-setting job at the State. Walt hadn’t enlisted yet so this would have been about ’43. I was eleven. The knock woke me up, but not Walt, who could sleep through anything. I followed my mother into the living room and watched her open the door. They didn’t wear those undertaker suits like in the movies; they looked like they were ready to go hunting, trousers tucked into mud boots and caps pulled down over their sausage faces.
My mother stared at them for about two seconds; they didn’t even have a chance to say anything. She’d grown up on a farm outside Castalia, but she wasn’t a fool. She said, “Wait a minute, I think I got some grocery money.” They just shuffled their feet and shook their heads; she’d embarrassed them. She pulled her purse off the table by the door, and we all watched her digging through it. One of the bricks said, “We’ll come back, Mrs. Florida.” But she had some bills in hand now.
“No, take it; it’s fine.”
The other brick said, “Mr. Florida is man enough to pay us outright, we have faith in that. We don’t need to take no food from your children.” And then he smiled at me like as if we were all friends now. Or like as if he was going eat me. I wanted to slit his pudgy throat. I wished he’d just taken the money instead of pretending he was doing us a favor.
They stepped back from the door, tipping their caps and such, and then they were gone. My mother shut the door, and when she turned around, she had this flat look in her eyes like as if she didn’t even recognize me. I’d never seen that look before. She told me to go to bed, but I just stood there. She said, “Go on!” I shuffled down the hall and sat on my cot, and I thought I’d be sick, I was so mad. I decided then that I wouldn’t have any weaknesses. I wouldn’t be blowing my cash or drinking it. But I was just a kid. It seemed simple to live straight.
When I came in Walt was sleeping facedown on his pillow, arms hanging on either side of his bed like fat ropes. He’d just graduated and was working at Engineered Fittings under our father, and he smelled like hot metal and grease all the time. He didn’t have anything to say to me anymore. So I made another decision right then. I was getting out of there. I didn’t want any factory job. I didn’t want to dole out an allowance to any woman, and I sure as hell didn’t want kids who sat in their dark bedrooms and hated me.
A few months after that, Walt enlisted and got sent straight to Normandy. He lived through that somehow and then did officer training and went to Korea. Sometime after that he got married, and then he was one of the advisors sent over to Vietnam in 1961, four years before they got official with the combat troops. I was thirty by then so he would’ve been thirty-seven. We hadn’t talked in years. I wouldn’t have known he was over there if our mother hadn’t let it drop and said it was a secret.
Then, just before Christmas that year, he died for six days.
By that time, I’d been out on my own more than ten years. I’d left when I was eighteen, figured I’d bowl my way around the country. I hadn’t been home except for a holiday here and there, and if it hadn’t been for Walt’s wife getting the visit from the base officer and the chaplain, hats in hand, I might never have come back.
Because at that point, I was doing pretty good. On the road, life was tournaments and match play and betting. I didn’t drink much, and I stayed smooth. I took on big-hooking crankers like Carmen Salvino, who was younger than me, and stylists like Earl Anthony, and everything in between. Saw Junie McMahon, who had to have the smoothest delivery in bowling—Salvino said you could balance a glass of water on the man’s head. Might as well have been scotch because the guy drank himself to death. Back then, the game was simpler but tougher. You won on skill, not your gear.
How my mother tracked me down with the news about Walt, I don’t know. I was in Minneapolis for a pro-am, sleeping on someone’s couch. But a mother has a way of finding you. I took the train home the next day.
The story was, Walt’s wife had planned to stay with my parents over Christmas anyway because she didn’t have any family. But then the news came, and so she came earlier than planned.
Louise was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother when I walked in. I went to kiss my mother, and I thought she’d be crying. But her eyes were dull. She looked like as if she hadn’t slept for weeks.
Louise