By: Michael Yockel

By 10:45 on an unseasonably warm Friday morning in late March, the nine members of the Old Stars duckpins bowling league have passed the midway point in the first game of their weekly match at tiny Patterson Bowling Center on Eastern Avenue. Smooth-rolling Maxine Hubbard has just converted a one-pin spare; not-so-smooth-rolling Bob Kline has just executed a difficult shot for a 10; and Theresa McElhose, co-owner of the Patterson with her husband, Charles Sr., has just knocked off a double-header strike before hurrying to field a phone call behind the front counter/snack bar/bowling-shoe-dispensing nook.

With Mix 106.5 coursing through the house sound system, good-natured kibitzing reigns—low-fives and knuckle-bumps exchanged after each bowler’s turn—among the mostly senior Old Stars crew. The four-team league occupies four of the Patterson’s six first-floor lanes (six second-floor lanes sit vacant at this early hour). Crammed into a 100-feet-long by 50-feet-wide space, the Patterson, located midway between Fells Point and Butcher’s Hill, bills itself as “the oldest operating duckpin bowling alley in the nation”—a hard-to-dispute claim given that the place opened in 1927 and now exists as one of only a handful of extant lanes in the Baltimore area, the unofficial duckpins capital of the known universe (see “Eighty Years of Duckpin,” January 2007 Urbanite).

“It holds its own,” says Charles McElhose, 53, who, with Theresa, 52, purchased the Patterson in 1995 from its original owners. “We bought it because we love the game.”

The place still rollicks on weekends, when young, non-league BYOBers jam both floors. Still, McElhose confesses that he subsidizes the Patterson during the summer—traditionally the game’s off-season—by funneling funds from the DJ/karaoke and home-improvement businesses he also runs. Meanwhile, attrition chips away at his older customers.  

“Over the thirteen years that we’ve owned it, a lot of bowlers who also loved the game have passed away,” he says. He motions toward the small group that includes his 78-year-old father. “With this league, we used to have eighteen bowlers. Now we’re down to nine. I have continued to run this league for the old-timers. You would hope that more of them would bowl, but a lot of people, health-wise, they can’t: They say, ‘This hurts’ and ‘That hurts,’ and they don’t want to do anything but sit in a chair.”

A day and a half earlier and a bit more than eleven Mapquest miles to the west, not far over the city line on an aggressively commercial stretch of Route 40, the Westview Lanes rips along in high gear at a little after 8 p.m. on a foggy Wednesday. Nearly all of the forty duckpin lanes in the football-field-sized building host organized bowling, with the six-team Sportsmen’s Bowling League (mixed gender, all ages, all white) sandwiched between the ten-team Gladiators (mixed gender, all ages, all African American) and six of the sixteen teams from the all-male Baltimore Professional Duckpin Association (BPDA).

The same amicable, jiving commiseration and encouragement that characterized the action at the Patterson dominates here, too, even among the considerably more focused and accomplished pros, who bowl a forty-week season for modest cash prizes. “A lot of the guys in the league like the competition, and they also like the friendships that they’ve built over the years,” explains Dave Garriott, 42, secretary of the sixty-four-member BPDA, which from late August through early May competes each Wednesday at Westview, Southwest Bowling Center in Linthicum, and/or Charm City Bowl in Brooklyn, plus occasional Sundays at White Oak Lanes in Silver Spring. “For me, it’s not financial, although some folks do look at it as a financial opportunity.”

Duckpin uber-fan Robin Olson brims with an even deeper passion for the game. The 49-year-old stay-at-home mom lives in Gaithersburg, bowls regularly at White Oak, and since 1997 has maintained a comprehensive website about the sport (www.robinsweb.com/duckpin/index.html). “I grew up with the sound of duckpin bowling when I was just a tiny little baby—it’s in my blood,” says Olson, who was raised in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs. “Back then, when you said you were going bowling, you meant duckpins. Now, you never see ads for it anywhere. It’s almost like a cult.”

Like many adherents of duckpin bowling—which is distinguished from higher-scoring tenpins by its smaller, lighter, hole-less balls and shorter, more squat pins—Olson touts her game’s inherent superiority over its more well-known cousin. “I look at tenpins and say, ‘Bor-ing.’ You don’t have the finesse of duckpins, where there’s much more variation,” says Olson. “And duckpins is a harder game, requiring a higher skill level. To me, it’s more fun, more challenging.”

Olson’s contention is borne out by the fact that, while tenpinners routinely roll “perfect” 300 games, duckpins remains a sport with an unconquered peak: No one’s ever achieved a 300 duckpins score, although Connecticut’s Pete Signore Jr. came tantalizingly close in 1992 with a 279.

Being a duckpin diehard in 2008 virtually demands those enduring friendships that Garriott mentions: Duckpinners are an increasingly rare breed. The game has steadily evaporated over the past thirty-five years, as one operation—or “house”—after another closed its doors in the Baltimore area, victims of a confluence of demographic, technological, cultural, and economic factors.

Among those factors: a general decline in Americans’ civic engagement, the subject of Harvard University social scientist and professor of public policy Robert D. Putnam’s well-known 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. By its very nature, bowling generates what Putnam calls “social capital”—the valuable ties that link individuals into communities. Citing numerous examples of groups that create social capital, from PTAs and civic organizations to labor unions and bridge clubs, Putnam contends that Americans have abandoned such social networks en masse. Case in point: the decline of league bowling. “Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by more than 40 percent,” he writes.

The implications of the league game’s demise go beyond the threat it poses to the livelihoods of bowling-house proprietors. “The broader social significance … lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo,” Putnam claims. “League bowling, by requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances, represented a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by an occasional pickup game.”

These are the community ties once forged amid the camaraderie of a citywide network of duckpin houses, now all but vanished. And if the downward spiral that Putnam chronicles holds true—and houses continue to fold—then Baltimore’s dedicated duckpinners may themselves be rolling toward extinction.



Duckpins and Baltimore have long been synonymous, dating back to the game’s shrouded inception. For sheer confusion, that creation story rivals those of Norse or Hindu mythologies. Throughout the 20th century, local newspapers chirped with civic pride about duckpins’ Baltimore origins. And while the exact date (most cite 1900, others 1904) and location of the sport’s creation vary (Howard Street’s Diamond alleys is the usual birthplace, but a lone wild-hair dissenter favors the Garage lanes at the intersection of Charles Street and Mt. Royal Avenue), most concur on the cast involved, while differing on the principals’ degree of significance.

A detailed, slippery-facts mash-up account goes like this: Two members of the Baltimore Orioles, catcher Wilbert Robinson and third baseman-manager John McGraw (both future Hall of Famers), owned a Howard Street recreation complex/restaurant called the Diamond, which included eight (or perhaps four) tenpins lanes. Usually, when the maple pins became damaged, they were tossed into the building’s furnace, but on one occasion, Robinson suggested to a bowling chum, Charles L. Seibold (or Seybold), superintendent of Carroll Park, that he pass along a bagful of battered pins to the lads who played in the park. Seibold graciously declined the offer, saying that the boys already tore up the park’s turf without additional encouragement. Instead, Seibold suggested to Robinson (or to Diamond manager Frank Vansant—or “Van Sant”) that the pins be whittled down and paired with the small, six-inch balls used for tenpins variations known as “cocked hat” (requiring only three pins) and “five back” (requiring only five).

Accordingly, a batch of banged-up pins was dispatched to woodworker John Dittmar (or “Dettmar” or “Dittmer”) at his shop at Pratt Street and Fallsway (or on Lombard Street). He returned the pins to the Diamond, at which point the on-lanes midwiving occurred, starring Robinson, McGraw, Dittmar, Seibold, Vansant, Sun reporter Bill Clarke (or “Clark”), Orioles outfielder Steve Brodie, and someone named Van Wettern. Or some combination thereof. Robinson (or McGraw) remarked that the pins, when struck, resembled a flock of ducks taking off—the two ballplayers sometimes hunted on the Chesapeake Bay— and, in a newspaper item about the event, Clarke christened the new game “duckpins.” 

A fabulous tale, accepted as gospel for a century. But one that has recently been exposed as fabulist hype. Author Howard W. Rosenberg, who has meticulously explored baseball’s formative years in a series of books centered on the sport’s first superstar (and exceptional tenpin bowler), Cap Anson, notes in the appendix to his 2005 book, Cap Anson 3: Muggsy John McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball’s Fun Age of Rule Bending, that a May 1894 article in the Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts, reported on duckpins competiton in that town. Rosenberg also cites a duckpins reference in the Boston Globe from early January 1893.

As for Baltimore’s duckpin bona fides, this much can be verified: A December 28, 1899, article in the Baltimore Sun mentions Vansant “introducing” the game at the Diamond on the previous evening, with Robinson topping the participants with a 101 score.

Of course, none of this myth-busting diminishes the fact that, for most of the 20th century, duckpins reigned here and in D.C., where the sport’s governing authority, the National Duckpin Bowling Congress (NDBC), was established in 1927. In Baltimore, from the 1930s to the 1960s, duckpins dominated tenpins; the city and its burgeoning suburbs throbbed with the sounds of crashing pins. “According to the best estimate, no fewer than 30,000 Baltimoreans are organized into regular leagues,” a 1952 Sun story noted. “If you include the casual players, the total duckpin population in the city jumps to between 80,000 and 90,000.”

Eight years later, the now-defunct Baltimore American newspaper pondered how the city could support an anticipated bowling “expansion boom, which is forecast to hit Baltimore with the full force of a hurricane. If all [new houses] come in which are rumored, each Baltimorean just about could have his own private lane.” A map accompanying the article showed thirty bowling establishments in the city alone, with a thirty-first under development.

In 1963, the Sun reported that “an estimated 102,000 persons bowl regularly in metropolitan Baltimore, 77,000 of them in 1,600 adult and children’s leagues. There are about 52 bowling establishments, with about 1,105 duckpin lanes and 538 tenpin lanes.” And those figures ignore the duckpin lanes in private venues: the Baltimore Country Club, Maryland Casualty Company, and the basement of my Episcopalian grade school in the 700 block of Park Avenue, among numerous others.

Leagues composed of shift workers from local manufacturing firms augmented teams from church groups, social clubs, and schools in duckpin houses, with some staying open around the clock to accommodate demand. Television helped fuel the craze. WBAL broadcast an array of duckpin shows from the mid-1950s through the early 1980s, most notably Duckpins and Dollars (for adults) and Pinbusters (for kids), going so far as to install lanes in its TV Hill studios to produce the programs. The game’s best bowlers—Elizabeth “Toots” Barger, Robert Fisher, Alva Brown, Dave Volk—were regional celebrities, all members of the NDBC’s Duckpin Hall of Fame, which relocated to Southwest Bowling Center in the early 1980s. 

But in the 1970s, tenpins began encroaching on duckpins’ hegemony in the Baltimore area, initiating a glacial tailspin from which the small-ball game has never recovered. “The larger scores of tenpins have more appeal,” local duckpinner/tenpinner Joe Doonan told the Sun in August 1973, “especially to the young bowlers.” In 1979, the News American daily newspaper reported “about 60,000 duckpin league bowlers in the metropolitan area, while men’s and women’s tenpins associations list about 40,396 league bowlers.” Tenpins was gaining.   

“The maintenance and upkeep of duckpins was too much,” the manager of a suburban house changing from duckpins to tenpins told the News American in that 1979 story. Another factor: new residents who didn’t understand the local game. “As outsiders move to the area, they are not familiar with duckpins and want the tenpins. All the big-time professional bowlers use tenpins.”

Crucially, duckpins suffered a technical blow when the only company that manufactured its automatic pinsetters ceased operations in 1973. “Even if you wanted to open a duckpin center today, you would have to find somebody who has some machines tucked away in a warehouse,” says Stacy Karten, 54, an Owings-Mills-based bowling consultant and editor/publisher of Duckpin News, a newsletter published three times a year. In recent years, when a duckpin house closed, something of a rugby scrum ensued to obtain its pinsetters. Three years ago, Charles McElhose purchased six such machines from the shuttered Thurmont lanes in Western Maryland, keeping them in storage at the Patterson to cannibalize them for parts.

Most of the thirty lanes featured on that 1960 Baltimore American map disappeared decades ago: the Stadium and the Boulevard in Waverly; the Strand and the Lafayette in West Baltimore; the Recreation Center and the Spillway downtown. Others perished more recently: the Arcade at North and Maryland avenues, the Southway in Federal Hill (now loft apartments), and, just last year, Seidel’s on Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore, slated to morph into an indoor flea market.

At present, two duckpin-only houses remain active in Baltimore city limits—the Patterson and Charm City. Duckpin lanes are still offered at a total of twenty-eight houses throughout Maryland, many in Baltimore’s suburbs. That represents nearly half of the fifty-nine that exist nationally, according to the NDBC, with more than a dozen in Connecticut. Somewhat incongruously, four duckpin lanes can be found at the Tenkiller Golf Club in eastern Oklahoma, which bills itself as “the first duckpin bowling center west of the Mississippi.” Equally curious: Duckpins once flourished in the Philippines, but now, judging from a post on www.robinsweb.com, interest there also seems to have waned. By contrast, tenpins still boasts 5,300 houses in the U.S.

League duckpins has been particularly hard hit: In 1973, the NDBC sanctioned forty thousand duckpin bowlers; today, that figure has plummeted to approximately nine thousand. “People’s lifestyles have changed,” observes Karten. “Thirty years ago, the league business made up two-thirds of the mix. Now it’s more like 45 percent. To ask someone to commit to a thirty- to thirty-five-week league is too much.” Another nail in the duckpin coffin, says Karten: the various recreational distractions competing for after-work time. “In duckpins’ heyday in the ’60s and ’70s, when leagues were really popular, there weren’t a lot of other things you could do.”


Struck by duckpins’ slow fade to black, 25-year-old filmmaker Dave Teodosio, now studying for his master’s at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, created Duckpin, a forty-three-minute documentary narrated by ESPN’s Kenny Mayne that premiered in April in Providence, Rhode Island. He calls the film “a retrospective chronicling the history and mystique of the dying sport of duckpin bowling. Duckpins is the main character of the film, and it’s accentuated by the cultish subculture of duckpinners who love it so dearly and have built their lives around the sport.”

Teodosio, who grew up not far from a duckpin center in West Haven, Connecticut, is reluctant to draw any firm conclusions concerning the factors contributing to duckpins’ demise, but he emphasizes the real estate boom. “People come along and say, ‘Hey, let’s open a Starbucks or a CVS here,’” he says. “Owners see that kind of money and jump on it.”

According to bowling consultant Karten, duckpin proprietors can survive—maybe even prosper—if they engage in some creative tinkering with their core product. “The people left running the establishments that do it right still do well from a business standpoint,” Karten says. “But the only growth that can occur is within the walls of the places that already exist. The purity of duckpins remains.” He recommends diversifying—offering non-bowling options such as video games, laser tag, mini golf, and bars. “They need to reinvent the game within the confines of what’s already there.”

Perhaps salvation lies in “boutique bowling,” a 21st-century phenomenon that markets a velvet-rope vibe, with fine dining and dress codes. Lucky Strike, a tenpins operation, pioneered the concept in 2003 in Hollywood, and now operates eighteen such centers, including one in D.C. Here in Baltimore, the independent Mustang Alley’s opened in August 2007 with a seventy-five-seat dining area, private banquet facility, and twelve bowling lanes: four for ducks, eight for tens.

“Because of the Baltimore tradition, we put the four duckpins [lanes] in,” notes Mustang Alley’s manager Jay Teramani, a 50-year-old who grew up bowling duckpins in Baltimore County.

Located above new foodie haunts Lemongrass and Tsunami in the rehabbed Holland Tack Factory on the fringe of Little Italy, Mustang Alley’s gives off the whiff of an upscale sports bar, with a dozen big-screen TVs beaming golf, hockey, basketball, car racing, and baseball on a Friday evening in April. Patrons are split equally between the loaded bar and not-quite fully occupied lanes (two of the duckpin lanes are dark tonight). “When people call for reservations,” Teramani explains, “we ask, ‘Would you like a duckpin lane or a tenpin lane?’ I can immediately tell who’s from Baltimore and who’s not [by their response]. Sometimes when the [tenpin] lanes fill up, we tell people, ‘Why don’t you try duckpins?’ And they—very good tenpin bowlers—say, ‘It’s not the same. It’s harder.’”

Harder, yes, and perhaps too subtle for a sports culture obsessed with performance enhancement. While tenpins continually tweaks itself in a quest to facilitate the bliss of higher scores—most recently via high-tech ball surfaces that make it easier to develop a lethal pro-style hook—duckpins remains steadfastly incorruptible, still operating with equipment made when Richard Nixon occupied the White House, still holding out the possibility of a perfect 300 score, still characterized by what Karten called its “purity.”

“The innate appeal of duckpins is also the same reason why people have an adverse opinion of it,” theorizes filmmaker Teodosio. “And that’s because it’s so difficult and so challenging.”

Incontrovertibly, the evidence points to duckpins’ eventual extinction, but even as its votaries acknowledge that likelihood, they trumpet the game’s transcendent virtues. Unabashed duckpins fan Olson, for one, points to her experience bowling for more than a decade in a women’s league in which she was the youngest member. “It’s like a fountain of youth," she says.  "Sometimes you get your ass kicked by a ninetysomething-year-old. I don’t know where else you would see that.”

—Writer and editor Michael Yockel lives in Roland Park.


CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE A VIDEO MONTAGE ON PATTERSON DUCKPIN BOWLING




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