Bowling In The 21st Century

I haven't been bowling in probably 40 years, but one Sunday Ron and I spent some time with our twin grandsons Ryan and Spencer, and bowling was our activity.  How things have changed.

When I was a kid, a common Saturday afternoon activity, was bowling.  We had a bowling alley in Westwood (It was upstairs near the Bruin theatre). where we would hang out for hours, bowling and eating pizza.  What great memories.  When I was in college, I had many bowling dates in the student union.  It was cheap and fun.  I think we paid 50 cents for each game, plus 25 cents for shoes.  Boy, have things changed.

On our outing with the twins, we spent $39 for the three of us, one game plus shoes.  The funny thing was, the kids didn't really care at all about bowling.  They were waiting until we finished and they could play arcade games.  That cost another $20.  Lucky for us, we had just eaten lunch, otherwise it would have been another $20 for crappy food.

Bowling alleys today are sort of like Las Vegas.  You walk in.  It's dimly lit, but you  seeTV screens, video games, and lots of noise everywhere.  There are so many distractions and it's so noisy, all we wanted to do was finish and get out of there.  You can't even keep score anymore.  That is all done automatically today.  You put your names in on a computer, and the score comes up on a big screen for all to see.  The other thing I noticed was that they have guard rails in front of both gutters.  If you request, they put the guard rails up and you never get a gutter ball.

I must say bowling is a little like riding a bike.  You never forget how to do it.  By the third frame I was knocking down 8 or 9 pins on my first throw.  I wasn't very good at picking up the spare, but with a little practice I would probably do OK.  It was a lot of fun, but I don't think I'll do it again for another 40 years.