Spare Me

"FURY!...The story of a horse...and a boy who loves him."

I was fortunate enough as a kid to have the Johnny Unitas Colt Lanes bowling center (they don't like to be called bowling alleys) a mile from my house. I could go down there and hang around with everyone else who had nothing to do on a Saturday morning until "Fury" came on.

Being at Colt Lanes was fun, it got me out of the house (to the relief of many), and now and again we would see Johnny Unitas himself walking around the place. Typical Towson childhood.

Now and again, we would even scrape up the price of a game and a pair of rental shoes, and bowl. I can still hear the sound of the place, the balls on their way to meet the pins, the pins flying and landing with a wooden chaos, the ball on the way back to where it started...

And then one day a big wheeler came in carrying a case, Was it a typewriter? A ham? What was in there? Turns out, he had his OWN bowling ball! To those of us in the rabble, that was like showing up for a formal dance in your own tuxedo! Or owning your own helicopter. Who owned a bowling ball, when the place was full of them to use?

All these thoughts came racing back when I read about the man in Michigan who went to knock down his back stairs...and found 160 bowling balls!

33-year-old David Olson is remodeling the back deck and when he started digging earlier this month he unearthed an old bowling ball.

OK. One bowling ball, that could happen anywhere. But Olson kept on digging and the next thing you know, he dug a veritable trove of the spheres.

“I was actually a little happy about that because it’s a little easier to roll bowling balls out of the way than to move the sand and figure out where to put all that,” he told the Detroit Free Press, using a sentence that has probably never been spoken by anyone ever.

Olson, who is from Norton Shores (Norton!) 
figures there have to be even more of them under the house.

They were Brunswick balls, so he called that company and got an answer. There was a bowling ball factory in that area back in the 1950s, and he was told that employees were allowed to take scrapped balls - the ones that were not perfectly round or otherwise lacking in quality -  home with them for whatever purpose. And one of the purposes a lot of people found for them was to use them as an alternative to gravel or sand.

I will avoid the obvious jokes.

I mean, you want to fill up a hole with something durable, one of those bad boys will do the job. Big hole to fill? Try 160.

The plant in Muskegon MI has been shuttered since 2006. The balls really aren't useable, or they would have been sold, not scrapped. But Olsen gave some away, donated some to the local Heritage Museum, and he'll keep a few around because you never can tell what use you'll have for a bowling ball or two!