duck pin

you can look up the details of this sadistic game online.  bill and I would always go with our parents. not often-they ere not regular bowlers.  the bowling ball is 5" in diameter with no holes-if you have a kid 8-10, see if they can hold this heavy, sold rubber bowling ball and then to throw it down an alley at 10 pins!  The pins where we bowled had a rubber rung around the center(not all duck pin do) and were about 8" tall  No auomation. a boy was paid to be a "pinsetter."  He would step on a lever and ten nails would come up through the floor -the pins had holes in the bottom to line them up just like reglar bowlong.  He would then jump up on a high bench while you threw youR ball, then come down and clear the fallen pins and reset them if necessary and then your ball would go down a shue back to you. Scoring was a little diffierent, but the idea was to get a perfect 300 game.  Someone claims the did, but the NDPB association has on  record, a 279 game from someone, of all places, Erie Pa. By the way, you got 3 balls per frame.  I t was the mostdifficult game I ever tried To play since you just could not get a grip on the ball to send it in a strike path.  I think our average game totals were around 60-85 points.  Today, I can see why the lanes wer in the basement of the club:  so you could drink enough beer to constantly cuss during the entire game. It was not at the Knights of Columbus (K of C) as their meeting hall was across the street from St. Joseph school, which I attended through my freshman year.  The nice thing about being a catholic was that after all the bad language(drinking was OK) you could go to weekly confession, and for a couple of hail Mary's and maybe a Glory Be (standard prayers,) you were forgiven.  If there was no time and you were about to die the catholic church had "death bed" repentance.  Just say your sorry and be contrite and all was forgiven. Next: Flakus Glass company, along with the Heights Plaza, forever ending the family stores in Brackenridge-just "up the avenue." Sidenote:  the "up the avenue stores," were always closed from 12 PM-3PM on Good Friday and all stores, even when all the stores of the strip malls in Natrona Heights were put up, plus the grocery chain's stores were ALWAYS closed on Sunday's.After all, when you were learning to drive, this is where you practiced since the lots were empty and void of traffic.  Forget Driver's Ed in High School;  we just got in the family car with a parent and went to the mal to learn driving skills!  Unless you grew up on a farm-they knew how to drive from the time they could reach a gas and brake petal on a piece of farm machinery! usually they were quite skillful at driving by the time they were 10.