Everything in this story is true.
Though I happily left my small, provincial hometown decades ago, I do keep up with my old friends who remain there, and occasionally go back to visit for events like the big fall festival parade, the annual car show, and so on. The social media age has even provided me the opportunity to follow the goings-on around there through a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to Ark City townies. It was in one of these groups that I recently learned the city’s beloved bowling alley, Hillcrest Lanes, was being torn down — to make way for a Starbucks.
This news triggered in me deep waves of sorrow and anger — irrationally disproportionate, I thought, considering the more or less nonexistent chance I might have ever bowled there again. My Buddhist practice, with its core acknowledgement of the impermanence of all things, has over the years made it a lot easier for me to give up physical objects and places and people. Yet I felt myself burning inside, grieving at what felt like a great and unjust loss.
It’s not just the fact that there are plenty of other commercial lots nearby that could have been easily developed without demolishing an iconic building that served as a community center for six decades. It’s not just that I heard scuttlebutt about some potential buyers working to save the place, only to be foiled by those who turned around and knocked it down. At the base of it, the fiery knot was forged in the pit of my stomach because that old bowling alley was as much a home to me as any place in my childhood outside my grandparents’ house.
Some of the earliest conscious memories I can recall today were formed at Hillcrest Lanes. My grandfather was secretary of the men’s bowling league there, where he also bowled for years on the team sponsored by the local Union State Bank, owned by the Docking family, a Kansas political dynasty. One of his teammates was Karl Smykil, a local businessman who had actually built the bowling alley, and would later serve as Ark City mayor. On league nights I would sometimes be lucky enough to accompany my grandparents out to the lanes for that evening’s matches. These outings were among my earliest experiences in crowded public spaces and I found them enthralling.
I can close my eyes now and it all comes right back to me. The thick heady haze of cigarette smoke, smells of beer and lane wax and shoe spray and french fries. That sound! Sixteen lanes of uninterrupted rumbling thunder, punctuated over and over by the cataclysmic crashes of sixteen-pound balls scrambling clusters of pins from one end of the building to the other. The hubbub of grown-ups talking and drinking and laughing, the uniformed men on the lanes gently cursing and taunting one another in good humor, their wives seated behind them, dressed up to go “out” and huddled in clusters gossiping around their drinks and ashtrays. And the vision that still comes to me in my dreams sometimes today: Ghostly black silhouettes of human hands moving silently across the pairs of overhead screens floating above each lane, writing scores on transparent plastic sheets with grease pencils.
In 1972 or so, when my foundational memories more or less begin, this place was still something of a palace. Built in 1961, Hillcrest Lanes was a paragon of Midcentury Modern design, long and low and sleek, faced with thin rectangular slices of locally-sourced limestone and featuring Space Age styling in the form of angled steel beams holding up the porticos over the entrances. Visitors walking toward the front door passed a spectacular water feature, a fountain illuminated from below with vivid red and blue and green lights, in the center of a little rock garden filled with sparkling white stones.
I could have stood all night and just watched the fountain, but the many delights inside never failed to call my name. The snack bar was more functionally a full-on diner, offering a pretty substantial menu; I remember us going to eat there sometimes even when it wasn’t a league night, my grandmother putting on her nice earrings and dabbing on perfume to eat a “chili size” — an open-faced hamburger smothered in chili. They also had a dark and mysterious cocktail lounge illuminated almost solely by amazing ’60s-era novelty motion signage advertising various beers, and a nursery for little kids, a row of pinball machines, an area full of lockers for the regular bowlers to stow their things, a cool ball-polishing machine, a powerful water fountain with a badge that read OASIS on it, which delivered the iciest cold water I have ever encountered in my life, and a display case at the front counter that was filled with candy bars, mints, chewing gum, cigarettes and cigars, antacids and other sundries. The whole place was magical and all the grown-ups there doted on me.
Hillcrest Lanes is the first place I remember ever seeing a video game, too: Space Race, which was Atari’s second-ever title, after Pong. Even as rudimentary as it was, I found the idea of playing a game on a television screen fascinating, and though I was largely unsuccessful begging quarters off the adults, I couldn’t help but watch, eyes agog, as older and better players worked the strange machine’s controls and moved the little spaceship up the screen. Over the years the alley would wisely expand their video game selection, and by the time my career as a youth league bowler was in full swing in the early ’80s, they even devoted a stretch of the snack bar’s seating area to arcade consoles — I recall playing Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Super Mario Bros. and many others there in my heyday. Even the one based on Journey’s Frontiers album!
I first got into the league around the time my brother and I were abandoned at our grandparents’ house. My grandpa, Troy Tally, was freshly retired from his long career with the Santa Fe Railroad; finding himself suddenly and unexpectedly forced to play parent a second time, he did his best to keep us engaged. I don’t know if he thought I needed to be more active, or that I ought to learn some sportsmanship, or what — but he signed me up for a bowling team. And one afternoon he surprised me by taking me out and formally teaching me the fundamentals of proper delivery. He had rarely made time to do anything one-on-one with me, and when he did I usually got the feeling he only did so because he felt sorry for me, or more likely, because my grandmother made him, but this time it felt like he really wanted to pass something on to me, and I paid attention. His approach was very old-fashioned, I would come to find, but I got the gist of it and had the basics down by the time my first team finally started rolling.
I don’t recall where we finished the season, but it was closer to the top of the pack than the bottom. We got trophies even! What I remember most, actually, is being with my grandpa on all those cold winter Saturday mornings, when he dragged his ass out of bed early to take me to the lanes. Sometimes we would even stop and get breakfast at the Sambo’s where my mom had worked briefly not long before; I recognized her old boss in the kitchen there and he always had a smile for me, which felt good. That guy made me the first omelet I ever had, too, with ham and cheese inside, and little diagonal stripes of cheese melted across the top to fancy it up. I don’t have a lot of memories of being alone with my grandpa, but those mornings rank high.
And then he literally keeled over dead when I was 13, right in the middle of a bowling season. Everything in my world was chaos and flux — my mother absent, my grandmother freshly widowed after being married since age 15, my poor brother in perpetual boiling-over emotional turmoil, my long-estranged father thankfully reentering the picture. I passionately hated school, where I was bored to death on one hand and continually bullied on the other. And I was still reeling with the prolonged trauma that had been my life with my mother and stepfather. It was a hard time for everyone in the house. But every Saturday morning I still had a place to go, and friends to see, and a mission to accomplish. The routine of our weekly bowling matches — paired with my job delivering the newspaper six days a week — gave me something to hang onto.
After Grandpa Troy died, I only bowled one more season, and that year, in no small part thanks to our handicaps, we managed to take first place in the league. A couple of the hotshot bowler kids from hotshot bowler families got real butthurt about being beaten by a bunch of nerds and the jerkiest among them got his lackeys together and confronted me outside the alley, sucker-punching me before one of the old counter men burst through the front door from inside to break it up. So much for sportsmanship!
Years passed, and I rarely returned to Hillcrest Lanes. I occasionally went out to roll a line or two, but it wasn’t like before; I was older now, with a car and a girlfriend and other stuff to do. I moved away to Wichita for college, then dropped out, but not before rolling a few times at the little alley hidden in the basement of WSU’s Campus Activities Center (now known as the Rhatigan Student Center). Someone stole my bowling bag with my ball and shoes in it and I didn’t bowl at all for a while.
In 1995 I broke up with my first wife and moved into a shitty apartment in a drafty old house on the south side of Wichita. During the week approaching Christmas some friends and I got into a prolonged series of rather Saturnalian hijinks that lasted several days and involved heroic quantities of reefer and alcohol. On Christmas morning (more likely early afternoon) I woke up with a wretched headache in my freezing apartment, with my pal Jeff next to me in my bed, similarly hungover. I didn’t even remember us getting back there to crash the night before. We were both hungry, but my cupboards were bare, and due to the holiday, practically no place that served food in Wichita was likely to be open.
And then I remembered Christmas Day 1980, when my grandpa and several other members of our extended family had met at Hillcrest Lanes in Ark City to bowl. That had been a really fun and exciting day, and I wondered if any of the Wichita alleys might be open on Christmas. I mean, bowling alleys always have food, right?
I got out the phone book (remember phone books!?) and turned to the Yellow Pages and started calling bowling alleys. My heart jumped when someone picked up.
“Thanks for calling Flight Lanes.”
The next thing you know, Jeff and I were halfway across town, wearing rented shoes, swallowing magnificent greasy double cheeseburgers and tater tots and washing them down with a shared pitcher of cheap American beer. Flight Lanes was built in very similar style to Hillcrest Lanes, though half again bigger, and I immediately felt right at home. We relaxed and smoked cigarettes and threw a couple games apiece on the lanes and it was a really lovely Christmas after all.
The next year I called the manager at Flight Lanes around Thanksgiving and booked some lanes for Christmas Day. I invited people to join me, and a handful showed up. The next year even more came. Christmas Bowling became a regular event, and at its peak around 2001 or so, 75 people attended. Sadly, Flight Lanes closed after our ninth or tenth year there; we tried it the next Christmas at a newfangled spot called simply The Alley but everybody hated it. One year later I found a more permanent home for the annual event, at West Acres Bowl way out on the far west side of town. Like Flight Lanes, it too was an MCM building similar to my old stomping grounds in Ark City, and again, it really felt like home. People who had moved away from Wichita would come while visiting family for the holidays, folks would bring all their Christmas cookies and candy and fudge, some came with their kids, everybody would enjoy a greasy snack bar meal and roll a little — it was a wonderful tradition.
I hosted Christmas Bowling every year for 25 years straight, from 1995 to 2019, and then came COVID. My personal life took a shit in a number of ways around then, as well, and by the time the pandemic passed I was struggling to keep it together and suffering from too much anxiety to get up the follow-through to put the event together again. We’ll always have the memories, anyway.
And then in January 2021 I heard Hillcrest Lanes, my old home alley, was up for sale. The asking price — if I recall something like $400,000 — seemed steep to me, as the place was a little down at the heels, and bowling just isn’t the draw it used to be, especially in small communities where the population has dropped more or less steadily for 60 years straight. But I had faith that someone would find it worth saving.
Sadly, those who did either couldn’t afford it, or (rumor has it) had a potential deal deliberately queered by folks who had other designs on the property. In the end, it was a lost cause, and the building was razed last week.* Unprecedented hell descended for days thereafter on the local Facebook discussion groups, forcing the moderators to lock down discussion on the topic as just too hot. I am not the only one who feels the burning pain of this loss, it seems.
The next time I visit Ark City, it’s going to be hard for me as I drive by that spot, which is right on the main drag on the way into town. I know times change and places change with them, and I am okay with that. But sometimes it still stings to be see a physical reminder that when they say, “You can’t go home again,” they really mean it. This old man comes rolling home no more.
*Six months after writing this piece, I learned that the building and everything in it — including the 16 hardwood lanes — went straight to the landfill, save a few items local people were allowed to grab out of there before the place was razed. This thoughtless waste makes the loss even more tragic.
