Strike & Spare: Canadians uniquely have 5-pin bowling but Americans have a 10-pin bowling alley in the White House

Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road in Thompson, offering both five-pin and 10-pin bowling, opened in March 1999 and celebrated its 16th anniversary March 19.

My first trip to Nick’s NC Crossroad Lanes – at least to bowl – was for some five-pin bowling a few weeks before that on Feb. 28 when my friend Paul Boge, the Winnipeg writer and filmmaker was in town for the weekend as guest speaker for Pastor Ted Goossen’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship Family Enrichment weekend, and a Saturday afternoon outing to the bowling alley was on the agenda. My curiosity got the best of me in wondering if Boge is as good a bowler as he is speaker and Christian apologist. He is.

DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes has been the only game in town when it comes to bowling since May 2010 when the last strikes were thrown at Thompson Lanes on Churchill Drive, which opened in 1965 and was operated by the Stuart family for 40 of its 45 years in existence.

Before my end of February five-pin outing at NC Crossroad Lanes with my friends from Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship, I think my most recent bowling outing had been back in Kingston, Ontario when I was a grad student at Queen’s University in the mid-1990s.

Five-pin bowling, for my American readers, is a Canadian thing, invented by Tommy Ryan in Toronto in 1909. Original pin count (values) are established as (from left to right) “4-2-1-3-5.” The first five-pin bowling league was formed at Ryan’s Toronto Bowling Club the following year in 1910. While there are  some five-pin bowling alleys in the United States and in Europe, the vast majority of five-pin bowling alleys and leagues are found in Canada.

Ryan ran his own pool hall in Toronto prior to inventing the sport of five-pin bowling. Ryan came up with the idea of five-pin bowling after many of his clients complained that the balls in 10-pin bowling were too heavy. As a result, he produced a version of bowling with a new scoring system, lighter balls, and rubber rings around the pins.

The first five-pin bowling organization was the Canadian Bowling Association (CBA) formed in Toronto in 1927, which followed a year later in 1928 with its first Official 5 Pin Rule Book printed by the CBA. In 1952, the pin count was revised to (from left to right) 2-3-5-3-2 (as it is currently). The highest possible score that can be attained in five-pin bowling is 450. This can be accomplished by achieving a strike in the first nine frames and then achieving three more strikes in the tenth (final) frame. In five-pin bowling, three strikes in a row is a total of 45 points (in the first frame in which the streak began). When multiplied by 10, the final point total would be 450.

The Canadian Five-Pin Bowler’s Association now determines the rules and rule changes in five-pin bowling, while the Bowling Proprietors Association of Canada (BPAC) represents the interest of bowling alley owners.

When a player uses all three of their throws to knock down all of the pins, it is known as a “full set.” Three consecutive strikes is known as a “turkey”; three consecutive strikes in the tenth frame is called a “Strike Out,” while hitting both three pins (in your first two throws) is called a “Howie.”

Each week nearly one million Canadians go bowling and five-pin bowling was voted the fourth-greatest Canadian invention of all time on the CBC Television series Greatest Canadian Inventions.

The United States had 4,061 bowling centers in 2012, down 25 percent from 1998, the earliest year for which the U.S. Census collected consistent data, Bloomberg Business reported last July. By contrast, the United States added 2,000 bowling alleys between the end of the Second World War and 1958, when the American Society of Planning Officials reported in May 1958 that “the bowling alley is fast becoming one of the most important – if not the most important – local center of participant sport and recreation.”

While Canadians may have the claim on five-pin bowling, Americans can point to the unique distinction of having a bowling alley – albeit 10-pin – right in the White House in Washington. In fact, it turned 68 last Saturday, as President Harry S. Truman officially opened it on April 25, 1947.

Fellow Missourians funded the construction of the bowling alley on the ground floor of the West Wing in honour of the president. They had intended to open the alley as part of Truman’s 63rd birthday celebration on May 8, 1947, but construction was completed ahead of schedule. Truman’s favourite pastime was poker and although he had not bowled since he was a teenager, A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes, “he gamely hoisted the first ball, knocking down 7 out of 10 pins. One of the pins is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.”

Truman allowed staff to start a league but presidential bowling was moved to the Old Executive Office Building in 1955 to make way for a mimeograph room. But in 1969, President Richard Nixon, an avid bowler, had a new one-lane alley built, which was paid for by friends, in an underground workspace area below the driveway leading to the North Portico.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

End of an era for gadget and gizmo DIYers as RadioShack to file for bankruptcy

I still remember trying to build my first crystal radio set as a kid. Or should I say more truthfully watching my dad build it for the most part. A crystal radio set is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wire antenna.  All you need are a few a few inexpensive parts, such as a coil of copper wire for adjustment, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones. Crystal radio sets are are distinct from ordinary radios as they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as Alternating Current (AC) wall power electricity or Direct Current (DC) battery power to name a couple.

Crystal radios can be designed to receive almost any radio frequency band, but most receive the amplitude modulation (AM) broadcast band, although some receive the 49-meter international shortwave band.

It wasn’t so much that as a kid I was what would today be known as a member of the “maker community” or DIYer (Do it yourselfer) or tinkerer (a word we did have back in the 1960s and 1970s). No, it was more my Uncle Ab (Abner Barker), my dad’s older brother, who was an electrician and lived in St. Catharines, Ontario when I was growing up in Oshawa. Uncle Ab didn’t visit often but when he did arrive for a few days now and then, he’d do things like bring me a radio or my first-copy of Popular Electronics magazine, a publication for electronics hobbyists and experimenters published from October 1954 until December 1999. Uncle Ab was such an enthusiast himself he seemed willing to overlook that even when interested his nephew had … err … a very limited aptitude for mathematics, physics or any other applied science that might have proved useful for an electronics hobbyist to possess.

Some may also recall Heathkit, the brand name of electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions and other kits and electronic products produced and marketed for assembly by the purchaser by the Heath Company of Chicago from 1947 until 1992.

Edward Bayard Heath, an early monoplane pilot and aircraft engineer, had founded the company in 1926, after purchasing the Chicago based Bates Aeroplane in 1912, and then going on to found the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co., which later becoming the Heath Airplane Company.

I hadn’t thought about building crystal radio sets for years. Or Heathkit. Just like I hadn’t thought about RadioShack for years. Not until I stumbled upon a  Feb. 2 news story yesterday from Bloomberg Business that  RadioShack, founded in 1921  as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, is about to declare bankruptcy. Circuit City bought the stores formerly known as RadioShack in Canada in 2004, re-branding them as The Source by Circuit City. In 2009, Circuit City’s U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and BCE Inc. bought the stores, re branding them once again as The Source. There is a store here in Thompson, Manitoba in City Centre Mall.

Bloomberg Business reported that RadioShack has lost $936 million since the fourth quarter of 2011, the last time it was in the black, and its shares have lost 99.6 percent of their value since peaking 15 years ago. On Feb. 2, the New York Stock Exchange said it had suspended trading on the stock and started the process of delisting it.

RadioShack has been based in Fort Worth, Texas since 1963 when Charles Tandy, who ran a successful nice market chain of leather stores, acquired the struggling-then chain of what was nine RadioShack retail stores in Boston and area, for about $300,000 as a favour to its major creditor, First National Bank of Boston.

From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, RadioShack, with its own private brand manufactured accessories, batteries, transistors and capacitors, had plenty of success going after customers “looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing,” writes Joshua Brustein, referencing Irvin Farman’s 1993 book, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built RadioShack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, in his Feb. 2 Bloomberg Business story, “Inside RadioShack’s Slow-Motion Collapse.” The target audience was people who needed one small piece of equipment every week.”

And then in November 1977, in its boldest move, Tandy had RadioShack launch the TRS-80, one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Why bold? There was no known market for personal computers in 1977. With a $600 price tag it was going to be the most expensive product RadioShack had ever sold. Tandy mused about the initial order of 1,000 TRS-80 units that his RadioShack stores could always use them for inventory management if customers weren’t interested in buying them. However, in its early years, the TRS-80 was more popular than Apple’s computers.

Early last year, Steve Cichon, a writer for the website Trending Buffalo, sifted through the back page of the front section of the Saturday, Feb. 16, 1991 Buffalo News with a RadioShack ad for items such as  voice recorders, GPS devices, answering machines and camcorders that RadioShack was selling 24 years ago. Cichon found that his iPhone had cancelled out any need for 13 of the 15 products then being sold by RadioShack, which had a combined listed advertised price of $3,054.82 in 1991. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars,” Cichon wrote in his Jan. 14, 2014 post, adding, “The only two items on the page that my phone really can’t replace: Tiny Dual-Superhet Radar Detector, $79.95. But when is the last time you heard the term ‘fuzzbuster’ anyway?” and the “3-Way speaker with massive 15″ Woofer, $149.95.”

Near the end, RadioShack was showing signs it was becoming self-aware of its stuck-in-the-past image problem, witness this 1:12 YouTube video from an ad they did for the 2014 Super Bowl, which is pretty  priceless, if too little too late. Clerk number one answers the phone and says to clerk number two: “The 80’s called. They want their store back,” featuring the spot-on perfect music of Canadian rockers Loverboy’s 1981 anthem Working for the Weekend blaring in the background. If you can honestly say you danced on the roof of one of your Loyalist College print journalism classmate’s orange Toyota Corolla at Lake on the Mountain, just outside Picton, Ontario, to the tune in 1981 and she still remembered the incident with some fondness, if continuing disbelief, almost 30 years later, it probably helps. You can catch the RadioShack 2014 Super Bowl ad on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkixVDFpcI

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22