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.

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The indefatigable Paul Boge, a Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker with a heart for Kenya, back in Thompson Feb. 27

Charles Mulli, left, Paul Boge, right
Paul Boge, the Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker with a heart for Kenya, will make a return visit to Thompson Feb. 27 to March 1 as guest speaker at this year’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s Family Enrichment weekend, says Pastor Ted Goossen.

“He will speak at the Friday night banquet sharing about his work and how he integrates his faith into his work environment,” Goossen said. “Saturday morning brunch Paul will share about his newly released children’s book  – The Biggest Family in the World  – an illustrated book on the Charles Mulli orphanage in Kenya.”

Mulli was a poor abandoned six-year-old Kenyan boy who grew up to become successful, powerful and very rich, but decided to sell all he had to rescue street children whose condition reflected his own childhood. Saving one child has turned into rescuing thousands for Mulli.

Faye Hall, administrative assistant for 54-year-old Winnipeg Juno-winning singer-songwriter Steve Bell’s Signpost Music and IncarNATION Ministries, who is herself an increasingly noticed artist, spent two years creating 32 paintings that capture Mulli’s life for Boge’s The Biggest Family in the World. “She has done an indescribable work,” Boge blogged last Sept. 8.  “I could not even dream of the paintings being this good.”

Boge, 41, is an award-winning author and has also written The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story; Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book published last December.

He has also written two novels in a potential trilogy, The Chicago Healer in 2004, and The Cities of Fortune in 2006.

Boge was last the keynote guest speaker at Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s annual family enrichment weekend five years ago in 2010, when he talked about his then recently published book, The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story, which explored the life of old west end Winnipeg inner city pastor Harry Lehotsky, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 49.

Boge won Word Guild’s best new Canadian author award in 2003 for his first book, The Chicago Healer, published the following year.

In addition to being an author, Boge, is a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, and no stranger to Thompson. He lived and worked here for nine months in 2003, five months in 2005 and for another 10 months in 2007, while working on three separate surface projects for Vale, and doing much of his writing in his apartment at night.

Boge is also behind FireGate Films, an independent Winnipeg company that made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Boge is also the co-ordinator for the fifth annual Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church, running this year from Feb. 17-22. He is a member of the church.

On March 1, the Sunday night wrap up for Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s  Family Enrichment weekend will include the traditional free chili dog supper.

Following the chili dog supper, there will be a free showing of the 2003 movie Flywheel.  Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.

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