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Rick Wilbur, Rutland Bowlerama employee, poses with his favorite bowling ball: a realistic eyeball. (Community News Service – Catherine Morrissey) -
A competitor lets one rip during Rutland Bowlerama’s Easter Sunday competition. (Community News Service – Catherine Morrissey) -
A corkboard displays photos from years of bowlers past. (Community News Service – Catherine Morrissey)
Rick Wilbur surveyed each lane at RutlandBowlerama, marking up a scoresheet as pins crashed, high-fives smacked and kids scurried around decked-out competitors.
It was a mid-April night of bowling in this year’s Green Mountain Open Tournament, and Wilbur, who’s been around the Rutland alley for over 50 years, was right at home.
His family has been coming to Bowlerama for decades; he’s competed as a bowler for close to six. He started teaching his son Jon the craft of the game when the boy was 10 years old. Twenty-six years later, in 2019, Wilbur watched his son become the first Vermonter and 35th person in the U.S. to bowl a 900 series in open league play, achieving three consecutive perfect games in one set — all at Bowlerama on a Monday night.
As Wilbur meandered his way among the lanes last month, regulars at the bowling alley patted his back and chatted with him while he kept score.
“Being that I’ve been here so long, it’s like a family reunion every weekend,” he said.
Owner Chip Forte came into the business shortly after his grandparents started the institution in 1965. Originally a 16-lane bowling house, the facility is now 32 lanes large, many of which still boast the original wood.
Ron Carrara, lifelong Rutland resident, has worked maintenance at Bowlerama since he was a kid and grew up with Forte and his family — Forte’s mom being his Boy Scouts den mother.
“It’s changed a lot,” Carrara said. “In the early ‘70s this place was packed. Now, we’re lucky if we fill 10 or 12 lanes.”
Bowling seems to be a dying pastime, with digital technology taking the forefront in family entertainment.
According to industry firm Hansell Group, the U.S. had around 5,800 sanctioned bowling centers and nearly 120,000 lanes in 2003. By 2019, there were about 4,500 commercial centers with around 95,000 lanes in operation, the group reported.
Increasingly, old bowling alleys nationwide have been converted into facilities offering a host of other games, activities and amenities. And new businesses opening up have focused on sleek, upscale experiences, according to the same report.
But for the few rural bowling centers in Vermont, old school charm and long community ties have been tough to beat. Bowlerama still uses the analog keypads installed in the 1990s, and prior to that the center relied on halogen-lit, handwritten scorecards.
While the regular crowd at RutlandBowleramaisn’t what it used to be, the business had no trouble filling out its lanes for the Green Mountain Open Tournament, which participants traveled hours across New England to attend.
“We have a lot of leagues, we have a lot of competition, we have a lot of fun,” Wilbur said.
He is a coach for a local youth league and often helps out with Addison County Special Olympics events.
The varsity bowling team at Fair Haven Union High School plays and practices at Bowlerama as well. The school has been in something of a friendly interstate rivalry with Randolph Union High School, and the two teams have duked it out at Bowlerama and elsewhere in recent years.
Randolph is home to Valley Bowl, which holds a similar spirit to Bowlerama — the open game rate is $5 per hour with $3 shoe rentals and has been since the place opened in 2006.
The year prior, the town’s only bowling center, Rose Bowl, closed after being sold to a New York developer who wanted to open a Family Dollar. Couple Karen and Wayne Warner, avid bowlers, had made a bid to buy the property but lost out. So they bought all the bowling alley’s lanes and equipment off the old owner, built Valley Bowl on Prince Street and opened in January 2006.
Karen Warner also runs the area’s Special Olympics program and has been coaching the Randolph Union bowling team for the past 10 years.
Valley Bowl recently started up a kids-bowl-free promotion, which offers two free games a day to minors all the way through the summer.
“What we try to do is grow a love of the sport,” said Warner. “We certainly see a lot of that come to fruition.”
Warner drills balls at the Valley Bowl pro shop, one of the few in-house pro shops in that part of Vermont, and helps with many of the other needs of local bowlers. She’s familiar with the folks at RutlandBowlerama and has crossed paths with them many times while coaching.
“Fair Haven and us were in the finals this year,” Warner said. “They ended up coming out on top. They wanted it, and sometimes it’s about that want. They’re a fun group of kids.”
Wilbur and Warner have also banded together to coach for the regional Senior Classic, a competition where the top 10 Vermont high school seniors go up against the top 10 seniors from New Hampshire.
“We all came together to coach these kids. It was a lot of fun,” Warner said.
The two haunts preserve a sense of retro family fun in Vermont. Still, business continues to decline as bowling becomes a less fashionable form of recreation.
“When one of these VT bowling houses closes, it’s not good for any of us,” said Warner. “It’s always good to see those guys, to talk to them as a resource. Maybe that doesn’t happen in other places, but it happens in this town.”
Said Wilbur, “Seems like every three months, everything changes.”
A retired police officer, Wilbur doesn’t let the slump get him down. He still bowls in a league every year from August to April, coming in recreationally with family and friends during the off season. It’s even a family tradition to bowl on Christmas Eve.
“It’s just fun,” Wilbur said. “I think I was put here for this reason.”
Eliza Walsh is a reporter with the Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship.