Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion
Authors: Gianmarc Manzione
PIN ACTION
SMALL-TIME GANGSTERS,
HIGH-STAKES GAMBLING,
AND THE
TEENAGE HUSTLER
WHO BECAME A
BOWLING CHAMPION
GIANMARC MANZIONE
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
In memory of John Mazzio and Kenny Barber
CONTENTS
S
ome people ask me how a guy with an MFA in poetry ended up writing a book about bowling alleys full of gambling gangsters. I have never found an adequate explanation for that divorce between the two poles of my existence—one, the kid who squandered his childhood in the bowling alleys of Brooklyn; the other, the college student who fell in love with books as his bowling balls gathered dust in his dad’s garage.
No experience heightened that discordancy more than the writing of this book. Particularly toward the end, while I was teaching English and creative writing at College of Central Florida, one night I would be studying spondaic substitution in “Fra Lippo Lippi” and the next I would be banging away at stories about gamblers and gangsters who troubled the bowling alleys of Brooklyn and beyond.
When I was a student at Manhattan College, I used to bowl Monday night leagues in Brooklyn at Maple Lanes on the corner of 60th Street and 16th Ave., a place made famous by legendary action bowlers such as Richie Hornreich long before
I came into this world. I used to take a book with me and read between shots, usually new volumes of poems by contemporary poets such as Philip Levine or Denise Levertov. After I bowled a 300 game there on November 13, 2000, some of the guys I bowled with told me maybe they would start reading, too. Look what it was doing for me!
Then they did what guys did for so many action bowlers back in the day—they gave me a moniker. Mine was “Shakespeare”—you know, the Michael Jordan of books. I myself was no action bowler—by 2000, action bowling as it was known in the 1960s had faded into an obscure collection of characters and stories—but this tradition of giving names that represented what made guys tick was one that still held strong in the Brooklyn alleys. “Shakespeare” was not bad, but it also was not nearly as interesting as some of the monikers attributed to those who roamed the underworld that was 1960s action bowling—names like One Finger Benny, Tony Sideweight, Bernie Bananas, and so many more.
Maple Lanes was closed down in 2013 to be replaced by apartment buildings and a synagogue. In 2006, Leemark Lanes on 88th Street between 4th Ave. and 5th Ave. closed down to be replaced by a six-story parking structure for customers of Century 21, one of many retailers on 86th Street whose revolving doors and sales signs distinguish one of the busiest shopping districts in Bay Ridge. Leemark was a place where many wise old men taught me as much about bowling as they taught me about life; to see it vanish was a crushing blow for me and for the many people who also made cherished memories there over the years. The list of bowling alleys that once speckled the five boroughs but are no longer standing easily could fill at least a full page or two of this book. And that is the reason I wanted to write it.
Pin Action
is an attempt to hold time still, to stop it from turning the way things are into the way things were.
Today, throughout New York City, bowling tends to be a trendy afterthought in night clubs that just happen to have bowling lanes in them, places where 20-somethings are as likely to go for a Cosmo as they are to go for a pair of funny-looking shoes. Establishments like The Gutter or Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, or Bowlmor Lanes inside the old New York Times building in Times Square, are jettisoning bowling into a glittery new era where the sport once ruled by Don Carter and Dick Weber now is ruled by celebrity chefs and craft cocktails.
Pin Action
memorializes the world where you kept score by hand, an all-night match left you with a bloated and bleeding bowler’s thumb by sunrise, and a combination of tobacco and lane oil smudged your calloused fingertips.
That is the world I began to learn about when I spent long afternoons listening to the avuncular and salty-haired regulars at Leemark and Maple talk about the old days. I was 11 years old at the time. The guys would tell me, for instance, about a bowling alley that once existed down a stairway accessible from the Fortway Theatre in Dyker Heights, how that was where Brooklyn’s own Johnny Petraglia, one of the sport’s overarching legends, started turning the heads of sharks and shysters with his talent at age 14. By the time I was growing up near Dyker Heights, that place next to the theatre where Petraglia once made waves was a gun range, its historical significance in sports history completely effaced. The theatre itself, where I had gone to see many movies with my cinephile father over the years, closed down in 2005. A Chinese supermarket took its place in 2007.
Names other than Petraglia’s would find their way into the stories I heard at Leemark and Maple. Names like Richie Hornreich, Mike Limongello, Mark Roth, Ernie Schlegel, Mike Chiuchiolo, Kenny Barber, Ira “The Whale” Katz, Hank Burrough, Dirty Willie, Frank Medici, Psycho Dave, and so many
others. It all sounded like some page torn out of a Jimmy Breslin book. But this was real; these were real people, real lives, and they had passed through the very place where I first got acquainted with the sport of bowling in the distant aftermath of so much sordid history.
I could tell from the looks in the eyes of those who told me about these characters and their stories that there was a lot more to those guys than a name. In pro shops around town I gazed in awe at memorabilia like bowling balls with Mark Roth’s signature on them as if I had discovered the signature of God. I still was too young to really understand why I felt that way back then; I only had the impression that something very big had happened there long before I came around. The more time went on the more I wanted to know about it. And the more bowling drifted into the background of my blooming love affair with literature and writing as I got older, the more I realized I was developing an ability to communicate my passion for the subculture into which my childhood immersed me.
Pin Action
is the culmination of that discovery.
As the stories that had absorbed me back when I was a kid listening to the old guys at Brooklyn bowling alleys lingered with me over the years, I developed an insatiable desire to know more about the New York City my parents and grandparents knew. I wanted to know about what things were like back before the 802 Club on 64th Street and 8th Ave. in Brooklyn—where
Saturday Night Fever
was filmed—became a medical building. I wanted to know more about the New York where Melody Lanes in Sunset Park was not yet the only place in southwest Brooklyn where you could bring the kids for a few games of bowling on a Sunday afternoon. What was it like when bowling alleys were as plentiful in New York City as the newsstands (remember those?).
I started asking around, beginning with my parents, and, much later, the action bowlers, whose stories I tell in this book. The things they told me gave me a glimpse of the way things were, just as the old guys at Leemark and Maple had back in my childhood, and I was hooked. This book started storming within me, and I felt as though I never would forgive myself if I failed to let it out.
I once asked former action bowler Red Bassett, for instance, about the 802 Club.
“When we were kids hanging out in Bay Ridge, we would sneak into the 802,” he told me. “The owner would see us and scream at us and kick us out. But after Johnny did a lot of good things on tour, oh, now they couldn’t get enough of us! Then we were something, ya know, and I just went along.”
Memories like that one are scraps of an irretrievable past I tried to salvage here in the pages of
Pin Action
. Bassett and so many others left pieces of themselves somewhere back in the bygone world that colors the pages of this book; I only hope I have done at least some justice to the time and place they knew. And so, reader, welcome back to the past. If it is even remotely as much fun for you to read about as it was for me to write about, then the journey will have been well worth the trip for both of us.
T
he first time eighteen-year-old Ernie Schlegel and his posse stepped inside Jimmy Dykes Lanes looking for action, the name of the place itself should have been their first clue about the kind of night they were in for. A famed ballplayer-turned-manager for the Philadelphia Athletics, Dykes was a hardscrabble Philly kid whose wrists grew as strong as a bull’s legs from working as a pipe fitter. As a manager, he spewed such venom at umpires over balls and strikes that fans were almost as likely to witness his ejection as they were to witness a ground-out to short.
But on this particular night it wasn’t just the streets of Philadelphia and their assorted characters that Schlegel and the boys faced; it was a part of town down on Route 1 in south Jersey that they knew better than to visit again by the time the night was through. They knew better than to do a lot of things by then. They knew to call it quits when they were ahead. They
knew not to take small-time bets from gamblers who will mug you at knifepoint if they lose. And they knew you only humiliate a man in his own house if you have enough weapons to make it out alive.
Such were the lessons you learned late at night in the bowling alleys of Philly and south Jersey in 1962, places Schlegel prowled in the back of Toru Nagai’s slick black Cadillac with his enterprising sidekick, Steve Harris, in tow. Nagai, a diminutive Japanese restaurateur who ran a sandwich shop near Columbia University, chauffeured Schlegel to big-money matches out of state on weekends like a horse breeder cashing in on his prized pony. Harris, twenty, was a street-wise Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses who grew up on the same tough streets as Schlegel. When he still lived with his parents, his mother threatened to lock him out of the house if he kept coming home in the middle of the night. Harris, who never turned down a chance to bet on Schlegel whenever he hit the lanes, went out anyway. He once came home to find the chain of his mother’s apartment door locked, his mother standing on the other side lambasting him for being a hoodlum and refusing to open the door. Harris went back out into the streets and rode the subway the rest of the night.