Pin Action: Small-Time Gangsters, High-Stakes Gambling, and the Teenage Hustler Who Became a Bowling Champion (2 page)

Harris made an uninspired attempt at the life of a nine-to-fiver by picking up odd jobs as a mail boy for the Baumritter furniture company, which later became Ethan Allen; working for his father as an exterminator; trying and failing to complete classes at New York University and The City University of New York. Harris had little interest in college. He grew up boarding buses with his buddies and heading off to Newark to see the stripper Tempest Storm perform at Minsky’s Burlesque at age 16. They once caught her bra in the crowd. The Minsky’s in Times Square had been closed down in 1942 by Mayor La Guardia, but no amount of distance was great enough to keep
Harris and his friends from doing what had to be done to tell their friends they had gotten their hands on Tempest Storm’s bra. The Minsky’s Harris and his buddies knew in 1956 was a place that mingled comedians with strippers while guys sold candy in the aisles between acts as a band played. Later, when Harris’s parents gave him $250 to register for those classes at CUNY, he took it to the horse track in Yonkers and blew it all. He then put on a farce that lasted for months: He gathered a bundle of books each morning in conspicuous view of his parents and headed out—seemingly to school. They had no idea their money had gone to the ponies, or that the “school” he learned in had little to do with books but everything to do with life. It was a school Harris attended in the poker rooms, horse tracks, bowling alleys and goulash houses of New York City.

Schlegel, for his part, did pick up a job for $48 a week at the Benrus Watch Company store where his mother worked as a clerk. One day, he fell asleep standing up, about eight weeks into the gig, and that was the last time he tried to squeeze a round peg into the square hole of the lives his parents lived. Schlegel knew as well as Harris that the real money was made in the bowling alleys out in Jersey or somewhere in Brooklyn or the Bronx, where he pulled in the cash he would later stuff in his sock drawer at home. He had some explaining to do the day his mother found that stockpile of cash while putting away his clothes. That was the day she realized her son already had a job, and it had nothing to do with selling watches. He persuaded her that you don’t always need to pull a menial paycheck working hours in a factory to get by. The smart ones made their own hours and called nobody “boss.” Schlegel was one of the smart ones, he insisted. The point was not that kids like Schlegel and Harris were making so much more money gambling than they might have made with honest jobs, though that certainly was true on good nights. The point was that
gambling afforded them an opportunity to make as much money doing what they wanted to as they would have made doing what they had to. Schlegel and Harris watched their parents do what they had to; when they discovered a way to get paid for doing what they wanted to, they discovered the rest of their lives.

Even when they did take on day jobs, as Harris did for a few years when he became an assistant in his father’s exterminating business, they still found ways of squeezing more money out of a day’s work than most. Shop owners would see Harris walking up the block with the case that identified him as an exterminator—a black case with brass handles and three compartments, one that held his spray gun, another with the concentrated chemical he mixed with water to spray, and another with D.D.T. If any shop owner asked Harris to spray his store on the way to his destination, he always happily obliged for a fee of $5. He only had to spray a minuscule amount of mist to do the job, so his father never noticed and Harris was a little richer for it. One day, Harris’s father, who had been saving up his son’s income for him because he knew it would be squandered otherwise, told him he had $1,500 saved. Harris quit on the spot and opened a pro shop, where he would drill bowling balls during the day and gamble through the night for the next five years.

As for Schlegel, bowling had always been a way for him to prove he was every bit as wily as any other street kid. The only reason he originally set foot in a bowling alley was to defy high school administrators at Bronx Vocational High School who told him he could not graduate because he did not have a required gym credit. So he joined the bowling team. The swimming team also was an option, but he preferred not to freeze out in the elements of New York’s unforgiving fall and winter days. Bowling was an indoor sport that promised to protect
him from the elements while also providing that needed gym credit.

Schlegel had gotten his first taste of the sport of bowling as a pinboy up in a small town in New York called Palenville, a hamlet on the outskirts of the Catskills where his parents took him during the summer to keep him out of trouble. Schlegel got his summertime gig as a pinboy at the town’s four-lane bowling alley at age 14. He loved the bowling as much as he loved the soda fountain there.

There were many things for kids to love about a Palenville summer in the 1950s: the swimming holes where they could catch fish in the falls that gushed off the mountainsides; the dances at J.C. Johnny’s; the gardens pregnant with blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, and vegetables kids loaded into crates and took back home. Schlegel entered the garden with a cigarette smoking out of each side of his mouth because he believed it kept the mosquitos away. Bugs were a problem; the leaves of potato plants crawled with them, and it took as much work to flick them all away as it took to uproot and bag the produce.

Schlegel’s father made sure his son understood that the berries were for his family, not for his mouth.

“One for you and then two for the basket, not two and then one!” he would yell at his son.

Schlegel brought garbage cans loaded with fresh-picked fruit and vegetables back home to New York City. His mother gathered her friends to squash the berries and make jam, which his Aunt Lee used to fill her renowned crepes.

A couple years later Schlegel discovered this bowling thing was something he could do. By the end of his first season bowling for school, he was the team’s best player. He began his senior year as captain of the bowling team. By the start of the bowling season in the fall of 1962, he was bowling four
leagues a week. He bowled Mondays at Ridgewood Lanes in Brooklyn, Tuesdays at Pinewood Lanes on 125th and Broadway in Manhattan, Wednesdays at Whitestone Lanes in Queens, and Thursdays at Manhattan Lanes just around the corner from the apartment where he lived with his parents at 42 Sickles Street in the Inwood section of Upper Manhattan. He soon heard about something called “pot games,” a form of bowling in which all participants tossed a quarter into a pot and bowled a game. The man who bowled the highest score pocketed all the quarters. At a time when people might have brought home between $50-$60 a week in pay, a kid making four or five bucks a day bowling pot games had a viable, full-time job on his hands. Schlegel soon heard about guys in the neighborhood who thought they were better than he was. He went to the places where they bowled and challenged them to head-to-head matches for any amount they cared to wager—action matches, they were called—and he found himself eminently capable of proving them wrong. Those quarters he won bowling pot games soon turned into dollars he won bowling action matches. Then those dollars soon turned into C-notes, and he knew he had found the thing he would do for the rest of his life.

The sport that action bowlers like Schlegel knew was entirely the same sport known to the tens of millions of bowlers who hit the lanes across the United States each year by the early 1960s. Nothing about the game itself was different. The lane was still sixty feet long from foul line to headpin and nearly forty-two inches in width, the bowling ball still twenty-seven inches in circumference and a maximum weight of sixteen pounds, the pins still twelve inches apart and ranging in weight between 3.2 and 3.10 pounds. Like Schlegel, the vast majority of action bowlers—or adult male bowlers generally—threw sixteen-pound bowling balls at the time. Women and children might be more
likely to throw lighter bowling balls; the lighter the ball, the less hitting power it had when it collided with the pins. Some tournament directors, such as John Vargo, who ran the famed Vargo Classic in New York City, ensured the pins themselves would be harder to knock down at his tournament by filling them with lead. That brought the weight of the pins closer to four pounds. It also made them bottom-heavy, as he planted lead in them through a hole he drilled in the bottom of each pin. The pins sometimes responded by behaving as though they were anchored to the pin deck. A bowler who won Vargo’s tournament knew he had earned it.

The lanes themselves still were made of wood in the early 1960s—maple for the first fifteen feet of the lane followed by forty-five feet of pine, a softer wood, and then maple again for the pin deck, where the pins stood. Maple, a stronger wood, helped the front part of the lane withstand the bruising it sustained as bowlers threw ball after ball. It also helped the pin decks survive the pounding of pins as bowling balls blasted them around.

Scoring, too, was the same for action bowlers as it was for any bowler. A strike still counted for ten points plus the total pin fall accumulated over the next two shots; a spare counted for ten points plus the next shot. A strike on the first shot of the tenth frame allowed a bowler two more shots; a spare allowed one more. A 300 game required twelve consecutive strikes. Bowlers who stepped over the foul line got a score of zero for that shot. Electronic foul lights, invented in the late 1930s, buzzed when a bowler stepped or slid over the foul line and had long-ago eliminated the need for foul line judges by the 1960s. Not every bowling center had installed them, however, and those that did would not always turn them on.

The thing that elevated these ground rules to the realm of “action” was gambling. And the thing that distinguished action
bowling from those pot games Schlegel bowled as a kid was the head-to-head match—one guy putting his money down against another’s for a game to see who truly was the best. Gamblers behind the lanes—a part of the action bowling scene colloquially referred to as “the back”—placed their bets on the bowler they thought had the best chance of winning. If enough gamblers in the back put money on a particular match, the bowlers themselves could end up bowling for many thousands of dollars in a night.

“Action” itself had nothing to do with bowling; gamblers found action in many forms. Those not bowling a match or betting on one were laying their money down on a game of dice in the parking lot, holding poker hands close to their chests in the lounge, or itching to head out to Yonkers Raceway and bet on the ponies. They made money pitching pencils at parking signs or flipping matchbook covers. Steve Harris and his buddies placed bets on who would have the most attractive woman sit next to them on the subway when they headed back home at dawn. If a large older lady sat next to one of them, they would fall on the floor laughing. Taking the bet was the rush.

Even when gamblers found the action they were looking for in the bowling alley, it was not always as simple as just betting on the guy they thought would win. The bowling alley was not the racetrack. Some matches featured one guy using only two fingers while the other used only his thumb; others featured bowlers who were blindfolded or threw balls between their legs or between chairs arranged on the lane. Action bowlers were gamblers first and bowlers second, and they found the action anywhere they looked for it. The action itself was the objective, regardless of what form it took.

This was the early 1960s, when Atlantic City’s rise as a gambling mecca still was years away, no one really spoke of going to Vegas because it felt so distant as to be somewhere on the
other side of the world, and even the Meadowlands Racetrack was yet to be built. Off-track betting (OTB) had not yet been legalized. Hustlers may have scratched the gambler’s itch in pool halls back in the 1930s and ’40s, but by 1962 the bowling alley was the place where they found what they were looking for. And they looked for however long it took to find it.

Schlegel may or may not have known it then, but any time he headed to a bowling alley looking to score some dough, he embraced a heritage that went back hundreds of years. Bowling’s dalliance with gambling actually dates back many centuries; bowling did not just become the locus of gamblers and shylocks in Schlegel’s New York City youth. In fact, King Henry VIII of England banned bowling in 1511 because of the sport’s appeal to society’s underbelly. Bowling alleys then were called “alleys” because that is exactly what they were—outdoor alleys usually attached to saloons, taverns, and other places gamblers frequented. As versions of the sport made their way into Germany in the third century and later throughout Europe, bowling continued to be an outdoor activity. America would not see its first indoor bowling alley until 1840, when a place called Knickerbocker Alleys opened in New York City with lanes made of baked clay. King Henry VIII’s 1511 ban still was in effect then—it lasted until 1845—even though members of his own court, as well as his successors over the centuries, partook nonetheless. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of bowling’s origins in ancient Egypt, and evidence also suggests that a version of the sport was played in the Stone Age. Given the sport’s longstanding affiliation with gambling, it would hardly be surprising if archaeological evidence someday proves that even bowlers in those early societies could not resist the urge to place a bet.

Bowling resumed as a magnet for gamblers in Schlegel’s New York City youth because of a boom in bowling center
construction hastened by the advent of automatic pinsetters in the early 1950s. Until then, bowling alley proprietors relied on pinboys to keep their doors open. If they had no one to set the pins, they had no customers. Pinboys tended to be sewer-mouthed street urchins proprietors hired while holding their noses, covering their ears, and looking the other way. The bruised, fractured, or bleeding shins pinboys suffered on the job served as evidence of the gruff ilk they represented. World War II ensured that pinboys were in short supply, forcing bowling alleys to reduce their hours of operation or shut down altogether. The American Machine & Foundry Company (AMF) successfully designed and manufactured the first automatic pinsetters, and the Brunswick Corporation later followed suit. The elimination of pinboys completely revolutionized the sport by ushering it into a glittery new era. Women felt welcome in the bowling alley more than ever before now that pinboys were gone and lavish, space-age decor replaced the dingy, claustrophobic, and poorly lit bowling alleys of subway stations and bar basements with spacious, inviting establishments. Bans placed on bowling by local governments in Connecticut and New York—for the same reasons King Henry VIII did so hundreds of years prior—now were lifted, allowing young people to frequent bowling alleys again. Suddenly, the bowling alley was a place to take the family, and soon neighborhoods throughout the United States featured many places to bowl. Most crucially for the action bowling scene, many of these new bowling alleys stayed open around the clock. When the families headed home, the gamblers headed in.