Lost and Found – Chapter Two
posted in Novel |
Hope you all had a great weekend. I know mine was fabulous — busy — but had a lot of fun. Didn’t do any writing as I’d planned, but will get to it today.
Here’s the next bit of the book, “Lost and Found”. This is more of the descriptive background to set the scenes for the rest of the book. I know it’s a lot more enjoyable to read dialogue, but we’re not there yet. Stay tuned. The characters will begin to make their appearance soon.
Be well – be in peace,
Ron Rink
=============================================
The neighborhood where I grew up was on the east side of Detroit and on the Northern edge of the city. I lived on a street called Russell in a small house that was built during the Second World War. I often heard my parents refer to it as a “post-war” house, even though they had built it during the war. I eventually came to learn that they called it that because of the style and method of building that was used. I don’t understand a lot about building techniques, but I gather that using two-by-four framing and wood for the exterior rather than brick had something to do with it. It was a small house that was painted white with green trim and green shutters on the windows.
The neighborhood was an arrangement of blocks of streets and cross-streets. Our house was in the middle of one of these blocks. There weren’t many houses on the street when we first moved there. Most of them were older, larger brick houses. Our house was one of the first of the newer houses built in that neighborhood. The cross-streets on either side of our house were named after two gun manufacturers, Winchester and Remington. The main cross streets on either side of Winchester and Remington were State Fair and Eight Mile Road.
At the time our house was first built, there were only a few, somewhat widely scattered, brick houses all the way to Dequindre, a main street about seven blocks east of us. The rest of the neighborhood was very much like living out in the country with some wooded areas and lots of open fields or meadows. Many of the people living in that area had cleared out small plots of land in the meadow areas around their houses for victory gardens. This was one of the ways that people found to provide fresh vegetables for their families during the war, since there were severe shortages of all the fruits and vegetables in the stores. Most of the produce was sent to the soldiers. The gardens looked like little rectangular islands with perfectly straight rows of many different vegetables. The only thing that made you realize you weren’t out in real farmland was that the still unpaved streets on many of the blocks broke up the openness you would experience in the country.
Within just a couple of years after the end of the war, that whole neighborhood changed. All the streets got paved and the lots filled up with these little frame houses similar to ours. They were called bungalows. Even though they all looked a little bit different from each other, they were basically one-and-a-half-story houses, with narrow side driveways leading to a small one-car garage in the tiny, postage-stamp-sized back yard. They were built on very small lots and were bunched close together. I can remember one of my uncles, one of my mother’s brothers, who said if you kept your ears peeled you could hear the next-door neighbor peeing. He was a fun uncle who was always saying things that made everyone else get embarrassed.
I worked part-time after-school and full-time in the summer setting pins in a bowling alley. The bowling alley was over on the corner of Dequindre and Conant, and was close enough to our house so that I could either walk or ride my bike over there. The building sat back off the road to make room for the parking area in front. There were no windows visible from the side that faced the street, just a big sign that said Dequindre Alleys hanging on the brick wall. The entrance was along the side and you could look in through the windows by the door and see the alleys inside. The interior was sort of grungy. The place reeked of beer, tobacco and piss. Except for the bowling lanes the floors looked like they hadn’t been scrubbed for years. A fresh coat of paint would have made a world of difference. There was a drink and food counter along one side as you entered, and the office and shoe racks were on the other side of the door. Then there were three or four steps down to where the bowlers could sit by the alleys. There were 15 bowling lanes — when they were all functional.
My job was to sit up on a shelf at the far end of the alleys. The shelf was just behind a large, flat rack that had ten round, numbered slots in it for the bowling pins. The rack was triangular shaped and when the pins were in the slots, they would be in the right position to be placed on the floor of the alley when the rack was lowered. The game of bowling was the same then as it is now, except there were no automatic machines to pick up the pins that were knocked down and re-set them, nor was there a machine to pick up your ball and return it to you.
There was a narrow, dark passageway right behind the shelf where we sat that was just wide enough to walk behind the pin racks. They kept it as close to pitch dark back there as possible because, as my boss explained to me, “We can’t have bright lights back here to distract the bowlers, you know!” The narrow passage was necessary because we would frequently work two alleys at a time and needed a way to slip back and forth. As soon as we racked the pins on one alley, we would jump down off the shelf into the passageway and then jump onto the shelf in the next alley and rack the pins there. Once I grew more comfortable with the system, I found that I was able to just vault over the wood separator between the alleys, rather than jumping down into the passageway-—that saved a lot of time when we had to work fast.
Most of the guys who worked as pinsetters would either be small in stature teenagers, or they would be younger, little kids like me. You had to be small and wiry to be able to fit into the tiny space where we worked. I don’t think it was legal for the bowling alley owner to hire kids of my age, especially since they served beer and wine to the customers, but there were about four of us that were eight to ten years old. In those days people didn’t pay much attention to hiring practices and whether they were legal or not. Businesses needed employees and families needed money, so whatever worked to accomplish those two objectives was considered appropriate.
The rest of the guys were older. In fact, there was one guy who was actually a grown man, but he was not much taller than I was. He was always telling us stories about how he used to be a trainer at a racetrack until a horse kicked him and messed up his leg. He had quite a limp when he walked, but it didn’t interfere with his agility when setting pins. There were times he worked three alleys at once.
What we did was wait until the bowler had rolled his ball down the alley to hit the pins. Then we would jump down off the shelf, scoop up the pins that were knocked down, put them into the pin-slots on the rack and roll the ball down the ball-return gully back to the bowler. If it was a strike that was thrown, we’d put all the pins back in the rack, shove the rack down onto the alley floor, jam a big lever down that would release the pins from the rack, and then raise the empty rack back up again. As soon as we sent the ball back to the bowler, we jumped back up onto our shelf to get out of the way for the next ball to come down the alley, or jumped over to the next alley if that one was ready to be worked. We had to pay attention to the game so we didn’t mess up and set the pins before the bowler had finished.
It was hard and dangerous work. The pins were made out of wood, and we had to learn to pick up three or four of them at a time and slide them into the slots on the rack. They were also heavy and some of the bowlers who were overly aggressive would throw the ball as hard as they could and send the pins flying in all directions. It wasn’t unusual to get clunked in the head or the legs by the flying pins. We had to work fast because if we took too long, or we made mistakes, the bowlers would start yelling at us. After the bowlers had a few beers in them they would start hurling loud and abusive comments at us, anyway. There were a few times when a bowler would lose his temper and come running down the alley yelling all sorts of abusive language at the pin-boy. Fortunately, there was no easy way for them to get back behind the pin racks where we were and the owner would have enough time to get the bowler back where he belonged, or throw him out, which also happened more than a few times.
The bowling balls were another part of the procedure. We had to not only pick them up, but we also had to get them back up the alley to the bowlers. One of the guys taught me how to give the balls an extra spin so that they had enough speed to go all the way back to the bowler. We put our right hand face up in front of the ball and our left hand on top of the ball near the back. Then spin the ball by moving our left hand over the top of the ball and at the same time move our right hand under the ball and then over the top. By the end of the day our right hands would be bruised and swollen from rolling the ball over them. We actually got docked in our pay if there were too many complaints about balls not making it all the way back to the bowler. We would also take some nasty ridicule from the bowlers if we had to crawl out of our hole and run up the alley to push the ball the rest of the way back to them.
=============================================
