A Trip Back To My Youth On YouTube - Rediscovering Candlepin Bowling

ENFIELD, CT — Bored out of my mind a few days ago, I decided to start flipping around YouTube in search of some entertaining old sports videos. Within moments, I came across a headline which may sound quite dull to most people, but took me back in time some 4-plus decades.

Candlepin Bowling - Charlie Jutras vs. Tom Olszta

When I was a teenager, Saturdays at noon was candlepin bowling time on WGGB-TV40 out of Springfield. We'd adjust the rabbit ears on the ol' Zenith or Magnavox, and the next hour would be spent watching competitors try to knock down tall, skinny pins with small round projectiles barely the size of one's hand.

For those who don't know, candlepin bowling is a game unique to New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces, with dozens of centers open at the time in Massachusetts. Ironically, living in Connecticut, there were no candlepin houses in our state, but it was a close drive to State Bowl in Springfield or Agawam Bowl (which still operates today).

It was a very rare occasion that we would actually play the game, but I was used to bowling that was different than the standard tenpins. My dad was a champion duckpin bowler - a game most prominent in Connecticut and Maryland - and on Oct. 1, 1981, he had set a new Connecticut record with a 246 game at T-Bowl Lanes in Newington.

Gradually, the bowlers who appeared on Channel 40 became like stars in my eyes. Names like Olszta - who once won for 21 consecutive weeks - Jutras, Dick O'Connell, Rosario Lechiara and Ed Czernicki became as well-known to me as Earl Anthony, Dick Weber, Mark Roth and Windsor Locks favorite Pete Couture were on the national PBA Tour.

When I clicked on the Jutras-Olszta match, I was immediately captivated by the down-home, folksy style of announcer Don Gillis. He was the sports director at WCVB-TV5 in Boston, the flagship station for the candlepin show, and had been a member of the broadcast teams for the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s

As I watched more and more old matches from the 1980s in the ensuing days, I had to laugh at the colloquialisms used by Gillis on a regular basis, from two to 15 times per broadcast. Granted, candlepins has a language all its own, totally different than tenpins, but it took some getting used to. Among the frequent expressions:

• Participants did not bowl "games," but rather "strings," and each string consisted of 10 "boxes" rather than "frames."
• "Thin hit, just four."
• "Nooooo, the wood acted as a roadblock."
• A "diamond" is known as a "bucket" in all other forms of bowling. When a bowler would fail to convert that leave into a spare, Gillis would inevitably say, "The diamond wins again."
• Four pins in a diagonal line, either the 1-2-4-7 or 1-3-6-10, is called "The Four Horsemen" rather than "a rail."
• A leave of the 2-5-8 or 3-6-9 pins was a "sidesaddle triangle," and punching out the 1-5-8-9 left the competitor with a "spread eagle."
• A punchout of just the 2-8 or 3-9 was a "Half Worcester," allegedly named when teams from Worcester and Boston were competing sometime in the 1940s. Needing a strike or spare, a Worcester bowler punched out two pins with his first ball, prompting a member of the Boston team to taunt him by saying, "You're halfway back to Worcester."
• A leave of the 5 and 10 pins was called a "Woolworth, the 5 and 10."

Gillis was of some indeterminate age at the show's peak - I recently found out he was born in 1922 - and often struggled with names. He had a habit of calling bowler Jim Orlandi "Jim Lombardi," once doing so until halfway through the 3-string match. He also regularly mispronounced the names of home viewers vying to win cash prizes ("this card is from Adams, Mass. from Mrs. Eleanor ... ummmm ... ").

Matches were taped at Sammy White's Brighton Bowl (owned by a former Red Sox catcher) until it closed in 1986; the show resumed at Fairway Lanes in Natick until being canceled in 1996. No matter the venue, it seemed the exact same people sat in the exact same seats each week for decades. A quick look in the background indicated the average audience member was between 80 and 140 years old, all with thick Boston accents ("Come on, get ovah ..." and "you need a mahk heah" were among the most popular phrases).

Finally, it was incongruous to me that the theme song at the opening of each telecast was "The Hustle" by Van McCoy. Somehow, disco didn't seem to fit a 60-something host and an audience of people towing IV stands. Then again, it was the eighties ...