Uncle John's Band

“What I Want to Know
Where does the time go?”

Got home from bowling last night and heard Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.” Years ago, when Ivan Jasper moved to Florida, he gave me some of his old albums, including the 1970 classic “Workingman’s Dead” in mint condition (wonder what that would bring on ebay?). Since it was only 8:30 in the Seattle, I was able to ring up Gaard and Chuck Logan, who are still huge Dead fans (it’s the reason Chuck pays for Sirius radio). The Dead were trendsetters in so many ways but totally unique, with a music historian’s sense of their roots.

My bowling team, the Electrical Engineers, won 5 of 7 points, winning the third game by a mere 7 pins. I stunk the first half of the evening, going into the fifth frame of the second game, for instance with a 34, but I got hot and finished that game with a 162 and then rolled 190 in game three. Our 81 year-old captain, Bill Batalis, goes home after the first game if not needed as a sub, and I call him if we win any points thereafter. He was pleasantly surprised to get my call since we bowled a tough team of over-200 average bowlers. Their leadoff man, Jorge Lopez, is daughter-in-law Delia’s uncle. In game three he started with five strikes. A deliberate bowler, he was ready to start the sixth frame when someone a lane down suddenly went in front of him. He threw a gutter ball, which cost him about 30 pins, and then got all ten on the second ball. He continued striking until the tenth frame, when the same bowler so annoyed him that he left one pin. He could easily bowled a perfect game instead of a 249.

Bowler John Gilbert came over, sat beside me, and told me he had had a rough day. We have a standing joke that I call him Johnny and he calls my “paw” – being that only his dad ever called him Johnny. I figured he was talking about work, but the reason was because his old girlfriend Jamie’s father died. He still loves Jamie and was close to both of her parents, so he went to the wake to pay his respects but couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He thought it might have made people, himself included, uncomfortable, so he’s planning to send Jamie’s mother a sympathy card and note instead.

“The old man had his high point every Wednesday at George’s Bowling Alley, where he once bowled a historic game in which he got three consecutive strikes.” Jean Shepherd

After I started game three with three strikes (a turkey) I immediately thought of the Jean Shepherd quote from “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.” I used that witticism in the intro to my Nineties issue “Shards and Midden Heaps” (another Shepherd line). My league, Sheet and Tin, is a vestige of an era when industrial leagues flourished. Now steelworkers are a vanishing breed, with more old-timers moving south every year or scaling back their league play as the recession has taken on an air of permanence. It was once common for guys to bowl in three or four leagues. When in my fifties I bowled in a league with son Dave and still have a championship jacket from 1994 to prove it. There was an IUN intramural league in the early nineties that sadly lasted only one season. One night teammate Jackie Cheairs, a leftie with a slow hooking ball who often struggled to break one hundred, bagged a half-dozen strikes in a row and after each one gave a hearty chuckle. Afterwards, she couldn’t believe she broke 200.

During the Nineties my league took up eight alleys at Cressmoor Lanes in Hobart and a women’s league bowled on the other eight. The women, for the most part, were better bowlers than the men in our league. I loved to watch the best of them, Lisa Anserello, who had the sweetest delivery I’ve ever seen. In today’s paper was mention that Linda Olszewski recently rolled an 843. Unbelievable. When I bowled my historic 615 series during the mid-Nineties, I stayed around to brag and have another nightcap. A couple blocks from Cressmoor a cop stopped me because a taillight on our ’84 Toyota hatchback had popped out. Noting that my breath smelled suspicious, he asked if I had been drinking. My classic reply, “Only a couple beers, officer.” Well, he had me blow into a Breathalyzer as a second cop car pulled up. Then a third cop car arrived. I had been sharing pitchers with some other guys and didn’t really know if I gone over the .8 limit. I thought to my horror, “They’re going to take me off in handcuffs the night of my big triumph.” The officer came back and begrudgingly (I thought) said I could go. Whew! Now my limit is two Leinie drafts (I once toured the Leinenkugal Brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, but that’s another story).