[HN Gopher] A Maine community comes together to save a candlepin...
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A Maine community comes together to save a candlepin bowling
tradition
Author : Tomte
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-02-03 10:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gpb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gpb.org)
| eschneider wrote:
| Growing up in Eastern Massachusetts, it was candlepin or GTFO.
| Didn't see a tenpin lane until after college.
| [deleted]
| jaqalopes wrote:
| Western mass here, still can't understand the appeal of
| "classic" tenpin bowling. I feel like I'm a reasonably strong
| guy and throwing the giant ball for a night kills my arm every
| time, never mind that it's impossible to actually aim it.
| Candlepin is so much more accessible and fun, especially
| leaving the downed pins on the lane instead of clearing them
| each throw. I'm lucky to have a popular and high quality
| candlepin alley down the road. Wishing the best for the woman
| in this article to keep her place running.
| mindslight wrote:
| Candlepin is most certainly the better game! While "splits"
| do happen in tenpin, they're nowhere near as varied as
| candlepin with its "wood" and ability for pins to move but
| not fall down. Getting a strike or a spare _means something_
| , rather than tenpin where knocking down all the pins on most
| frames is basically expected. Candlepin has a world record
| single string score that is far from 300, whereas in tenpin
| perfect games are common.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Probably why tenpin is more popular. Casual players have
| more fun getting a couple strikes and a few spares on a
| night out.
| runsonrum wrote:
| This was my thoughts on why tenpin has taken over. The
| sense of some achievement without practice/dedication.
| mindslight wrote:
| I agree on that front. These days when I end up bowling
| it's usually at one of those newer hip bowling+drinks
| type places, which are generally tenpin. I haven't done
| enough big ball bowling to develop a technique or
| anything, but it's easy enough to roll them straight down
| the alley and get a decent score - it feels like the ball
| does most of the work.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I feel like I'm a reasonably strong guy and throwing the
| giant ball for a night kills my arm every time
|
| It's definitely worth combing the alley for a lighter ball
| that still fits your hand. Can't go too light or the physics
| are poor, but I remember being a young person who just wanted
| to use the heaviest ball and that doesn't work after the
| teenage invincibility wears off.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _I feel like I 'm a reasonably strong guy and throwing the
| giant ball for a night kills my arm every time, never mind
| that it's impossible to actually aim it._
|
| You're supposed to roll the ball, not throw it!
|
| Kidding aside, it's all technique. My octogenarian father-in-
| law and his wife bowl on several leagues without problems.
| Both are reasonably proficient amateurs. Neither are large or
| muscular.
|
| You could be trying to use power/speed as a substitute for
| aim and spin control.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Western Mass here too - if you want to go "old school" you
| can bowl here in Shelburne Falls as the second oldest alley
| in the country (running since 1906). Bonus: to get there you
| literally have to walk down a narrow alley from the main
| street in town to get there.
|
| https://www.shelburnefallsbowling.com/
| detourdog wrote:
| Another Westernmasser, Pittsfield just had 2 newspaper
| articles about ownerships changes at separate Candlepin
| alley's last week.
| nateburke wrote:
| Northeastern CT, my town had both duckpin and regular. Both
| are now long gone. As a kid, duckpin was WAY more fun than
| knuckletwister!
| wrldos wrote:
| UK here. I'd rather play candlepin because of this but it's
| all tenpin here :(
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I moved to MA recently. Last year for our end of year team
| bonding activity, my boss reserved a couple of lanes at a bowling
| alley.
|
| I think my exact words when I walked in and saw the weird pins
| and tiny bowling balls was, "what is this shit?"
|
| I had a blast. I would love to go back and do more candlepin. It
| is totally unknown in the US outside of New England, and I'm glad
| articles like this are raising awareness. Its good fun!
| zacharybk wrote:
| Similar to many others here I grew up with candlepin in Bangor,
| ME. While there was a tenpin lane, I also never went until post-
| college.
|
| We actually had my cousin's birthday party at a candlepin lane
| call Big20 in Scarborough, ME last week. It's a great spot!
| drmpeg wrote:
| Wow, I remember that place as a kid in the 60's.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| That's right down the street from me! I'm happy to report that
| the place is still busy on weekends.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| That's the town where I grew up! I have a lot of fond memories of
| that bowling alley. I'm glad someone is preserving it. The candle
| pin bowling balls are much smaller and easier for small children
| to throw, so it's great for the kids.
| codpiece wrote:
| There is a candlepin alley about a mile away from my house, very
| popular with the leagues. It helps that it's right next to a
| restaurant and across the street from the French-Canadian social
| club.
| evandale wrote:
| You get a bit of everything in Quebec when it comes to bowling
| :) You can find Duckpin, Candlepin, 5-pin, and 10-pin!
| don-code wrote:
| As a New England native, I'm ashamed to admit that outside of
| television and movies, I had never seen tenpin until I went to
| college. I rationalized it as some kind of Hollywood in-joke,
| rather than a real thing.
|
| Nowadays, bowling alleys in the area probably skew two-thirds
| tenpin, one-third candlepin. Luckily there is a candlepin alley
| about two blocks away.
| dadro wrote:
| I grew up in rural Maine and always called 10-pin bowling "TV
| bowling" because I had never actually seen one of the large
| bowling balls. I didn't play my first non-candlepin round until
| my mid 20's. I still prefer candlepin. Luckily Boston has
| "Southie Bowl" where I can get my annual fix!
| colanderman wrote:
| Feel pride, not shame!
|
| In Rhode Island we were extra peculiar with duckpin [1] as the
| predominant variant.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckpin_bowling
| wiredfool wrote:
| We had duckpin in the late 70s near Alexandria VA.
| evanelias wrote:
| That's interesting, I always thought Duckpin was primarily a
| Baltimore-area thing! Never knew it was present in New
| England, in my head that's Candlepin country. I quite enjoy
| both, but Duckpin is my personal favorite.
|
| I'm surprised that no eccentric-entrepreneurial-type person
| has ever tried opening a Duckpin or Candlepin alley in
| Brooklyn. Honestly I think it would do quite well: more
| accessible than ten-pin due to the lighter balls; family-
| friendly during the day; sufficiently novel and retro enough
| to attract the hipster set at night. Similar vibe to the
| resurgence in pinball, skee-ball, etc.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That seemed to have shifted by the time I was a kid. About
| 2/3 of the lanes were ten pin.
|
| I did try duck pins in Kingston once though
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Candlepin was so popular in New England that they had candlepin
| competition TV shows on Saturday mornings after the cartoons.
|
| A short documentary film was recently made about candlepin
| bowling in Maine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBL3O3PV3tw
| loph wrote:
| Candlepins for Cash! I remember.
| paleotrope wrote:
| I remember watching it as a kid. I learned to bowl (candlepin)
| at lanes and games in Cambridge as a kid. When we moved to Ohio
| and we went bowling (tenpin) I was soooo confused. I still 30
| years later get surprised when the tenpin lanes clear the pins
| between rolls.
| jghn wrote:
| I had almost the exact same experience but in reverse. Was a
| huge culture shock.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Reading through the comments here, it is really fascinating how
| regular humans used to just "invent" things and create whole
| businesses around them. Like, the idea that some guy invented the
| duckpin pin setter, patented it, and managed to make enough of
| them for duckpin bowling alleys that it is still regionally
| popular today, is kind of wild. I feel like it doesn't (and maybe
| couldn't) happen today at the same scale.
| tiagod wrote:
| I think it's still common in industrial machinery and such
| specialised things.
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| Part of the reason, I think, is that the modern talent
| extraction system didn't exist then. Think of standardized
| testing and the education industrial complex as a kind of strip
| mining operation.
|
| Many of the most capable people are identified before they're
| adults and then relocated to certain specific institutions,
| locations, and careers. The result is that the places and
| subcultures they leave behind fail to thrive in a thousand
| small ways, the cumulative effects of which are obvious.
|
| In 1900, lots of the people who today are 10x programmers in SF
| were farmers and small business owners in small towns or rural
| areas. When you look back at some of the things they figured
| out and built, you see a level of talent that most of their
| modern successors lack.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| A big factor is modern government corruption. Try starting a
| restaurant in SF vs getting a job as a programmer.
|
| https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/how-san-francisco-s-
| leng...
|
| https://sfist.com/2021/06/25/disgraced-ex-dbi-inspector-
| appr...
|
| https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/27/15733554/cost-open-
| restaurant...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Corruption was WAY worse back then.
|
| Hell, the examples provided are way less crazy than graft
| scandals and mafia wars from the time period you are
| looking at with rose tinted glasses [0]
|
| [0] -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_graft_trials
|
| [1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-
| corruption-...
|
| [2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tong_Wars
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Main difference, corruption didn't put artificial
| barriers for new business. Remember, politicians back
| then enacted anti trust laws. You can't expect similar
| courage in 2023.
| riskpreneurship wrote:
| The pie was smaller back in the day, but it was sliced more
| evenly.
|
| If real income had kept up with productivity gains, we might
| still live in a world where ordinary people could afford to
| invent and patent expensive new forms of recreation.
|
| It still happens, but only the extremely wealthy can
| participate in their devopment. Water-jet hoverboards, VR,
| green homesteading...
|
| I personally have prototyped an idea for a small, cheap,
| flexible consumer product that I would love to build and sell,
| but I don't have 7 figures to burn if it doesn't work out - I
| can't even afford a house on a low 6-figure salary, nevermind
| saving enough to start a business! So it will remain a pipe
| dream until some large organization with loads of capital picks
| the low-hanging fruit.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > Water-jet hoverboards, VR, green homesteading...
|
| I know I'd rather have weird bowling than any of those, but
| we don't have it in my region.
| robg wrote:
| Have you considered a Kickstarter to test the market?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > small, cheap, flexible consumer product
|
| Kickstarter is like the fastest route to getting undercut
| by an imitation for something like that.
| riskpreneurship wrote:
| From what I've seen, that's a good way to give the drop-
| ship economy-of-scale undercutters a head start.
|
| Honestly, I think something like as-seen-on-TV would work
| better for a novel widget idea. You could sell an initial
| run all at once, and fund future development if it turned
| out to be popular: I guess the modern equivalent would be
| Instagram or YouTube ads. But I don't have enough capital
| to build up enough stock for a launch, when the runway for
| clones is about 4 months from the point where a mainland
| factory catches wind of your idea.
|
| The incentive to actually implement and sell an idea once
| you see that it can be done cheaply and easily doesn't
| exist in our current economy, unless you already have so
| much capital that you don't need to work. It's a
| frustrating catch-22.
| rcme wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much what a startup is? Someone has an idea,
| they create a product, and then sell it to people.
| kubectl_h wrote:
| I was in a candlepin bowling alley a couple of years ago and was
| chatting with the owners and when they found out I am a software
| dev they wanted to know if I could help them with their lane
| terminal software. The setup was rough: ms-dos, who knows what it
| was written in, a whole pc per lane (they had 20 towers running
| in the back room) and no remote administration -- the man who
| runs the software company makes some updates every year by
| jumping in his RV and working his way up the coast from maryland
| to maine, stopping to do maintenance at various bowling alleys.
|
| These people seemed desperate for any kind of help because the
| owner of this software company was retiring within the next
| couple of years and there was no plan for anyone to take over the
| relationships, of which it sounded like there were dozens. If I
| wasn't happily employed I would have very seriously looked into
| what it would have cost to buy that operation.
| absurddoctor wrote:
| I think this may have surfaced on reddit recently, with a
| picture.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/10pciup/the_comp...
| kubectl_h wrote:
| Oh wow crazy. That's pretty much what their back room looked
| like.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| I ran across a similar setup in the late 80's as a student
| studying industrial process control and the point of the field
| trip was interfacing to very old analog processes.
|
| The bowling alley was an 80 lane 10 pin and they had 80 pcs
| chugging away.
|
| The software was written in Turbo Pascal.
| headcanon wrote:
| I went candlepin bowling recently in Cambridge, MA, and it was a
| blast. Highly recommend. It must be a New England thing though
| since I haven't seen it outside of the region.
|
| Most "regular" bowling alleys I know of are either dingy and reek
| of old cigarettes, or they're brand new, expensive, and tacky. I
| would love to have someplace to go to that had the prewar, old-
| school aesthetic I see a lot of these places having. Hopefully
| places like this continue to thrive.
| jghn wrote:
| It is indeed regional. Until not too many years it was almost
| impossible to find a ten pin bowling alley in the area. These
| days I just assume any new bowling alley is tenpin & not
| candlepin.
|
| We moved to MA in the mid-80s from the midwest. We bowled a lot
| as a family. But the candlepin was such an unexpected
| difference that we stopped bowling as much. Never really got
| used to it.
| Symbiote wrote:
| For something even older in style, there's skittles in England
| (Old England).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skittles_(sport)
|
| https://m.youtube.com/shorts/RFggl8H8UXQ
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QGOkNCZbzWk (not the best video,
| but very much how I remember it from a couple of visits to
| similar places as a child.)
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