The very New England sport of candlepin bowling is near and dear to me. I have a lot of history with it, so when I learned about Lunch With Tommy and Stasia, a book that chronicles a lot of the history of the sport from its television era on, I was very interested and knew I had to get the book when it came out. Even better is that I got a chance to meet author Mike Morin, a long-time media personality and one-time co-host of one of the longest-running candlepin bowling television shows.
Although I played a lot of competitive baseball and basketball in my life, the first sport I ever competed in was candlepin bowling. Before I ever picked up a baseball bat or a basketball, I was in a father and son league with my dad at one of many candlepin bowling alleys that has since closed, Circle Bowl in Lynnfield, Mass. It’s also the sport I competed in longer than any other, as I was consistently in a bowling league right up until over a decade ago. As a kid, I had toys like Skittle Bowl and Snap Bowling as well as, of course, a set of toy bowling pins, and the first video game I ever played was Bowling on Intellivision in the 1980s (although all of those toys and the video game were based around tenpin bowling). Perhaps if I were a kid today, I would have a Cornbowl, which was created by Eddie Florentino of Saugus and has been a big seller, and is talked about in the book.
Having lived my entire life in New England, it’s only natural to have been drawn to it, and Saturday used to be at the center of it all every week.
I haven’t been in a league in over a decade, but that owes to life taking over more than any lost interest. The last year in was in a league, I had an average of over 103, which was pretty good although nowhere near what those who made TV appearances had (a few of the best had league averages over 130!) Also, in my last year, I set my personal high single and high triple along the way. In recent times I have gone back to watch many old shows, mainly of Candlepin Bowling but also Candlepin Stars and Strikes, that are now available on YouTube. To say it has rekindled my interest in the sport would be an understatement, and the book now adds on to that.
The book’s title is a reference not only to the time of day on Saturday that Candlepin Bowling – the long-time TV show on WCVB in Boston – aired, as it was almost always at noon outside of the college football season, but also to the two bowlers widely regarded as the greatest in the sport. As a kid, my Saturdays would start with cartoons, of course, but they would really got going once we hit noon with Candelpin Bowling and then Candlepin Doubles (a half-hour show with many of the same bowlers but on two-person teams and for two strings) right behind it, and for good measure, at 3 p.m. would be PBA Bowling on ABC (and WCVB just happens to be Boston’s ABC affiliate) with the late Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton, Jr. While I watched a few other bowling shows that I could occasionally find, it was the dynamic duo starting at noon on WCVB that led the way.
For those not from New England and the eastern parts of Canada where candlepin bowling exists, it has some similarities to tenpin but also significant differences. There are still ten pins, but they are thinner, while the balls are lighter and smaller. It’s still a strike if you knock down all ten pins with one ball and a spare if you do so with two balls, but you get a third ball if needed, and any pins knocked down on the first two balls stay where they are unless they roll behind a deadwood line as per local rules. That can make picking up spares easier or more difficult depending on where the downed pins – known as wood – settle. A downed pin(s) may settle into a position that makes picking up any pins left standing easier, but they can also make it harder – a roadblock, as is commonly described. Having watched and played both, it’s even fun to think about how one leave might be easier in one than the other.
The book chronicles many stories with a game that has been in some decline ever since Candlepin Bowling was taken off the air in 1996. The show and its Doubles complement used to get great ratings in the Boston area, routinely even beating games with the four area pro teams, and the annual championship show for the former that was held for the last 20 years of its airing in August was a big hit as a live show that also got a great crowd in the alleys where it was held. Even so, WCVB made the move that started what has felt like a slow death for the sport. Two of the main alleys that hosted the live show, Fairway Sports World (later Fairway Bowling) in Natick and Pilgrim Lanes in Haverhill have closed in the past decade. When those closings happened, they felt like shots across the bow when it comes to the sport. The hope with a book like this and more is to keep it alive, and to the latter end Morin closes the book with a call to action for the reader.
The book gets going with a look at who Morin rightly describes as the “First Family of Candlepin Bowling”, the Czernickis. Stasia naturally leads the way, but her husband Tony was no small part of everything even if he wasn’t anywhere near the accomplished bowler she and sons Ed and John were. Stasia was legendary on the alleys, but that was only the beginning, as Morin chronicles how much of a high-character person she was as well as how competitive she was anytime she was in an athletic setting, such as the softball game where she was told to basically be a wallflower – something she was simply too competitive to do. Ed had the highest single in the history of Candlepin Bowling in its run of over 37 years, while John, who passed away in 2013, was on the last airing of the show in 1996.
While Stasia was a bit before my time – her best days were behind her when I came of age watching the show, and by a wide margin the best woman bowler I watched was Toni Marie Baldinelli – Tom Olszta was decidedly not, although I did miss his early years that included his first two TV championship show wins and I had not entered the world when he made his first TV appearance. That last fact, however, also speaks to his greatness even at a young age. I remember many of the greats from the years of watching these shows, but there were none better than Olszta, who I always sensed was deep down an understated man beneath his intense competitiveness. He has 17 WCBC titles, qualified for half of the 20 live championship shows on Candlepin Bowling and is the only four-time winner (he was also runner-up four other times), and at his peak had a league average of well over 130, which means if he were to bowl his average over three strings, he would top 400.
Many of the greats who had success on television were from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, with a chapter devoted to each state. Morin runs down many great stories, including Paul Berger hitting 500 in 1992 and some of what was behind the scenes with it (idle thought: isn’t it interesting that he did that without once getting three strikes in a row?) and the only time a woman qualified for the WCVB championship show (Janet Poch in 1994), while also getting into the two highest singles on record – 245, not 300 like in tenpin bowling, which further illustrates the challenge of this game. Morin also talks about celebrities who had the chance to play this game in their travels, including a fun story about Will Ferrell one time.
While Candlepin Bowling and its Doubles complement were the big shows, there were others of note. Morin goes through Candlepin Stars and Strikes, which he hosted for eight years after Doug Brown and Hall of Famer Danny Murphy capably hosted for a long time, and talks about how Candlepins for Cash was a little different in that it was not with bowlers who also bowled on a pro tour and were basically the best of the best. He shares stories about purse matches, which include many of the greats talked about elsewhere in the book, and also goes into some of the newspaper coverage, especially in Worcester, which is one more illustration of where the sport once stood in the grand scheme of things for sports fans in the region.
Throughout the book are mentions of how fans came into play, especially since these bowlers were big celebrities. Some got a good deal of fan mail; some got socks, a story that was quite interesting in its own right; and there was one fan who especially stood out and came from my hometown of Chelsea, Massachusetts, the late Arthur Terlemezian. He was a colorful character who was on many televised contests and was well-known for looking like Colonel Sanders.
Near the end, Morin talks about many of the bowlers who came of age after the halcyon days of the television shows and thus who have never become the household names that past bowlers did. A few of them are sons of bowlers who used to be on TV such as Dave Barber (father was Jim, who once had four strikes in a row), Jeff Surette (son of the late Tom Surette) and Brian Fuller, Jr., but the best of the best in more recent times might be Jonathan Boudreau. He drew a lot from Peter Flynn, a great left-hander I remember growing up who nearly died from an aneurysm in the early 1990s but is thankfully still with us today.
Morin lays out at the beginning that the book is not comprehensive and for good reason. It doesn’t try to cover everything, so while there are some great bowlers not mentioned in much detail (ones that stood out to me include Dick O’Connell, the only bowler besides Olszta to win more than one WCVB championship show, and Jeff Atkins) It’s not a book to learn the history of the sport for those who are not familiar with it, although you could probably do worse for a starting point on that subject. A reader who watched a lot of it on television when the opportunity existed will enjoy it thoroughly, finding it to bring back memories and enhance what the reader might already know.
But what Morin hopes will happen, as expressed at the end, is that this book will help spur action to keep it going and lead to a reason for a follow-up to it. He challenges the reader to take action, from supporting the proprietors of the alleys that remain to anything creative that keeps the interest going. This is preferable to just taking issue with the state of affairs for those of us who love the sport. I know that I will take my son, currently shy of four years old, to experience it one day just like my own father did when I was a kid.
Whether or not Candlepin Bowling and other shows might have done well longer, even up through today, is an interesting hypothetical to think about. The television landscape is very different nowadays. While I was a rare kid who grew up without cable, such households seem even more rare now, cord cutting aside. There are many more channels that did not exist back in the 1990s, a number of which I enjoy in the realm of college sports, as well as MLB Network. But it is long gone, and does not appear to be coming back. Or can it? If Morin’s call to action is heeded, anything is possible.