Casa Venida was a modest little 12-lane bowling alley, located in the blue-collar town of Compton, California. But man what a great place that was!

Casa Venida was a dark place: low lighting, dark corners, no windows. But the bowling pits were brightly lit. Twelve little numinous shrines, each of which contained ten 3.5 pound, female-figured bowling pins, the innocent victims of my roundhouse hook.

The bowling alley also had a bar and a middle-aged, heavily breasted woman who owned the place and took no guff from anyone. When I opened that door to Casa Venida, I was home.

I knew that place inside out. I set pins, kept score for leagues, bowled in leagues, bowled in pot games, played liars’ poker with dollar bills, and drank Shirley Temples from the bar. When I wasn’t doing those things, I was sitting in the spectator seats smoking cigarettes with Red, while we savagely critiqued the sad-sack recreational bowlers. We thought we were as clever as all get out.

Casa Venida was a refuge, a social club, and a playground. School sucked big time by comparison. I wasn’t one of those cute, clever, and confident boys that girls and teachers paid attention to, so school wasn’t a whole lot of giggles.

A steady girlfriend would have leavened my joyless school life, but I was too intimidated by girls to ask one out. (Did you women out there know you had such an powerful effect on boys like me?) I had a girlfriend for a very brief time. I can’t remember how I got her. Probably pure luck. She was a Jewish girl from the better side of Compton. I got to third base. Any farther would have been scary and inconceivable. I can’t remember how that brief relationship ended. She probably finally sized me up and came to the conclusion that she could do better.

Playing sports in high school would have been a godsend, but though I considered myself a whiz of a sandlot athlete, I wasn’t good enough, once I reached high school, to make the varsity teams in any sport.. I would sinned incessantly, as E. A. Robinson once wrote, if that could have gotten me on the baseball or basketball teams.

But don’t feel sorry for me. I had a place to go: Casa Venida, the neighborhood bowling alley, where there were no unattainable girls, no teachers to ignore me, no books to read. Is it any wonder that I preferred the bowling alley to school?

And I found my sports niche in Casa Venida. I discovered that if you go down far enough in the sports world, you might be able find your sport. I found bowling. And I was good. At one time I held the second highest junior average in LA. Later I bowled on the University of Oregon team. (Yes, bowling was an official sport at Oregon at the time. We even had a one-time professional bowler, Lou Belissimo, as our coach.) So I found my sport. It just wasn’t one of the big three, something your dad can brag about to his friends.

A few years back, I drove through Compton and stopped at Casa Venida. It was desolate, with shuttered windows and refuse on the pavement outside. It looked as though it had been that way for a long time.

Thomas Wolfe was right when he said that you can’t go home again. You can’t go home not only because the place won’t be the same, but also because you won’t be the same.

In the mid 1960s, there were about 12,000 bowling centers in the U.S. Today there are about 5,000. When I bowled for the University of Oregon, there were 8 lanes, later expanded to 16, along with a number of bowling classes. A few years back, the U. of O. removed all 16 lanes.

In the 1970s, there were over nine million league bowlers in the U.S. Today there are about 1.5 million. Bowling alleys used to count on their leagues. League bowlers showed up every week, the often ate before they bowled, and they drank a lot from the bar when they bowled. At Casa Venida, we had twelve leagues a week, Monday through Saturday. The first league started at six p.m., the second at 9. Almost all teams were associated with the blue-collar companies the men worked for.

The decline of league play is sometimes blamed on a trend toward social isolation.*

We have one of those giant recreation centers, Big Al’s, just a few miles from my home in Portland. It has a huge restaurant/sports bar, an arcade with hundreds of video and roller-ball games on the second floor, 24 regular lanes on the bottom floor. There are also 12 psychedelic lanes (dark with pulsing lights and loud music). Big Al’s, has no league play at all. In fact, its 36 lanes look forlorn most of the time when there are just a few rec bowlers in action. I get the feeling that its main revenue comes from the giant restaurant/sports bar and the arcade on the second floor. The guy who built this thing was wise to hedge his bets.

Were I a kid again, there would be little reason for me to hang around Big Al’s. There is no league play, so I wouldn’t be able to keep score for ten cents a line per bowler. And there would be no Shirley Temples for me from bowlers who scored 111 in the 7th frame (a longstanding league bowling tradition). And I wouldn’t be able to set pins because the automatics have taken over.

As far as I can see, there are no permanent bowling alley kids that hang around the place. So there would be no more liars’ poker, no more criticizing bowlers from the spectator seats (no spectator seats in Big Al’s), no more social life at the bowling alley.

Here’s an odd little fact that might have a larger meaning: I’ve come across four guys who used to hang with me at Casa Venida and all became hardcore conservatives. How about that? What does that mean?

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“The past beats in me like a second heart” is a quote from John Banville.

* If you want to read a very good book on the decline of league play and how that’s a reflection of social isolation, read Robert Putnam’s seminal book, Bowling Alone.

Here comes Halloween and Bob the dog will be going to the various festivities dressed as a lion. Party down, Bob.