A Maine community comes together to save a candlepin bowling tradition | Hacker News Reader

A Maine community comes together to save a candlepin bowling tradition

gpb.org

93 pointsTomte51 comments

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.

I think this may have surfaced on reddit recently, with a picture. https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/10pciup/the_comp...

Oh wow crazy. That's pretty much what their back room looked like.

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.

Every candlepin bowling alley that I've been to had hilarious MSDOS scoring machines with CRT screens (those that HAD scoring machines) and adorable primitive animation when you got a strike. Kind of part of the allure for me. Definitely implemented in Turbo Pascal.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

We had duckpin in the late 70s near Alexandria VA.

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.

I think it's still common in industrial machinery and such specialised things.

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.

Have you considered a Kickstarter to test the market?

> small, cheap, flexible consumer product

Kickstarter is like the fastest route to getting undercut by an imitation for something like that.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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

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.

Try opening a small business in NYC in the early 20th century without paying off Tammany Hall or the same in SF without paying Ruef

So govt has now replaced the role of organized crime and protection rackets.

It seems like you are supporting my point.

Isn't that pretty much what a startup is? Someone has an idea, they create a product, and then sell it to people.

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!

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

Candlepins for Cash! I remember.

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.

I had almost the exact same experience but in reverse. Was a huge culture shock.

Growing up in Eastern Massachusetts, it was candlepin or GTFO. Didn’t see a tenpin lane until after college.

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.

Northeastern CT, my town had both duckpin and regular. Both are now long gone. As a kid, duckpin was WAY more fun than knuckletwister!

Another Westernmasser, Pittsfield just had 2 newspaper articles about ownerships changes at separate Candlepin alley's last week.

UK here. I'd rather play candlepin because of this but it's all tenpin here :(

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.

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/

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.

Probably why tenpin is more popular. Casual players have more fun getting a couple strikes and a few spares on a night out.

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.

This was my thoughts on why tenpin has taken over. The sense of some achievement without practice/dedication.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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!

Wow, I remember that place as a kid in the 60's.

That’s right down the street from me! I’m happy to report that the place is still busy on weekends.

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.

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.

You get a bit of everything in Quebec when it comes to bowling :) You can find Duckpin, Candlepin, 5-pin, and 10-pin!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com