Vintage Bowling Memorabilia

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Bowling is often called the king of pin games, but historically, its most ardent fans have worn blue collars rather than ones trimmed in ermine. From its development in Renaissance Europe to its embrace in the 13 Colonies, bowling and its various...
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Bowling is often called the king of pin games, but historically, its most ardent fans have worn blue collars rather than ones trimmed in ermine. From its development in Renaissance Europe to its embrace in the 13 Colonies, bowling and its various antecedents have been a pastime accompanied by equal parts alcohol and gambling, which evolved into its depiction as a game for dull-witted working stiffs, from Jackie Gleason’s loud-mouthed Ralph Cramden in “The Honeymooners” to everyone’s favorite animated lummox, Fred Flintstone. Given the game’s simplicity—it’s basically the act of rolling a ball at a group of objects in order to knock them down—it shouldn’t be surprising that bowling has been around for quite some time. The earliest known version of bowling was discovered in 1900 by a University of London Egyptologist named Sir Flinders Petrie, who came upon a set of nine marble pins, three stone balls, and a trio of marble rectangles (which Petrie assumed were intended to be stacked into an simple archway for the balls to pass through on their way to the pins) at a site near Cairo that dated to 3200 B.C. More recent forebears include the French game of quilles (which means “pins” in English) and the English game of kayles. Unlike modern bowling, in which all 10 pins are worth the same number of points when knocked over, in quilles and kayles the game’s nine pines are often set up in three rows of three pins, with the protected center pin being worth more than the eight surrounding it. The even older German game of kegelspiel gave bowling its trademark alley. Quilles and kayles could be played on just about any open, flat area, but kegelspiel required a narrow channel of packed clay or a width of smooth wood for the ball’s passage to the awaiting pins, which were set up in a diamond shape rather than a triangle, as in tenpins. In the New World, bowling was an important enough activity to the Dutch immigrants who lived in 17th-century Manhattan that an area...
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