End of a Bowling Era

Warpath Lanes shortly before 1960 grand opening. 

The Lanes No Longer Own Warpath Lanes

Dennis Lane, whose parents founded Warpath Lanes, sold the bowling alley earlier this week. The lanes won't close but Dennis has decided it's time to retire. I remember when the Lanes first opened in 1960.

The excitement reached a fever pitch in my neighborhood this time in 1960. Warpath Lanes was about to open!

There had never been a bowling alley in east Kingsport. In fact there had never been a bowling alley anywhere in Kingsport except downtown.

The first bowling alley, which opened in 1920, was in the YMCA, which was located about where City Hall is today. In the thirties B&M Bowling Parlor operated at 137 Broad Street (now home of Anchor Antiques). Later Kingsport Bowling Center opened at 315 Cherokee. By 1960 it had relocated to Cumberland in the building where Olde Tyme Auction now operates.

But Warpath Lanes would be only 300 yards from my house, an easy walk, even carrying a bowling ball, assuming some day I would own a bowling ball.

David Good, who lived even closer, only a couple of blocks away on Warpath Lane, remembers walking over most every day to check on the construction progress. “They’d let us go in and walk around.”

By June 1960 the $350,000 building was completed, the snack bar stocked, the offices furnished. All that was missing were the lanes.

And missing. And missing. And missing.

All the little kids in my neighborhood, who like David Good, walked over daily to check on the progress, were getting anxious.

“Soon,” Mr. Lane would tell us. “Soon.”

I found out what caused the delay ten years ago.

Dennis Lane, founder Jim Lane’s son and, until this week, the owner, told me the story.

“Dad had given Brunswick a $5,000 deposit on the equipment. He had originally looked at a building downtown on the corner of Cumberland and Main. But he decided to build his own building.”

Here is where it gets cutthroat.

“Larry Carrier, who later built the Speedway, owned a bowling alley in Bristol. He wanted to open up in Kingsport so after dad passed on the downtown building, he took it. He went to Brunswick and told them if they would delay delivering Dad’s equipment he would buy from them when he opened up a third bowling alley. So they delayed our shipment.”

And delayed. And delayed.

“Finally Dad went to them and demanded his deposit back. That’s when he went to AMF.”

And that’s why Warpath Lanes had, and still has AMF equipment.

And that’s how Larry’s Lanes opened in what many of us think of as the Slip-Not Belting building on April 8, 1960, four months before Warpath Lanes opened.

That was the beginning of a bowling boom in Kingsport. One year later Bowl-Mor opened on Stone Drive giving the city three brand spanking new bowling alleys!

Bowling was so big that the Times-News inaugurated a weekly bowling column, Bowling Beat, written by Bob Smith.

(Larry’s Lanes closed in January 1965; Carrier blamed the closure on a fire at his Bristol alley.)

When Warpath Lanes finally did open the first week of August 1960, the local kids, including me, swarmed the place.

Most of us had never bowled a line in our lives but we had watched bowling on TV: “Make That Spare,” “Championship Bowling,” and “Bowling for Dollars.” We knew the names Carmen Salvino and Steve Nagy and Don Carter, great bowlers of that era. We just didn’t know how to bowl.

I suspect Jim and Frances Lane cringed every time they walked through the alley and heard the sound of bouncing balls from inexperienced bowlers who didn’t so much bowl as they did fling.

A month after opening business really boomed…at the snack bar. At least between 11:45 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. when the kids from Robinson crowded in, ordering lunch from the grill and sprawling around on the seats everywhere to eat. (We were allowed to leave school during lunch!)

I can remember standing three and four deep around the counter to get my hot dog.

The grill food was wonderful, and it wasn’t just because I was a kid and any restaurant food tasted wonderful. Jim and Frances Lane had hired W. B. Cliatt, former owner of the Sherwood Restaurant, to run the grill.

One of the highlights of my young life came that winter at Warpath Lanes. David Good and I won the junior doubles event of the AJBC Christmas Tournament, 1060 pins to 1050 pins.

Okay, okay, if you look up the results in the old newspaper clipping, it will say that Jim Beck and Joe Duncan won by that score.

But when David and I left the alley that afternoon, we were the winners. They called us later to say there had been a ten-pin error in each of our scores and that actually we had finished second.

I say, and I still say, once you walk across the threshold as the winner, you are the winner. Even if my trophy says second place.

David Good (here spelled Goode) and I wuz robbed of our rightful title.