On the Lake Shore Limited

I will return with a sword

ABOARD THE WESTBOUND TRAIN — It was a hot and hazy afternoon in Springfield when I boarded the Amtrak, just after 3:30 on the last day of June. By the time we approached Pittsfield two hours later, the haze seemed slightly more orange. A freight train was said to be blocking our entrance to the station, so we sat for a long time with no forward motion. A youngish woman across from me was traveling with a pet carrier on her lap. I assumed it held a cat, but as we waited she unzipped it a bit. Out popped the head of a little white and brown terrier. He’d been so quiet and patient. When we finally got to Pittsfield, they got off the train and were on their way.

The train can get me from Springfield to Chicago overnight. Saturday morning, I expect to get out at Union Station, walk a couple of blocks to the Enterprise Rental Car, and then drive to Milwaukee, and later to Madison. There’s a bowling tournament in Wauwatosa, just west of Milwaukee. It’s for ordinary league bowlers, though it’s sponsored by the Professional Bowlers Association. There’s a whole backstory there. And Dots and Arrows has been neglecting bowling coverage of late, so I really should tell it.

Or should I discuss, instead, the other reason for this trip? I am going to Madison to collect my inheritance. Some may recall a report I filed in March of 2022 (“Turbulence”) after my father died just shy of his 88th birthday. He left a house full of stuff. It gradually was cleaned out. There was one item I had wondered about, and it was found behind a bookcase: a Civil War sword. He had inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father. I have a binder full of genealogical research prepared many years ago by my grandmother, and it would probably tell me who the Union soldier was who bequeathed us his sword. But I’m on the train now and don’t have that binder with me.

As a boy, I was fascinated by the sword. It was kept in my grandfather’s “den,” a cool dark wood-paneled room in the grandparents’ house in Homewood, Illinois. Every once in a while I was allowed to hold it. It seemed impossibly heavy. Someone recently suggested to me it may have not been the kind of sword one wields in battle—by the Civil War, guns were where the action was—but rather a dress sword, held in a scabbard. I haven’t seen it in many years, but I know exactly what it feels like and what it looks like. It has a slightly curved blade, a metal knuckleguard, and a rough sandpapery grip that is partly worn away. No surviving scabbard, though.

A question was raised about how one transports a heavy sword. I once traveled on the airlines with a bowling ball; it looked like a bomb when it went through the x-ray machine and caused some alarm. Security workers consulted the regulations and then waved me through. I don’t think I’d make it onto a plane with a sword, though. So I will visit one sister who lives in Madison (where the sword is stored) and we will be joined by the other sister who lives in Portland, Maine. She will collect her inheritance, too: a dramatic stormy seascape that used to hang over the mantel in the Homewood house. The painting is heavy and would also not travel well through an airport. We’re going to put the stuff in the rental car and drive back across the Midwest after the 4th of July.

I’m traveling today with a satchel that holds one bowling ball, a trusty fourteen-pound Hammer Arson. When I go to Wisconsin, I always want to bowl. The state is still full of bowling alleys with character. A while ago, I saw a story in the Wisconsin State Journal about a fellow who is running a four-lane bowling alley called Stars & Strikes. It’s in Princeton, Wisc., which is about halfway between Madison and Green Bay, just north of Green Lake and Puckaway Lake. He had worked in the bowling biz in Milwaukee, had battled a brain tumor, and at fifty-three decided to buy Stars & Strikes. As the WSJ reported:

He had won $23,000 playing bingo at Potawatomi Casino in Milwaukee, which allowed him in April 2020 to buy a 1968 Corvette. Just over a year later, he sold his car for $14,000 and put $7,000 down to finance a deal to run and rehab Stars & Strikes with an option to purchase the business after three years for $150,000.

Living the dream! This report further revealed that there is a Wisconsin Vintage Alleys Tour that is sponsored by the state’s Bowling Centers Association. Twenty-eight people were on the tour in April to visit Stars & Strikes. They planned to hit a few others, including Lambeaul Lanes in the town of Redgranite, a short drive to the north of Princeton. There are 276 bowling centers in Wisconsin now, with about 68 percent of them having twelve lanes or less, according the State Journal.  

But it’s not an easy business. While reading about vintage bowling alleys, I happened to see a listing for one that is now for sale—not in Wisconsin but in Dutchess County, New York. I could hardly believe it. It was Schneider’s Fishkill Bowl. I bowled there several years ago when I attended the week-long Dick Ritger bowling camp. Ritger was a professional bowler in the 1960s and 1970s, inducted into the PBA Hall of Fame in 1978. He grew up in Hartford, Wisc., in an apartment above his family’s ten-lane bowling alley. His passion in his later years was teaching the fundamentals of bowling, old-school. The key was to find “Your Total Strike Feeling,” as I reported here for The Atlantic. (Ritger died in August of 2020 at the age of eighty-one.)

Schneider’s in Fishkill has been in business and family-owned for fifty years. Now the forty-lane center is listed with an asking price of $3.75 million. At that price it’s not likely it will be bought by some guy who won Bingo money. A possible outcome—if it survives—is that it will be bought by a chain. One of the biggest ones out there these days is Bowlero, which four years ago bought the Professional Bowlers Association. This weekend’s PBA-sponsored tournament mentioned above is at the Bowlero Wauwatosa.

Does the dream of running a bowling alley or winning a tournament all seem sort of frivolous and beside the point as the planet is literally burning up? I guess it does. It takes a lot to laugh (it takes a train to cry).

What am I going to do with an unwieldy Civil War sword? I suppose it will get mounted on my office wall, near a piece of framed cartoon art someone once gave me that asserts that the pen is mightier than the sword.

What is the backstory of the PBA tournament in Wauwatosa? I’ll have to report on that later. Right now, this train is making its way through the dark New York night. We’re well past Schenectady and I neglected to concoct a synecdoche for the occasion. We barrel toward Rochester and Buffalo, we aim for Ohio. I expect to sleep through Indiana but will probably wake up in time to see an orange haze over Gary, as there always used to be—from the steel mills rather than from Canada’s burning forests.

There’s a talented talker named Chuck Mertz who has a syndicated radio show out of Chicago called “This is Hell.” He invited me on his show this past week to talk about my recent Baffler salvo “The Shame of the Suburbs.” At one point, I believe I told him “we’re not supposed to be talking about this.” If you discuss how the federal government did so much to keep the American suburbs white, you are likely to use terms like “structural racism,” and that is verboten, according to our censorious right-thinking right-wingers these days. If you happen to be feeling subversive, though, you can give it a listen. “This is Hell” is here.

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