From The High School Archives-The Day The Girls' Bowling Team Clamored To Go Co-Ed u

Maybe in some corners of the world there are odd-ball traditions that exist for no earthy purpose except somebody got a bee in their bonnet or had hit the bong pipe too heavily and never got over it. Maybe ingested too much coke or went over edge in some mystical ashram of the mind. That is the case of the long-standing tradition carried out to this day, to 2019 if you can believe that what with the “Pill, sexual revolution, #MeToo and a thousand other movements which would, or should have led to other more rational conclusions that the North Adamsville high school girls’ bowling team will never become co-ed, will never mingle with members of the boys’ team, at least on the bowling alley floor.

Rumor had it back in the 1960s when it would have made some sense, never confirmed although the story has the ring of truth to it, that before the war, World War II, before the world went up in smoke and fog the bowling teams were mixed, boys and girls mingling just like real people in real relationships. That school, social, maybe religious and parents policy all such agents would seemingly have had their hands deep inside this one was established, in perpetuity, because one night some smartass male bowler, the list of possible included such well-known historic names as Tiger Callahan, Bomber Kiley, Gary Devine and Jimmy Larkin   brought hard liquor into the place, distributed it and all hell broke loose, including long suppressed evidence of sexual activity.

The latter a well-known activity among the young since I would guess there have been young was not that hard to figure for later generations since certain young women, I will use first names only, Cindy, Jane, Irene, and Ellen had reputations for sneaking in the back room at Billy Larkin’s (Jimmy’s father) Bowling Lanes and “playing the flute, ” you figure it out if you don’t know what that means long before the night in question.   

What set the town on fire, what got cops, priests, ministers, rabbis if there were any, parents and school administrators is that some of those girls had to go see “Aunt Betty” out in Iowa or Nebraska somewhere within a few months of that escapade. The deep dark secret that every guy and gal in the 1960s knew was afoot so the reason for the deep cold files seems baffling. Nevertheless Henry Hanks, some old fogy headmaster whose photograph still graces the front foyer as you enter the hallowed hall declared by executive order that henceforth and forever separate teams at separate bowling alleys. Nobody since has made a squawk. Weird, right ?