Bowling: America's Greatest Indoor Pastime now available By Mark Miller
10/05/12
While the name changed slightly, the content still focuses on America's love affair with bowling and how changes in the country and the sport are related.
All are captured in the new book "Bowling: America's Greatest Indoor Pastime" now available across the world.
Authored by The Bowling Examiner, the 64-page paperback traces the sport from its ancient beginnings in Egypt to Europe and eventually to the United States during the 1800s when many people emigrated across the Atlantic Ocean bringing their popular game with them.
For many years primarily a men's-only game, women began coming to the lanes toward the end of the 19th century. Trouble was, societal attitudes at the time pushed them toward second-class status. Even worse was the country's beliefs about minorities who were not allowed into the American Bowling Congress or Women's International Bowling Congress until 1950.
When the Prohibition amendment that banned alcohol in the U.S. was repealed in the 1930s, bowling's great beer era began. As the country developed new technologies on either side of World War II, so too did bowling with innovations like foul lights, tel-e-scores and the biggest one, automatic pinsetters that eliminated the need for pinboys.
Television's rapid growth in the 1950s and 60s fueled an explosion of bowling shoes that helped the sport toward its peak years in the late 1970s. Then dramatic changes in American culture like women going back to work, changes in real estate values and changes in how people committed to structured activities changed how, when and how people went bowling, a trend that continues today.
The book features more than 70 pictures, mostly from the collections of the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame and United States Bowling Congress at the International Bowling Campus in Arlington, Texas.
Individual currently copies are available on Amazon.com and soon through USBC's bowl.com web site. Bulk purchases are available through the Bowling Examiner who will hold signing events at different locations in the coming months.
Column
Republished courtesy of Examiner.com (Oct. 4, 2012)
While the name changed slightly, the content still focuses on America's love affair with bowling and how changes in the country and the sport are related. All are captured in the new book "Bowling: America's Greatest Indoor Pastime" now available across the world.
Authored by The Bowling Examiner, the 64-page paperback traces the sport from its ancient beginnings in Egypt to Europe and eventually to the United States during the 1800s when many people emigrated across the Atlantic Ocean bringing their popular game with them.
For many years primarily a men's-only game, women began coming to the lanes toward the end of the 19th century. Trouble was, societal attitudes at the time pushed them toward second-class status. Even worse was the country's beliefs about minorities who were not allowed into the American Bowling Congress or Women's International Bowling Congress until 1950.
When the Prohibition amendment that banned alcohol in the U.S. was repealed in the 1930s, bowling's great beer era began. As the country developed new technologies on either side of World War II, so too did bowling with innovations like foul lights, tel-e-scores and the biggest one, automatic pinsetters that eliminated the need for pinboys.
Television's rapid growth in the 1950s and 60s fueled an explosion of bowling shoes that helped the sport toward its peak years in the late 1970s. Then dramatic changes in American culture like women going back to work, changes in real estate values and changes in how people committed to structured activities changed how, when and how people went bowling, a trend that continues today.
The book features more than 70 pictures, mostly from the collections of the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame and United States Bowling Congress at the International Bowling Campus in Arlington, Texas.
Individual currently copies are available on Amazon.com and soon through USBC's bowl.com web site. Bulk purchases are available through the Bowling Examiner who will hold signing events at different locations in the coming months.
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