If you’re from Ogden, or have lived here for any real length of time, the words Hilltop Lanes will have meaning for you. Me? That’s a HUGE part of my childhood. It’s my maternal grandparents and really that whole side of my family. It’s a childhood dream to grow up to be a pro bowler. I was obsessed with bowling at a very young age. My parents got me a set of plastic bowling pins, and I would ENDLESSLY set em up and knock em down in our hallway. When I was about five years old, I lost my poor little kid mind all over our dog because I had set up my pins before we went to visit my grandma and, when we got home, the dog had knocked the pins down with his tail. I was, as I said, serious.
I watched bowling on TV. I went to the bowling alley with relatives every chance I got. I was never allowed to bowl, because it was a different atmosphere back then (mid-seventies). Bowling was a grown-up activity that children were occasionally allowed to watch. Bowling alleys were places of smoke, booze, and smelly old wrist wraps, and at the bar, to paraphrase Johnny, the mud and the blood and the beer. Basically, I remember Hilltop as, essentially, a bar with lanes.
Am I remembering it wrong? Almost certainly. I know kids were allowed to bowl, sometimes, but we never were. I was actually okay with that — I just loved being there and watching the adults bowl. The adults in my family were pretty damn good, and I just loved the sound of those pins breaking and flying all over the place.
Somehow, by the time I was six or seven, the love affair with bowling had ended. I still liked to go to the alley once in a while, but that obsession had mellowed considerably. I still thought of Hilltop Lanes as the be-all and end-all of bowling alleys, but we never went there as a family after I was about six or seven. We did a lot of bowling at Ben Lomond Lanes and Rainbow Gardens. I bowled a few times in my later teens and early twenties, but I wasn’t very into it. Nor did I think I ever would be.
In February of 2008, however, my son did a little bowling at my sister’s house on her Wii and, as a result, wanted to try the real thing. He was nine years old at the time, almost ten. I figured, what the hell, we’ll hit Ben Lomond Lanes, let him try it a little bit and, when he realizes how much harder it is to bowl in real life than in a video game, he’ll lose interest. I was never more wrong.
I know I’m his father, so everything he does is precious and impressive to me, but I was just about on fire with pride as he flat-out refused to use bumpers (when I was a kid, either bumpers hadn’t been invented yet, or I had just never seen them). To this day, he never has. His total score on that first game was something like twenty-seven, but this score included one strike. His first game. Me? To that point in my life, I had never bowled a strike. He was hooked and, because he was obviously enjoying it so much, my latent love of bowling was reawakened, with a vengeance.
We began bowling at least once a week and sometimes two or three times. One day, we went to Ben Lomond and found we couldn’t bowl that day because they had a league in there, and they were going to be there for quite some time. I remember Hill Top, and headed on up there for the first time in almost twenty years.
I remembered as a kid that Hill Top was all flashing lights and shininess, a glittering bowlerama, like something from your dreams of the Palladium. The present day reality was nothing at all like that. The equipment was very outdated. Yes, they had scoring computers, but as often as not, they missed pins or counted pins that hadn’t fallen. The ball returns were slow at best and often just completely failed to return the equipment. The pinsetters had a nasty habit of only setting up eight or nine pins. However, they were obviously in the process of a pretty major remodeling. They were improving the appearance of the place, but continuing to ignore the deplorable state of their equipment. Bad move, as we later found out.
We learned they were having a summer parent/child league, and at the end of the league, participants got a Marvel Superheroes Visiball. In addition, competitors were allowed to bowl three games per day for free. So for about six weeks, the boy and I bowled our ever-loving asses off. We made a big deal out of showing up every Friday night with a Marvel Heroes shirt on and dreamed of that day at the end of the summer when we’d get our own balls. Yes, many, MANY childish jokes were made around this concept.
On the sixth Friday night, we went to the league match. As I was walking up to the counter to pay, the owner stopped me and said not to bother — the alley had been sold and would be closing the following night, and as we’d spent so much money there over the past months, he wanted us to go ahead and bowl for free.
Hilltop couldn’t close!! That was like telling a seven-year-old kid there’s no Santa! I was crushed, but not very surprised — the place was almost always deserted anymore, and the prevailing complaint I heard from other bowlers was, you guessed it, the equipment. Many other customers shared my complaint that it was pretty stupid to fix the place cosmetically without first updating the equipment. Since the closing, I’ve talked to other bowlers at Ben Lomond Lanes, and they say the same thing — the reason they didn’t bowl at Hilltop was the appalling state of the equipment. I was heartbroken.
We bowled our last league game and paid the price we would’ve paid for the rest of them so we could get our balls. Sean picked a twelve-pound Iron Man ball; I chose a ten-pound Spidey. Yeah, I’m rockin a ten-pounder, and you can keep your snotty comments to yourself, thankyaveramuch.
Anyway, we made a point of going back the following day to get our three free games, and it was VERY hard for the boy. He was VERY sad, so much so that we went back that night and bowled until they kicked us out. On the drive there, he burst into tears as much out of frustration as pure sadness, which, in turn, caused me to get pretty choked up too. When we left, he wanted to “just sit here in the parking lot for a while and look at it.” So we did, trying to put some necessary closure on it.
Growing up is as much about saying goodbye to things you thought were eternal as it is about learning entirely new things. I much prefer the new things to the goodbyes.
