LOU KRASNODEMSKI goes back to the golden era of pinboys, who gathered all scattered duckpins and set 'em up again. The pinboys are long gone, and very nearly forgotten. But Krasnodemski remembers. Half a century ago, long before automatic pinsetters and long before computerized scorekeeping, he set pins for 5 cents a game. But after a few years, through hard work and diligence, he had worked himself all the way up to 7 cents a game.
His memories seem to arrive from some other time zone. Striding across the dark wood floors at Patterson Lanes the other day, Krasnodemski plucked from a wall a pinboy's pay card from 1929. It hangs there like a memorial plaque. The pay card marked the first week of July that year. For setting 90 duckpin games, the pinboy earned a total of $4.50.
"Not including tips," Krasnodemski says now. "You might get 10 cents a game that went to your pay, so it wasn't all that bad."
As he recollects, Jim Mokliber and Rick Young pay close attention. They are independent documentary filmmakers. Some of their work has appeared on PBS' Frontline. Mokliber, from upstate New York, came here for graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University and fell in love with duckpin bowling. Young, from Washington, D.C., loves a good story and sees it in duckpin bowling, the sport so vital for so long to Baltimore's neighborhood culture.
The two of them are teaming with photographer Murray Pinczuk to produce a documentary: on duckpin bowling, on the closing of the old Southway Lanes by the Cross Street Market, and on the impact of the game on Baltimore's character and the life of so many local communities.
"The Southway story," says Mokliber, "isn't just about the closing of a bowling alley. It's about a neighborhood changing. As neighborhoods change, so do its institutions. What does it mean to a community when a gathering place like a bowling alley closes?"
In the case of Southway, opened in 1896 and closed more than a century later for conversion to loft apartments, its old Federal Hill neighborhood has changed considerably from the time of Eastern European immigrants settling around South Baltimore to generations of blue collars to the modern influx of young white-collar professionals.
"You'd be surprised," says Charlie Justice. "The yuppies like to bowl, too. If they discover it."
Justice has some perspective on this. He's the mechanic at Patterson Lanes. He says plenty of yuppie-types revel in duckpin bowling. But it's not a religion for them, the way it was for so many generations of Baltimoreans who stuck to the game when the rest of the country was going for the tenpin version with its larger balls and taller pins.
"Well, we had the local connection," Lou Krasnodemski says. He points to a nearby poster on a wall. It's a picture of Babe Ruth holding a duckpin ball. Krasnodemski says duckpin bowling originated in Baltimore when some neighborhood guys tossed boccie balls at pins.
"Look at that," one of them cried at the scattered pins. "They fly like ducks when you hit 'em."
Thus is folklore passed through the years. Krasnodemski's heard all the stories. He remembers the old 100-alley Recreation Lanes on Howard Street by the old Greyhound Bus Terminal. "Four or five floors, and the higher up you got, the lower the ceilings were. If you had a high back swing, you didn't bowl upstairs."
In fact, long before Lou's own pinsetting days, his father had the same job.
"Oh, yeah," he says, "all the bookies in Highlandtown used to throw tips down the alley to my father."
Mokliber and Young, setting up their film equipment, love the old stories -- because they connect to the lifestyle of a community. Krasnodemski and his wife, Phyllis, manage Patterson Lanes, the Eastern Avenue establishment that will mark its 75th anniversary in October.
The place has six lanes downstairs and six more on a second floor. Krasnodemski leads the documentary makers to a back room, where there's a big framed photo marked "Bowling Exchange Champions, 1949-50." The names alone evoke an era: Toots Barger and Ethel Dize, Sis Atkinson and Alva Brown, Jimmy Dietsch and Dave Volk and Min Weisinborn, who used to toss the bowling ball in the air like a Russian shot putter before throwing it down the alley.
"The story's about a sport," says Jim Mokliber, "but it's also about connecting the sport to the life of the communities around it."
That's a very American story: about our amusements, about our dwindling attention spans, about newcomers finding common ground in the games we play. It's why the filmmakers think such a story would resonate everywhere.