After the tidal wave wiped out the bayfront area, the Bowling Palace was gone. Glenn and I used to go be pin boys there. (We also used to go to the Hilo Municipal Golf Course and caddy, but for some reason we took more of a liking to the bowling alley.) Well, soon Hilo Lanes opened and I remember a bunch of us Lanakila boys deciding we were going to bowl and we were having good fun on the new lanes; but, much to our consternation, the desk clerk, Ah Pat Chun, (or was it Masa Matayoshi, the janitor)scolded us because we were bowling barefoot - wow! we bowled barefoot at the Bowling Palace. Man, this new bowling alley really sucks! Man, we're never going there again, too many rules!
It was 24 Lanes, what is now 17 thru 40. Kind of expensive because it cost 35 cents a game and 15 cents to rent the shoes. I'm trying to remember what the "pull" was, but, we ended up hanging around there all the time. Then, we got into the Saturday morning Junior Bowling Program and our "second father" Mr. Bob Kurihara came into our lives. We (Glenn and me) slowly drifted away from our "soft-core criminal- leaning" lives and naturally, our circle of friends changed.
In a more positive turn of my life, getting involved with bowling and Bob and the coaches of the Junior Bowling Club of Hilo, it "took me off the streets", so to speak and I began getting into less juvenile delinquent behavior. Much of my character development came during the 6 years of junior bowling. Bob, Charles Grube, Itsu Sakai, Hide Nakashima, Paul Miyada, Elaine Sakoda, Ruth Okino, Muggs Kataoka, Yori Shimooka, Sam Sakoda, Paul and Violet Goo, Mrs. Segawa, Leslie Tanimoto, and probably a host of others I have not mentioned. They treated us as their own and helped us to keep pointed in the positive direction and out of jail. Late 1960....or early 1961, the time when bowling started taking me in a better direction for my future life.
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