Globe rolled a gutter ball!
"Teenage job offered window into world before automation" by Steven Kurutz | New York Times May 25, 2014
In high school, I had one of the rarer jobs for a teenager in modern America. The time-honored types of teenage employment — jobs in fast food or in retailing at the mall — didn’t exist in the rural Pennsylvania town where I grew up.
And truth be told, those jobs no longer exist. Teen unemployment is at crisis levels because of this hollowed out economy.
The few positions for restaurant servers, grocery stockers, and cashiers were filled mostly by older women who needed that work to get by.
Yeah, those are the people hanging on to the fast food and mall retail jobs now.
Strangely, the job readily available to me was at the town bowling alley, where I worked one night a week as a pin boy.
I don't like where this ball is headed.
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Pin boys. The term itself sounds old-timey, like “newsies.” A Depression-era boy’s job.
The more things change.... do I have too type 1%, written of and for by bended-knee wannabes? Thank you, readers.
You know what else sounds Depression-era? The New York Times.
At the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, in Arlington, Texas, people are sometimes hired as historical reenactors of pin boys’ work. But last spring, my hometown paper — The Record, “The Voice of Clinton County” — carried an article on its front page reporting that the lanes at the old Y had been shined and restored, and that after a six-year closure the alley was reopening. There was a need for part-time pinsetters. Interested candidates should inquire.
This article not up my alley, sorry. All I have is this regional flag$hit of eliti$t $upremaci$m.
When I returned, on a Saturday night, a birthday bowling party was underway, and two teenage boys had replaced Brian and me. One of them, I learned, was the 18-year-old son of a woman I went to high school with — which did not make me feel sprightly. Masters with keyboards and touch screens, the new hires seemed flummoxed by the archaic pinsetters. Mike, my classmate’s son, held up the palm he had bloodied.
The pin-boy fraternity is small. We talked shop in the brief pauses between rolls. They told me that they earned $5 an hour, plus tips — about the same as I had made two decades earlier. Where was the pin-boy union? Then Brandon, the other new pin boy, jumped out of the pits, and I got down to what I’d come for.
Climbing onto the bench and getting into position made me feel a little like E.B. White returning to his lake in Maine, the sense memories flooding back:
I had forgotten about the heat down in that basement, a dull, thick, up-close heat, like being stuffed inside a gym sock. During game breaks, I remember, I’d run sweat-soaked upstairs to the restaurant and ask one of the waitresses for a huge cup of ice water.
I found it amazing that those machines were still there, that I could return to this, my first workplace, and find teenagers doing what had been ridiculously antiquated even 20 years ago.
There are jobs you work only when you’re young and, if you’re lucky, never again.
Like swabbing toilets, sweeping s***, and moving mops?
They often require the energy or the ignorance of youth.
Now I'm getting sadly nostalgic.
Whatever capacity and willingness for pinsetting I’d had was gone. Back in the pits again, I was all out of rhythm. The game was moving too fast, my reflexes too slowly. The job now struck me as faintly absurd.
I climbed out after a couple of frames, shaken. Pin boys still exist in this alley and probably a few others. There are no pin men.
Just rolled a spare!
--more--"
Add a STRIKE!
Related: Abramson Leaves 'Em Lying
Readers, I really do think the New York Time is lost.
