This space is usually reserved for a local sports personality, past or present, to tell his story. George Hayes would qualify based on his 25-year relationship with junior bowling, but today’s story is not about him.
They will be his words, but it is a story of history and tradition, of striving for equality, and of tough times, especially now.
There was an era when African-Americans were not welcome in white-owned bowling houses. The sport’s sanctioning bodies, the American Bowling Congress and the Women’s International Bowling Congress, enforced Caucasian-only rules. Even after those bodies merged into the United States Bowling Congress, segregation was the rule until the early 1950s.
In 1939, blacks started the National Bowling Association with five founding branches - the Toledo Bowling Senate and others from Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Chicago. The founding fathers for Toledo were legendary black bowlers Lucius Huntley, Dwight Guy and Clarence King and the city was so much at the forefront that the NBA’s national office was located here from the association’s inception through 1974.
In 1951, Charlie Mae McIntosh, whose home on Palmwood Avenue housed the original NBA national office, founded the Toledo Senate’s junior bowling program at the black-owned Belmont Enterprise bowling alley on the corner of Nebraska and Division. The league moved to the Paladrome on Junction Avenue and, after the USBC’s Caucasian-only rule was abolished, to Airport Lanes, University Lanes, Ottawa Lanes and its current site, Bowlero Lanes on Monroe Street.
The kids have been bowling on Saturday mornings from September through Easter weekend for more than 55 years, aided by top local coaches, including Charles Gibson, the first black ever to be certified as a bowling coach. Hayes can name every coordinator since the league’s inception, including living legends like Ellen Clark and Berene Miller. He took over in 2003 from Bessie Mack, one of the longest-serving of the coordinators.
Despite never bowling in the league as a kid and not having children of his own, the 51-year-old Hayes runs the junior league as a labor of love. He also has served as president of the parent Toledo Bowling Senate for the past year.
After more than five decades, though, the junior program is struggling. Participation numbers are at an all-time low and the economy makes fund-raising tougher than ever, despite the generosity of the Belmont Sportsman Club, a descendant group of the old Belmont Enterprise and the NBA’s national sponsor award winner for 2007. Hayes, who works in plant operations at the University of Toledo, has been known to dig deeply into his own pocket to cover expenses. How deep? “That’s nobody’s business,” he said. But the league is his business and these are his words:
“MY PARENTS worked hard while I was growing up to make sure we had everything we needed, but there were no luxuries and bowling was a luxury. So I didn’t start messing around with it until the late 1970s. I remember walking into University Lanes in 1982 and there were all these black folks in identical blue shirts bowling. It was the Toledo Bowling Senate and I joined right then and there.
“A couple Saturdays later I went back in the morning just to practice and saw all these kids bowling. There were adults giving their time and talents to run this league and I’ve been involved ever since. We try to make sure it’s all about the kids. There’s nothing better than seeing a smile on a kid’s face, or see the pride when I announce a good grade card or some accomplishment like that over the loudspeaker.
“IF YOU WALKED into the house on a Saturday morning, you’d see mostly African-American kids. But our league and our arms are open to anybody. I’d love to see more of a racial mix in our league because we think that makes it a wonderful and more valuable experience for the kids. We would love to grow that way or any way.
“I’m concerned about the future, but I’m determined to keep this program going to honor all the people before me who worked so hard to make it a success. We have about 60 kids right now. Last season we had 80 and one year we had 28 teams, so that would be more than 110 kids. We lose some kids to the leagues at Imperial Lanes, and I’m actually glad for that because it’s a great program with great structure and top competition with the high school league and travel leagues and exposure to other cultures.
“But we’re not getting the numbers. There are people out there, black and white, that don’t know this program even exists. We have kids from [ages] 5 to 21 and different divisions like bantam, for the little kids, to juniors and all-stars.
“WE TRAVEL to tournaments and the big one is at the end of the season, a two-day regional that starts on Good Friday. We know some kids can’t afford to travel, so we rent a bus, which is pretty expensive. There are hotel rates involved. There are sanctioning fees. Each kid has two bowling shirts; they pay for one and we take care of the other one. We have a banquet and kids can win trophies and book stipends and scholarships. Bessie Mack is the scholarship chairperson and we’ve awarded $12,000 in scholarships since 1998. We’d love to have more money in our scholarship fund.
“Some of the kids really struggle, so I do what I can to keep them in the program and help with travel expenses. I don’t want to see any kid go without. And I surely want to see this league stay alive and well. It’s too important. But it is getting harder and harder to keep things going. We could use some help. We need more kids and we need more support.”
The Toledo Bowling Senate’s junior league competes on Saturday mornings, beginning at
8:45, at Bowlero Lanes, 4398 Monroe St. George Hayes can be contacted at 419-343-6988 or at ghayes@utoledo.edu.
Contact Blade sports
columnist Dave Hackenberg at: dhack@theblade.com
or 419-724-6398.
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SOURCE: toledoblade.com
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