"Let's go bowling!" That's become the rallying cry of almost thirty million Americans throughout the United States who take their exercise in extremely palatable form: rolling a hard rubber ball down sixty feet of maple and pine toward ten standing pins. Today nearly everybody bowls—mother, dad, the kids—the whole family.
Though bowling can trace its beginnings in this country to the time of the earliest colonists in Massachusetts, it wasn't until the last decade that the sport began to boom. A number of events triggered its rebirth. The first was the introduction, in 1952, of the American Machine & Foundry Company's Automatic Pinspotter—the remarkable device that resets the pins, announces which ones are knocked down and returns the ball—all automatically. By replacing the often unreliable pinboy, it thereby made bowling an attractive investment for the entrepreneur. Million dollar bowling centers began to spring up in every section of the country.
And people were waiting for these centers because another factor had whetted their appetite for the sport. That was television. The type of competition bowling offers lends itself remarkably well to TV. Scores and scores of locally originated television programs as well as several full network productions introduced bowling to millions upon millions of Americans who had never been exposed to the fun of knocking down the stubborn tenpins.
Today, nearly thirty million Americans bowl regularly. Of these, approximately ten million are women; one and a half million are children. And there are more than a million new bowlers who take up the sport each year.
