From the bowler's side, all you saw was the lane, the pins, and the crash. But down at the far end, in the dark pit behind the pins, somebody was waiting.
He was usually a kid. He sat on a ledge with his feet pulled up, and when your ball came down the lane, he got out of the way. Pins flew. Then he hopped down, cleared the fallen ones, set them back in the rack, and rolled your ball back to you.
Then he did it again. And again. All night.
What the Job Was
Pinsetters, usually called pinboys, worked at the back of bowling alleys before machines did the job. They reset the pins after every ball and sent the bowling balls back down the return track.
Most were teenagers or younger. Some were girls. It was one of the easiest jobs for a kid to get, because alleys always needed more hands, especially on league nights.
A Day on the Job
The shift started when the leagues did, usually in the evening. You climbed into the pit behind your lane and waited for the first ball.
After each ball, you picked up the fallen pins (bowlers call them "deadwood"), cleared them out of the way, and returned the ball. After a full frame, you reset all ten pins in the triangle, using a rack or pins marked on the floor, and got back up on your ledge before the next bowler let go.
The pay was by the game. On The Historians podcast, historians Dave Greene and Bob Cudmore put a typical wage around ten cents a game, about the price of a soda. The fastest pinboys "jumped alleys," handling two lanes at once for double the money.
The Skills Nobody Saw
Speed, mostly. Paul Retseck, who set pins in the 1930s for a dollar a night in Michigan City, Indiana, told Scientific American decades later: "You really had to work fast, or the bowlers would yell at you, 'Hey, get moving!'"
Timing, too. You learned to read a ball by its sound coming down the lane and to know exactly when to pull your legs up. A heavy pin flying off the deck could hurt, and every pinboy had a story about one that didn't miss.
And patience. The pit was hot, smoky, and loud, and the people on the other end mostly forgot you were there until you were slow.
Tools of the Trade
The ledge at the back of the pit, where you sat between balls.
The pin rack or floor marks that showed where each of the ten pins went.
The ball return track that ran back to the bowlers.
Your own two hands, mostly. The job had very little equipment.
Why It Disappeared
Inventors had been trying to build a mechanical pinsetter since before 1900. AMF's engineers worked on theirs starting in 1937, with time out during World War II.
In 1946, AMF showed its Automatic Pinspotter in Buffalo, New York, during the American Bowling Congress tournament. That first version was so heavy and expensive that it could only go in ground-floor alleys, so the company kept working.
In 1952, the first commercial installation opened at the Farragut Pool bowling alley in Brooklyn. According to the Smithsonian, the machine weighed about 2,000 pounds. It used suction to lift standing pins, swept away the deadwood, sorted all ten pins, set them back down, and returned the ball. The New Yorker covered the opening with a one-line verdict from AMF: "The pin boy has finally been superseded."
Brunswick soon followed with its own machine. Within a few years, alleys across the country had switched.
Where It Lives On
The pinboy's story is preserved at places like the Smithsonian, which tells the history of the machine that replaced him. And every time a machine jams at your local alley, someone still has to walk back there and fix it by hand.
Did you or anyone in your family ever set pins? How much did it pay?
Sources
- "Set 'Em Up, Knock 'Em Down: Bowling's Automated Pin Technology," Smithsonian Lemelson Center, Aug. 2013
- "Eureka!" *The New Yorker*, Sept. 6, 1952
- Mark Fischetti, "Perpetual Reset Machine," *Scientific American*, Jan. 2008
- "Jumping the Alleys: The Age of Pinsetters," *New York Almanack*, Jan. 2017
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