Husted penned those words in an August 22, 1941 column that appeared on the eve of the grand opening of what would become the most fabled Dayton bowling alley of its time.
With 44 lanes side by side – a highly-polished wooden expanse that equaled 86 percent of an entire football field – McCook Bowl was the largest single alley installation ever attempted in the sport.
It would be the biggest bowling alley east of the Rockies and the second largest in the nation behind the 52-lane Hollywood Bowl in California. But that facility was a converted Warner Brothers sound stage and had begun with 32 lanes and later added 20 more.
McCook Bowl stood out because, unlike other places, it had no support pillars. It was air conditioned, a rarity back then, and it included 500 opera-style seats for spectators. There was recessed lighting and pastel colors and an Art Deco curve to the front of the building.
Colorful postcards captured the elegance of the lanes both inside and out and newspaper headlines back then – like the one of Husted’s column: “McCook Bowl Gorgeous Tenpin Layout”– often did the same.
“Dayton has a bowling layout which takes rank as the finest in the country,” Husted wrote.
When the lanes opened on the night of August 23, 1941, 15,000 people congregated around the bowling house at 1301 Keowee Street near Leo Street. Extra police were called in to handle the crush of onlookers.
Louie Zavakos and some partners bought McCook Bowl from Arthur Beerman in 1946 and Thursday afternoon Louie’s 78-year-old son Jim – who now owns Victory Lanes in Springfield, Royal Z Lanes in Wilmington and once ran McCook Bowl – said the massive North Dayton facility once “did more business per lane each day than any place in the world. There were approximately 100 games a day on each of the 44 lanes.”
Today, Husted likely would have difficulty painting “a true word picture” of the place as well – but for opposite reasons.
After the Zavakos family got rid of the business, two decades of closure and decay followed – as did multiple tax liens – and finally the property was bought by the Miami Conservancy District, which is dedicated to protecting our environment.
That’s why McCook Bowl now has been reduced to a vast pile of rubble that includes several hundred tons of concrete and metal that is dotted with long-abandoned bowling balls, scores of pairs of rental bowling shoes and even some discarded trophies topped with golden, ball-throwing figurines.
Bladecutters Demolition, the well-known razing and clearance company on North Dixie Drive run by John Scott, began to take down the 44,000 square foot building 10 days ago.
The demolition was complicated by the likely presence of asbestos from the collapsed ceiling.
Scott sub-contracted the asbestos removal to another company. Track hoes – swiveling, long-armed excavators including one fitted with a metal beam cutter – were brought in, as were workers in Hazmat suits.
The pile is constantly sprayed by a water hose to keep dust down and the materials that are scooped up for removal are dropped into waiting dump trucks whose beds are lined with heavy plastic sheets.
When the trucks are full, the plastic load is sealed at the top and the massive pouches are taken to two specifically-designated landfills and buried deep in the ground.
After that, Bladecutters will remove some 200 tons of metal for recycling, and it will grind all the remaining concrete into dust and chips to be used in cement.
The parking lots will be pulled up, topsoil will be hauled in, and grass will be planted.
While that emerald expanse may one day again be a sight to behold, the view at the moment is painful for many of the old-time bowlers who once frequented McCook and especially for Jim Zavakos, who drove over a few days ago to take a look at the demolition spectacle.
“To a certain extent I felt sad,” he said. “I spent a number of years there and I thought of all the bowlers who came there and the people who worked there, including much of my family.
“There are a lot of memories there.”
Baptism by fire
Although Dayton was a great bowling town in the middle of the last century, the building of McCook Bowl was a feat beyond the imagination of many.
“You wonder what the thought process was back then,” Zavakos said. “What was the economic situation in Dayton, Ohio in 1941 that someone thought: ‘We need to build something like this’.”
Back then a committee had been sent to study 20 different bowling alleys in Columbus, Detroit and Chicago and then Ben Danis and Sons Construction was hired to build this one.
It became another step in the transformation of old McCook Field – the airfield and aviation experimentation station in Dayton operated from 1917 to 1927 by the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps and the United States Army Air Service.
Parkside Homes were built nearby. Soon there’d be a nearby Elder Beerman store and a Cassano’s restaurant.
Next to the bowling alley was McCook’s Theater which, until 1978, showed family films.
According to various published reports, the bowling center cost between $200,000 to $250,000 to build.
To get an idea of how much money that was, consider that a new 1941 Plymouth – according to an advertisement in the Journal Herald – cost $685 and a new Frigidaire refrigerator was $132.75.
By the time the Zavakos family bought McCook Bowl they already were well-established in the bowling business. At one time they had eight bowling centers in Dayton and were connected to another dozen in the Miami Valley.
“Our family operated the old Royal Bowling and Billiards where the Spaghetti Warehouse is now on Fifth Street downtown,” Zavakos said.
“There were lanes in the basement and on the second and third floors. On the first floor there was a soda fountain and pool tables.
“There was an elevator in the back – it’s still there – to take people floor to floor... The place closed in the late ‘40s though.
“Dad had another bowling center – called the Recreation – next to the Victoria Theatre on Main Street. It later became the Metropolitan Clothing Store, and it also was the Esquire Red Room. The husband of my mother’s sister ran it. It was a nightclub and he brought in acts – like Johnnie Ray – from all over."
The night McCook Bowl opened, it featured 10 matches between top teams from across the Midwest. Herman’s Undertakers from St. Louis was here, as were the Strohs Bohemians from Detroit, and the Shook-Bieph Girls and the Brunswick Minerals, both from Cincinnati.
Among the Dayton entries were the Pepsi Cola Girls; the Miami Maids; and teams from Frigidaire, Delco and the Moose Lodge.
When McCook Bowl opened, it had pin boys who set the pins manually. For 44 lanes, some 22 pin boys were needed each shift and Zavakos has stories of his mom and dad driving around town, especially in West Dayton on Saturday and Sunday mornings, picking up their pinsetters for work.
There was a bunk room behind the lanes where 20 pin boys often slept overnight.
Zavakos said when bowlers rolled especially good games they sometimes rewarded the pin boys by sliding change back to them through the lane gutters.
In 1957 the pin boys were replaced by automated AMF 82-30 Pinspotter Machines.
In its heyday, McCook Bowl was home to numerous leagues and big tournaments. Bob Brodbeck managed the place until he had a debilitating stroke in 1970.
By then the bowling center was in decline and Louie Zavakos – known as Uncle Louie to everyone – asked Jim, who had gotten a college degree in Boston, to take over its operation in 1971.
“I was just 25 and it was a baptism by fire,” Zavakos remembered. “The place was a nightmare. The place was in disrepair and the bowlers were upset.”
Zavakos began fixing the problems, but the neighborhood was struggling as well, and in 1978, the McCook Theater switched to adult X-rated films and live sex shows with individual viewing booths.
“A lot of people thought we were connected to the theater next door,” Zavakos can now say with a laugh. “But we never had connections to that theater.
“I even had a personal friend who came to me and said ‘Hey, can you get us some dancers? My friend is having a bachelor party.’
“I said, ‘Dave, what are you talking about? We have nothing to do with that place.’
After eight years managing McCook, Zavakos went to Victory Lanes on North Main and eventually his family parted ways with the Keowee Street bowling venture.
Nothing to salvage
Five years ago, after the bowling center had been abandoned for nearly two decades, the Dayton-based Urban Exploring Crew – which tours forgotten buildings, makes fascinating videos of their finds and posts them on onceoccupied.com – ventured through McCook Bowl.
Portions of the roof were gone and the lanes that weren’t removed were destroyed. Bushes and small trees grew inside the building and everywhere you looked, there was rubble that occasionally held reminders of the past.
Bowling balls lay in the gutters. Rental shoes were still stored in their individual cubbies. Names of bowlers were displayed up on a wall and they found a trophy awarded to the 1992 Delco Hoover second high bowler.
There was minimal graffiti – “Dennis loves Debbie” and “Amanda and John” — and it dated back to 2004.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
A racoon appeared and seemed to guard the forgotten bowling shoes from the intruding explorers.
When the Miami Conservancy District decided to take the building down, Bladecutters won the contract thanks, in part, to its impressive demolition record.
The company was started by Scott – a Colonel White and Wright State grad out of Dayton View – who initially did lawn work and landscaping. In 2008 he bought his first track hoe and started demolishing things.
Bladecutters has taken down everything from the United Theological Seminary in old Dayton View and the massive Bainbridge Building on the edge of the Oregon District to numerous derelict homes in the area and many of the properties destroyed by the wave of tornadoes that hit Dayton six years ago this month.
“One lady told me she left with nothing but her purse and her cell phone,” he said.
“She said she never paid attention to tornado warnings before, but this time divine intervention told her to get into the basement and right after that her house collapsed on her.”
Over the years Scott said he and his crew have discovered everything during demolitions from a Model T in an abandoned property to a deceased hoarder’s large baseball card and coin collection.
At another place they found $50,000 in savings bonds and when no living relative could be found they handed the bonds over to the state’s unclaimed funds department.
Over the years they’ve even discovered bodies; mostly after fire destroyed the places where the victims lived.
“We do maybe 350 houses a year,” Scott said. “We take out all the wood, the mantles, the windows, things like that.
“But in this building there really wasn’t anything to salvage. There wasn’t anything of real value left.”
On one level that’s right, but on another that’s not true at all.
Before they started with the demolition, Scott made a short video of what the old bowling center now looked like, and he posted it on the Facebook page of Dayton History.
Quickly, the video drew over 100 comments.
Some came from people who had bowled there. Other posters said their parents or grandparents had frequented the place.
It was the same when the Urban Exploring Crew posted their video a few years ago. It has gotten over 20,000 views and many comments.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Catherine Becker Reynolds told of the big party they had there for her eighth grade graduation from Our Lady of Mercy School in 1958.
Cyndy Budenz Campbell Salins remembered how both Chaminade and Julienne high schools had bowling teams that called McCook home.
Wendy Gilmore said her dad “bowled more than a few 300 games there.”
Even Demetri Zavakos – Jim’s son who now helps run both Victory Lanes in Springfield and Royal Z Lanes in Wilmington and is the offensive coordinator of the Oakwood High football team – recalled bowling in the Saturday morning youth league at McCook, then having a cheeseburger in the restaurant there and going into the lounge on Saturday afternoons to watch televised pro wrestling on the overhead screen that had been set up.
Randy Sweeney summed it up best for everyone:
“Bowled there as kid into an adult, spent a lot of my youth in that place, worked ‘n bowled there in the 80’s ‘n 90’s… a lot of memories in there.
“Miss the place a bunch.”
He ended his post with a crying-face emoji that showed a single blue tear coming from one eye.
Unlike Bob Husted so long ago, he had help painting a true word picture of McCook Bowl.
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