By Dan Roark

I often think about when I was younger in the area. I remember hanging out at Preston Forest Bowling Center at – you guessed it – Preston Rd. at Forest Ln. There was a Titches store in the same shopping center. There are several different things there now, with Staples where the Titches was.

Preston Forest Bowling Center was open by 1961. It was a community center for decades until 1999. I hung out there with friends in late ’60s and early ’70s. At that time they had an arcade of pinball machines just to the left inside of the front door. It looked pretty much like the picture, but I don’t know if there were that many machines.

The pinball machines were backed up to the front wall of the building. There was a wall between the pinball machines and the bowling alley proper. It could have been a solid wall or half glass, I don’t remember. There was also a wall between the pinball machines and whatever was at the north end of the building. The end toward the front door was open.

We would play pinball, watch each other play pinball, smoke cigarettes, and hang out for hours. When our friend’s parents or someone from church came in, we’d shove our cigarette packs in our jeans pocket so they wouldn’t see them and report back to whoever we imagined them reporting back to.

There was a period of time when one or two of the pinball machines were impossible to tilt. We could swing them violently side to side, keeping a game going until we thought someone at the front counter would notice. So we could play for hours with just a handful of change. And wrack up an insane number of points on the two machines.

Then the owners got one of the first video games. The only one in the surrounding area. A Pong machine. Then we only played pinball until our turn came up to play Pong.

Gradually, we got older and moved on to other things. We became seniors and had life ahead of us that no longer revolved around pinball, pong, or bowling alleys.

But we still have the fond memories.

_______________________

Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.

Peace be with you.

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