The Nellie Fox auction is over and I’ve had some time to reflect, mostly during the 8 1/2 hour drive home from Chambersburg, Penn. The auction was held on Saturday, January 22, at Kenny’s Auction House. I detailed Nellie and the auction of his personal property in the past three parts of this series. To the casual fan, researching Nellie’s baseball career on the Net is easy. However, what most fans don’t realize is that baseball wasn’t Nellie’s only sport. Nellie Fox was also a bowler.
Nowadays, Major League baseball players don’t have to worry about what to do when they retire. But in the days before baseball free agency and salary arbitration, life after baseball was a real concern. Most baseball players, from benchers to Hall of Famers, had to come up with an Act Two once they hung up their cleats. Some opened restaurants, others opened bars.
San Francisco had two of the most famous examples of those categories: Lefty O’Doul’s bar in Union Square and Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. Lefty’s joint is still there but DiMaggio’s is long gone. I was lucky enough to encounter both venues (sort of) when I visited San Francisco for my tenth wedding anniversary in 1999. Rhonda and I ate lunch at Lefty O’Doul’s and then headed over to Fisherman’s Wharf the same afternoon.
As we were standing on the corner waiting for the crossing light to change and looking at what once was DiMaggio’s restaurant (now a Joe’s Crab Shack), we found ourselves standing behind an elderly bespectacled man. He was pointing to the building and reminiscing in a very specific way. I nudged Rhonda and told her, ”I think that’s Dom DiMaggio.” And I was right. Turns out we were witness to Dom’s first trip back to Fisherman’s Wharf in decades. Mr. DiMaggio explained that his father, Giuseppe, once worked as a fisherman on the wharf when the brothers were kids. Dom told us that his father wasn’t even allowed to fish there during World War II because he was an Italian immigrant.
The Di Maggio brothers opened a restaurant they named “Joe Di Maggio’s Grotto.” Dom recalled that his dad took great pride in preparing meals for baseball players who visited the Grotto during the off-season. “He cooked them the Italian dish of cioppino,” Dom said with a laugh, “then covered them with towels for bibs and told them they had to eat with only their fingers, no knives or forks permitted.” In time, Joltin’ Joe sold out his interest in the family restaurant to his brothers Dom and Vincent, both also former big-league players. I remember Dom candidly telling us “Joe wasn’t handling his money very well at the time, he was all wrapped up with Marilyn Monroe, so we bought him out.”
Other big leaguers opened restaurants: Mickey Mantle, Willie McCovey, Ozzie Smith, Albert Pujols, Ken Griffey, Jr., and George Brett to name a few. Johnny Bench and Pete Rose each had restaurants of their own and the two Big Red Machine teammates partnered in a Cincinnati car dealership as well. Most baseball players eschewed restaurants preferring instead to open businesses with a more durable stock in trade. Food spoiled. Hardware, sporting goods, cars, bowling balls and pins did not. In 1919 Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famers Honus Wagner and Pie Traynor partnered in a sporting goods store at 813 Liberty Ave. in downtown Pittsburgh. Likewise, Brooklyn Dodgers star Dixie Walker opened up a hardware store in Leeds, Alabama.
But like many other big leaguers, Nellie Fox chose to open a bowling alley. In 1956 the “Nellie Fox Bowl & Sport Shop” opened in Chambersburg. With 20 ten-pin bowling lanes, the state-of-the-art bowling center is still open today. There were a few lots in the auction that spoke to Nellie’s association with the sport. Lot #29, Nellie’s F.C.D.B.A. Bowling Hall of Fame plaque sold for $90. Lot #44, Nellie’s personal bowling towels and belt buckles sold for $35. Lot #115, and two candid photos of Nellie Fox bowling sold for $70 (to the current owner of the Nellie Fox Bowling Center). An uncataloged lot of Nellie and Joanne’s personal bowling trophies sold for $75.
Then there was lot #123, a set of three candid B&W snapshot photos of Nellie Fox holding his hunting rifle, squatting down at the end of the lane comically aiming his rifle at a full rack of ten pins. Whether the photos were taken by the family for fun or for some long-forgotten promotional story remains unknown. The photos sold for $110. Occasionally, other items from “Nellie Fox Bowl” surface in the many antique malls that populate the area: ashtrays, memo books, placemats, score sheets, patches, keychains, and postcards picturing Nellie in his baseball uniform, but for the most part, these items are highly prized by collectors and remain hard to find.
When you stand back and look at the bowling industry from a distance, you quickly find that Nellie was not alone in the “baseball players as bowling alley owners” field. On November 23, 1958, St. Louis Cardinals teammates Stan Musial and Joe Garagiola opened Red Bird Lanes at Gravois and Hampton in South St. Louis. The 32-lane center was the last 24-hour bowling alley in St. Louis when it closed on May 7, 1996. Ultimately, it was demolished for a Walgreens.
In 1959 New York Yankees Hall of Famers Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto opened a bowling alley together on Route 3 in the Styertowne area of Clifton, New Jersey. Originally called Rizzuto-Berra Lanes, the establishment’s trademark was a baseball diamond-shaped bar and the stadium seating behind each lane. The two eventually sold their stakes in the alley to new owners, who changed its name to Astro Bowl before selling the property to a developer, who closed the bowling alley in 1999 and converted it into retail space.
In 1961 Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese opened Pee Wee Reese Lanes in the Dahlem Center at Eastern Parkway and Shelby in Louisville, Kentucky. Like Red Bird Lanes in St. Louis, Pee Wee’s bowling center was eventually demolished and replaced by a Walgreen’s.
Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett, a.k.a. “Old Tomato Face” played for the Chicago Cubs from 1922-40. Hartnett served as a player-manager for the Indianapolis Indians in 1942. He retired to Chicago in 1947 and opened Hartnett Recreation, a bowling alley and lounge, in the suburb of Lincolnwood. Gabby not only owned the place, he was also a frequent league bowler there. Gabby used a two-finger ball because his hands were so messed up from years of catching. “The crowd goes wild when I get three strikes in this league,” he once cracked. It was torn down in 2010 and now a bank sits in its place.
1912-28 Chicago White Sox baseball Hall of Famer Ray Schalk was considered to be the best defensive catcher of his era. Like Hartnett, Schalk also managed the Indianapolis Indians. He was also an assistant coach at Purdue for 18 years. After his playing and coaching days were over, Schalk opened Evergreen Towers, a popular Windy City bowling alley and pool hall in Evergreen Park on the Southside of Chicago. It was demolished a generation ago.
From 1897 to 1915, Baseball Hall of Famers John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson owned a popular bowling hall and saloon called Diamond Alleys on the corner of Howard and Centre streets in Baltimore, Maryland. It is believed that Diamond Alleys was the site of the first game of duckpin bowling in the spring of 1900. Duckpin bowling has been a Baltimore and East Coast tradition ever since. McGraw and Robinson, both avid duck hunters, said the small pins flew like a “flock of flying ducks” and a Baltimore Sun reporter ran with it and the rest is history.
Bluffton Indiana’s own Lewis “Deacon” Scott played shortstop for the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox, and Cincinnati Reds, from 1914 through 1926. He had a career batting average of .249 with 551 runs batted in. His 1,307 streak of consecutive games played was the major league record until it was broken by Lou Gehrig in August 1933. Gehrig’s streak began in 1925, the same season Scott’s streak ended. Scott was an avid bowler who owned Scott’s Bowling Alley in Fort Wayne.
Brooklyn Dodgers star and Princeton Indiana native Gil Hodges owned a bowling alley in Brooklyn which he ran during the offseason. Gil Hodges Lanes was located at 6161 Strickland Avenue. The 48 lane bowling center’s outstanding feature was four grandstand seats salvaged from Ebbets Field. The bowling center was tucked away in a hard-to-reach part of Brooklyn known as Mill Basin, a little spit of land that pokes out between a couple of inlets on Jamaica Bay.
Gil’s bowling alley is still there, although it is now known as “Funfest” or “Strike Ten Lanes” depending on who you talk to, and is half the size it used to be. The other half of the building houses a gym. It anchors a modest shopping plaza on Strickland Ave., across the street from the neighborhood green space, Lindower Park. If you type “Gil Hodges Lanes” into Google Maps, it still comes up, even though nobody calls it that anymore.
Nellie Fox began his baseball career in 1947 by signing with the Philadelphia Athletics. That same year, another rookie was kicking around the Athletics farm system. This kid from St. Louis grew up playing baseball in the same neighborhood as Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola. He was a pitcher and infielder and, although he had a .302 batting average as an infielder, his record as a pitcher was pretty poor. This young man decided that he would not make it as a major league baseball player and asked for his release after the season ended.
His name was Don Carter and he was widely regarded as professional bowling’s first superstar. He was voted the Greatest Bowler of All-Time in a 1970 Bowling Magazine poll, and ranked #1 among 20th Century bowlers by Bowlers Journal in 1999. Carter capitalized on his fame during televised bowling’s most popular period to become the first athlete of any kind to earn $1,000,000 in a single endorsement deal (for Ebonite bowling balls). Who knew baseball and bowling were so closely connected? Nellie Fox knew and of all the major leaguers identified with the sport, his is the only bowling center still active under the original name to this day.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
