My apologies go out to Ginny Szymanski, but I guess I really owe an apology to her old man Joe Szymanski, who it turns out after all these years was really bowling with the guys over at the Pilsudski Club.

It has been almost ten years that I’ve been playing volleyball with Szymanski and time and time again, she’d tell us that her hubby was over at the Pilsudski Club bowling with the guys.

“Bowling with the guys”. Isn’t that the same line that Fred “Twinkle Toes” Flintstone gave Wilma when he wanted to go to the Water Buffalo Lodge? And didn’t Ralph Kramden tell Alice that when he and Norton wanted to hang out with the Hurricanes? In fact I think Kramden actually said, “Bowling is good exercise for me to keep my weight down.”

It wasn’t until I was invited into the legendary cavernous downstairs club of the Joseph K. Pilsudski Fraternal Organization at Belgrade and Ontario Streets that I saw with my own eyes men that were indeed, bowling.

The smell of Miller Lite on draft being pulled into frosty mugs by “Pleasant” Jack the Bartender. The Phils game on in the background. Hand pulley operated cigarette machine. The sound of 16 pounds of hard plastic resin smacking down on hardwood lanes and crashing into ten little white and red bow tied pins waiting 60 feet away. Maybe time machines don’t exist but stepping into the downstairs bar at Pilsudski’s is as close as you’re ever gonna get!

Only card carrying members get this far into the club. Decades ago there was a waiting list longer than the bowling lane itself to become a member of Pilsudski. Your grandfather was a member, then your dad and then you.

“I became a member in 72,” said Szymanski, “But I couldn’t bowl until 75-76 when there was finally an opening on a team.”

Szymanski said that the older guys would laugh at the young bucks who thought they could just come in and bowl. “What you had to do was come in on a Saturday afternoon and throw some strikes so the old guys could see your game,” he said.

Back then, bowling at Pilsudski and likewise clubs like the Harmonia, VFW’s, Point No Point, Polish American, the AD Club-that was serious business. Even churches like St. Adalbert’s on Allegheny Avenue had bowling alleys in the basement and a healthy C.Y.O. bowling program that would feed into leagues like the one still at Pilsudski.

“St. Al’s had four lanes in their basement and I was a pinsetter,” said Mike Parcheta, who started to bowl at Pilsudski a few years after (ahem) he could legally drink. “There was this guy named Freddie, I still think he lives on Almond Street, he would throw the ball so damned hard the pins would explode and I’d be sitting up in the alley hoping not to get smacked with a pin.”

The Lost Sport

But somewhere along the way as the seventies became the eighties and the eighties became the nineties and so on, bowling became a lost sport. “Schools don’t offer it to the kids anymore, there are not a lot of high school teams out there to compete,” said Szymanski who now is President of the Pilsudski Club. “Let’s just say there isn’t a waiting list to bowl here anymore.”

And that’s why Szymanski and the guys who still have membership cards to the club with the double steel doors on Belgrade Street are looking for some bowlers because the league is looking thin. The lanes are open for bowlers in leagues Monday thru Friday starting at 7:30 p.m.

“What does it take to get eight guys together who want a night out with their buddies,” Parcheta asks aloud. “Sure you need your own shoes and a ball, but hell, we had a guy who took one from a local bowling alley.” (Sure enough, over on the ball return, there was a 15 pound “house” ball with a local bowling alley’s name imprinted on the ball.

Even a co-ed bowling league, something that in years’ past was a mandatory no-no at Pilsudski-to the point that ladies could only be admitted when as a guest of a card carrying member, is a possibility if couples wanted to start up a team of their own.

League fees are only $130 per team and you’ll have to get a $20 social membership to the Pilsudski Club. By the way, just so you’re up and up on your history, Pilsudski was a powerful and prominent leader in Poland who hated the Russians and rumor had it that Hitler was afraid of this guy. He is considered largely responsible for Poland’s regaining its independence in 1918, after 123 years of partitions. A well appointed oil painting of him hangs over the bowling alley next to the sponsorship signs of Stanley Trush Roofing and Reilly Funeral Home so the Big Pilsudski himself can shoot you the hairy eyeball when you totally choke on that 7-10 split.

Right now, Pilsudski plays against Harmonia, Point No Point, Polish American and Polonia in a Bridesburg-Port Richmond traveling round robin league. Every club still has lanes in their establishment. And Pilsudski is looking for players.

Give Joe Szymanski a call at 267-312-8321 and tell him Patty-Pat owes him a frosty mug for all those years she thought he was B.S.ing his wife, St. Ginny. And tell him you wanna bowl and who knows, maybe you’ll become the next Big Pilsudski.