Striking Up Friendships in Their Spare Time

BURBANK —  They’ve outlasted three bowling alleys and nearly all their husbands.

Mary Myers has had both knees replaced.

Dot Koester can’t see the pins at the end of the lane.

Not a week goes by without mention of someone’s sciatica.

But still they come. Still, they bowl.

“They won’t give up--they’re always here. Rain does not stop them,” says Janie Desgroseilliers, manager of Pickwick Bowl in Burbank. “They’re adorable.”

Meet the ladies of the Burbank Emblem Club’s bowling league, who commandeer eight lanes at Pickwick each Friday. Club members--wives, sisters and daughters of men in the Burbank Elks Lodge--have been bowling as a league since 1958, although only one original member--Dot--still laces up each week.

About half the women are in their 80s, the other half in their 70s. And then there’s Mary Zarycka, who at 60-something (she won’t be specific) is “just a baby” to the rest.

Julia Dickason remembers a time when there were so many women in the league that four-member teams “would take up half of Pickwick,” a 24-lane house. Now there are eight teams with three bowlers each.

I am one of them.

Several years ago, I began bowling every Friday at Pickwick. One day I looked up and saw Julia Dickason staring me down.

“If you’re going to be here anyway, why don’t you come bowl with us?” she said, in a tone that permitted no argument.

“I don’t think there ever was a time when you had to have experience to join this league,” Julia says. “You just start learning to bowl if you’ve never bowled before.”

Camaraderie More Than Competition

The ladies make a complimentary cup of coffee their first order of business. As they assemble, they swap news on who’ll be showing up to bowl and who’ll be sidelined by aches and pains. They turn to me, the only baby boomer in the bunch, to program the computerized scoring to make allowance for the absentees.

After a few minutes of warmup, the voice of Pickwick’s Dick Williams booms over the loudspeakers. “Good morning, ladies of the Emblem Club,” he says. “When you see your arrows, you may start bowling.”

While Dot, 81, is the only original member still at it, Julia, 80, can still claim to be a veteran--she joined the league during the Kennedy administration. Mary Myers--one of three Marys in the league, so we always use both names--signed up not long after.

Lou McCasey, 84, joined the league 20 years ago after retiring from her job as a cafeteria worker for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Lou has a unique bowling posture, bent at the waist with the ball held inches off the floor, her derriere pointing toward the sky.

“I used to stand up, until one day this man said to me, ‘You’re standing too straight.’ So little by little, I got down.”

Lou says men used to line up behind her while she bowled, to admire the view.

“Oh, not anymore,” she sighs, “but they used to watch me and they’d just shake their heads.”

Ivy Miller, 75, is a more traditional bowler, except for the gardening apron she wears to protect her clothes.

Ivy is a white-haired optimist, speaking with admirable frankness about her battle with cancer. She credits laetrile treatments and two years of herbal therapy at a clinic in Tijuana with helping her beat the disease, which has been in remission since 1989.

Ivy says the key to bowling is licking your fingers. It adds viscosity when you release the ball, she says, though it never seemed to do me a lot of good.

But she doesn’t mind sharing her secret with an ostensible competitor, because this is a league where averages and handicaps take a back seat to Vegas winnings and vacations as a topic of conversation.

It’s not that they don’t rejoice every strike and lament every missed spare. It’s just that being there, with their friends, sharing each other’s lives, is more important than winning or losing.

“We are mostly a social league,” Mary Myers says, “you know, just for the fun of it.”

Like most of the Emblem Club ladies, Mary Myers, an Iowa native, moved to the Valley during the postwar housing boom. She has lived in the same Burbank home for 53 years.

She and her husband, Kenneth, who died in 1989, ran a machine shop in Burbank, making her one of a handful of Emblem Club ladies who had employment outside the home.

While recovering from her second knee-replacement surgery, Mary Myers, who is league secretary, came down every Friday nonetheless, dressed in what could be the league uniform: baggy sweats or T-shirts appliqued with frolicking kittens.

She and longtime league mascot Florence Elsenpeter, who died two years ago at 94, would serve as a cheering section from the blue wooden benches behind the ball racks.

She never was a bowler, Mary Myers says, but for 40 years, “Flo came down here every week just to root us on.”

Mary Myers’ booming Midwestern voice often fills the house with teasing commentary.

An impossible 7-10 split elicits a gleefully malicious “Pick up your spares!” while a “sleeper,” one pin hidden from view behind another, garners a raucous “You’ve got a man in your bed!”

After sitting out a year, Mary Myers picked up her ball again and this year opened the season with a 137 average. Not bad in a league where many are happy just to break 100.

It wasn’t always that way. Julia and Mary Myers recently reminisced about tournaments for which the league would travel all over the western United States.

“I’ll never forget the $250 I won in Las Vegas,” recalls Mary Myers, magically producing pictures of herself and her teammates in 1967, each holding a first-place trophy a foot-and-a-half tall.

“See, I used to be a good bowler,” she chuckles.

A Knack for Survival

Julia is the only member of the Emblem Club league who still maintains an average close to that of her younger years. The feisty redhead can break 200 without breaking a sweat, and her average is consistently in the 150s and 160s.

Last season, Julia tripped in her daughter’s driveway, bruising her face and seriously wrenching her left shoulder. Lucky for her she bowls with her right hand.

She listened to her doctor at first and benched herself for one week. But she was back the next, bowling one-handed, her injured arm immobile in its sling.

Julia recounted the circuitous route over four decades that brought the league to Pickwick.

“We started up at Magnolia Bowl, then we moved to Mar-Lin-Do, up on San Fernando Road. When that closed, we went over to Grand Central” in Glendale.

In the mid-1980s, the Grand Central alley closed and the league installed itself at Pickwick, a Valley landmark now in its 50th year of operation.

The league’s knack for survival mirrors that of the ladies themselves. They all have stories of hardship endured with dignity and grace.

And through their liveliness of spirit and resistance to the physical limitations that aging can impose, these women prove it’s possible to grow older without growing old.