The GEICO PBA Summer Swing, presented by Lucas Oil, will continue for five consecutive Tuesdays — all at 7 p.m. Eastern — including the Lucas Oil Wolf Open on June 18, the Lucas Oil Bear Open on June 25, the Lucas Oil Milwaukee Open on July 2, and the GEICO Summer King of the Swing presented by Lucas Oil special event on July 9.

To find the channel and service in your area that carries CBS Sports Network, visit: http://www.cbssportsnetwork.com/channel-finder.

The Summer Swing featured the introduction of three distinctively different lane conditioning patterns and competition at three different Milwaukee area bowling centers.

The Badger Open, conducted at AMF Waukesha, featured a 52-foot oiling pattern, the longest application of oil in PBA Tour history.

The Wolf Open at AMF West featured a 32-foot oiling pattern, the shortest of the PBA’s eight “animal patterns.”

The Bear Open at AMF Bowlero used a 40-foot flat condition, very similar to the challenging oil pattern used in the U.S. Open. The Milwaukee Open used a combination of all three patterns.

All tournaments will be covered by the veteran PBA team of play-by-play man Dave Ryan and color analyst/PBA Hall of Famer Randy Pedersen. NFL all-star wide receiver and PBA League team owner Terrell Owens will make a visit to the broadcast booth during one of the telecasts.

The Badger Open finals will feature three players who have never won a PBA Tour title (top qualifier and 2011-12 PBA Rookie of the Year Josh Blanchard, second-year player Jake Peters, and Saginaw Valley State collegiate star Aaron Lorincz, the 2013 USBC Intercollegiate Singles Champion), along with three-time tour titlist Michael Haugen Jr. and Kurt Pilon, who won his only tour title in the 2001 Peoria Open — the first tournament conducted under the PBA’s then-new ownership group.

The Wolf Open finals will feature two players seeking their first tour titles (nine-year journeyman and top qualifier Chris Loschetter, and 20-year-old rookie E.J. Tackett), two PBA Hall of Famers who are tied for third place on the list of all-time tour title winners with 37 each (Norm Duke and Pete Weber), and one of the tour’s rising stars, former Saginaw Valley State collegiate star and four-time tour champion Bill O’Neill.

The Bear Open finalists include PBA Player of the Year contender Jason Belmonte, 14-time tour winner Chris Barnes, two non-titlists (Chris Loschetter and Dan MacLelland, who hopes to become the first Canadian ever to win a tour title), and Tom Hess, who won his only tour title in the 2011 USBC Masters.

The Milwaukee Open stepladder field will include Barnes, the top qualifier, Hall of Famers Weber and Duke, four-time titlist Mike Fagan and Jason Sterner, who won his first PBA Tour title by rolling a 299 game in the title match of the 2013 Don Carter Classic.

The field for the Summer King of the Swing telecast will be decided at the conclusion of the first four events. The King of the Swing field will include the four event winners (runner-up if any player wins more than one event), plus a “wild card” player (the Summer Swing points leader). The winner of the special event will collect a $10,000 prize, but it is not a PBA Tour title event.

Here is the correct URL: www.kegel.net/phantom/2013/06-05-13-sam-baca.mp3

NORM DUKE WON three titles during the 2011-12 PBA season. And the earth is round and water’s wet. Coal is black. Kansas is flat. And dog bites man.

It’s not exactly stop-the-presses stuff. Norm Duke is to professional bowling what the old Yankees used to be to baseball, Notre Dame used to be to football, Ali to boxing. Norm Duke with a bowling ball is Hank Aaron with a bat, Magic Johnson with a basketball, Sinatra with a song.

In the cases of a couple of those titles, he made it look hard. But long-time Duke watchers weren’t fooled. It was vintage Duke. He just toyed with the field. Waited for the opening, then landed the right, played the ace, went to the whip.

Duke treats bowling lanes the way you might treat a beautiful girl. He romances them, cajoles them, coaxes them. He flatters them. Even talks to them. It was the way Shoemaker rode racehorses, Jack Nicklaus played golf or a riverboat gambler plays cards.

Duke knows that professional bowling tournaments — well, most of them, anyway — involve a lot of games. This would seem to be an obvious piece of information to most people, but it’s surprising how many bowlers seem to think they have to win a tournament in the first game.

Duke doesn’t really care who leads the tournament after six or eight or 10 games. He spends that time trying to establish a rapport between the lanes and his bowling balls — making them his sweetheart, getting them to eat out of his hand, not biting them.

With bowling balls, you have to find out what they can do and will do and cannot do. Lanes are the same way. They change from day to evening and from frame to frame. It is during the early rounds of a tournament that Duke observes and adjusts and puts the information in the memory bank for future use.

Duke doesn’t walk around a bowling center; he swaggers around it. He always looks like a guy trying to scare up a game or press a bet. You get the feeling that he could beat you left-handed if the price were right.

Much of that swagger comes from the fact that Duke learned the game by bowling pot games and money matches with his own dollars on the line. He has been known to empty the pockets of local stars from coast to coast prior to and during his many years on the PBA Tour. As his fellow competitors like to say, “You’d better have car fare in your shoes if you take on Duke at his own game.”

In this era of power bowlers with powerful bowling balls on highly reactive lanes, Duke is a throwback to another era. He is constantly adjusting his speed and his hand position to fit the environment that he’s facing. He is one of the few bowlers of the modern era who would not have to change his game considerably in order to be successful in the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s.

You could compare him to Don Carter or Nelson Burton Jr. or Dick Ritger, all of whom also were masters of subtle hand releases and speed adjustments. The word “finesse” comes to mind. In fact, if you were to look up “finesse” in your bowling dictionary, you’d find Norm Duke’s picture there.

Also like those aforementioned names, Duke seems to bring his game to its highest level in the most important tournaments. This is evidenced by his seven major titles — including the Grand Slam, something that has been accomplished by only one other bowler: Mike Aulby.

I would not like to see Mario Andretti in my rearview mirror on a racetrack. I would not like to go down and check on a noise in the cellar of a castle in Transylvania. I would not like to find a rattlesnake under my bed.

And I would not like to go into the final round of the U.S. Open with a mere 50-pin lead over Norm Duke. The bleached bones of guys who have tried it line every cattle trail in Oklahoma.

Norm Duke is 48 years old. That’s not old enough. That has nothing to do with that little-hooking ball that has been emptying wallets and piling up trophies and winning 37 tour titles since 1983.

Where he comes from, they give two-handers 10 pins a game and their choice of which lane to finish on.

Part 8 in a 12 Part Series

IT BOTHERED ME FOR YEARS that there was so little contact among the writers who covered bowling’s burgeoning schedule of overseas tournaments. The Asian writers would congregate in one corner of the pressroom, the Europeans in another, the Americans in still another.

That’s the main reason Keith Hale and I decided to launch something called the World Bowling Writers. In addition to fostering a friendlier forum, we also hoped to create a better working environment for journalists covering major events: ample communications gear, quick and accurate score reporting and, most importantly, a few more upscale bottles in the beer cooler.

Our annual WBW meetings were small but lively. Like most bowling organizations, we handed out a lot of awards. In later years, Hale issued an e-mail newsletter called Worldletter at least once a month, alerting WBWers worldwide to the results of nearly every international event of any consequence, and all members received the Bowlers Journal regularly. But the most rewarding aspect of our little experiment in journalistic togetherness was the cross-border friendships that blossomed.

It may have been exciting, but the addition of all these time-consuming global jaunts to my already over-burdened travel schedule raised havoc at home. Barbara and I were divorced in 1968. The day I left my three beautiful daughters and the nice house in Wilmette was the saddest of my life.

It was also around this time that our star bookkeeper/circulation director — my mother — decided that it was time to hang it up. Frieda had run the office for a decade but, at 70, was tired of driving her Oldsmobile convertible from the house on Leavitt Street to our shabby little downtown office.

For a management-challenged person like myself, this was a time of deep crisis. Frieda’s firm hand on the financial tiller of the company was one reason I was able to spend so much time on the road, chasing stories and advertising.

After all, publishing is a very complicated business. Creating the right editorial product is a constant challenge. You have to orchestrate a group of unruly editors, correspondents and graphics folks so that they produce fresh and constantly entertaining content — on deadline. Most magazines require that at least 50 percent of their pages be filled with advertising; in times of industry downturns, this can be daunting.

Circulation is an ongoing headache. Getting and keeping readers is a never-ending struggle. Production (dealing with the printer and other vendors), delivery (the Post Office, newsstand distributors, etc.) and other publishing issues can give you an ongoing migraine.

Obviously, if you don’t have a solid financial structure, all of the other elements tend to fall apart. I’ve often said that I should have tried for a degree in management instead of journalism at Notre Dame.

Mom went off to retirement and I suffered through a string of inept and dishonest office managers and bookkeepers. One guy nicked me for a quarter of a million dollars. I was so focused on the editorial side of the business (because it was the most fun, I suppose) that I neglected almost everything else.

It was also around this time that Willie Mosconi — probably the best pool player that ever lived — sued me, the company and one of our correspondents for more than $3 million. He claimed that a story written by an award-winning writer, Tom Fox, had libeled him. The case bounced around various courts for months and was finally thrown out.

It took about 10 years, but Willie and I finally became friends again. We even joked about our outrageous attorney fees.

Miraculously, the business survived the onslaughts of the late 1960s. After my divorce, I moved downtown to a new residential high rise about four blocks from our old office at 506 S. Wabash Avenue, all the better to spend most of my waking hours at my desk.

The company had been located in the old Congress Bank Building on the corner of Wabash Avenue and Congress Boulevard in downtown Chicago for many decades. It may not have been fashionable, but it was convenient.

Directly across the street was Johnnie’s Steak House, the de facto epicenter of the bowling industry. Brunswick headquarters was two block away, the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America was a 10-minute walk, and Sam Weinstein’s Universal Bowling Supply was next door.

Out-of-town visitors from New York (AMF) and Milwaukee (ABC/WIBC) made Johnnie’s their automatic first stop when they came to town. You could walk in the door almost any day at noon, order the 60-cent luncheon special, and chat with half of the movers and shakers in the tenpin industry. At night, the place buzzed with salesmen making deals with soon-to-be bowling center owners.

Brunswick finally moved into a swanky high rise building in the center of The Loop, the BPAA segued to even fancier quarters in suburban Hoffman Estates, Universal was forced to relocate a block away, and the building that housed Johnnie’s was demolished because of an urban renewal project. With our lease running out, I decided to move our office to a new building in Chicago’s tony Lincoln Park district.

But we missed the action and convenience of Chicago’s vibrant downtown. After a few years, we were on the move again, this time to the 100-story John Hancock Center. We spent many years in the Hancock, moving three times within the building as the business grew.

I bought a condo in the same building (the bottom half of the Hancock is mostly commercial space, the top half is residences) and commuted to work for many years by elevator.

(Part 7 in a 12-Part Series)

AS THE INDUSTRY BOOMED in the late 1950s and early ’60s — largely because of widespread sales of automatic pinsetting machines and changing public perceptions about bowling — Bowlers Journal really flourished.

AMF, which leased machines to proprietors, touted its business model in many two-page spreads. Brunswick sold its machines outright, likewise ballyhooing this “advantage” in elaborate advertising campaigns. The magazine’s page count grew steadily as bowling companies became more prosperous. New suppliers emerged, old ones expanded and non-bowling companies tried to catch a piece of the action.

The total of U.S. bowling lanes exploded from 65,000 in 1957 to nearly 160,000 in 1962. Bowling was the hottest industry in America. I wrote a piece for the Associated Press national wire which pointed out that AMF and Brunswick had the greatest increments of all stocks on the New York Exchange. Bowling TV shows enjoyed huge audiences.

I admit that it was pretty easy to be a publishing genius in this environment. As advertising revenues poured in, the size of the magazine increased and we ran a lot more photos and artwork. I studied the major magazines of that era — particularly Life and Look— and tried to emulate their look and feel.

Akron attorney Eddie Elias founded the Professional Bowlers Assn. in 1958, thereby providing lots of fresh fodder for our expanding editorial space. Where we previously depended on the ABC and a handful of other once-a-year tournaments to fill our pages, we soon had dozens of new competitions and an entirely new cast of celebrities to write about.

A group of eccentric (or so it seemed to me) millionaires lent more fuel to our editorial fire by launching a so-called National Bowling League. They built fancy stadiums (or converted existing theaters and other commercial buildings) across the nation and attempted to compete with the PBA for the best talent. The NBL lasted just one season and then died, largely because the owners weren’t able to sign a major TV network contract.

After Ernie Ahlborn died of cancer, I began scouting for a new editor to handle our growing workload. Dick Denny, a member of the Chicago’s City News Bureau, had been freelancing for us for years, and I admired his work. I offered him the job and he astonished me by accepting.

With Denny carrying much of the Bowlers Journal editorial load, I felt emboldened to expand our publishing horizons. It had always puzzled me that the bowling industry had no classified directory of products and services. Just about every business in America had its own little “Yellow Pages” directory, but not bowling. A directory would have seemed a perfect fit for the BPAA’s publications office, but its leadership was preoccupied with palace intrigues and battles with the American Bowling Congress.

Our once-a-year Bowling and Billiards Buyers Guide, which was mailed free to every U.S. proprietor, was an instant hit. The first issue weighed a pound and contained more advertising than any periodical in the history of the sport up to that point. It my not have been very glamorous, but the Buyers Guide was one of bowling’s most successful periodicals for many years.

Then Came the Bust

Bowling’s meteoric growth suddenly hit a brick wall in 1963. Too many centers had been erected, too many lanes and machines installed. The industry was clearly overbuilt. The public fell out of love with bowling and linage dropped drastically. Bowling centers began closing their doors. AMF and Brunswick stock went into a swoon. Several notable industry characters committed suicide.

All of this had a huge impact on Bowlers Journal, of course. Our ad revenue dropped like a stone. We reached a sad nadir with an issue that contained a measly 14 pages of advertising. Our “gala” 50th Anniversary Issue in 1963 contained merely 86 pages and not much advertising.

Denny returned to his newspaper roots in Indiana and our tournament manager resigned. I was basically running a one-man operation. Happily, the Bowlers Journal Championships and the BJ Press Service soldiered on, providing just enough revenue to keep our little ship afloat. I was discouraged, of course, but the thought that old Dave Luby’s enterprise might finally collapse never entered my mind. I guess I was too busy grinding out copy and trying to sell ads to the few suppliers that remained.

A few positive developments helped sustain us during the depths of this nadir. Thanks largely to the lobbying efforts of Remo Picchietti of DBA Products Co., I was elected president of the Billiard and Bowling Institute of America. The prestige of the office apparently convinced some other people that Dave’s grandson was finally ready for prime time. I was soon elected president of the Bowling Writers Association of America and named to the boards of several other bowling organizations.

All through the drought of the late 1960s, I remained confident about the incredible resilience of the industry. Whenever a segment of the industry sagged, something new always seemed to come along to prop things up again.

In the mid-’60s, the fresh impetus came from overseas. Suddenly, international tenpin bowling was hot. Olympic medalist Bruno Soderstrom had introduced tenpin bowling to his native Sweden around 1913 and encouraged the development of centers in the neighboring Scandinavian countries. But tenpins didn’t penetrate the rest of Europe until the early ’60s, when an incredible boom spread over Great Britain and then spread across the continent.

Europe’s sudden fervor for bowling, however, paled in comparison to the sport’s volcanic rise in Japan. From practically zero, the Japanese bowling industry soared to a peak of 3,770 centers with 123,000 lanes. After a long malaise in the domestic market, Brunswick and AMF factories began humming again. And advertising surged in the pages of Bowlers Journal. The explosion of the overseas market also gave us more to write about.

After ignoring the international market for years, the American Bowling Congress and Women’s International Bowling Congress finally joined the Federation Internationale des Quilleurs and sent a U.S. team to the 1963 World Championships in Mexico. I covered the event for the Associated Press, and thus launched a long string of international adventures.

During a break in the action at Cuernavaca, I encountered a tall Englishman who was having problems exchanging his British pounds for Mexican pesos in the local banks. His name was Keith Hale, and he was in Mexico on assignment for a new British bowling magazine. I asked one of my Mexican friends to help Keith convert his pounds to pesos. We became fast friends, and he has been writing for our magazine for nearly half a century.

Bill McDonald, who was still AMF’s spinmeister, called me a couple of years later and made a proposition: If I could guarantee coverage on the Associated Press wire, he would pay all of my expenses to cover a new international tournament in Ireland. I called AP Sports Editor Ted Smits in New York and convinced him that this new International Masters Championship (it’s now dubbed the QubicaAMF Bowling World Cup) was an event of epic importance.

My journey to Ireland was, in many ways, a turning point for our magazine and myself. After talking to bowlers, journalists and promoters from two dozen countries, it dawned on me that international bowling was not just a fad. Tenpin bowling had universal appeal among people of just about every heritage and culture. A lot of smart businessmen in countries around the world had obviously recognized the commercial opportunities of this imported sport from America.

It became clear to me that bowling would eventually become a huge global industry, and I wanted Bowlers Journal to become an integral part of it. Until my retirement a few years ago, I covered nearly every edition of the World Cup. I’ve visited more than 80 countries while chasing down stories for our magazine and the AP. International events became a key source of circulation, as we’d often set up a subscription sales booth at major events.

(Part 6 in a 12-Part Series)

MORT LUBY SR. was a rabid Notre Dame football fan, a devout member of the famed Subway Alumni. When the subject of my own education came up at the dinner table, I’d slyly suggest colleges, which I imagined to be teeming with gorgeous co-eds. For me, the exclusively male campus of Notre Dame in a hick town in Indiana had limited appeal.

But my father made it clear that if I wished to earn a college diploma at his expense, Notre Dame was my only option. So off I went to South Bend in the fall of 1949. After barely surviving the first two years, I found my true niche when journalism classes began in my junior year. Before long, I was writing a satirical column (called “The Week”) in Notre Dame’s only student periodical, the weekly Scholastic magazine.

Meanwhile, my father’s health began to fail. Although he had suffered a minor stroke, he still came to the office, wrote his column, and made the obligatory calls on advertisers. Despite warnings from his doctors, however, he continued to drink and smoke. His only concession was to switch from Camels to English Ovals, which he considered a less lethal smoke.

The record-shattering 1953 American Bowling Congress Tournament (8,180 teams) at the Chicago Coliseum might have been a financial bonanza for the Bowlers Journal Press Service, but my father just wasn’t up to nearly 100 straight days of back-breaking toil. So he handed over all of his wire service accounts (plus more than 100 contracts with individual newspapers) to Jim Fitzgerald, a young reporter for the Chicago Tribune. My father’s idea was that Fitzgerald would return the accounts when I finally segued into the business after graduation from Notre Dame.

Alas, my full-time debut into Bowlers Journal affairs was detoured by a letter from my local draft board. My father had discouraged me from attending Officers Training School at Notre Dame, hinting that he had an excellent connection at the Selective Service (draft) office. Also, he theorized that the Army would be disinclined to draft me because of his illness.

Wrong. I was drafted into the Army in the fall of 1953 and served 18 months in various outposts in Missouri and Kansas. Oddly, I learned more about journalism during my stint in the Army than I had at Notre Dame. I talked myself into a job as executive editor of the weekly camp newspaper at Fort Riley, Kan. As such, I single-handedly edited an 8-page tabloid that was printed by the daily newspaper, the Mercury, in nearby Manhattan. The experience of dealing first-hand with typesetters and layout technicians would pay off in later years.

The Gavel Passes Again

My father hired a quiet, taciturn editor named Ernest Ahlborn while I was away in the service. Upon my return to the little office on Wabash Avenue, Ernie and I were anointed “co-editors.”

Although advertising revenues had picked up because of the introduction of the AMF pinspotter, there was trouble afoot at Bowlers Journal. The Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America had decided to publish its own magazine, called Bowling Proprietor. And the American Bowling Congress periodical, Bowling magazine, was gaining strength under ABC’s new public relations director, Bruce Pluckhahn.

Bowlers Journal had served as the “official magazine” for both BPAA and ABC in the early years. As the chase for advertising dollars heated up, our relations with both outfits soured.

As if he wasn’t burdened with enough business problems, my father’s sister sued him for a share of the company. Auntie Grace’s suit argued that my father had simply segued into to ownership of the company back in the roaring twenties without a single scrap of legal document. As another legitimate offspring of old Dave Luby, she felt entitled to a piece of the action.

The case was in court for weeks, and you could practically see my father weakening by the day. His breathing grew more labored and he suffered yet another minor stroke. The trail ended with a small financial settlement, and Auntie Grace was never heard from again.

Meanwhile, I had settled into the business and entered into matrimony. The bride was Barbara Short, a beautiful girl from the north side of Chicago. We had met on the campus of Notre Dame several years earlier on a blind date arranged by the daughter of one of my professors.

I had planned to cover the 1956 ABC Tournament in Rochester, N.Y., for the wire services and the usual list of Bowlers Journal Press Service clients. Alas, Jim Fitzgerald, who’d been handed our portfolio three years earlier, refused to surrender it.

Denied the Associated Press and United Press accounts, I shopped around for another major client. I finally had to settle for International News Service, which was running a weak third among national news wholesalers. I also managed to sign up 40 daily newspapers, largely because of my father’s clout with sports editors around the country.

My new bride and I headed off to Rochester in the dead of winter and spent nearly three freezing months in the Rochester War Memorial. Between dispatches to my newspaper accounts, I batted out stories for Bowlers Journal and mailed them back to my “co-editor” in Chicago. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald glowered at me from across the pressroom; he was highly annoyed that I had managed to corral some of my father’s old newspaper accounts.

Mort Sr. came to visit us in Rochester on his way to Buffalo, N.Y., to pick up the Billiard and Bowling Institute of America Industry Service Award, the last of many kudos recognizing his huge contributions to the sport. It was obvious that he was failing fast.

A few months after the ABC, I was back in the Chicago office when I got a call from my mother. My father had died in his sleep in a berth on a Pullman car on his way back from a party for ABC President Clarence Leonard in Houston. He was only 60.

The funeral was huge. Hundreds of his business and journalism pals came from all over the country. I’m sure a lot of them glanced over the casket at this skinny, pale lad of 25 and wondered if I was going to be able to fill my old man’s shoes.

Thankfully, I had plenty of help. One of my father’s hard-drinking chums, Byron Schoeman, an editor for the Daily Racing Form, came to our office during his lunch break every afternoon and showed me the niceties of layout and editing. Ernie Ahlborn, who’d been on staff for three years, handled most of the advertising. My mother, who in the past had been involved only in the periphery of the business, took charge of bookkeeping and circulation duties.

With all this backing, I was able to go off to the ABC Tournament every February and continue my BJ Press Service chores. Fitzgerald gave up his ABC reporting and went to work full-time with the Chicago Tribune, enabling me to build up our wire service and daily newspaper network.

In addition to the ABC, we covered many other events, including the BPAA All-Star and the World’s Invitational. The volume at these events was so enormous that I would hire three or four additional writers to help handle the load.

In writing these early segments in the history of the company, I worry sometimes that I put too much stress on our Press Service. In addition to providing a reliable stream of income, however, the Press Service bolstered the company in many ways. Back in the days when ABC was bowling’s biggest and best showcase, it put us in the heart of the action. It also enabled us to wield considerable clout with the all-important news services.

I knew most of the most important editors at Associated Press and United Press headquarters. When I’d call and suggest a bowling story, they’d listen. At least, most of the time.

Ted Smits, the legendary general sports editor of the Associated Press, once turned down my suggestion that I cover an important international event in Sweden. ABC Public Relations Director Bruce Pluckhahn and I went to New York, and invited Smits to lunch at Toots Shor’s After numerous dry martinis, Ted finally agreed.

But Bowlers Journal magazine, now as well as in the past, has always been the heart and soul of this company. The BJ Press Service helped sustain our flagship periodical for many years but, in the end, it proved vulnerable to the changing culture of the media and the public at large. We covered the ABC for the wire services for the last time in 1972. The magazine, however, has soldiered on through thick and thin.

BY MORT LUBY JR.

Writing is hard work. After more than a half century of laboring on keyboards of various ilk (Smith Corona, Remington, Compugraphic, IBM, Apple, etc.), I can assure you that this is not an easy way to make a living.

But writing history is even harder. As an avid reader of history books and historical novels, I’ve always sensed that it must be brutally difficult to assemble all the research and construct a plausible historical narrative that will entertain (and perhaps educate) the reader. Now I know; it’s more difficult than I ever dreamed.

My task was complicated by the fact that I haven’t done much writing since I retired more than a decade ago. I still write an occasional piece for this magazine and love doing it. But the tale-spinning knack that you acquire by writing many thousands of words a year diminishes quickly when you become an occasional writer.

I made several false starts on chronicling the history of our company. At first, I tried to avoid repeated mentions of my own family, theorizing that I might be able to tell you most of the story without describing the actors. That didn’t work at all. I finally decided that I’d better work in all of the essential characters that played pivotal roles in the development of the company, even if they happened to be named Luby.

Out of fear that I might bore you, Dear Reader, I tried to make this history as brief as possible, consistent with the object of putting down all the essentials. This meant giving a lot of important people and events very short shrift. This was painful for a congenital storyteller, like myself. Some episodes which deserved a chapter were relegated to a brief sentence. For this, I apologize.

Anyway, this little junket down memory lane, which will unfold in 12 parts, has been a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it.

The History of Bowlers Journal International

“Dave Luby: A Bowler Through and Through — November 2012

“How It All Began: November 8, 1913 — December 2012

Mort Sr., Frieda and Sam Weinstein — January 2013

The Depression and Pet Projects — February 2013

The Birth of the Bowlers Journal Tournament — March 2013

An Education in The Trenches — April 2013

The Birth of the Bowlers Journal Tournament — May 2013

A Forum for Bowling Writers — June 2013

Manufacturer’s Intent: “The versatile Chalk offers a multitude of motion shapes and expands Hammer’s line in support of TNBA, the second largest bowling association in the United States,” says Hammer’s Jeff Ussery. “The Chalk combines the Assault core with the GTR III coverstock for performance at its best.”

Core Design: The Assault core has a low 2.48 RG. The differential measures a whopping .056, which gave us nearly 6.5 inches of average track flare during testing. The symmetric design and core numbers will provide fast revs with a strong, controllable breakpoint shape.

Coverstock: Supplying the traction for the Chalk is the popular GTR III reactive cover, also used on the Taboo (January 2011). Colors are a blend of red, blue and purple. The factory surface is sanded with 500, 1000 and 2000 grits and then polished. The response time off friction is quick and strong. Oil traction is somewhat limited. The Ra measures 1.5. The effective surface grit is 5400.

Test Results: The Chalk will be one of those all-purpose polished reactive balls we all need for medium oil. The low-RG core helped the Chalk rev easily and added to down-lane control. The .056 differential allows the player to choose the amount of flare. The Chalk has a type of benchmark roll around which one could build an arsenal. The ball ate up fresh and broken-down medium Sport and house oil patterns. The breakpoint was a strong arc shape, yet supplied very good pin carry left of the 4th arrow. Our lower pin positions worked well when needing a less angular, smoother shape leaving the pattern.

When to Use: On fresh medium oil volumes, the Chalk can be played slightly inside the oil line and banked toward the friction areas. We never saw a skid/flip shape, but I’m sure with the help of Ebonite’s Blueprint software, we could find one. Hammer offers the complete array of hook and motion shapes needed to build an effective arsenal of equipment.

Manufacturer’s Intent: “The Yeti is the first of the new generation of extremely versatile symmetrical balls in the Reliable line from Radical Bowling Technologies,” says Mo Pinel. “By using the offset patent and the new Radical ‘finger scoop’ (patent pending) at the top of the core, Radical has created the most drilling-versatile ball ever.”

Core Design: The Yeti boasts an all-new symmetric core that may revolutionize future core designs. The RG is low at 2.48 and the differential strong at .054. This “finger scoop” shape can alter differentials between .044 and .077. We saw upwards of 7 inches of total track flare from our 300 rev-rate tester.

Coverstock: The Yeti’s coverstock is a new pearlized mixture, colored in red and purple. We rate this cover as average in oil, yet quick and strong off friction areas. The factory finish is sanded at 500/1500 and Rough Buff polished, resulting in a 2.5 Ra reading and effective surface grit of 5135.

Test Results: The Yeti’s breakthrough core shape can alter the ball’s motion shape dramatically, dependent on pin location and if a weight hole is added. The Yeti can be either an aggressive skid/flip pearl or an earlier rolling, smooth-arcing pearl; it’s all about proper layout choice. In short, it’s an extremely versatile all-purpose ball for medium to medium-heavy oil volumes. With box polish, our best looks were on medium oil, yet when sanded with 1000 grit, we saw an average of six to eight boards more total hook and a 2-foot-earlier breakpoint on the heavier stuff.

When to Use: With our higher flaring “MOtion Hole” layouts, we could easily play well inside the oil line on our THS test patterns, and “swing it and bring it.” The “MOtion Hole” layout adds length and entry angle on almost any type of oil pattern. When we wanted something to transition earlier, we drilled the Yeti with Mo’s “Double Thumb” layout, which is earlier and stronger downlane, even when the ball is polished. The Yeti also responds well to duller surfaces for speed-dominant types looking for an even earlier read and even more total hook.