Pinsetter

Behind every bowling lane, in a shallow trench called the pit, a boy crouched in the half-dark and waited for the thunder. When the ball struck, ten maple pins exploded toward him at speeds that could break a shin or split a lip. His job was to leap clear, then leap back: clear the fallen pins (the deadwood), roll the ball into the return gutter, and reset the survivors or, between frames, drop a fresh rack of ten into a spotting jig so each pin stood on its painted spot. Then he climbed up on his perch and waited for the next ball. A fast boy could keep two lanes going at once.

The work was piecework, paid by the line (a single game), and the pay was pennies. The boys who did it were usually that, boys, working evenings and weekends after school, and the alleys that hired them were frequently rough, smoky, late-night places. The pinsetter, or pinboy, or pinspotter, was the human bottleneck at the heart of bowling: no matter how popular the game became, a house could only run as many lanes as it had boys willing to sit in the pit.

That bottleneck is what an automatic machine finally broke. Gottfried (Fred) Schmidt, an engineer, built a working mechanical pinsetter in the 1930s; his patent was assigned to and developed by American Machine and Foundry (AMF), which demonstrated prototypes in 1946 and shipped its first commercial Pinspotters in 1952. Brunswick followed in 1956. Within a decade the machine had not only replaced the pinboy but unleashed bowling’s enormous postwar boom, because a house was no longer limited by how many boys it could keep in the pit.

By the late 1950s and into the 1960s the pinboy was a memory in nearly every American tenpin house. The trade survives today only at the margins: a handful of historic alleys and duckpin houses, especially in the Northeast, that still pay a person to sit behind the lanes and set the pins by hand, more as living heritage than as economics.