FARGO — There’s just something about bowling that sends one’s mind backward in time. On the surface, the game hasn’t changed much. Roll a ball and knock down pins. High score wins.
I have an affinity for old bowling alleys. As a youth, I began bowling at Kenby Lanes in my hometown of Princeton, Minnesota, in the early 1980s. The eight-lane center hosted a junior league every Saturday morning. A jukebox blasted the tunes. We tried to demolish the pins.
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A place in downtown Fargo delivered that kind of excitement. Grand Recreation Parlor was the place to be. It was a lunch diner, cigar shop, pool hall, bar and bowling alley.
Located at 620 1st Ave. N., it appears to be the footprint where Würst Beer Hall is today. An upper floor was for bowling. With its beginnings in 1917, just three years before Prohibition, Steve Gorman kept with the times, making the bowling lanes “among the finest in the northwest,” The Fargo Forum wrote in 1939.
Following a $20,000 investment into the 18,000-square-foot joint, Grand Recreation hosted a grand reopening Oct. 14, 1937 . It was big news. Various Fargo-Moorhead businesses flooded the pages of The Fargo Forum with advertisements wishing the parlor well.
The remodel included the installation of the Grand’s own wire, displaying scores and play-by-play of various sporting events.
By 1939, Fred Jewell was in his 11th year at Grand Recreation, overseeing the bowling operation with assistants Einar Slayton, Joe Wallem and 12 pinsetters. The lanes, modern for its time, were made by Brunswick-Balke (today, simply Brunswick) with “the 1939 model Backus automatic pin setters and new 20th Century stream-lined ball returns.”
It also had a 40-foot bar and a shoe shiner on the premises.
Grand Recreation hosted the Fargo Forum Singles Classic, which by its own account was the largest singles bowling event in the northwest outside of the Twin Cities.
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World bowling champions stopped by, including Jimmy Blouin of Illinois and Floretta McCutcheon of Iowa.
Blouin, from the Chicago area, held an exhibition at Grand Recreation in 1923, rolling two six-game series of 1,341 and 1,340. “Anytime I can average 223 for a series of 12 games, there is nothing the matter with the alleys,” Blouin told The Fargo Forum.
An unassuming lady by various accounts, McCutcheon first began bowling in 1923 at age 35 when her husband signed her up for a league (without her knowledge) and her early style was to roll the ball as fast as she could.
In 1931, McCutcheon took on three men and six women in an exhibition sponsored by the Fargo Women’s Bowling Association at Grand Recreation. Carl Herdeg, Harvey Poloof, H.E. Major, Naomi Cady, Mrs. T.H. Lewis, Mrs. George Olmstead, Mrs. John McCormick, Mrs. R.B. Harmon and Lillian VanHorn.
McCutcheon would return in 1933 when the Fargo Forum sponsored a bowling class for women, led by McCutcheon. The free sessions focused on how to address the pins, handle the ball, stride and deliver the ball.
Grand Recreation closed in the late 1960s, joining a host of other F-M alleys that no longer exist. In 1978, a story in The Forum recalled Barry’s Lanes in downtown Fargo and Kossick’s Lanes in downtown Moorhead. Most recently, Town and Country Lanes, which later became All Star Bowl in north Moorhead, closed in 2020 and was later razed.
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