Rachel McPhee

Rachel McPhee remembers when Waldoboro’s bowling lanes were run by Nick DePatsy.  Arcade games stood in front and behind them, eight narrow, wooden lanes for candlepin bowling.  On the other side of the wall were pool tables and a bar and other entertainment.  Today it’s Sammi’s ALLPLaY Family Entertainment Center named after its owner, Sammi Spear.  The bar is gone, but the original wooden lanes still shine.  And on Thursday nights, six league teams play rounds against each other. Unlike classic 10-pin bowling, candlepin bowling has ten thin pins that don’t topple easily with smaller balls that weigh a little over two pounds.  Candlepins were a spinoff of classic bowling that started in the late 1880s and spread throughout New England and Canada’s Maritimes.  The cylindrical pins are arranged the same way but the knocking them down is more challenging.  But for Rachel, who was born and raised in Waldoboro, candlepins are all she’s known and wants to bowl.  Rachel bowls for fun.  Most of her week is occupied with working hectic shifts at the McDonald’s in Damariscotta where she is on the grill crew.  As such, she cooks, makes sandwiches and even washes dishes.  She saves her days off for her four cats and quiet and rest.  But Thursday nights and sometimes Wednesdays are the exception -- when she gets out of the house, hangs out with other bowlers, and shares some laughs. 

Back when the bowling lanes were DePatsy’s and I was working at Moody’s, Captain Moody asked me if I wanted to cheerlead.  It was things like shouting “Go get ’em,” for the Waldoboro Strikers.  Well, we did that a season and then the team moved to Oakland Park (in Rockport), and we went on Wednesday nights.  But I didn’t want to give up on Waldoboro either, so I thought I’d just go and find somebody to hang out with.

That first night, I come out and sat, got my dinner, and I’m just setting there, and a fellow bowler who doesn’t bowl anymore said, “Rachel, get some bowling shoes on, please,” and that would be Ricky Justice.  Don and Kelly Benson had the lanes at the time, so I went to the counter for shoes and told Donny, “I don’t understand it.  I’m not on any team.”  But I put the shoes on anyway, and by the time I figured out what was going on, I was on the team.

I won’t say I was nervous because I was pretty sure that by the time the guys figured out how bad I am, they weren’t going to want me.  But I decided, “Well, I’m on it now.  So bowl it.” Even after seven years, I’m not that good.  But I’m still bowling it.

In the beginning, it felt kinda odd, trying to get the ball to go straight down the middle of the lane.  Got more gutters than what I needed to, but you can’t learn if you don’t give it a whirl.  We had our ups and downs, like all the teams.  But at the end of that season, we took first place.

Each season, the teams change.  We’ve all been on different teams.  Some bowlers don’t come back, which is fine because we always get new ones.  This year, we’re down to four-person teams instead of five-person ones.  I’m on the team called Three Bozos and a Bimbo who might be me because I’m the only female.  I guess that how it works.  But we have two new bowlers.  We’ll just have to see how the season goes.

When I’m bowling I try not to think about the game.  I just get up there and do the best I can.  It’s a league, not a tournament.  I bowl for the fun of it.

Everybody’s got their own way.  You’ve just gotta find out what works for you.  I don’t have a curve or anything like Sierra has.  I’m lucky if I can get the ball to stay on the darned lane ’stead of going down the middle of the alley.  Let alone trying to figure out how they do their curve balls and all that stuff.  I just try to aim for somewhere in the middle of the lane, throw the ball straight as I can get it and hope it don’t jump the gutter and go into the next lane.

But I pulled a Freddy Flintstone once.  My ball popped over the gutter and headed right for my neighbor’s pins.  That was pretty funny.

Good nights are when you hit the pins more often than not and you take what you can for points.  If I’m having a bad night, it don’t matter what I’m doing, what I try.  It’s just one of those nights when I can’t bowl anything, and I want to hang up my shoes.  But I don’t.

Two or three seasons back, Sammi had the orange pins out, and they were discussing it what they were going to do with them.  They decided that the orange pin had to be the head pin, and you had the get the strike on the orange pin.

Well, I’m not that good.  I don’t get that many strikes, so when I bowled, I just stood there after and looking down the lane because there just had to be a pin standing in there somewhere.  But there wasn’t.  That got me.  I took the first strike from underneath them.  And I got a little gift certificate for it.