Autumn Mowery probably knows more about aging candlepin bowling equipment than any other 20-year-old on the planet.
Mowery’s interest has developed over the past four years as she has worked at the bowling alley in Ellsworth and learned to maintain the aging equipment. Over the past year, the interest has become out of necessity as much as her love of the distinctive New England game.
That’s because last fall Mowery became the owner of the business, currently known as D’Amanda’s, after buying it from her mother who owned it for about a year. Since then, Mowery also has been the bowling alley’s sole employee and has devoted a lot of time to trying to keep the circa 1940s equipment working.
“There’s a lot of duct tape back there,” Mowery said Friday, referring to the automated equipment behind the alley’s 12 lanes that collect and reset the pins after every frame.
“On a good day I’ll have eight or nine working lanes,” she said. “On a bad day I’ll have four.”
Mowery grew up in Franklin and graduated from Sumner Memorial High School in Sullivan in 2020. Her mother and stepfather bought the Ellsworth business in 2020, after Mowery had worked there for a couple of years. But they moved away after her stepfather, former Sumner Principal Ty Thurlow, was offered a new job in Texas.
Mowery convinced her mother, Amanda Thurlow, to sell her the business. Since then, she has been in charge of everything from shoe rentals to preparing and serving food, cleaning the bathrooms and dealing with leaks in the roof.
“She knew I really loved the place,” she said. “I never leave this building.”
Mowery also has to scrub the bowling lanes clean every night and monitor how well the video and mechanical games are functioning in the adjoining arcade. More than once, she has broken a finger trying to free a 2.5-pound candlepin bowling ball that got stuck in a return chute.
“I wear all the hats,” Mowery said. “It’s been a struggle.”
Mowery said her social life has vanished, but she has the support of her mother, who has kept the bowling alley’s liquor license in her name, and of her fiance, 22 year-old Ryan Lounder, who owns Comics Plus, a comics and collectibles store in the same complex on Eastward Lane.
The young couple live in an apartment above the bowling alley, and Lounder also takes care of the building. He plans to re-roof the entire structure next summer, Mowery said. He is also taking over operations of the bowling alley’s lounge so that Mowery can focus solely on the bowling side of the business.
But she’s also taking classes through Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor, she said. She takes business and psychology classes online at night, after closing and cleaning up the bowling alley. She also has gigs as an instructor for incoming students at the college and for women who are nearing their release dates from the Hancock County Jail.
“I definitely keep a busy schedule for sure,” she said.
Outside her educational commitments, the bowling alley dominates her waking hours. Keeping the lanes functional is by far the most involved part of running the business, which is one of a dwindling number of candlepin bowling alleys in Maine.
Although it was first opened in 1974 as Eastward Bowling Lanes, the business had used equipment from the outset. The original owners, Del and Judy Gaspar, bought pin-setting equipment that had been in a Massachusetts bowling alley since the 1940s, and the equipment’s manufacturer is no longer in business, Mowery said.
As a result, Mowery does her best to make repairs as they happen, sometimes on the fly, and requires bowlers to make reservations so she knows how many are coming and when the lanes have to be ready.
She has a stack of burned-out motors on a shelf in the workshop behind the lanes, and struggles to make sure the temperature at the back of the building doesn’t get too warm or too cold, which can affect the pin-setting equipment. She said it is hard to find belts that fit well on the old motors, and she frequently has wiring issues.
She has pirated equipment from two of her lanes to make sure that she can keep other lanes operating, and estimated that on a busy day she has to go fiddle with and make patchwork repairs dozens of times.
Despite all this, she remains optimistic and upbeat about keeping the business afloat. She is planning another name change — which she declined to disclose — to get better attention online, and hopes to be able to actually upgrade all the lanes over time.
There is a Canadian candlepin bowling supply company that, for $25,000 per lane, can install new candlepin-setting equipment, new wooden lanes and gutters, and even new automated scoring equipment and displays, she said. If she can earn and save enough money, she should be able to gradually upgrade the alley.
“This was my birthday spot when I was younger,” Mowery said, emphasizing that she wants a place where children and families can come to have fun. It is the only bowling alley in all of Hancock and Washington counties, and Ellsworth doesn’t have many other options for family entertainment.
“Wanting the place to succeed and giving families a place to go is why I keep doing it,” she said. “I do think this can last another 30 years.”
