The same league for 70 years
Retiree Ron Ferguson joined the Dofasco 5-pin League at 17, a year after being hired on
AT ONE TIME the league had a dozen teams, seven bowlers to a squad, and now there are only four, with just three or four men a side.
Ron Ferguson has been there through it all, and he’s still there every Wednesday night at Mountain Lanes on Upper Wentworth, taking aim at a quintet of pins and knocking them down for his team, The Misfits.
Ferguson, an 87-year-old Dofasco retiree, has been bowling in the same league for 70 uninterrupted years.
That league is commonly referred to as the Dofasco 5-pin League but its formal name is the Brickies and Combines 5-Pin Bowling League. It began in 1942, just five years before Ferguson, then a 17-year-old Dofasco mail boy, signed up. In 1941 bricklayers at Dofasco had formed a four-team league called “The Brickies” and the “Brickies and Combines” came into being the following year when an Armour Plate team and two Main Office teams, all from Dofasco, combined with three surviving Brickies teams.
Ferguson joined the league in 1947, a year after being hired on.
“I was a pin boy for two or three years at Kenilworth Bowling Alley, and I really liked the game,” he explained. “We were making five cents a game. But when we weren’t setting pins, we were bowling and I came to love it.
“Dofasco had their own bowling alley, down below the Dofasco Club, at the time.”
Indeed, when heavy industry was at its peak
in this town, so was five-pin bowling.
By 1949, the Brickies and Combines grew to 12 teams with A and B divisions. At the time, at Dofasco alone there were 11 five-pin bowling leagues, comprising 78 teams and 590 bowlers.
“Everybody in Hamilton likes it,” Ferguson says. “There were so many factories, which had so many teams back then. There were lots of alleys in the city. My favourite was the one on Kenilworth, and it’s gone.”
So have a number of bowling houses where his league has played. They’re now at Mountain Lanes which, fittingly, opened its doors in 1947, the same year that Ferguson joined the Brickies and Combines.
“I’ve known Fergie since I came into the league in 1969 or ’70,” says Chris Vargo, the league president for more than 20 years. “He’s a great guy, he’s the Energizer Bunny. He doesn’t look his age at all.
“He’s always been dependable, being here, even with aches and pains and such. It’s hard to keep it going, there are only 16 or 17 guys now. He’s been one of the mainstays, as was my brother-in-law Gerry Dunn, who just passed away last year. They were all very competitive and they had high averages, in the 260s and 270s, but things tail off with time.
“It’s gone from a competitive league to more of a fun league. We’re just happy to see their faces as they come up the stairs.”
Ferguson also bowls Mondays with his wife Faye in a seniors league at Sherwood, curls at Hamilton Victoria and plays golf twice a week. Recently he shot an 88, one stroke over his age, at MontHill outside Caledonia. But it’s bowling he likes best, and he has no plans to leave the league he’s played in for seven full decades.
“I don’t know what it is about bowling,” says Ferguson, who has tried 10-pin bowling but preferred the five-pin game. “I got pretty good at it, I guess. I always had a 200 average or more, but not now. I haven’t had a good score lately. It’s getting a little harder to bend.
“I’ve tried to change my style but I always go back to throwing my little hook and curve.”
In his time, Ferguson has seen the removal of the “counter” pin, the far left pin which had to be knocked down in order for any other pin fall to count. But he says that’s not the biggest change in the game. “It’s the strings on the pins,” he says, referring to the cords which automatically reset or remove fallen pins. “They keep the strings tighter so they don’t get tangled, but the pins don’t fly back like they used to.”
Ferguson has never bowled a perfect game. His highest league score was 388 (450 is the maximum) and he has also recorded a 901 triple, but he knows those days are past. He’s bowling as much now for the camaraderie as for the scores.
“Most of the guys are retirees and have been here 15 to 20 years,” he says of the other league members.
“These guys are a bunch of characters.”