The Big Islip Bowl Bowling Alley Pencil

This work started by chance.  In the fall of 2018 we had a couple of guys come over to do a job terracing our vegetable garden.  It’s not very big, but the ground slopes down at a pretty steep angle, so there are basically three levels.  The terracing is done with round logs of treated wood.  A number of vertical posts, trimmed to a point, are pounded into the ground to support the horizontal logs that retain the earth.  I saw one post, ready to use like this, and told the workers that if they had a piece left over, maybe I‘d make a big pencil from it, just for the hell of it, as a sculpture.  When they were done they left me a good-sized piece, trimmed to a point.  I thought, my sculpture is half done!  What little I knew.  (If you want to see the finished item right away, scroll way down where there are two photos of me and the pencil.)

It wasn’t my idea at first to make an enlarged Islip Bowl pencil - I only had in mind to do a pencil.  I even thought I’d make it with a ferrule, using a piece of flexible aluminum tube I happened to have on hand, and an eraser.  Then I wondered what to write on the side of the pencil.  Eagle?  Armand Hammer?  Armadillo?  Then I thought of “Islip Bowl - Behind the Town Hall”, a phrase burned into my brain from my early years, as the Islip Bowl was my father’s business for most of my life (and his).  It was there on all our promotions, and it was there on the pencils used by some four decades of bowlers, the people who (second only to the drinkers in our bar) put bread on our table, and everything else. 

I had a perfect model - an Islip Bowl pencil that I’d saved since about 1969, as a souvenir.  It had about the same proportions as the log I had to work with.  In case you didn’t know, bowling alley pencils are typically fatter than most pencils, with a fat lead as well, extra soft.  No erasers; don’t ask me why - so no ferrule.  These pencils are not adapted for fine writing or calculation, but rather for big fat Xs and /s for strikes and spares, and big fat numbers that don’t go beyond three figures.  Comfortable even in the hands of the ham-fisted, hands well-developed from gripping that heavy ball. 

I decided to do the Islip Bowl pencil in homage above all to my father and my uncle, long-time partners in the business, and to the rest of the family, almost all of whom took part in the business, whether by bookkeeping, working the luncheonette, cleaning, or pin-chasing*.  (We had no scruples about nepotism.)  My father had been in the building business for several years after the war - mainly private homes in our area of Long Island - and in 1956, I think (when I was five years old), he built what became the Islip Bowl, and then went into the bowling business.  A few years later he built another, Centereach Lanes. 

Throughout my upbringing we did a lot of bowling, the whole family.  (Family price.)  Before we were big enough to bowl, my brother and I used to run loose at the bowling alley during the afternoons, probably consigned by our beleaguered mother to Pop so that he could pretend to keep an eye on us for a while.  I remember vividly the cool and the hum of the huge air conditioners, the polished linoleum floors, the smell of the oil used to treat the hardwood bowling lanes, and of the stale beer in the bar sink, the Coca-Cola machine, the automatic bowling ball polisher, the whirling luncheonette stools, the formica-topped wooden lockers my father made, the front desk with the cash register and the racks of bowling shoes, the cigarette machine, the juke box…it’s all very Proustian.  So I have ample personal connection to this whole thing. 

Anyway, the first thing I did, other than sand this big log and patch up the cracks, was to paint it.  Islip Bowl pencils are penitentiary orange, not the cadmium yellow light of most pencils.  Mixing yellow enamel that I had on hand with a bit of red, I quickly found a match, and painted the thing.  I knew that I would not paint the pencil point black; rather, I would use the lead of the original pencil to blacken it (thus maintaining some kind of material link between the original and the replica).  I also knew that I would reproduce the writing on the pencil with a stencil.  I decided as well to include the illustration my uncle Oliver made back then of “Gutterball Gus”, a comical figure he invented, who became a sort of mascot or trademark for Islip Bowl.  (This element is the only part that doesn’t copy the original pencil, which would have been too small to do Gus justice.)  So far so good.  Looking at this big orange thing, I might have thought, my sculpture is half done!  But I knew a little better by this time. 

I also took close-up photographs of the original pencil (since one cannot photograph all sides of a pencil at once) in order to enlarge them to make a stencil for an oversized pencil - a pencil stencil.  I combined the photographs into one image file, but the bulk of the work still remained.  I knew I could save myself some effort by simply having an adhesive transfer made, to then apply to the pencil, compared to painting the lettering by hand with the aid of a stencil.  But I couldn’t make up my mind, many other things went on happening, and a year and a half went by.  The big orange pencil stood in the corner of my studio, always remonstrating with me as I went by. 

In summer of 2020 I got back down to it, and decided that the result of painting through a stencil would be more material and more tactile than that of a mere transfer, and more appropriate for a massive five-foot-long pencil.  More durable too.  And so the lettering was done.  (For details, if you’re really curious, see the technical notes way below. ****)

With some trepidation I moved on to the Gutterball Gus drawing, which was derived from my sister’s photo of a promotional coffee mug of no great quality (the photo, not the mug, which is still like new after 60 years).  I copied it fairly well, all things considered, but it’s difficult to reproduce faithfully in paint what was originally done with a few quick strokes of a pen - especially when you have little chance to correct any mistake.  It took me hours with a small brush, while Oliver may have spent ten minutes on his pen-and-ink original.  (I enjoyed these hours of monkish concentration; when I used to paint I loved painting intricate details.)  So my reproduction has a touch of the nervous, jittery quality of line we see in the work of the artist Philip Guston, instead of Oliver’s graceful and confident penstrokes.  I was much aided in the final stages by another photo my sister sent to me of an old Islip Bowl ad featuring Gus, in which I could see certain details much better than in the photo of the mug, especially Oliver’s cross-hatching technique for the shadows.  As I worked I also noticed that Oliver’s lettering (of Islip Bowl’s slogan “Right Down Your Alley”) on Gus’s bowling ball is curved and distorted in a way that emphasizes the ball’s shape.  (See the close-up above of Gus’s ball.)

To the extent that my pencil can be related to other modern sculpture (not that I think of competing), the obvious comparison is to the works of Claes Oldenburg and Cossje van Bruggen.  Oldenburg’s stock-in-trade back in the 1960s was big, soft sculptures that resembled everyday items - a telephone, and ash tray, a hot-water bottle, and such.  (With van Bruggen he even did a set of giant bowling pins flying left and right, having just been it by a giant bowling ball.)  As part of the Pop Art tradition, they were (and still are) a lot of fun.  But  my work is more earnest than Oldenburg’s and van Bruggens’s, and not so ironic.  Another comparable work is the giant toothbrush that once resided behind The Towne Crier, a café in lower upstate New York that featured (and still features) jazz, roots, folk, and world music, where my brother worked for some years.  Behind the 200-year-old building was a toothbrush about ten feet long, made in white and pastel-colored resin, with a short row of molars where you’d expect bristles.  On the handle was written “Brusha-Brusha-Brusha!”, which came from an old Ipana toothpaste commercial of 1957 with Bucky Beaver.  It had been made by an artist named Tim Ryan, who had to get rid of it because his landlord didn’t like it displayed outside.  (This information is courtesy of my brother, Brian Schill.)  Philistine! 

Flying Pins, sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, 2000, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Dr. Gutzerbawl examines a bowling ball for illness.

Oliver was intellectually inclined, an avid reader with a rich sense of humor and an interest in art.  He read about artists and art history, more traditional than avant-garde, and did a bit of drawing and oil painting.  While still a very young man, he contracted TB and spent a long period in a sanatorium, and it was there in part that he honed his drawing skills.  He did a portrait in oil of my father when both were in their thirties (1954).  But I think his real love and youthful ambition - though he may well never have thought of going pro - was in cartooning.  He often made sketches for fun or for use in the bowling business.  Besides Gutterball Gus, he invented at least two other characters:  Doctor Gutzerball (who wears one of those bands around his head with a mirror on it) is professionally indicating a problem area of someone’s bowling ball), and Centereach Sadie, the counterpart to Gus, and trademark of Centereach Lanes, the other bowling alley my father operated. 

The long-limbed Sadie, in a wild, demented posture, is about to hurl the bowling ball, but where it’s headed is anybody’s guess, so take cover.  For some reason I imagine polka music and kielbasa when I think of Gus and Sadie.  (Regrettably I haven’t been able to find any reproductions of Sadie, but I remember her well.  Possibly her name was adopted from Sadie Hawkins of the Li’l Abner comic strip.)  I remember also his drawing of a “whammy” (a bad-luck spell, as in “Somebody must have put a whammy on me; I can’t make my spares tonight”), a hand gesture in which the fist is closed but the index finger and the little finger are extended - the horns - to make someone bowl badly.  (The horns of the devil?)  Oliver drew this, I suppose, to make fun of our superstitious bowlers.  (Old-fashioned Italians use this gesture, called lo scongiuro, to ward off eventual bad spells, not to cast them.  Something like touching wood.) 

During the past several years I have looked at a lot of the work of the great cartoonist George Herriman, creator of the immortal Krazy Kat, and at times have thought that Oliver adopted some traits of Herriman’s style.  Now that I have looked closely again at Oliver’s drawing, my impression is stronger.  Herriman was in his prime while Oliver was growing up.  I saw reprints of Krazy Kat occasionally while I was still a kid and an adolescent.  I loved the crazy desert landscapes, always changing, but the action was too subtle for me - this situation of the cat always getting beaned by the mouse was just slapstick to me.  I didn’t grasp the existential aspect of the strip, largely because I was unaware of its racial subtext, usually a between-the-lines thing.  But apart from that, Herriman developed a sketchy style that looked deceptively casual and unskillful, but which was always animated and lively.  I surmise that this is what appealed to Oliver and influenced his own style. 

One way in which Oliver departed from cartoon convention was his insistence on portraying all five fingers (like R. Crumb, even at his most outrageous).  Most comic strips and animated cartoons - those of a simple style at least - show only four fingers, since it saves a lot of drawing time.  (Think of Mickey Mouse.)  And for a simple drawing, Oliver took unexpected pains with a matter of a hand gesture.  Look at Gutterball Gus’s left hand, swung out behind him as he releases the ball. **  The hand is turned outward, palm up - rather gracefully, and surprisingly in the case of this goofy-looking guy.  It’s as elegant a posture as we see in the hand of Michelangelo’s David - left or right - even though the hand of Oliver’s Gus is not so anatomically refined.  (Oliver was also a photographer, a serious amateur who did his own black-and-white developing and printing.  He set up a darkroom in a utility room at Islip Bowl, and took and printed many pictures of our bowlers simply for display.  The photos of bowlers were conventionally done, the picture snapped at the moment after releasing the ball, the photographer standing a few yards up in the next lane.  This moment is the one we see with Gutterball Gus, and the one we see in the photo of me bowling for the Islip High team.) ***

Michelangelo’s David, detail of the upper body from below, with the left hand.

Michelangelo’s David, detail of the right hand and hip.

Besides his oil portrait of my father, I have only a few other examples of Oliver’s work.  The only “elaborate” or finished ones are two drawings of my father that Oliver made in the early 1940s.  One depicts my father, dressed flamboyantly and smoking a long-stemmed pipe, with his suitcase, as he heads off for college.  Bow tie, suspenders, and yellow diagonal-plaid trousers!  (Pop spent a year at Cornell before the prospect of getting drafted for the infantry nudged him into enlisting in the Army Air Corps.)  The other shows him in a Cornell football game as he tackles his opponent mercilessly.  Both are done in pen and ink, but colored - the portrait with watercolor, it appears, and the football game with pastel.  (I’m not sure how much Oliver has invented or embellished.  My father was indeed a formidable and determined athlete, and the football scene is true to that.  However, I simply can’t imagine my father - in my experience more comfortable in his beat-up gardening pants - ever dressing flamboyantly, or smoking anything.  Here, for both reasons, he makes me think of Cab Calloway.  But Oliver is solidly in the tradition of caricature, so anything goes.)  Art-wise, I want to point out Oliver’s attention to detail:  in the tiny hairs that stick out from Pop’s woolen overcoat,  and in the hands, rendered more naturalistically than those of Gutterball Gus, each with a distinct posture.  And Oliver was always good with shoes.

Ol’s portrait of my father deserves comment.  His paint-handling here is better than most people can do when they first try to paint in oils; I certainly didn’t do any better.  The paint is pasty, while Oliver probably would have liked a more luminous or natural effect that artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt achieved.  He has created shadows in parts of the face and neck, but without imparting much feeling of volume.  But to do better requires considerable training and experience.  The composition holds up well, and (more importantly) his observation is very keen (he didn’t miss a wrinkle or a mole, or the knots on the wall behind).  Above all he rendered my father’s character, which is what counts most in such a portrait.  This is the expression of the man that I knew all my life.  Those penetrating eyes - maybe too intense in the painting, but true to life in a more essential way.

You couldn’t say that Oliver’s drawings are naturalistic, or that there is much individualization to Oliver’s stylized, cartoonish faces.  (E.g., the “X” he sometimes uses to denote the whorls of the ear.)  But if you compare my father in these drawings to Gutterball Gus, you might see some resemblance.  That is, perhaps Gus is a veiled, comical portrait of my father. 

The only other things are casual sketches, one a promotional illustration for The Island Room, the tropical-landscape-decorated catering hall at Centereach Lanes, our second bowling alley, in which a fish-shaped Long Island is transformed into a very bon vivant fish with top hat, cane, and cigarette (very green, unlike ordinary cigarettes).  Another is a clever doodle that illustrates a certain method of grabbing a stack of Fig Newtons.  (Like Gus’s hand, this too illustrates Oliver’s interest in gesture and posture; he was a real observer of life.) 

Promotional illustration for The Island Room of Centereach Lanes (available for catered events), by Oliver K. Zipp, ca. 1959.

An illustration of a certain method of grabbing several cookies at once, by Oliver and Jim Zipp, reprinted by permission of Popular Science magazine.

There is also a very charming two-page poem that relates, in pseudo-medieval poetry, the story of the meeting of my mother and my father, which Oliver seems to have orchestrated, as his fiancée’s sister was to be my mother.  Oliver made it for the occasion of my folks’ 50th anniversary.  It is embellished with simple, childlike doodles of flowers and birds.  I love the tone of the mock-Arthurian language of his tale, and the sudden interjection of the talk of the young people of the 1940s.  Besides his sense of humor, it shows Oliver’s own love of language, something I share that I must have picked up partly from him. 

The artist and his pencil, Sept. 2020.  Photograph by Stefania Levi.

The artist, with his pencil, Sept. 2020.  Photograph by Stefania Levi.


Footnotes and technical notes:

* The pin-chaser or pin boy is the person - usually a teenager - whose job is to sit behind the alleys and kick out the little jams that automatic pinsetters often develop.  (In the old days before automatic pinsetters, the pin-chaser actually had to rapidly collect the pins, tossed here and there, and set them by hand for the next bowler.  They were also directly in the line of fire and so must have suffered many accidents.)  My brother and I each did this job a couple of nights a week when we were in high school.  We were able to squeeze in a little homework during the glitchless intervals. 

** I’ve had a look at some recent photos of bowlers, and noticed a wide variety of free-hand positions, some quite outlandish.  But the way you hold your free hand is quite irrelevant to where the ball is going.  Instead, it’s a sort of body english, an expressive gesture that comes spontaneously with the way you bowl, like the arms and fingers of a dancer who wants to express a tree.  More obvious to the bowling spectator is the body english of the bowler at the moment when the ball strikes the pins, showing the winner’s satisfaction (sometimes you just know you made a perfect throw, and the falling of the pins is a mere confirmation).  We see this in the closed-fist, backward jerk of the elbow in other sports.   Most amusing of all is the absurd, almost dancing body english that seems to hope to influence the trajectory of the ball before it hits the pins.  But there are probably bowlers who swear that it works.  (Einstein would have called it “spooky action at a distance”, and he was very skeptical.)


*** Besides his photos of bowlers for display in the bowling alley, Oliver took many ID photographs of young people for the Islip Bowl Card, which was required of any bar patrons who weren’t obviously eighteen years old at least.  These cards were laminated, and came to be accepted as proof of age in establishments all over the area because they were practically as good as a driver’s license.  I have a box of Oliver’s old negatives.  I’m sure they would make an interesting book or historical document.  They are from the 1960s and 1970s.  A project I’ve had in mind for some years is to scan the negatives and take a better look.  Photographs like these are windows into another age.


**** Hard-core technical notes: 

The image files used to prepare the stencil were derived from separate close-ups taken at slightly different distances from the original pencil.  Thus they had to be adjusted to a matching scale so that the four lines of copy would be in correct proportion.  With the longer lines of text, I also had to correct the slight distortion left at the extremities by the curvature of the pencil.  The unified image file was brought to the scale of the pencil, then divided into four panels to serve as guides for the cutting of the stencil.

I printed the panels on four standard sheets of paper, butted them together side by side, mounted them on a heavy paper, then applied another layer of mounting adhesive to the back side of all this.  Then I meticulously cut out the lettering for four lines of copy.  I did the same to my enlargement of Oliver’s Gutterball Gus drawing, but this was much too complex to make a stencil that I could paint through.  I would use this stencil only to trace through with a pencil.  I cut the drawing into many small constituent pieces, like jigsaw puzzles for small children, taped them back together, and then traced the main lines of the drawing by removing various pieces in turn.  These tracings would guide me in copying the drawing by hand in paint.  (It occurred to me that it was a bit like the Renaissance practice of transferring a full-sized drawing to a wall to prepare for painting in fresco.  A preparatory drawing was made on a large sheet of tracing paper and applied to the wall, then perforated with many small holes along the lines of the drawing.  Then a small cloth bag of coal dust was beaten right up against the paper while following the drawing.  The paper was removed to reveal a multitude of black dots as a guide to the painting of the fresco.)

The stencil for Gutterball Gus, which could only be used for penciling.

The stencil with removable pieces to allow the tracing of all the principal lines of the art.

The tracings left on the pencil as a guide.

I applied the stencil with the four lines of copy, testing a small patch first to see that it would be simple to clean off the adhesive that would remain after removing the stencil.  The residue came off easily with lighter fluid, so I proceeded to paint, using two coats of black, water-based enamel, satin finish.  Despite the name, this was too glossy, so I gave another coat or two of the same paint slightly diluted to leave a flatter finish, like that of the original pencil.  

The stencil wrapped around the pencil, ready for painting.

The painting done, before removing the stencil.

The stencil had to be removed with considerable care, since it tended to pick up the lettering around the edges - the paint film is rather strong, and elastic.  I worked with a sharp knife to free certain areas while lifting away the stencil.  Then the adhesive residue was removed with a cotton ball and solvent.  A few defects remained, which were touched up by hand with a small paintbrush. 

Due mainly to the two thicker coats of paint, the letters stand out in slight relief, which I like.   However, this paint-through-the-stencil method was time-consuming.  I might have done better for time by using a stencil without adhesive (otherwise necessary to assure neat edges when you paint through) and simply drawing through it to trace the letters, removing it, and then painting the letters by hand. 

The pencil is about 4’ 10” (147 cm.) and 4” (10 cm.) in diameter.  It weighs a little over six kilos, or about thirteen and a half pounds (though it seems twice that when you lift it), which happens to be roughly the weight of a bowling ball.  I also made a pair of rests out of painted wood to hold the pencil displayed on a shelf. 

The point of it all, blackened with the lead of the same pencil it was modeled on.

The rests, to support the pencil sculpture on a shelf or mantelpiece and keep it from rolling.

The backs of the rests, painted with two designs of my initials.  The first, basically robbed from Albrecht Duerer’s “AD” woodcut signature, I made when I was a teenager.  The second, invented much later, interprets the letters more freely, like Japanese calligraphy:  the “A” becomes a human figure, the “S” a serpent.  Tags, you could say.

© Copyright Allen Schill 2020, for the text and most of the photographs.  Other art by Oliver K. Zipp, and by others as noted (or not noted, in the case of images I found who-knows-where online).  Hearty thanks to all who contributed to this article with a photo or information.  (Anything else is welcome.)  My best regards to all the old patrons of the Islip Bowl, who will all remember Oliver and Mainy well.


P.S. - Speaking of the “way up in the middle of the air” composition mentioned above in the caption to the drawing of my father tackling another football player, I have yet to find out what the word must be - most likely something coming straight from Greek, like phantasmagoria or onomatopoeia.  Acro-something, I guess.  But its use has a history.  The question aroused my interest several years ago when the New York Review of Books published two articles in the same issue which were both illustrated with paintings that used this compositional approach (Jan. 10, 2013).  I suppose this was deliberate, a very fine choice by the picture editor.  One was by Raphael (the famous one) and Giulio Romano,  ”The Vision of Ezekiel” of 1518, seen with Ingrid Rowland’s article on late Raphael.  (The “way up in the middle of the air” phrase comes form the well-known old gospel song, ”Ezekiel Saw the Wheel”, by William L. Dawson; see below.)  The other painting was by John James Audubon, his ”Red-Tailed Hawk” of 1829, which accompanied Robert Paxton’s review of a book, ”Birds: The Inner Life”.

Raffaello Sanzio and Giulio Romano, The Vision of Ezekiel, 1518.

John James Audubon, Red-Tailed Hawk, 1829 (better-known as a buzzard).

If the reader will endure one more sidetrack:  while I was trying to figure out just what we are seeing in the Raphael and Romano painting (by no means easy to understand, as the artists took great liberties with what is written in the Book of Ezekiel, the text of which is itself obscure, like most visionary accounts), I came across another theme from Ezekiel, “the valley of dry bones”.  This is the source of the famous old spiritual, ”Dem Bones” or ”Dry Bones”, composed by no less than James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson.  (I wonder if they drew on an older source; the song for me has a much older flavor than the 1920s.)  You all know it; it gives you the whole skeletal system from toe to head and back again:  ”Toe bone connected to the foot bone, foot bone connected to the heel bone”, etc., as the melody climbs up the chromatic scale.  In the Bible, Ezekiel’s vision is of the dead of the house of Israel rising again.  I just wanted to share this, as ”Dry Bones” is one of my earliest musical memories.

All right, maybe I’m taking this a little too far, but I came across a drawing by Werner Heldt, a German artist, in which I find the same device as we see in Oliver Zipp’s drawing of my father playing football.  Oliver represents the crowd in the grandstands with many tiny circles (for the heads of the spectators).  Heldt’s drawing, called Meeting (Parade of the Zeros), from 1933-35, shows a massive crowd in the square and the streets of his city scene.  Each person is represented by a zero.  Some carry white banners or black flags held on standards.  Heldt despised the Nazi regime for its stupidity, its fanaticism, its suppression of individual freedom, and its glorification of the masses and conformity to Nazi ideology.  The title in German, Aufmarsch der Nullen, literally means deployment or parade of the zeros, but Null probably has as well the same sense as it has in English, when we say that a very stupid, thoughtless, insignificant person is a zero, a nullity.  (Of course, for Oliver it was just a formal device, not a sarcastic comment on the mentality of football fans.)  Still, Heldt’s is a powerful drawing, especially only a few days after an attempted coup on the part of a crowd of nullities in Washington, D.C..

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