O.C. Bowling Alley's Days Roll to an End

So they decided to close. The Manns still own bowling alleys in San Dimas, Riverside and Tustin.

End of an Icon

Tiki aficionado Kevin Bullat of Huntington Beach sees the closure as the death of another icon of California's beach-and-car culture.

"We treasure those places and go to visit them before they meet their demise," said Bullat, who arranged a recent outing at Kona Lanes even though he and his friends don't bowl. "The bowling alleys are going fast, that Polynesian type of architecture. But there are a number of folks who have gone into restoring those."

He cited the Bahooka restaurant in Rosemead and Sam's Seafood in Sunset Beach as still-standing examples of the style. Many others, he said, have disappeared under what he referred to as the "Mission Viejo-ization" of Southern California, with homogenized strip malls anchoring neighborhoods of cookie-cutter houses.

"Look at Huntington Beach. The old downtown was skanky and cheesy but it had something," Bullat said, arguing that renovations in recent years have stripped the city center of its uniqueness. "Mission Viejo is the antithesis of style, and that's what's happening everywhere."

For Billy Folsom, the loss of Kona Lanes is personal.

"That's where I learned to bowl," said Folsom, who grew up within walking distance of Kona Lanes and still lives about 100 yards away. "That's where my children learned to bowl. Now they're tearing down my childhood."

Among bowlers, Kona Lanes was less an architectural emblem than a place to get together and have fun. Replacing it with a store robs the community of an alternative, and replaces it with something easily found elsewhere in town, Folsom said.

Other cities, from Long Beach to Fullerton, have used local idiosyncrasies to define their retail cores, he said.

"In Costa Mesa, we've done none of that," Folsom said. "Costa Mesa is rapidly running out of color. Our character has just been lost and I think it's a shame."

Late last week, regular bowlers trickled in to buy mementos -- old pins, shoes and bowling balls -- as workers prepared for a large sale of fixtures and other items stored up over nearly a half-century of doing business. Inside, generations of stale beer and cigarette smoke give the alley a musty aroma, the smells of a place with history.

"I met my husband here 40 years ago," said Karen Shafer, who showed up for her regular Thursday noon Jingle Bells league -- this time not to bowl, but to reminisce. "It's going to be missed. There's nothing to do around here now."

The Jingle Bells league began within a few years of the Kona Lanes opening, and the women talked Thursday of the decades of memories, and the even larger collection of the forgotten moments that make up life.

"There's an awful lot of people this affects," said Barbara Kilmer, cradling a banged-up bowling pin with the dates "1958-2003" scrawled in black marker on the side.

The draw, said Lou Ann Towner of Huntington Beach, was the people, "the hometown feeling," and the sense of community that grew from sharing countless hours together over a generation of time.

"I started here when this place opened," Towner said, holding several folded T-shirts over her arm like a waiter's towel. "I'm just depressed."