Business and love of the sport
keep bowler in the fast lane
By Sandie Parrott - Contributing Writer
The Flint Journal
Story from Magazine Insert - People Section
 

He was the first bowler admitted to the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame - nearly 20 years ago.

But when one asks Howard Gilroy why he was such a successful bowler for so many years, he can answer with a word:  Concentration.

"What good bowlers told me I had over other bowlers was concentration." Gilroy explains. "The more you bowl, the better you should be."

If there was ever an example of a person who could say, "Bowling is my life," that person might just be Gilroy.  He was inducted in 1980 to the Flint Bowling Hall of Fame and the Michigan State Bowling Hall of Fame in 2001. 

Born in Sault Ste. Marie in 1929, Gilroy was 12 when he first bowled.  It was the start of a love affair with the sport that would continue for the rest of his life.  At 16, he moved to Flint, where he had a sister, to find a job and got one as a "pinboy" at Flint Recreation, a downtown bowling alley and billiard room. He mad 7 cents a line, setting up pins.

"It had 26 lanes, 16 on the top floor and 10 lanes on the bottom, along with billiard tables," he recalls about the bowling alley. 

Within a few years, bowling was not just his bread and butter and his recreation; it also introduced him to his wife, Margaret, who was working as a coat check girl.  They married in 1949.  A few years later, now manager of Flint Recreation, Gilroy bowled the first four perfect games.

Gilroy was also an innovator.  In the mid-1950's, he worked with a partner to invent a cork tube for a bowling ball's thumbhole, an invention they called "the 300 Grip."  Gilroy ended up buying out the partner and manufacturing and selling these grips.  This got him started in a business named Bowl-Rite.  In partnership with fellow bowlers Bud Lillard and Dr. Warren Clark, that company branched into other related businesses, like bowling pin and lane refinishing.  In 1959, the partners opened GLC Bowling Supply (for Gilroy Lillard Clark).  That store sold everything for bowling.

The fabulous '50s was also the time period when Gilroy rubbed elbows with the bowling elite.  He bowled in the American Bowling Congress National Tournaments and in the National All-Star Bowling Tournaments; he won the state title.  The Journal called him,  "Flint's hottest bowler."

It was not rue that as a bowling proprietor, Gilroy had nothing but time to bowl in those days.  He also worked for a period in one of the Flint area automobile plants and for a beer distributorship.

Yet as a bowler who was competing a the national level, he decided not to turn professional.  Gilroy said he would have had to take time off from work; being a pro at that time mean low pay and high expenses.  Besides, he then had what many other professional keglers were trying to raise money to establish - a successful bowling business.

Since the '70s, knee problems and surgery slowly reduced the time he could spend bowling.  "I think I must hold the record for the best sub." he said.  But while he's been sidelined from bowling, Gilroy remains active in his business.

In 1974, he spun off GLC Bowling Balls (located on Fenton Road), and he says he still enjoys seeing new and experienced bowlers come though the door.  He still does most of the measuring, and he always has a customer toss the ball to him so he can see "how you throw the ball."  His wife still keeps the books for the store. 

While interested in bowling has remained stronger in the Flint area than it has in many other places, Gilroy says he hopes the sport will regain the kind of popularity it had in the past. 

"Bowling goes in cycles," he says.  "If you get kids involved, then they will grow up wanting to bowl."