Kingpin of Canada’s alleys As one of the nation's only bowling-lane equipment maintenance and repair experts, Edward Dubinsky has provided service from coast to coast to coast, ensuring it's never quiet By: David Sanderson Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 11, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/09/2020 (1570 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the phone has been ringing off the oft-sanitized hook at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based firm that builds opulent, subterranean shelters, ever since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in North America in January.

It’s so busy the company was forced to add a second shift to keep up with demand for steel-encased escapes equipped with a range of amenities that include indoor swimming pools, shooting ranges and fully-stocked wine cellars.

Bowling alleys are another popular request, company spokesman said, adding the firm recently completed a bunker for a California client priced at a cool US$8.35 million that included a set of lanes, gym, movie theatre and greenhouse.

Closer to home, Westwood resident Edward Dubinsky is the owner and operator of J.D. Bowling, one of the last independently-run, service-based businesses in Canada 100 per cent dedicated to strikes and spares.

And while the married father of two hasn’t fielded any pandemic-fuelled requests for private, fortified alleys of late — he did install one in a Winnipegger’s basement some 10 years ago and has another custom order on the books for 2021 — he has been kept hopping assisting alley owners doing everything in their power to let the good times roll by complying with the province’s physical-distancing guidelines.

“Because of reduced capacity, the owners have been really struggling. To combat that I’ve been putting up clear sheets of Plexiglas between lanes to see if that satisfies the Health Department or not,” says Dubinsky, seated in a Henderson Highway coffee shop, steps away from Rossmere Lanes, one of his regular stops.

“I’ve been in this business a long time and have seen quite a bit, but this year takes the cake, that’s for sure.”

OK, here’s a head-scratcher: why did Dubinsky, a person who can’t exactly be described as a kingpin, given the fact he can’t recall the last time he went bowling — perhaps in the mid-’80s — choose a career path that requires him to spend the majority of his waking hours in the gutter?

The answer to that begins more than 60 years ago in Toronto, where his father Joe Dubinsky — the J.D. in J.D. Bowling — was living after exiting the Canadian Armed Forces.

Following his military career, the elder Dubinsky, raised on a farm in Saskatchewan, needed a job. One morning in 1958, he was combing through the classified ads when he spotted a help wanted blurb for a bowling-lane installer. He didn’t have a clue what that entailed — he was a radar technician with the army, his son says — but he applied nonetheless.

“He’d never even set foot in a bowling alley before getting hired, but by the next week he was already the company foreman, if you can believe,” says Dubinsky, 55, rolling his eyes.

)Dubinsky’s father was employed by Double Diamond, inventor of the first automatic pinsetter for five-pin bowling, a device that rendered human pinsetters, usually fast-on-their-feet, male teenagers dubbed pinboys, obsolete.

In the early 1960s he was transferred to Winnipeg to manage the company’s local operation. But when Double Diamond went out of business in 1971 he had a decision to make: try to catch on with Brunswick, the recognized leader in the industry, or strike out on his own.

With the assistance of his wife Anne, he chose Option B, establishing J.D. Bowling in 1972 out of their home in St. James.

Dubinsky figures he was 10 or 11 when he began tagging along with his dad, helping him wax lanes or drop off orders of balls and rental shoes to alleys all over the city. After graduating from John Taylor Collegiate, he asked his father if he could work for him full time. He enjoyed getting his hands dirty and was a relatively quick study — “Dad always used to say, ‘This is how you do it, now don’t bug me’ — but his request was rebuffed.

“He told me he wanted me to do something more with my life than work in bowling alleys, all day, every day,” Dubinsky says.

Heeding his father’s advice, Dubinsky enrolled in a diesel mechanic course at Red River College. One problem: by the time he completed his studies he’d discovered he wasn’t particularly fond of diesel fumes. He approached his father again, this time successfully.

“At first I was mainly responsible for doing the bookkeeping, but after Dad retired in 2000 I basically took things over. A couple years later my wife Dorothy left her job at the bank, and it’s been the two of us ever since,” he says.

Dubinsky never knows what each day — or night, he’s on call 24/7 when league play starts up in the fall — will bring. To date he’s witnessed everything from crushed floorboards to errantly thrown balls lodged in walls or ceiling tiles to otherworldly beings, what with Roxy Lanes on Henderson Highway reportedly haunted by a trio of ghosts.

He does have a weekly maintenance schedule he follows to a T, mind you. Every Monday he’s at Uptown Alley on St. Matthews Avenue, Tuesdays he’s at Dakota Bowling on St. Mary’s Road and Wednesdays he’s at Rossmere.

At each he tinkers with everything from computerized scoring systems that are on the blink to bumper rails stuck in place to ball retrievers that won’t retrieve balls. “Then there’s a whole bunch of others I fit in here, there and everywhere, not just in Winnipeg, but from coast to coast, pretty much.”

He’s the only game in the country, for the most part; he fields calls from as far west as Vancouver, as far north as Churchill and as far east as Newfoundland.

“A few weeks ago a guy in Ontario told me if I can’t fix it, it won’t get fixed,” he says.

Todd Britton is the owner of Uptown Alley, a 43,000-square-foot entertainment mecca at 1301 St. Matthews Ave. Besides 30 bowling lanes, Uptown also features an arcade, ping-pong space and laser-tag arena.

Britton says it was comforting to know there was someone in Winnipeg who “knew what they were doing” when he relocated Uptown from its former home on Academy Road to its present location two years ago.

“He definitely takes a lot off of our plate. Back in the golden age of bowling in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was a guy in every major city, but as the amount of bowling centres diminished, so too did the number of people who can help you out when a lane stops working at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, when your place is packed to the rafters,” he says, noting his family has relied on the Dubinskys’ expertise since 1982, the year his father Brian purchased Academy Uptown Lanes from the previous owner.

Britton says he’s had to call Dubinsky in emergency situations “many, many times.”

“He’s great, in the sense that he’ll dart over here in 10 minutes, no questions asked. What he does is a lost art, in a lot of ways. He has a skill set few others in Canada possess.”

At one time, Dubinsky looked forward to annual training seminars held in Las Vegas; he’s far less enthusiastic about attending now that they’re staged in somewhat less-glamorous Muskegon, Mich.

How knowledgeable is Dubinsky? Well, if your bowling scores started going up, up, up about 20 years ago, you have him to thank. Recognizing that pins with wide bottoms weren’t getting knocked down very easily, he fashioned a pin with a slightly narrower base that, after months of tinkering, flew far better when struck by a fast-moving ball.

Alley owners agreed, to the degree he and Dorothy now produce and sell upwards of 3,000 J.D. Bowling-approved pin bases every year out of their basement. He laughs at the suggestion his mail carrier must love him, given the fact their garage, which doubles as their distribution centre, is loaded with pallets of five-pin bowling balls brought in from outside the province.

“No, we give him a break. They arrive freight,” he says.

One more thing: about 15 years ago Dubinsky was at Polo Park Lanes, watching his son Adam take part in youth-league action. At some point the kids Adam was bowling with took off to “God knows where,” he says.

When they still hadn’t returned five minutes later he instructed his son to continue bowling by pushing a green button marked “skip” on a scoring tablet, which allowed him to keep track of his own game without deleting the others’ scores.

A moment later another parent wandered over, asking Dubinsky in a loud tone of voice what they were doing, exactly. “That equipment is highly sensitive. Your kid is going to break it,” he bellowed

“I wanted to say, ‘I think I know what I’m doing, I’m the one who installed this system,’ but instead I just turned around and told Adam to keep doing what he was doing,” Dubinsky says with a laugh.

“The owner of the alley told me later he bet one of his employees $5 I was going to let the guy have it but no, that’s not me. Unless somebody asks, I don’t usually talk about what I do, too much.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca