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Lack of pin boys led to innovation

Olentangy Lanes is long gone but once thrived at 2815 N. High St. in Clintonville, near where a Giant Eagle supermarket sits today. It had an interesting claim to fame.

The first automatic bowling-pin setters were invented and installed at this bowling alley in the mid-1940s.

At the urging of Leslie LeVeque, who owned the lanes, Michael O’Leary invented machines to reposition pins after each bowler knocked them over.

Before that time, “pin boys” were hired to set up the bowling pins by hand, but by 1944, “they couldn’t get boys to spot pins anymore,” O’Leary told The Dispatch in a 1978 interview. “And they wanted to speed up the game.”

O’Leary hired a half-dozen Ohio State University students who helped him tabulate the positions of pins, and he developed the device. The patent was sold to the American Machine and Foundry Co., now known as AMF, after LeVeque's death in a 1946 plane crash.

Linda Deitch