As part of the 100th Anniversary Celebration of Bowlers Journal,, P Emeritus Mort Luby Jr. chronicles the history of Luby Publishing, from the magazine’s inception in November 1913 through today. Part 5 of 12.
A fter Buffalo in 1946, the
American Bowling Congress Championships tournament made its first journey to
the west coast. Predictably, the 1947 event in Los Angeles, then considered a distant outpost in the bowling world, produced a smaller-than-average entry count — just 3,356 teams.
But my dad, Mort
Luby Sr., had one of his greatest brainstorms
under all those California palm trees: He invented the Bowlers Journal Championships.
Up until that time, BJ’s
no sustained marketing eff ort to pump up the readership. So it was a pivotal moment in the history of the company when he came up with the concept of including a subscription in every entry fee in his new tournament.
His plan was to run a
fi ve-game singles sweeper at a nearby commercial center during the ABC
Tournament. He advertised the event in his own magazine and made
Mort Luby Jr.
circulation was a dicey proposition. My father would run a subscription booth at all major tournaments, but there was
extravagant promises in the editorial columns. He hired a nationally celebrated bowler, former ABC all- events titlist Max Stein, to run the show. He chose the
famed 52-lane Sunset Bowling Center — situated on the Warner Brothers lot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood —
Center Stage: Bowling centers with 50 or more lanes were fairly commonplace in the 1970s and ’80s, but rare in 1947 when Hollywood’s Sunset Bowling Center hosted the fi rst Bowlers Journal Championships. Sunset, so named because of its location on Hollywood’s famous Sunset Boulevard, boasted 52 lanes and leagues with movie studio teams.
as the venue. And he worked harder than ever before.
“I’ll never forget seeing your father
walking up and down the ABC concourse, handing out fl yers and chatting up every soul he saw,” Joe Norris, who worked the tournament for Brunswick, told me years later. “He really worked the fl oor.”
While the tournament was a great idea, it triggered one of the worst
crises in Luby’s career. Stein attempted to cook the books, and line his own pockets, by inserting fake names and scores.
But he made a serious error when he listed the hometown of some of those bogus entries as Detroit. Norris, who knew virtually everyone in the Motor City bowling community, was puzzled. Who were these guys bowling these big