Out of the gutter

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

It’s been almost 18 years since John and Vickie Woodford first walked through the door of Spare Time Lanes, which at the time was for sale.

Lane 3 was down.

Again.

John Woodford climbed back behind the pins, fiddled with the decades-old AMF 82-30 automatic pinsetter and, just like that, Lane 3 was back in business.

“This place has offered us lots of stories,” Vickie Woodford said.

Suddenly, though, the one about John walking in off the street, no ties whatsoever to Jefferson, and fixing Lane 3 has never seemed more symbolic.

The last weekend in February, 285 bowlers descended on Jefferson as part of the West Central Iowa Bowling Proprietors team tournament — a number that has only increased since 2012, when the Woodfords modernized Spare Time Lanes with a six-figure remodel that turned a scuzzy bowling alley into a sparkling bowling center.

“It brings a lot of outside revenue to Jefferson,” Vickie Woodford said. “We’ve been trying to tell the Chamber for years we’re probably the biggest source (second only to the casino) of bringing in outside revenue, and we’re probably the least utilized.”

The feeling that Spare Time Lanes has largely been excluded from local efforts to boost tourism and divert gamblers into town from Wild Rose Casino will be even more apparent when the Woodfords are soon featured in a national bowling magazine.

The bowling company QubicaAMF is working on a profile of the Woodfords for Bowlers Journal that will tout Spare Time’s pioneering adoption of its most current and most advanced pinsetter yet, the XLi Edge.

For starters, they no longer have “machines breaking down every five minutes,” Vickie Woodford said.

It’s believed the Woodfords installed one of the first XLi Edges in the Midwest during the 2012 remodel.

“I don’t know what we saw in it,” Vickie Woodford, 58, confessed, recalling that day in 1998 she and her husband first strolled through the door. “It was horrible.”

Buckets hung from the ceiling to catch rainwater.

Vickie Woodford noticed a complete absence of women and kids.

Within a week, though, they were talking to a Realtor.

“Home State Bank and Sid Jones took a chance on us,” Vickie Woodford said. “Our bank in Adel wouldn’t help us.”

That initial bit of faith would put Spare Time Lanes on its current trajectory.

Today, Spare Time Lanes offers glow-in-the-dark “cosmic bowling” — but when the lights turn off and the blacklights turn on, it’s like finding a wormhole to another dimension.

“A lot of people have said they hope Jefferson knows what a beautiful bowling center they have,” said Vickie Woodford, a Chicago native who moved to rural Humboldt County when she was 16.

What was once a bleak hue of brown and green, with a touch of cream, is today an amazing Technicolor playground.

“As they say,” said John Woodford, a 46-year-old Des Moines native, “you have to spend money to make money.”

What once was a bar with a bowling alley is now a bowling center that also happens to have a bar.

Where strippers are said to have once shaken it, kids’ birthday parties are taking place.

A new ramp to assist those young bowlers in the shape of a dragon glows a radioactive pinkish red under blacklight.

“It had a bad reputation for so many years,” John Woodford said.

“It took us probably close to five years to get over that,” Vickie Woodford added.

John disagrees.

“Probably closer to 10 years,” he said.

“It was just a local hangout,” Vickie Woodford explained. “And it really wasn’t family oriented at all.”

Future anthropologists will one day be able to tear apart the building at 118 S. Chestnut St. and be able to determine how its inhabitants evolved over time.

The floor of an earlier roller skating rink is still underneath Spare Time’s 10 lanes.

Underneath new wood paneling they’ll find wallpaper emblazoned with naked women — apparently put up in the ’70s, according to John Woodford, when people remember a funky mix of exotic dancers and country and Western music.

The pinsetters the Woodfords inherited when they purchased the building were from the early 1950s. Whoever converted the building into a bowling alley had bought them used.

By 2012, though, the AMF mechanic refused to work on them.

“He was getting shocks,” Vickie Woodford said.

They were always unreliable. Now they were a fire hazard, too.

The remodel has allowed the Woodfords to fully realize what they saw in their minds all along.

“We’re getting way more kids in here,” Vickie Woodford said. “That’s what we really wanted, to give kids and families a safe place to go.

“That’s what we’ve been working on all these years.”

Spare Time, according to the Woodfords, is now among the smallest bowling centers with a pro shop — a place where you can buy a new ball (maybe one scented like “candy apple”) and have the holes drilled while you wait.

The Woodfords sell shoes, gloves, wrist supports and other accessories.

They also can resurface balls.

“The quality of bowlers is increasing,” Vickie Woodford said. “They’re always wanting that stuff, but they don’t want to wait.”

One of the newly painted walls inside Spare Time features oversized bowling pins in the shape of a W bearing “Woodfords” on one and “Dad’s Dream” on another.

It had been the dream of John Woodford’s father to own a bowling alley, which he briefly did in the late 1980s with Horseshoe Lanes in Adel.

“My dad was the best bowler,” John Woodford said. “He only took one step and averaged 200.”

John Woodford quit his job at Hiland Potato Chip in Des Moines to be his father’s resident mechanic.

“I wasn’t even mechanically inclined,” he recalled.

Vickie just happened to be manager of Horseshoe Lanes when the Woodfords took over.

In May, John and Vickie will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

Despite a long family history of bowling, John Woodford’s parents “said we were nuts” when they bought Spare Time Lanes in Jefferson.

“We’ve got more that we want to do,” he said, alluding to the building’s exterior.

Already, though, Spare Time Lanes has jumped out of the gutter and is on a clear course for a strike.

This is exactly what Vickie Woodford envisioned.

“It’s going the direction John and I wanted it to go.”