by Dan Barry
Many of the numbered metal markers, forged by hospital patients and spiked into the ground, vanished over the years, sold for scrap or tossed into a nearby gully as impediments to mowing. In the early 1990s, groundskeepers began affixing numbered plaques flat onto the ground, but the job was left incomplete when the hospital shut down in 1995.
In a last-minute search of Willard’s buildings for items worthy of posterity, state workers opened an attic door to find 427 musty suitcases. Among them: a brown leather case containing two shaving mugs, two shaving brushes, suspenders, and a pair of black dress shoes that a slight and precise immigrant hadn’t worn since World War I.
The discovery of the suitcases led to an exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany, a traveling display, and a well-received book about forgotten patients called “The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic.” Confidentiality laws forced its authors, Darby Penney and Peter Stastny, to reluctantly use pseudonyms; Lawrence Mocha, then, became Lawrence Marek.
Ms. Penney said that for the last several decades of his life, Mr. Mocha exhibited no signs of mental illness and was not on any medication. Her guess: “There were certain people who were kept there because they were decent workers.”
And Mr. Mocha was the meticulous gravedigger.
Ms. Spellecy read the book. She is a wife, a mother, and a retiree who lives in Waterloo, about a half-hour’s drive from Willard. Visiting the cemetery for the first time, she “sensed the injustice immediately,” she said, and quickly set about to forming the Willard Cemetery Memorial Project. Its mission: “To give these people a name and a remembrance.”
Ms. Spellecy and other volunteers got on their knees to begin unearthing the numbered plaques. They searched the surrounding woods to salvage discarded metal markers. With the help of another former groundskeeper, Mike Huff, they erected signs to identify sections divided by religion—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—and planted a small boulder where Mr. Mocha’s shack stood.
They have also engaged in a contentious back and forth with the Office of Mental Health over its refusal to grant names to the dead—beginning with a plaque on that boulder to honor Mr. Mocha, and then, perhaps, a central memorial that would feature the names of all those buried anonymously or beneath numbers.
“It’s as if they are saying that they own the cemetery and therefore they own the names,” Ms. Spellecy said. “In so owning the names, they are owning the person—as if these people continue to be wards of the state.”
State officials say that they are bound by state law to protect patient confidentiality, even after death, unless granted permission by a patient’s descendants to make the name public. They also say that attempts to change the law have failed, and that, even now, some descendants express concern about prejudice.
Mr. Allen said that the state had worked with communities throughout New York to restore these cemeteries as places of reverence and contemplation, and had assisted families in locating graves. In fact, he said, “We have helped a number of families place a marker at a number.”
But without some descendant’s consent, Willard’s dead will remain memorialized by a number, if at all.
State officials also say that at the request of the Willard Cemetery Memorial Project, they are searching for any relatives of a certain individual—they would not say “Lawrence Mocha”—who might grant permission for the public release of that individual’s name. This is highly unlikely, advocates say, given that this individual never married and left Europe a century ago.
But Ms. Spellecy will not give up. She and other volunteers are developing a list of the dead through census rolls and other records, and hope to secure permission from descendants to have those names made public, perhaps even in granite.
When asked why she has committed herself to this uphill task, Ms. Spellecy paused to compose herself. With her eyes wet from tears, she said: “Every stage of life is very sacred. Life deserves to be remembered, and revered, and memorialized.”
A few weeks ago, Ms. Spellecy and some others bundled up and went out again to the 29 acres of stillness that is the Willard cemetery. They removed a little brush and cleaned a little dirt from a few of the numbers in the ground.
The autumn winds carved whitecaps from the steel-gray lake below, while fallen leaves skittered across a field of anonymous graves, many of them dug by a man buried here too, whose name, Lawrence Mocha, you are not supposed to know.
Searching for the numbered dead
EPILOGUE
Colleen Spellecy and other champions of the anonymously buried have had several small successes, including a change in New York State law and a monument erected to remember, by name, 96 former residents of the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital who are buried at a nearby cemetery in Ovid, New York.
But the seminal moment came in the spring of 2015 with the unveiling of a lasting tribute to Lawrence Mocha, the gravedigger. Beside a memorial plaque affixed to a granite boulder, there is now a shovel set in concrete, poised as if in mid-dig.
Still Standing, Precariously
PITTSFIELD, MASS.—MAY 29, 2016
The world’s best female duckpin bowler holds so many bowling records that she has lost count, but her game-day shirt features a star for each of her tournament wins—a sartorial requirement of the Women’s National Duckpin Association. With 19 stars so far, her polyester constellation is running out of sky.
The world’s best female duckpin bowler lives here in the Berkshires, where duckpin bowling is neither played nor followed. If she wants to bowl, she must drive two hours to an alley in Connecticut, where bowlers sometimes ask her for shared selfies and autographs.
The world’s best female duckpin bowler is Amy Bisson Sykes, a slight woman of 37 who dominates a black-and-white pastime in a Technicolor world. Her sport is so yesterday that whenever another duckpin alley closes, the remaining alley owners descend like predatory relatives to cart off the mechanical parts of duckpin setting machines that have not been made in two generations.
But Bisson Sykes was reared in the duckpin bowling alley her father owned in Newington, Conn., amid the drone of rolling balls on pine and maple, the clatter of pins scattering like startled waterfowl. The soundtrack of her youth.
In leagues and tournaments, Bisson Sykes used to slip into an all-business cocoon that others found intimidating and even off-putting. Wearing the mask of singular purpose, she would stand with the same red-and-white ball firm in her right hand and raised close to her chest and then release it with the twinning of a ballerina’s curtsy and a fencer’s thrust.
“I was there to win,” she said.
The cognoscenti of duckpin often pause before describing Bisson Sykes’s talent and impact, as if searching for the proper superlative.
“Phenomenal,” said Al Zoraian, the president of the National Duckpin Bowling Congress.
“Not unbeatable,” added Lauree Schreiber, a friend and longtime opponent. “But she’s about as close as it gets.”
Bisson Sykes has retained much of her intense focus on the 10-pin triangle. But motherhood has taught her that the lanes of life are curlicue, with pins that can move about and refuse to fall. Now she offers high-fives to opponents who throw strikes and embraces the sense of community that has always enveloped the ancient game of bowling.
It’s been an epiphany. Turns out some things in life are even more important than duckpin bowling.
IT’S NOT EASY
To all those armchair athletes rolling their eyes instead of balls, let’s be clear: Odds are, you’d be lousy at duckpin.
The grapefruit-size ball weighs less than four pounds and has no finger holes, and the squat duckpins look like out-of-shape cousins to the more familiar bowling pin. And even though a turn can include throwing three balls, instead of the two in the more common game of tenpin bowling, scores are still much lower.
According to the United States Bowling Congress, there were 55,266 certified 300 games—that is, 12 cons
ecutive strikes, for a perfect score—in the 2013-14 season of tenpin bowling. But there has never been a 300 game in duckpin bowling. As all serious duckpinners know, a Connecticut man named Pete Signore Jr. came closest in 1992, bowling a 279.
Her engraved ball
The history of duckpin is a murky pond. It was long believed that the game emerged around 1900 from a Baltimore gaming hall owned by John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson, future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. But research has since found references to duckpin dating to the early 1890s, in New Haven, Boston and Lowell, Mass.
The sport became popular along the Eastern Seaboard, finding particular passion in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maryland. Men now gray and halting in step will recall their glory years as pin boys, setting pins and clearing deadwood for the greats: Harry Kraus and Wolfie Wolfensberger and the singular Nick Tronsky, out of Connecticut. And don’t forget the female standouts: Toots Barger and Sis Atkinson and Cathy Dyak.
Big matches drew standing-room-only crowds. Local newspapers chronicled the scores and profiled the stars (“Nick Tronsky of New Britain stole the show at the state duckpin tournament today with a nine-game total of 1,203”). Companies hired ringers for their league teams, and some stars barnstormed, taking on all local heroes. In certain American crannies, duckpin was life.
Some pastimes just fade away, to resurface only with the smirk of irony. Like so many other endeavors, duckpin has been a casualty of the fundamental change in how Americans choose to spend their leisure time. But some of the duckpin faithful will also cite what is known as the Curse of Ken Sherman.
In 1953, a submarine designer named Kenneth Sherman invented an automatic pinsetter for duckpin. It was an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-like contraption of more than 1,000 moving parts—cast-iron gears and gaskets and pin holders—that did away with the need for pin boys and made the game faster and more efficient.
But the story goes that when Sherman’s company stopped operating nearly 50 years ago, he refused to sell the patent for the Sherman Pinsetter to Brunswick Equipment—some say because he feared that Brunswick would end production so that duckpin could no longer compete with tenpin.
“But we’re in the same situation as if Brunswick had shut us down anyway,” said Stan Kellum, 72, the executive director of the National Duckpin Bowling Congress, which is run out of a small office in a Maryland bowling alley. “Nobody is manufacturing the machines.”
That is why, if you go behind the lanes at, say, Highland Bowl, in Cheshire, Conn., the back wall is lined with cardboard boxes crammed with cast-iron bits, duckpin nests and assorted other parts no longer manufactured—all scavenged and saved from closed alleys.
When all 20 lanes are operating smoothly, the deafening roar is mere background music for the owner, Todd Turcotte. But his ears are attuned to the faintest false note in the mechanical syncopation. When that happens, something is broken—off.
And what does Turcotte do then? “Pray,” he said.
His situation reflects why the game of duckpin could not grow. No new automatic pinsetters means no new alleys.
Today there are 41 congress-certified duckpin bowling alleys, down from nearly 450 in 1963, Kellum said, “and we’re losing houses all over the place.”
In fact, he said, “We just lost T-Bowl last year.” That would be T-Bowl Lanes in Newington. The alley in which Amy Bisson Sykes grew up.
WHEN DUCKPIN WAS LIFE
She was 3 years old when her father, an insurance man named Dick Bisson, bought the 48-lane alley in 1981. “His dream was to own a duckpin bowling alley,” she said.
The youngest of his four children, Amy took to the game like—well, you know. “I never really found the sport to be difficult,” she said.
By 12, she had her trusty red-and-white ball, engraved with her given name. By 15, she had a junior-level reputation as a fierce competitor with the exceptional hand-eye coordination required to consistently knock down a stubborn last pin 60 feet away. The junior records piled up: highest game (262); highest three-game set (567); highest average (145).
She played softball at American International College in Springfield, Mass.; graduated with a degree in elementary education; and promptly joined the professional duckpin tour. Reaching the finals of her first tournament, at Perillo’s Bowl-O-Drome in Waterbury, Conn., she faced an estimable opponent, Lynne Heller, a Hall of Famer who had recently bowled a 200 game.
Into that cocoon she slipped. All business. She won the tournament and, soon, a reputation. A couple of years later, she wound up being matched with another bowler through the entirety of a weekend tournament. At the end of it, the other woman said she was glad to have spent time with her, adding, “You’re not the bitch that people say you are.”
Bisson Sykes remembers the moment as if it were yesterday: at Pinland Bowling Lanes, just outside Baltimore. “Back then, I probably just closed myself off to that,” she said. “I was just there to bowl. But I think people took me as cocky.”
The tournament wins and records kept piling up. Then, in 2007, she met Stephen Sykes, a financial adviser, through mutual friends. Coming from Pittsfield in the Berkshires, he knew little of duckpin bowling and nothing of the superstar status of the woman he was now dating.
They married and moved to Pittsfield, just 60 miles—and a duckpin chasm—away from her father’s alley in Newington. “I thought I could handle it,” Bisson Sykes said. “I didn’t think that it would have the impact that it did.”
She gave birth to her first son, Benjamin, in 2009. Returned to the tour in 2010 and was named female bowler of the year (one of at least eight such honors). Gave birth to her second, Nathan, in 2011. And was named bowler of the year in 2012.
That same year, her father died, unexpectedly, at 65. He took a cup of coffee to his work area at the back of the lanes, where all those Sherman Pinsetters were clacking and whirring, and collapsed.
And the next year, in the spring of 2013, her younger son, Nathan, was found to have a brain tumor. After two brain operations and who knows how many consultations—a neurologist, a neurosurgeon, a neuro-oncologist, a neuro-ophthalmologist—it was determined that the tumor, sitting on his brainstem, was inoperable.
These days, no news is good news. Nathan was undergoing magnetic resonance imaging every few months, but now he has yearly intervals between scans and is monitored by doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He attends preschool, sings, dances and trails after his older, protective brother.
“A goofball, a spitfire,” Bisson Sykes said of Nathan. “He lights up the room.”
As Nathan, 4, illuminated a room in the Sykeses’ house, and as Benjamin, 6, dueled imaginary demons with his “Star Wars” saber, their mother went down to the basement. There, inside several plastic tubs stacked in a far corner, were the trophies and plaques that state her case as the world’s best female duckpin bowler. Once on display upstairs, they lost out to the playthings of children.
MOURNING A FADING PASTIME
Reading through a couple of old newspaper clippings, Bisson Sykes mourned a pastime inexorably slipping into memory. Here was an article featuring T-Bowl, her father’s bowling alley. Closed last year, it is now a furniture store.
“So many places are closing,” Bisson Sykes said. “People just don’t come out to bowl. Where is everybody going?”
Bisson Sykes knows at least where she will be for the Memorial Day weekend: at Turner’s Dual Lanes, in Hagerstown, Md., for the first tour stop of the women’s 2016 season. She has already paid her $115 entry fee.
She will be wearing a rubber bracelet on her right wrist that reads, “Nate the Great.” And in her travel bag she will have all the essentials for a duckpin assassin:
The red-and-white ball she has carried with her since she was 12. Two other balls. A pair of Dexter bowling shoes, with the toe bottom worn away on the right shoe from so many follow-through curtsies. And a gray bowling shirt adorned with 19 stars.
It’s not the same as it was, of course. When she turned professional 16 years ago, she’d see 80, maybe 100 women competing in a tour. Now, maybe half that.
But she will enjoy herself, catching up with friendly adversaries, visiting an outlet mall, going to dinner with a few close duckpin pals. And when it’s time, she will lose herself in the fading, therapeutic endeavor of throwing a ball to knock things down.
EPILOGUE
As of this writing, Amy Bisson Sykes has 23 stars on her game-day shirt—one for each of her tournament wins—having added four more since this story’s publication in 2016. She has also broken several more records, and has been named bowler of the year two more times. In women’s duckpin bowling, she is the best there is.
More important, Ms. Sykes remains very active in raising money for A Kids’ Brain Tumor Cure Foundation, a non-profit 501 (c) organization. The website is https://akidsbraintumorcure.org. The page dedicated to her son Nate is www.teamnatethegreat.org.
A Ranger, a Field and the Flight 93 Story Retold
SHANKSVILLE, PA.—SEPTEMBER 4, 2016
Just another Thursday, and the morning mix includes leather-vested bikers from New Jersey, Amish visitors from Pennsylvania and a few children adjusting to a park not intended for play. They settle onto benches for the 11 o’clock retelling.
A ranger in the green and gray of the United States National Park Service tucks his peanut-butter-and-jelly lunch on a shelf and walks out to face his audience. A field of wildflowers undulates behind him; the pewter-bellied clouds seem nearly within reach. He begins:
“Remember how bad the weather was that morning?”
Hesitant nods turn quickly to head shakes. No. On that particular September morning, you could see forever.
