Perfect strike!

“We don't class this as work,” says Aldo Belmonte, sitting alongside his wife Marisa in the bowling alley they built and have operated together for the past four decades.

On Saturday, September 2, Aldo and Marisa celebrated the 40th anniversary of Orange Tenpin Bowl. But hearing them tell the story of how it all began, it is amazing that it happened at all.

“We were home at our house and we had a whole group of us and it was miserably cold,” recalls Marisa, who was just newly married to Aldo at the time.

“And everyone says, Gosh, we wish there was something here that we could all go to… Someone called out — we can't recall who it was — but it was a general consensus that it would be good if there was a bowling alley here.”

After everyone left, the young couple began to talk excitedly about the idea. They had both been dreaming of a business they could do together and this seemed an ideal opportunity.

“We couldn't sleep!” recalls Aldo.

“No, we couldn't,” says Marisa, “We thought, maybe this is what we need to do. So that's what we did!”

Despite having only bowled once before in their lives, Aldo and Marissa began pursuing the idea, quickly discovering that it was not going to be cheap.

“So 40 years ago, this was just over a million dollars to put together… a million dollars! Forty years ago, it's a lot of money!” says Aldo, whose Italian-born parents showed incredible faith in their son and his bride, despite never having set foot in a bowling centre in their lives.

“They became the collateral,” he continues, “Our home, their home, their cars, our undies, our bloody shirts! Everything became collateral to the bank!”

But Marissa says they were never apprehensive about such a large investment as they were all confident in their ability to make it work.

“They had faith in their son, I suppose, they had faith in us… We can't really recall the conversation with my father-in-law but we do know they were ‘all in’ right from the word go,” she says.

“And what surprises me is that we weren't frightened, not ever. We weren't anxious. We just thought, well, we are all hard workers, we'll just get in and do it!”

Aldo was 25 and Marissa not yet 21 when they opened the doors of Orange Tenpin Bowl, and it was not long after that their first child (and future world champion bowler) Jason Belmonte, was born.

“What did the accountant say? Hold off having a family for a while, but it was too late!” laughs Aldo.

Marissa says they just made it work, with Jason growing up alongside them in the bowling centre.

“I never found it hard. I was young. You can do anything when you're young — you can survive on two hours’ sleep if you need to!” she says, “But he was a great baby. He slept really well. He ate really well. He was here all the time with us…. in a way it was a good family lifestyle.

“And we never looked back. It was busy, it was seven days and when I say seven days a week it was from 8.30 in the morning to 11 o'clock, midnight…”

“And then we cleaned after that! We'd stay back and do all the cleaning,” adds Aldo.

Another challenge they faced bringing a bowling alley to Orange was that few of their early customers knew how to bowl.

“We had to teach people how,” says Marissa. “We had to score for them. They’d bring us this sheet, their piece of paper with the score on it, and we'd have to add up the scores.”

Technology has made things much easier in that regard, says Aldo, who does not miss the days of physically installing ‘bumpers’ in lanes, nor replacing globes and fans in the old manual scoring projector units.

“It has come a long, long way, the technology for bowling,” says Aldo. “We now have LED walls and we have imaging on the lanes. So at a kids' birthday party, jet fighters and unicorns chase the ball down the lane while they're actually bowling.”

And then there’s the Specto tracking system which gives accurate feedback on the speed and rotations of the ball, used by the local league bowlers to train for competitions.

While many things have changed over the past 40 years, it’s evident that Aldo and Marissa’s love of what they do has never waned.

“There's never been a day we're not happy to walk through those doors,” says Marissa.

“We love the interaction we have with people, whether they're visitors, locals, it doesn't matter from what walk of life we all come from, everyone's treated the same here.

“We enjoy people, we really do! And we love the industry. We love bowling. We love that it’s such an inclusive thing for people to do.

“We're very thankful that the community has embraced us and I think it's nice that we have a facility that locals can be proud of… and we plan to keep doing that!”