Murals by Wallace Roland Stark
The Pioneertown Bowl offers
great food, games of skill
and a chance to match your bowling game
with the King of the Cowboys
"Red usually means stop but here it means go and green is usually go but here it's stop." Ron Young, owner/operator of the Pioneertown Bowling alley, is explaining the two salsas that come with our meal.
We've ordered chicken tostadas which he has just brought over from Maria's kitchen back behind the bar. We behold the heaping plates of vegetables pleasingly arranged and even more pleasing to the palate. But then there are those two little tempting bowls of salsa. The red looks hot but isn't. The green looks cool and inviting. I don't heed Ron's warning and pile on the green.
My wife, Elizabeth, rolls her eyes. "Typical John Huff," she murmurs.
I feign to ignore her. I take a bite of salad, braised chicken and crunchy corn tortilla. Very tasty. I follow it with another bite, this time with a goodly helping of the radioactive green salsa. In the moments that follow I pretend everything is okay but this is hard to do that when you're sweating behind your eyes and suddenly aware of sinal cavities you never knew you had.
Al, a Pioneertown Bowl regular, watches me with interest from the bar where he's sipping his beer. Right now the show I'm putting on is better than the sports channel on Ron's TV. "That stuff is sure hot," Al grins. "Makes you sweat in the winter time."
"Um-hm," I respond, avoiding my wife's twinkling delight.
But the dish is perfect and even the hot salsa adds its own piquant accent-- when used with discretion. Everything on Maria's menu is like this, the tasty side of perfect, what she and Ron have billed as "Maria's Mexican Hand-Crafted Foods."
Maria waves from the kitchen, dark eyes that always sparkle, raven black hair and a genuinely warm disposition that fills the whole big room. "She is the best thing that ever happened to me," Ron says softly. "We met in '93 and adding her food service here was something I thought was going to be complicated but she made it easy."
Where did Maria learn to cook?
"She was one of the older sisters in a traditional big family," says Ron, "Her cooking comes from the verbally handed down recipes of great grandmother, to grandmother, to mother to her. Restaurant cooking was no threat for Maria because feeding her family was like managing a restaurant every day."
Maria's best dishes?
"All of 'em," Ron answers emphatically. "I haven't found anything she cooks that I don 't like." Elizabeth and I nod in agreement. "But if the lights are off in the kitchen," he quickly adds, "don't bother to ask for food because I'd have to cook it and that would be bad."
Then there is the atmosphere of the bar itself. Part sports bar, pool parlor, game arcade, bowling alley and restaurant to be sure, but the walls are adorned with caricatures of early Pioneertown denizens and, of course, talking cows. My favorite cow is slurping its big tongue into a bowl of food on a table. A word balloon sprouts above the cow's head: "If I mix this with beer, it will surely stick to the sidewalk." Another cow has a movable flap over her udders. Elizabeth has to lift the flap, there's a sign under there: "Shame on you! Put down my skirt!" The murals are the work of Wallace Roland Stark, done in the late 1940's. If words could capture the feeling these happy pictures convey, then there wouldn't be any need for them. They are pure Pioneertown.
The bowling alley, all six lanes of it, is its own history lesson. One of the last several real wood lanes in the state and probably the whole country, even its Brunswick automatic pinsetters are historic. "We had a heck of a time keeping pin boys," Ron remembers. "They'd work a few hours and whine for their money to go on their way. In 1961 we got a deal on eight automatic machines from a bowling alley that was closing in Lakewood, California. These are Brunswick originals."
Of course, as most folks know, the first person to roll a ball down the lanes back in 1946 was none other than the King of the Cowboys himself, Roy Rogers. Ron has a picture to prove it. "I still have his scoresheet around here someplace," he says.
Ron Young came to Pioneertown in August of 1959. Alice "Honey" Fellers, reigning Realtor at the time, was showing him and his mom, Gladys, land parcels when she mentioned that the bowling alley was for sale. The rest is history. "It's been the most pleasant time of my life," Ron smiles. "Like most people here, I was bailing out of L.A. I was a linotype operator for the Los Angeles Times. It was a good thing I left when I did because a year or so later, my job disappeared-- done in by the modern age. It's been almost 40 years but it only seems like three or four. Time flies when you're having fun."
Whether it's a holiday or an ordinary day, all types of gatherings find their way to Ron and Maria's hospitality. There are the mule and horse clubs on Sunday afternoons and karaoke on Monday nights. Superbowl Sunday was a blowout with a potluck spread brought by attendees and prize drawings provided by Ron from the bar.
But now (1998) Ron is ready to move on. The bowling alley is up for sale, represented by Ed Greenfield with Titan Realty. "I've been doing it long enough," Ron says, "Time to go on to bigger game."
For sale: (1998) A living tradition; a good business for someone who likes people and wants to live up to a 40 year tradition of hospitality and hosting good times.
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