If you want to know how Steve Liesse ended up with a 13-foot-long, 300-pound sign blocking the garage door in his Chicago Heights driveway, the story starts in 1985, at Glenwood Bowl on Halsted Street just south of 183rd.
“I was bowling one night,” said Liesse, who was in three leagues at the time. “I sat down to have a beer. Bonnie Kubin (the alley’s manager) asked if I knew anybody who could tend bar. I said I could do it.
“So she threw me behind the bar for an hour with Laurie.”
Laurie would be Laurie Barker, a Glenwood native.
“That was the night I met her, when Bonnie put me behind the bar for that hour,” Liesse said. “Laurie showed me how to use the cash register, stepped back and said, ‘Have at it.’
“A few months later, we were dating.”
In 1989, they were married. Then came daughter Lauren, now 26, and son Jim, 22. And all the while, there was Glenwood Bowl.
“It was family,” Liesse said. “The kids slept on the floor when Laurie and I bowled in a Friday night mixed league.”
Steve tended bar through 1996, when a promotion at Ingalls Hospital, where he works as a building manager, ended the second job. Laurie, too, eventually left the bowling alley. But Lauren’s first job was there, in the snack shop, and she worked the alley’s final day of operation: April 1, 2006.
For the decade since, Glenwood Bowl has been a 52-lane ghost town — though the lanes and anything else of much value had been stripped out before demolition on the property began this spring.
Redeveloping the entire Glenwood Plaza property, from 183rd Street south to Strieff Lane, as well as the old Glenwood Theater land north of 183rd, is currently high on the village’s to-do list. Two developers’ proposals for the area are under consideration by the village board.
Once home to the Dragon Inn, a Chinese restaurant that lasted more than 30 years in its Plaza location, Harlem Furniture and the original Little Guys appliance store among others, Glenwood Plaza now has more vacancies than tenants. Some of those tenants have expressed an interest in being included in a redeveloped plaza, but none of the details have been worked out.
“We won’t see anything until 2017 as far as ground-breaking,” Glenwood’s public works director, Pat McAneny, said.
Building breaking, on the other hand, began with an outbuilding on the plaza lot that last was a liquor store. The former Garafalo’s grocery and the bowling alley were next in line.
Steve, a Hazel Crest native, is still a bowler, carrying averages in the 210 range in leagues at Oak Forest Bowl and Centennial Lanes. As the demolition began, he off-handedly mentioned to Laurie he wouldn’t mind having one of the two rectangular “BOWL” signs that remained above the alley’s west and south doorways. He thought nothing more of it until a few weeks back.
“We were sitting on the couch, and she started crying,” said Steve, suddenly adopting the mannerisms of a husband frantically searching for the wrong he must have unknowingly committed. “I said, ‘What?'”
Laurie explained she’d reached out to the village, but found out the signs were already spoken for. Her planned Father’s Day surprise for Steve was scuttled.
Within 10 days, Laurie got a call back from the village. The signs were too big for one of the original claimants to take. She could have one if she wanted it. She did.
“She posted it on Facebook — that’s how I found out,” Steve said. “I said, ‘Cool.’ Then she cried again.”
Originally neon, the rectangular red sign with “BOWL” spelled out in white block letters had an eight-inch-deep rear compartment housing transformers, other hardware and, Steve said, “about a thousand pounds of birds nests.” When the neon failed, two spotlights were rigged to illuminate the lettering.
Liesse plans to detach the metal sign from the rear compartment, then bolt the front plate — actually, two plates, “BO” and “WL” — to the deck railing of the family’s summer place on Woodsmoke Ranch in Seneca.
“I’m going to paint it up, close up the holes so we don’t get too many birds, and I’ll light it up again,” Liesse said.
Truth be told, he lit up a bit just talking about it.
Smiling, he said, “A lot of the faithful that bowled at Glenwood think the fact that I have the sign and that it was saved is kind of awesome.
“I do, too.”
Phil Arvia is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown
