TOOTS BARGER, 85,
THE QUEEN OF DUCKPINS’ WOBBLY WORLD
Her family said the cause was cancer.
If duckpins doesn’t ring a bell, chances are you didn’t grow up in or around Baltimore, where the squat-pin version of the familiar 10-pin bowling game was invented and became something of a municipal mania.
During the years Mrs. Berger was virtually invincible, from the mid-1940’s to the mid-1960’s, the sport was so popular in Baltimore that the prestigious annual tournament sponsored by The Baltimore Evening Sun was regularly broadcast on local television, and Mrs. Barger, who won the tournament 12 times in 22 years, became such an acclaimed figure that she was regarded as the city’s premier athlete until Johnny Unitas came to town.
If the former Mary Elizabeth Ryan’s record of 13 world duckpin championships and 9 world scoring records doesn’t sound impressive, it’s a safe bet you haven’t stood at the head of a regulation,60-foot bowling lane and tried to knock down 10 undersized (9-inch tall) pins placed at the usual 12 inches spacing with a 3-pound ball just 5 inches in diameter.
If you had, you would not be surprised that in her reign in duckpins, which has the same 10-frame scoring system as regular bowling and the same theoretic perfect score of 300, Mrs. Barger dominated the sport’s women’s division for the better part of two decades without ever once reaching 200.
But then one of duckpins’chief appeals has been that scoring is so difficult that while there have been myriad perfect games in regular bowling, no one has ever rolled a perfect game in tournament duckpins, whose highest recorded score is 279. (Mrs. Barger’s best game was 198.)
No wonder. In contrast to the 8.5-inch bowling ball, the duckpin ball is small enough to roll between any two pins with plenty of room to spare. As a result, even though duckpins has been called a game of spares in contrast to bowling as a game of strikes, a spare (knocking down all 10 pins in two rolls) is so difficult that a third ball is allowed when a spare has not been scored.
Because the lightweight duckpin ball, which has no finger holes, is small enough for a child to handle, duckpins has long been cherished as a family sport in Baltimore.
Even so, Mrs. Barger, a Baltimore native who was given her nickname by an aunt, seems not to have played the sport as a child, perhaps because she was born only 13 years after duckpins’storied beginning.
According to Baltimore legend, it was invented in 1900 in an upstairs bowling alley at a tavern owned by two of Baltimore’s premier sports heroes, the baseball figures John J. McGraw and Wilbert Robinson.
The game got its name, so the story goes, because the squat, cutdown pins reminded the duck-shooting owners of ducks.
Mrs. Barger, whose husband, Ernest, was a plumber who later operated a bowling alley managed by his wife, was the mother of two children when she joined a housewife’s duckpin league in the late 1930’s and discovered that she had a rare talent for a difficult game.
Primarily because she played with dead solid oak balls in the days before the lively plastic pin era, Mrs. Barger’s records have long since been eclipsed, and the sport itself, which once proliferated along the Atlantic coast from New Hampshire to North Carolina and as far inland as Indiana, has been in serious decline, even in Baltimore.
Even so, Mrs. Barger continued playing until three years ago and remained such a well-known figure that in 1992 she achieved renewed prominence leading a campaign to have duckpins named the Maryland state sport.
The campaign failed, perhaps because legislators felt duckpins was just too odd to be the state sport, especially when Maryland already had an official sport: jousting.
Mrs. Barger is survived by a son, Ernest Jr., of La Jolla, Calif.; a daughter, Mary Jane Joyce of Derwood, Md.; four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
October 2, 1998