Okay, I gotta steal The AP's opening line here because it's beautiful:
A Michigan man made a striking discovery under his house when he went to demolish his back stairs: about 160 bowling balls.
🤣🤣🤣
I promise I won't spare you the details...
This dude was hitting up his back stairs for a little demo action when he realized there was a bowling ball underneath the concrete.
"Okay," he must have thought, "this is strange."
And he just kept digging (mostly because he was trying to get rid of his old stairs, but now a little bit of curiosity had kicked in).
And as he broke up more of the stairs—it took four hours—he found bowling ball, after bowling ball, after bowling ball. Eventually there were 158.
158 BOWLING BALLS!
UNDER THE BACK STAIRS!
WHY?!?!
Actually, there's an extremely simple explanation.
See, David Olson—now known as "the bowling ball guy"—lives in the beautiful beach town of Muskegon, MI. And it just so happens the Brunswick Corporation ran a few plants in this town since way back in 1906, the last one being demolished in 2006.
Muskegon County became a hub for bowling manufacturing when Brunswick Bowling Products brought its operation to the area in 1906. The iconic Muskegon plant produced bowling balls, pins and equipment for a century until production was moved to Mexico.
At the company's height, Brunswick Bowling Products had 11 factories in town producing everything from toilet seats to truck tires to bowling alley equipment, according to Kirk Bunke, site manager at the Muskegon Heritage Museum.
But that doesn't really explain the whole bowling balls under the stairs thing, you might be saying.
Well...
"It shows our industrial past and the innovation of the workers. They saw a waste product, came up with a use and way to improve the house with no out-of-pocket expense," [manager of a local museum, Kirk] Bunke said.
It was an "extra perk," Bunke said, for Brunswick employees to take and reuse products that didn't meet sale quality, like repurposing bowling pins to make footstools.
So these dudes just used the free bowling balls in place of gravel or sand!
Brilliant!
(and cheap)
Olson has started a Facebook group for his new discovery and hopes to find even more bowling balls under his home.
