Welcome to Hell World by O'Neil Luke;

Author:O'Neil, Luke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: LCO010000
ISBN: 6518919
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2019-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE MAN WHO BOWLED A PERFECT GAME ON 9/11

SO OF COURSE EVERYTHING WAS DEAD SILENCE.

Bill Moro remembers 9/11 fondly. He’d gotten up early that morning to go to work at the paper mill like any other day. Tucked into the southwest corner of Massachusetts, not far from the New York and Connecticut borders, the area around Great Barrington, where Bill has lived his entire 67 years on earth, was once one of the centers of paper production in the country but not so much anymore due to they closed all the plants. Bill’s plant, now known as Onyx Specialty Papers, the last mill in the area, sits on the Housatonic River, which travels 150 miles south from there and winds its way down into the Long Island Sound. If he’d picked up a copy of the Berkshire Eagle that morning Bill would’ve seen headlines that didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Pittsfield’s Postmaster transferred, read one. Experts say Mideast talks already in doubt another.

And then it was 9/11.

“I was at work when it happened,” Bill said. “Of course we didn’t have a television there, but we had a radio and a newsflash came across the radio. So of course everything was dead silence.”

Bill and his co-workers finished out the day, and not knowing what else to do he said fuck it, let’s go bowling, and man is he glad he did because it was the best game of his life. He’d never bowled so well in decades of trying. He’d never bowl so well again. Amidst the chaos and fear and uncertainty of the world changing in ways neither he nor the rest of us yet understood, Bill Moro went and bowled a perfect damn game on 9/11.

I first heard about Bill’s game this summer when someone on Twitter posted a picture of him. When you bowl a perfect game at the Cove Lanes there in Great Barrington where he lives they go and put your photo on the wall as a way of commemorating a memorable and festive occasion.

I knew instantly I wanted to talk to Bill when I saw the photo but he wasn’t so easy to track down. I reached out to the bowling alley and after a couple weeks Juanita O’Rourke one of the owners wrote me back.

“I do believe that the bowler who bowled the 300 on 9/11 no longer bowls at the Cove and has not for many years,” she told me. “I do not have contact information for him although I do believe he is local. Hope that gives you something to go on,” she wrote. “Sorry I’m not much help.”

O’Rourke bought the lanes with two of her nephews in 2003. Both of the nephews had worked there doing odd jobs in exchange for unlimited video games when they were kids, and the timing was perfect for one of them, Michael Hankey, to try something new because he’d lost his job of 10 years at the Rising Mill when new ownership closed it down the year before.

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