In New England (those six little states just to the right of New York), we used to have a lot of candlepin bowling lanes. My ex business partner, now deceased, had a candlepin league average of about 117, which was near world (small world) championship caliber. In the Boston suburbs, they had and still have a few Duckpin lanes. Duckpins look like undersized tenpins, whereas candlepins of course, look like candles. A "B" league candlepin bowler might average 100 per string, whereas a duckpin league bowler might average closer to 110.
When I was in the sixth grade, my father was in a store league that rented two adjacent lanes for a few hours on its league night, so he and I would get to bowl a practice string for free before the league competition started. Then, I would hang around the pinball machines and get to play the leftover games of all the bowlers who got called back for their next 5-frame "strip" before their pinball game credits were exhausted. Good deal for me (we were of modest means, to put it mildly).
One night, my father's team was short a man, so under league rules, his team had to post a "dummy" score of 80 pins per string, and they let me bowl in that turn for free, even though my scores didn't count. In the first string, I was actually high "man" for my father's team, bowling my then lifetime high score. The father of the owner of the bowling alley, who was a Greek immigrant, got on the public address system and announced, "You're attention pleeeze. Leetle AntAltMikie has a just beat his daddy, 110 to 109!". The next string, I scored a more normal 71 and began inauspiciously in the third, but then I marked in three of the last four frames, so the next message over the PA system was, "Leetle AntAltMikie has a just beat his daddy again, 104 to 99!"
My father was mortified and stopped taking me bowling after that.
