Ethel Morley is not short on confidence.
After a 20-minute conversation with the Courier wraps up, her attention is directed to a bowling lane, where amid high fives and dabs from 20-plus pals, she proclaims: “I’m going to give you a lesson in a couple minutes.”
Morley is wearing an honorary jersey adorned with the number 99, along with a name bar that reads “The Great One.”
Such a site in a hockey rink would be cocky at best, sacrilege at worst.
“Gretzky’s got nothing on you Ethel,” Commodore Lanes league manager Ken Hayden proclaims.
Again with the confidence.
“I’ve been bowling with Ethel for 15 years and she’s the best bowler on our team — that’s what I tell everybody,” Janice, 81, tells the Courier.
Morley first bowled at the Commodore Lanes during the Second World War. On Jan. 16, she turns 99.
“I don’t feel any different and I don’t feel any older,” Morley says.
If friends really are the family we choose, then Morley is surrounded by family, both by blood and by kinship, on a Monday afternoon at Canada’s oldest bowling alley. Commodore Lanes opened on Sept. 8, 1930, when Morley was 10.
About 25 people, mostly women in their 70s, 80s and 90s, are chucking bowling balls down the lanes like nobody’s business.
After six or seven frames, Morley’s got the best score of the four others in her group. Morley may be the oldest person there, but she tosses bowling balls with more pep than anyone else.
And it’s not even close.
“She throws the ball harder than I do,” says Hayden, 14 years her junior.
