BY BOB JOHNSON
Grange Halls were established after the Civil War to serve America’s rural and agricultural communities. The town of Fredonia in Upstate and Western New York is home to Grange Hall No. 1, constructed in 1868, which still stands on Main Street. Fredonia also has a place in history books for having hosted the first meeting of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which would lead a decades-long movement to enact Prohibition in the United States.
As the 20th century unfolded, Fredonia was part of a region where manufacturing fueled the economy, with steel and other industries providing the livelihoods for most residents. In 1959, Lou Nocek opened the Modern Lanes bowling center, featuring 12 lanes and a dozen modern AMF pinspotters.
Steel company employees and other blue-collar workers packed the house, prompting Nocek to add another 12 lanes. When he went to order the steel trusses needed to expand, larger and less-expensive trusses were available, so the plan changed to adding 16 lanes. Nocek also wanted to incorporate the Modern Lanes name but somebody had beaten him to it, so he decided to change the name of the expanded center to Lucky Lanes. He’d long had the nickname “Lucky Lou” for reasons lost to history.
In 1977, with the local economy showing no signs of declining in any significant way, 12 more lanes were added to Lucky Lanes, bringing the total to 40.
Soon, however, factory closures found their way to Fredonia. America’s Rust Belt was creeping ever closer, gradually choking the life out of the once-flourishing town.
“The population has been in a steady decline for close to 50 years,” says Paul Nocek, the son of Lou, who took over the family business in 1996. “There was a steel plant that’s gone. Kraft had a plant here. There was a shovel company. Three hundred jobs here, 200 jobs there. Over time, that’s a lot of families moving out of the area.”
As of 2021, the population of Fredonia was 9,809, an 11.8% decline since 1980. One by one, centers in Chautauqua County closed. Today, there are two eight-laners in the general vicinity of Lucky Lanes.
“I’m a big center in a small town,” Nocek notes. “But I don’t have a lot of people to delegate to. I’m the mechanic, I oil the lanes, I order stuff, I don’t have a food-and-beverage manager. Things like that.”
Fortunately, Nocek knows the business like the back of his hand — his left hand, that is.
“I remember sorting pop bottles in wooden crates,” he says. “The pop came in glass bottles back then. I sharpened No. 2 pencils for the score tables,” but not yellow pencils because the center never had telescores.
“My dad was old-school,” Nocek says. “He never wanted automatic scoring. It was a battle for years to get him to do it. Finally, we put in (Brunswick) Frameworx. We went from archaic to brand-spanking new in one fell swoop.”
Before that, Nocek learned how to work on the pinspotters from a family friend, Wayne Wilcox.
“He had one of those mechanical minds where he could figure out how things worked, and if something didn’t work, he could fix it,” says Nocek. “He’d grab me and throw me in a machine, then he’d give me a wrench and say, ‘Do this.’ There was no looking in a book. You just learned how to do it.”
As for the business side, Nocek says his father taught him that, “and my mother (Nancy) was instrumental in keeping my father from killing me.”
Given the long hours and hard work required to keep a 40-lane center profitable in a small town, did Nocek ever consider seeking a different career path?
“Never,” he says without even pondering the question. “I always wanted to do this. My father didn’t even really want me to go to college, but enough people convinced him to let me go and get an education; they told him it couldn’t hurt me.”
With that, Nocek began attending Fredonia State, part of the State University New York system, full-time while continuing to work full-time at the center. Lou Nocek would have expected nothing less.
“He was born before the Depression and grew up on a grape and berry farm,” Nocek says. “Those were hard times, and he developed a crazy work ethic — something, fortunately or unfortunately, he passed along to me. Everyone says I work too much, but oh well.”
The farm is situated about a mile from the bowling center, and Nocek works it during his “spare time.”
“We have about 15 acres of grapes — mostly Concord, with some Niagara — in five fields,” Nocek says. “My house is on that property. We sell our grapes to Growers Co-op, which is a step above Welch’s in quality, for purple grape juice, jams and jellies.”
Nocek pays neighboring farmers who own expensive equipment to handle spraying in the vineyard and harvesting, while he performs general upkeep throughout the year.
In the spring of 2024, an ill-timed spring frost damaged vine buds just as they were beginning their growth period, ultimately costing Nocek 80 percent of anticipated tonnage. That was a significant financial hit.
But barely a month after the frost, something happened in the vineyard that was even more significant — something that would change Nocek’s life forever.
“I was looking to replace some lower vine wires in a couple of the vineyards that were getting really bad,” Nocek says. “They were 50 years old, and each year when I tried to fix them, they were breaking in different spots. I was getting tired of that.”
Nocek bought some new wire, cut it into pieces that were 15 feet long and was carrying them to the vine rows by hand.
“After doing about 10 rows of that I’m thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. This is going to take all summer.’ I needed to find a different way to do it.”
His solution: to use an auger-type system.
In a vineyard, an auger is a mechanized drilling tool used for efficiently digging holes for planting new vines, replacing old ones and installing trellis posts. The system uses a spiral bit powered by a motor to quickly bore holes in the soil, which greatly reduces the manual labor and time required for establishing and maintaining a vineyard.
Nocek’s plan was to use the auger in a different way: to wind up the wire for easy movement and placement.
But sometimes plans go awry.
“I got the tractor running,” Nocek recalls. “I tied the wire around the auger and started it, just guiding the wire onto it. All of a sudden, the wire caught a little bit and pulled the auger out a little way. I pushed it back up straight and it was winding wire again.
“Then it really caught somewhere down the wire and pulled the auger way out. The wire came off the bottom of it — kind of unwound a little bit. I pushed it back down vertically so it would wind again and it started. But some of the loose wire, when it came back and tightened, latched the back of my right hand to it as it was running, and it was turning away from me.”
There was no time for Nocek to react, other than to try to resist the pull and say, “No, no!”
The auger twisted and pulled Nocek’s right arm off, separating at the elbow. The date of the accident is engrained in his mind: May 21, 2024.
“It was not my best day,” Nocek understates.
Nor his best month, given the frost that struck the vineyard just weeks earlier.
“I’ve been trained since a little boy to be careful around machinery,” Nocek laments. “Around farm equipment and pinspotters, you have to be. Just one moment of putting my hand in the wrong place took away that arm.”
But when the accident occurred, Nocek had little time for reflection. He needed to act.
For whatever reason, perhaps because she had always kept his father from “killing him,” Nocek thought he should call his mother to cancel their dinner date. Almost immediately, he concluded it might be a better idea to have someone else call her. Finally, he decided to call 9-1-1.
Nocek fashioned a tourniquet out of what was left of his right arm. He laid down. He elevated the wounded area. He put pressure on it.
“I have no idea why all that stuff went through my head,” he says.
The local rescue squad arrived in about six minutes, stabilized Nocek, drove him to a nearby heli-pad, and a helicopter transported him to the nearest trauma center, Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, where a team was waiting for him.
Reflecting on the incident, Nocek says he is surprised that he did not panic.
“I was very calm, and to be honest with you, I never would have bet on myself to be that way,” he says. “You just don’t know until you’re in a situation like that. I’ve had days at the lanes when things just went sideways for a while and I wasn’t that calm.”
Nocek underwent three surgeries in Buffalo, the first to stabilize him (and apply a real tourniquet), the second to clean him up and make the area look nicer, and the third two days later to clean the bone and sew him up in preparation for adding a prosthetic arm down the road.
Word spreads fast in a small town like Fredonia, and it wasn’t long after the accident that Nocek’s phone blew up with texts of concern and encouragement. As soon as he was able that night, he was returning the texts.
“What was I going to do?” he posits. “I was just laying there.”
After returning home, Nocek followed doctors’ orders as far as convalescing was concerned, but had to immediately begin adapting to becoming a lefthanded person. Back in the days when he’d played ice hockey, he shot lefthanded. Other than that, he did everything with his right hand.
“When I first got home, everything was different,” he reflects. “Brushing my teeth. Combing my hair. Taking a shower. You don’t appreciate the dexterity you have with your hands and arms until you don’t have one. It’s a two-handed world. Just opening a jar can be a challenge. I can’t play piano anymore.
“Writing is a challenge because I can’t do it quickly or neatly,” he adds. “People used to compliment me on my penmanship; not anymore. Everything in my life takes longer now. I still bowl three nights a week, but my average is a lot lower,” dipping from the low-200s to the mid-120s.
Of course, a lower average brings a bowler a higher handicap, and that helped Nocek and his long-time doubles partner cash in the Dunkirk Lakeshore Bowling Association Tournament.
While Nocek is fine with the bowling handicap he’s receiving — at least for the time being — don’t describe his lot in life as being handicapped.
“I don’t look at myself like that,” he says. “I’m the same person. I do the same stuff, as much as I can. I don’t use a ‘handicapped’ placard on my vehicle. I’m just missing part of my arm.”
Nocek says that a good friend who is in a wheelchair gave him some great advice that has helped him through this unplanned stage of his life.
“My friend told me, ‘Look, you have to let people help you now.’ I’m very comfortable being the helper, but I’m not comfortable being the helpee. I hate asking people for help. He asked me how many times I’d helped him over the 20 years since his accident. I said I didn’t know. And he said, ‘Exactly.’ And then he said, ‘Other people are like that for you. They want to help you.’ I never realized that the little things you do for people, they remember.”
As the weeks passed and Nocek slowly adjusted to becoming a southpaw, it was time to visit a prosthetist and prepare for the amplification process, which would involve increasing the strength of weak biological signals to enable reliable control of a prosthetic device. The appointment did not go as planned.
“The prosthetist told me that the length of my arm was about as bad as it could be,” Nocek says. “It’s too short for one amplification and too long for another. He said he recommended having a revision surgery to shorten it up by about 6 centimeters so anything they made could be put on.”
Yes, a fourth surgery.
It was now early September, and Nocek felt the need to fast-track the procedure.
“High school bowling was coming up in November, and that’s not a time I can be away from the center,” Nocek explains. “We have six high schools that bowl here. When they’re all here at once, they fill up all but four lanes.”
Nocek wasn’t seeking to get the work done for any reason other than to ensure the bowlers from his alma mater, Fredonia High School, and the five other high schools in the area got their new season off to a smooth start.
Despite all he has gone through — from surviving the accident to enduring four surgeries to learning how to do basic life skills all over again — Nocek says he feels fortunate.
“The surgeon told me that he had seen some rough injuries over the years, and if I had not resisted when my hand got caught, it would have pulled me in and wound me up like a bale of hay. He said I would have been sitting there spinning until someone found me. So I’m very lucky, honestly. I could have bled out. I could be underground.”
Given what he went through and the state of the economy in his community, did Nocek ever think about closing Lucky Lanes?
“No,” he says. “Too many people depend on me having this place open. The high schools, our junior program, the Special Olympics kids and adults, the adult leagues, club events from the college, people who have their birthday parties here…”
Nocek pauses as if assessing the enormity of that list.
“There’s no other center that could absorb all this,” he resumes. “If I closed up, all of these people and groups would have no place else to go.”
Adds Nocek: “Business isn’t as great as it once was, but it isn’t terrible. I’m thankful to have the business I still have, I’m grateful for the community we have and I’m grateful for our customers.”
Nocek has chosen gratitude over bitterness and community mindfulness over retirement, incredible decisions given all he has been through.
“People tell me I have such a great attitude,” he says. “But you can just sit there and feel sorry for yourself, or you can move on. I’m just doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”
It’s a frame of mind that has kept bowling alive in a Rust Belt town, providing residents with a place to gather, engage in friendly competition and keep in touch with one another — much like the spirit of Grange Hall No. 1, less than two miles away.
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