Ladies’ Night at the Bowling Alley: Clinton, Iowa, 1943

The archive record for this photograph names everybody in it — and then tells the whole story of the evening.

Rear brakeman Clarence Averill, at right, went over to the bowling alley in Clinton, Iowa, one night in January 1943 with friends: Lester Stein, a passenger brakeman on a streamliner; Jim Cross, a freight brakeman; and Miss Lucille Disher, who ran the boarding house where they all stayed when in Clinton. The other woman in the photograph is the proprietress of the bowling alley.

There was just one problem: it was ladies’ night, so there was no bowling for the men. The record finishes the story the way the evening finished: “Instead, they had beer and talked.”

Jack Delano’s photograph is a small, complete piece of wartime small-town life — railroad men on a night off, in a town that wasn’t home, making an evening out of a closed lane.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USW3-013976-E

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