As most of you locals out there already know Jay Lanes Bowling Alley in Douglasville, PA went up in smoke early Saturday Morning. Over 100 firefighters fought the two alarm blaze which has caused an estimated damage of $850,000, and will more in likely go up as the days progress. Most of the Bowling Alley is destroyed.

Now I want to bring up another side of this that won’t be reported. Both Jim Reitnour another blogger with the Berks Blog Network, and myself both knew the owner Ed Satkowski pretty well from both of us competing there for several years, and from what I have been hearing at Berks Lanes today about the gossip of Ed burning down the place to cover his losses kind of shocked me.

Now let’s come clean. Jim and I can both tell you that Ed has been running in red ink with the business for at least 5 years now. The Bar & Grill Flyns Inn made very little of no money there either. Now a ton of factors were the cause of this ranging from Douglas Township, and Berks County taxing Ed into submission, and the fact that the former Pottstown Bowling Association having a close connection with Albert Blough who owns CHB Sports which includes Limerick Bowl, and Berks Lanes were trying to destroy him there. Limerick and Jay Lanes were bitter rivals in the business.

This whole issue brought me to a conversation that Jim Reitnour, and I had with Ed about two years ago about the future of Jay Lanes. Ed seemed more and more stressed about the amusement tax being put on him harder and harder where his open bowling rates were getting hard to compete with Blough, and said he would more in likely have to call it quits in a couple of years. This was two years ago almost to the day when we had this discussion.