PROVO — People ridiculed Lynne Wright 54 years ago when he built a bowling alley in the midst of sleepy orchards beyond the end of town.

It didn’t seem too smart to rebuild Regal Lanes either, after fire gutted it in 1952.

Time has proved Wright right. Provo long ago sprawled out past 1200 N. University Ave. The orchards are a memory and Regal Lanes sits on prime real estate along

the main artery of Utah’s third-largest city.

Wright, 89, still cleans the lanes each morning with his friend, Johnny Barrett, 83. The ritual they’ve performed together for 30 years usually ends with breakfast at Village Inn near the south end of University Avenue.

“We have a standing order,” Wright said. “If they see us walking in, they get it in to the cook.”

Both men eat the same meal: Water, no ice, and half a French skillet.

They plan to continue their tradition even after July 1, the day Regal Lanes re-opens under new ownership as Fat Cats, a glitzier bowling alley with a souped-

up arcade and a Pizza Factory outlet to boot. They don’t plan to stop cleaning the lanes and discussing BYU football at Village Inn even after Wright turns 90 on July 19.

Wright, a pioneer in the bowling industry, can’t imagine himself fully retired.

“I could easily do that,” he said, “but then I wouldn’t have anything to do.”

A sedentary Wright, who graduated from BYU during the Depression, would be a shock to those around him, too.

Wright’s son, David, said his father “is a pillar of work ethic; 18-hour days were nothing to him.”

Long days weren’t enough to pay the mortgage, however. At one point in the 1960s, Regal Lanes faced a serious challenge from a nearby 32-lane bowling alley, another on 900 East and the new lanes at BYU.

“Eighty-four lanes were built in a three-year period,” David Wright said. “Dad’s income was cut in half. It was obvious not all of these places would survive. The one on 9th East went out first, then the 32-lane one. It was a major crisis dad had to face. His other businesses really helped then.”

Lynne Wright, frustrated by how long it took to get supplies from Brunswick, had started Wright Distributing. He supplied most of the western United States except for the coast. Disappointed in the way his own lanes were refinished, Wright also started Wright Sanding and refinished lanes in several Rocky Mountain states.

“Nobody bowled in the summer,” he said, “so we needed additional income to make payments.”

Another break came from a local banker who bowled at Regal Lanes and paid Wright’s property tax one year when things were tight.

“Everybody used to bowl,” Wright said. “The mayor used to bowl.”

People still do, of course. More people bowled in one week last year than attended all the NFL games played in 2001. But bowling has changed drastically since the 1940s, when Wright was introduced to the sport at Bullock’s Billiards and Bowling on the 100 North block of University Avenue.

So, Lynne Wright bought land amid the orchards, landed the first federal small business loan in Utah and opened Regal Lanes in 1948 with 12 lanes, shuffleboard, ping pong and pinball games.

“People thought I was nuts going out there,” Wright said. “It was two blocks past the end of town. They wondered why I was going all the way out there.”

Wright, too, wondered briefly when Regal Lanes burned down in 1952. Wright had stayed home sick that day.

“Someone called me and told me the place was on fire,” Wright said. “I got up there, took one look and went right back home. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but all I could think about was putting it back up. I still thought it was a good business, and I thought the town needed it.”

Another first came soon after when Wright noticed his now 24 lanes had a problem in the maple at the head of each lane; the joints chipped and feathered. Wright decided to drill holes in them and apply an epoxy to hold them together firmly. With the help of a friend in Wyoming, he developed an injection gun that reduced the hard labor.

The problem was a national one. The pair sold the patent on their invention, which Lynne Wright estimates has saved the industry millions of dollars and each bowling alley hundreds of hours of labor. He still gets royalty checks, though they’ve grown smaller now as bowling alleys have gone to synthetic lanes.

Wright’s know-how made him a sought-after consultant who still gets several calls a week seeking advice. The proof can be seen at Regal Lanes every day.

“Generally,” Barrett said, “lanes last 20-25 years. We’ve had ours for more than 45 years.”

Fat Cats owners Sean Collins and Dave Rutter won’t be fooling with those lanes. Collins, in fact, started working at Regal as a teen-ager and took over management of Wright Distributing just a few years later. When several bowling alleys in Salt Lake City went out of business, Collins and his partners opened the first Fat Cats there in August.

Collins was a natural target when David Wright and his two sisters began to look for a buyer for Regal Lanes.

Lynne Wright began to turn over his businesses to his children a decade ago, for tax purposes. The distributing and refinishing businesses have been sold, but the man whose father died before he was born wanted to leave the bowling alley to his children.

Wright’s children, however, faced a major obstacle.

“This place is 54 years old now and we knew it needed heavy renovation,” David Wright said. “We didn’t want to go into heavy debt again, which it would require. We struggled with this because this is my father’s baby. He’s emotionally attached to this place. We worked with my father for a couple of years to get him to the point where he was willing to sell it.”

Selling to Collins was a key factor because he, like many in the business in Utah, got his start with Wright. Collins and his partners were willing to let Wright continue cleaning the lanes each day.

“All of us feel like if he didn’t have this place to come to every morning and give meaningful service, it would be hard for him,” David Wright said. “We feel like people who don’t have a purpose wilt away on the vine. We made it a fixed part of the deal that he still comes down here with Johnny and works on the lanes every morning.”

There’s nothing in the deal about the stop at the Village Inn, but Wright and Barrett expect to remain fixtures there, too. They’ll talk about football, fishing and car accidents that happened on the way to refinishing lanes at other bowling alleys.

The old friends also will laugh when people mistake their relationship.

“I guess because we both have no hair,” Barrett says with a laugh, “people think we’re brothers.”

No, it’s not the thinned-out hair that makes people think Wright and Barrett are brothers. It’s the close quality of a 48-year friendship created by a bowling alley.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.