Before streaming, smartphones, and social media, bowling leagues used to bring people together. And in New England, it was candlepin bowling. Alleys stretched from Massachusetts all the way into Canada’s Maritime Provinces. But it never really caught on anywhere else.  

But in Ellsworth, Maine, Autumn Mowery is fighting to keep the candlepin flame flickering.

Asked what the difference is between candlepin and regular bowling, Mowery replied, “Well, this one’s better!”

In short: it’s thinner pins, and smaller balls. And it’s not easy.

Mowery has been coming to this alley since she was six years old, especially during Maine’s winters. Ellsworth doesn’t boast a lot to do when the days are long and the snow is deep.

At 17, she started working at the alley, not in the front, but in the back, where she became fascinated with the old-world engineering of the pin-setting machines. “I remember my first time going back there, I’m looking up at these machines and I’m like, ‘Whoa, like, this is so cool!’” she said.

They are the beating heart of this place – a ballet of gears and conveyors that would be the pride of any museum dedicated to analogue genius. And when something broke, Autumn risked life and limb to fix it. She’s gotten smacked in the eye with a ball, broken more than a few fingers, and the gears snarl her hair every time they get the chance. 

And yet, she treats the machines like employees, even talking to them: “When I’m having a really good day, I will come back here and go, ‘Let’s go! We got this!’” she said.

She came into this family of pins by way of defeat. The previous owner had let the alley fall into the gutter. In 2020, it was set to be bulldozed, until Mowery begged to give her three months. If she couldn’t keep the balls rolling, she said, the owner could take the wrecking ball to all of it. She was just 18 at the time. “The obstacles this place has thrown at me, sometimes I think it doesn’t want me here,” she said.

Shortly after taking over, a storm fried the alley’s wiring, the roof started leaking, and a pipe burst. And then, COVID hit. Not to mention that she was working every single day just to keep the lights on.

But she never thought of throwing in the towel. “I would’ve if it wasn’t for Mom,” she said. “She was kind of like the angel during everything. Because of Mom, I didn’t give up.”

Her mom, Amanda, is her best friend. If she taught her anything, Mowery says, it was to remain positive, even in the darkest of times. “Growing up was just really tricky, just walking on eggshells a lot,” Mowery said. “We were feeding off of the environment that was around us.”

That “environment” was challenging, both physically and mentally, Mowery says. She still suffers from anxiety to this day, but it’s in that suffering she has found a way to help others. “I wanted to become a clinical therapist. That was kind of always the goal, to help people. And with this place, I saw a lot of potential.”

She remembers one day in the bowling alley she noticed a situation she could tell wasn’t quite right: “There was a couple sitting over at that furthest booth. And she wouldn’t leave the guy’s side, and I thought, I definitely was, like, catching on to some red flags. When I brought out their food, I brought them out napkins, and I handed her the napkin and I had written on there to do a thumbs-up or thumbs-down if she was okay, and she put a thumbs-down.”

Mowery called the police.  

In the ensuing months, she began opening the alley to those who needed a place to talk, just like that stranger. “Domestic violence victims have been able to come here,” she said, “and we’ve been able to, like, put the tables and chairs all together and do therapy sessions.”

Her outreach to both adults and kids has been noticed. Bowler Jen Johnson had stopped coming here altogether. But she’s back now, with all her friends. “For a girl her age to bring this to life again, to reinvent it, it’s a gift for all of us,” Johnson said. “That’s why we want to give back to her, because she brings people together.”

It’s been six years since Mowery first made that three-month offer to keep the alley running. She’s now 24, making monthly payments to buy the place, along with her business partner. Ryan Lounder. He’s also the pizza chef, the fry cook, and he owns the game shop next door. He’s also Mowery’s fiancé. They plan to hold their wedding reception in the alley next year.

Unlike some couples, they don’t argue about money. They have a GoFundMe, but haven’t really told anyone about it. Instead, what little profit they do bring in, they’ve turned around for the community, in food drives and pancake breakfasts.

Asked if they can afford to do that, Lounder replied, “Really? Probably not. And should we? Also, probably not. Could we upgrade the machines more? Yes. But we’re not the only people in need of stuff.”

The old machines still test Mowery’s patience, but they’re her babies – along with their young son, Jackson. He can barely walk, but already gets the spirit of the sport. “I have joked with a lot of people, that he’s either going to love bowling, or hate it!” Mowery said.

Bowling a 300 – a perfect candlepin game – is almost impossible. As far as we can tell, no one ever has ever done it. But Autumn Mowery has nevertheless found this a perfect place to remind herself and others that real connections, while never perfect, do in fact matter.

“For so long I’ve been searching of who I am, and I feel, like, that the place really did save me, and helped me find that,” she said. “I feel like it really just brought out who Autumn really is, if that makes any sense! And it just feels good. I’m happy, you know? And me being happy is also making others around me happy. So, it works out!”

     
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Story produced by Jon Carras. Editor: Carol Ross. 

MONSON, Maine (WABI) – Crews are on scene of a fire in Monson.

The fire happened at the old Moosehead Mill just before 7 p.m., Saturday, according to the Piscataquis County Emergency Management Agency.

There are power outages in Monson and Elliotsville, authorities said.

Officials are asking people to avoid the area.

Crews from Piscataquis and Penobscot counties are responding to the scene. Firefighters will be working throughout the night to put out the fire, officials said.

We will have more information once it becomes available.

ALLAGASH, Maine — Troy Jackson stood alongside a small group of loggers deep in the northern Maine woods and stared down State Police troopers who threatened to arrest them.

The lumberjacks had used their trucks to block access to the Quebec border in protest of Canadian loggers who were stealing their jobs by working for less. The blockade, which took place nearly 30 years ago, failed to stop the problem, leading Jackson to decide that he needed to try another way.

“He realized that the only way to change, to change it from the inside, was to be involved,” said Hilton Hafford, a logger who stood with Jackson at the blockade.

That moment set the fifth-generation lumberjack on a path into politics, eventually making him Maine’s unlikely Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He faces longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of a handful of races that could determine control of the chamber in November.

Jackson’s campaign has focused on his ties to Aroostook County, a sprawling, wooded region known as “The County” to Mainers. It’s where Jackson, 58, says he watched hard-working people struggle to get ahead, fueling his fight against billionaires and corporations. It also is the place that has elected Jackson to the Legislature while supporting Republican Donald Trump for president.

Defeating Collins, a five-term incumbent who has survived other efforts by Democrats to unseat her, will not be easy.

Jackson is a last-minute replacement for Graham Platner, the initial nominee who exited the race after a sexual assault allegation that he denied. Jackson has accused Collins of looking out for herself instead of Maine and he criticized her vote that paved the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to end the nationwide right to an abortion. Collins, 73, who is also from Aroostook County, has accused Jackson of being too liberal for the state.

Speaking to Maine Democrats while he accepted the party nomination last month, Jackson pointed to his logging background and humble upbringing in a rural county as critical to shaping his desire to fight for the working class.

“What I am is a guy from northern Maine that’s a logger,” Jackson said.

The evolution of a liberal lumberjack

Aroostook County, among the poorest in the state, is thinly populated but so large that it could easily contain both Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Tucked in the northern tip of the county is Jackson’s hometown of Allagash, where pavement turns into the logging roads and where Jackson went to work as a lumberjack at 19.

Jackson said he worked long, dangerous hours. It was not unusual to wake up at 2:30 a.m. for a 12-hour shift on a job that often did not offer health insurance.

“Everyone in that profession works hard for our families. We did follow the rules. But the harder we worked, the more that companies took from us,” Jackson said during his nomination acceptance speech at a party convention in Bangor. “And further behind we would fall.”

The town saw a steady drop in population as job opportunities dried up. Officials shuttered the school in the mid-1990s, crushing those who remembered the glory days of the school’s prominent basketball team, which won a handful of state championships in the 1970s.

Jackson’s disappointment with the logger blockade and other labor demonstrations in the late 1990s further cemented his feeling that something had to change.

He turned his attention to running for state office. Jackson first ran as a Republican but failed to collect enough support in a region that was heavily Democratic at the time. Eventually he won running as an independent and then became a Democrat in 2004. He went on to serve as president of the state Senate.

His political positions evolved over time, particularly on social issues. Early in his political career, Jackson opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. He has since reversed those stances.

“The logging industry is a very, very red industry,” said Louie Pelletier, the brother of Jackson’s longtime partner, Lana Pelletier. “That’s the kind of mindset he was in.”

Once in office, Jackson started to think he was on the wrong side of those social issues, added Louie Pelletier, who was a logger before taking over his family’s wood shop in Allagash.

“Then he never looked back,” he said.

Allagash is divided on the crucial Senate race

There is just one restaurant in Allagash, while a modest museum alongside the banks of the St. John River displays key moments in the town’s history, including a framed photo of Jackson shaking hands with former Democratic President Joe Biden.

As of late July, only one campaign sign for Jackson could be seen from the main road that goes through Allagash. Several Republican gubernatorial and congressional candidates’ signs were prominently displayed.

Taking a break from slinging hamburgers during the weekend lunch rush, Darlene Dumond acknowledged that Allagash remains divided on Jackson. She supports him.

With a population of about 230 people, Allagash is defined by the handful of families who have lived for decades in “Moosetown,” where divisions can fall not only between Republicans and Democrats, but Catholics and Baptists.

Dumond said Collins’ long tenure as senator has been a disappointment even if she helped bring in resources and money to the state. She pointed to Collins’ role in confirming Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he helped overturn the ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide.

“Why would our girl from Aroostook County be the deciding vote for the justice that overthrew Roe v. Wade?” Dumond said, shaking her head.

Collins has said she disagrees with the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but she does not regret her vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

Jackson has repeatedly argued that he will be a strong Senate candidate because he has kept his legislative seat as a Democrat while the region steadily became more Republican, including when Aroostook County swung for Trump.

Still, Jackson has struggled to compete outside Allagash. He failed to secure the Democratic nomination for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in 2014 and came in third place in the June 9 primary for governor. In 2023, he lost a local race in Allagash — a seat for first selectman position — by six votes.

He has butted heads with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers while in the Legislature, including Democratic Gov. Janet Mills. She ran against Platner for the Senate nomination but dropped out, citing a lack of campaign money. Mills has since declined to endorse Jackson.

Some lawmakers who worked with Jackson have criticized him as having a temper, including once throwing a plastic water bottle on the ground in frustration while disagreeing with a female lawmaker. His inner circle is quick to deny he has anger issues, instead describing him as “passionate” and “competitive.”

Asked by reporters about the confrontations, Jackson said “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” saying that he took responsibility for his outburst and apologized to those he had confrontations with at the time.

Hafford, who worked alongside Jackson as a logger, has seen that fiery side but chalked it up to strong feelings. He remembers being in meetings with Jackson in the 1990s where loggers were debating what to do to improve working conditions, and encouraging Jackson not to fly off the handle — even though he wanted to.

“Troy would look over at me and he’d say, ‘Is it time yet?’” Hafford said.