By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Bowler Sandy Favreau was clearly upset.

“It’s like a death in the family,” she was saying. “I hate to see it end.”

But like it or not, the pinsetters will be stilled and the balls put away at Auburn Lanes, and soon.

Pat Irish, who has run the popular candlepin bowling alley with her husband, Chip, for the past 15 years, says, “We’ve got to be out by midnight on Aug. 31.”

The final Monday night bowling league roll-offs are set for Aug. 22. After that, unless Favreau can persuade the Irishes to host one more evening of bowling fun, it’s lights out.

It isn’t that Pat and Chip Irish want to get out of the business.

“We couldn’t come to a lease agreement,” said Chip Irish. “They want to go up another $1,000 a month. We can’t afford that. It would be like working for nothing.”

Pat Irish said the closing date was dictated by the lease, which expires Aug. 31. By calling it a night a few days earlier, she and Chip will have time to move out some of the alley’s equipment. Chip Irish said he has been approached by someone who wants to buy it.

He did much the same years ago when L&A Lanes in Lewiston closed. The equipment can be cannibalized and used to keep other alleys up and running.

Auburn Lanes opened in the early 1960s during the height of the candlepin bowling craze that swept New England. Candlepin bowling remains an East Coast phenomenon, although fewer and fewer lanes remain open.

Favreau said her family grew up bowling at Auburn Lanes. She enjoyed it not only for the sport, but for the socializing that went with it.

“We’ve made some wonderful friends, people we never would have known if it wasn’t for bowling,” she said.

She suspects that more than one person met their future spouse as a result of bowling there, too.

The lanes, and the Irishes, also proved to be a safe haven for the Favreau children, and hundreds of others like them.

“We never worried when the kids went there,” said Favreau. “And we always knew where they were.”

So popular were the lanes with kids that often the place became the site of bowling-theme birthday parties.

“We’d put bumpers on the alleys,” said Chip Irish, and let the kids go at it.

But older people also enjoyed the lanes. Even now the place hosts two seniors leagues in which about 110 senior citizens bowl and socialize twice a week.

Adult leagues during the year bring in another 360 bowlers each week. League play would take place six nights a week and Saturday mornings.

The lanes also proved to be a popular place to go with a date.

Now, says Favreau, she’s scrambling to put together a league of Auburn Lanes regulars who will bowl this fall at alleys in Oxford. That bowling alley, along with one in Lisbon, are the closest to the Twin Cities to offer the candlepin sport.

Pat Irish says she feels bad about having to close.

“Oh, gosh. This (past) weekend was terrible,” she said.

That’s when she learned she and Chip couldn’t manage to meet the spike in rent and that the owners wouldn’t lower it. Within hours of their negotiations failing, she said, “a for sale sign went up.”

Favreau says she’ll miss the place.

“It’s part of the family,” she says.