July 12 (UPI) — A Michigan man demolishing the back landing of his home made a surprising discovery under the stairs — 160 bowling balls.
David Olson said he was taking apart the stairs behind his Muskegon home July 1 when he noticed a spherical object in the sand behind some cinder blocks.
“That was one of the bowling balls. I didn’t think a whole lot of it. I was kind of assuming maybe there were just a couple in there just to fill in. The deeper I got into it the more I realized it was just basically an entire gridwork of them making up the weight in there,” Olson told the Detroit Free Press.
Olson said he continued to dig in the ensuing days and found 160 bowling balls.
The homeowner said the house was built in 1959, while the Brunswick Bowling Products factory was still operating in Muskegon. The factory produced bowling balls, pins and other products before the company relocated its operation to Mexico.
Olson said former Brunswick employees contacted him on social media and said it was common practice for workers to take unusable balls home to use as a substitute for gravel or sand in construction projects.
He said the balls are no good for bowling anymore, but he plans to put some of them to use.
“I plan to keep a lot of them, like some of the nicer looking ones, to do some edging,” he told MLive. “My wife is really crafty and wants to do some projects.”
Olson said he donated eight of the balls to a local church to use in a bowling ball cannon at a pig roast, and his stepfather is planning to use some of the balls as legs for custom-built furniture.