How One MAN found home
In 2016, Josh Solomon was standing outside Pro Bowl West in Fort Wayne having a cigarette. He was seven-and-half years into a career doing warehouse logistics for a grocery store chain and life was, by his own account, genuinely comfortable—four-ten shifts, every other weekend off, work he was good at. He was also, somewhere underneath the ease of it all, slowly going crazy.
“I wanted more,” he says.
As to what “more” could actually mean, Solomon thought back to his roots. “I grew up in a bowling family: Grandpa bowled, Mom bowled, my uncle bowled, my dad bowled professionally,” he says. He picked up a bowling ball for the first time at five years old and got serious about it at eight. “Dad took me out, got me my own ball drilled, got my own shoes. I loved it. I took to it. I was talented at it,” he says. He went on to bowl in high school, winning back-to-back state titles with guys who are still his best friends.
So, one day at work, Solomon called a friend who had just retired from coaching at Indiana Tech. “I’m not cut out for this life,” he said. “I can do the job, but I’d rather make bad money doing something I love than make the money I’m making doing what I’m doing.”
Taking a leap, he put in an application at Turbo, a bowling equipment company.
He didn’t even receive a “thank you for your application” e-mail.
Back outside Pro Bowl West, Brian Cave, both a friend and the general manager, was standing outside, too. David Small, the owner, drifted out to join them. Solomon told them that he was thinking about getting out of his job, and how he applied at Turbo but never heard back.
“Are you trying to get out of what you’re doing, or are you trying to get into bowling?” Brian asked.
“If I can do both,” Solomon said, “That’s what I want to do.”
Small told Solomon to come for an interview the following Monday.
“I had a job in bowling and a $4,000 raise waiting for me,” Solomon says now, with the kind of satisfaction that comes from knowing exactly how a story ends. He grins. “Don’t smoke cigarettes. It’s bad for you,” he says. “But if you’re going to smoke, smoke with the people who will change your life.”
Solomon spent the next few years learning the business and operations side of the bowling industry. Eventually, Small had ‘the talk’ with Solomon.
“Would you ever want your own bowling center?” he asked.
“That’s the dream,” Solomon replied.
Today, Solomon is living the dream. He’s the Regional Director for Fun Time Centers, a cluster of bowling facilities spread across Indiana and Michigan. His home base, the place he runs day to day and talks about in the way fathers talk about their kids, is Jax 60, a 60-lane facility on the west side of Jackson. He drove into Jackson on June 30, 2018, unloaded, and took over operations at the bowling center the next day, working 80-hour weeks before the boxes were unpacked.
Solomon’s best memories of bowling aren’t about perfect games, but spending time with family, friends of the family, and bowling teammates who stood up in his wedding years later. He’s trying to recreate those memories for the people of Jackson.
“This place is for Jackson,” he says. “Not for any other reason. We are here for the community, we’re here for the city, and we want to make it better.”
That’s not just talk. Jax 60 hosts seven high schools. It’s the home facility for Spring Arbor University’s bowling program—whose women’s team just won a national title. It hosts Junior Achievement’s Crazy Bowl, Big Brothers Big Sisters’ Bowl for Kids’ Sake, Henry Ford Health, Alro, regional tournaments, D3 state finals. They’ve converted a storage space they call the Paddock into a 120-person event room for baby showers, rehearsal dinners, cornhole tournaments and other events after landing a grant through Experience Jackson for the audio-visual upgrades.
The restaurant does hand-breaded chicken to order. The arcade with 54 games goes by the ‘Kiddy Casino’. There are leagues for those who take the sport seriously along with leagues called Here for the Beer, which is exactly what it sounds like.
While Solomon moved for the bowling, he says he’s stayed because of the community. “There are amazing people here who love this city. Relationships matter here. You know people personally. You help each other,” he says.
He tells a story about some landscaping his wife Amber wanted done. Instead of looking up a company, Solomon picked up the phone and called someone he knew could do the job. “I said, ‘Hey, can you come out to the house? My wife’s got some stuff she wants done,’ and they did,” he says. “Here in Jackson, a good business is built on relationships, not money. If you create good relationships and do right by people, everything else falls in line.”
Amber is a teacher from a small town in Indiana who met Josh while he was working at a bowling center in Noblesville. They were dating when David Small told Solomon he was giving him the Jackson center. Small had asked Amber and Josh out to dinner, looked at her from across the table and asked: if I give Josh a center in Jackson, are you going with him?
“She said, ‘I’ll follow him anywhere his dreams take him,'” Solomon says. He stops for just a second. “That’s when I knew she was the one.”
They moved in on June 30. On the evening of one of those first brutal weeks, his operations manager told him to go take Amber out to dinner, just get out for a couple hours. They drove around Jackson, came back, and stood in the living room.
“I just looked at her and started to tear up,” Solomon says. “I said, Babe—we’re home. This feels like home.”
She said, well, unless David moves you again.
“David’s not moving me,” he told her. “We’re staying here. This is home.”
Jax 60 Bowling & Fun
3501 Wildwood Ave, Jackson, MI 49202
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