Many bowling alleys today are places where the martinis cost you at least as much as the bowling and a mirror ball twirls over neon lanes while a D.J. shouts in the booming dark. But those who roamed them between dusk and dawn in 1960s New York City recall places where kids too young to shave made more money in a night than their parents made in a year, con men faked heart attacks to evade the gangsters they swindled, and no one went home before sunrise.

It was a time “when America had a prince for a president and they called it Camelot, when Arnold Palmer was reinventing the golf tour and an arrogant kid from New York’s West Side was becoming bowling’s equivalent of ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson,” the bowling writer Dennis Bergendorf wrote in 1980 for Bowlers Journal, a monthly magazine founded in 1913.

That arrogant kid from the West Side, Ernie Schlegel, is now 69. A Professional Bowlers Association Hall of Famer, Schlegel was one of the most notorious practitioners of “action bowling,” a high-stakes form of gambling in which bowlers faced off for thousands of dollars.

“You’d go at 1 in the morning, and there were 50 lanes and the place was packed,” Schlegel said in a telephone interview. “The action was huge back then, like poker is today.”