At the 80th-anniversary celebration of the Santa Barbara Lawn Bowls Club last month, club president Sharron Adams described the year-round activity on the downtown greens as “a challenging and genteel sport.” No lawn bowler has ever been known to talk trash or offensively mock an opponent like a certain Houston baseball player. “I’ve never found a nasty bowler,” Jo Millett said. “The people are so nice here.”
The easygoing nature of the game precludes the possibility of burnout. Lawn bowlers rarely retire. In the case of Millett, Carol Smith, and Pearl Slauterbeck, even serious medical setbacks have not kept them off the greens. They are known as the “Never-Give-Up Girls.”
Smith, who turns 90 in December, has been a bowling stalwart since the late 1960s, when she was the city’s adult recreation supervisor. “My boss, Bill Bertka, insisted I learn to bowl,” she said. The club, located on De la Vina Street between Victoria and Anapamu, named the Carol Smith Greens in her honor in 2010.