Back to Hall of FameVision, energy, determination, leadership, and love of the game of tenpins has made Matthew R. Bennie the Washington area’s most renowned bowling personality and one of the first members of the Hall of Fame.
Born in May 1906, in Park City, Utah, Matt came to Washington in 1933 from Battle Creek, Michigan, to enter federal service as a machinist. He retired from the Naval Gun Factory 28 years later to devote full time as secretary of the City Association, a post he held since 1944 when the association was first organized.
Matt has seen the association grow from four teams with a membership of 20 men in 1944 to 9,330 teams bowling on 1,018 certified lanes in the 1962-1963 season. The amazing growth of tenpins in the Washington area is considered to be without parallel in any other community in the country. And the man behind that growth is conceded to be Matt Bennie.
Matt will have gone a long way from the days of 1944 when he helped organize the City Association to 1966 when he becomes president of the American Bowling Congress. He was elected a director of bowling’s national organization in 1952 and six years later was elected a vice president.
The same qualities that have made him an association secretary for 19 years, an ABC official for 11 years, and its president in 1966, have earned for him a permanent place in the City Association’s Hall of Fame.