Doris Coburn remembers vividly the day her family’s legacy in bowling began on February 8, 1944 — that is when she married Frank Coburn, whose earliest moments as Doris’s boyfriend included bowling dates on which he started giving her pointers in a gentle manner she came to trust as his natural demeanor. 

Now 101 years old, Doris, a PWBA and USBC Hall of Famer who bagged three PWBA Tour titles in her career, glowed as Frank’s bride in an orchid suit amid a standing-room-only church.

“It was a beautiful suit,” she gushes to this day. 

And yet, it also was quite the impromptu arrangement. 

“He came home from leave [while stationed in Ft. Smith, Arkansas with the U.S. Army] and decided they were going to get married that week,” Cindy explains. “My mother always laughs, because he was out at a basketball game one day that week — my father loved all sports — and someone asked him, ‘So, what are you up to?’ And he said, ‘Oh, well, I’m getting married this evening.’”

“He came home and said, ‘Let’s just get married now,’ because he was going overseas after that,” Cindy adds.

“We were thinking of getting married that summer but he was constantly overseas and things were so uncertain,” Doris recalls.

The standing-room-only turnout for the ceremony that night was a testament, in part, to the good will Frank had amassed locally with his affable, welcoming personality. In fact, ask Doris the secret to a long life, and it’s Frank to whom she gives much of the credit. 

“I tell everyone that I had such a happy marriage. Such a wonderful person, Frank was,” says Doris, who was married to Frank for 73 years until his death in June 2017 at age 96. “This year would have been our 80th anniversary.”

Any marriage of such length requires reservoirs of patience. There was one reason in particular Frank had plenty of that, says Cindy, Doris’s daughter, who joined mom as the first mother-daughter duo in the PWBA Hall of Fame in 1997 and then in the USBC Hall of Fame the following year.

“He always would say he lived in a house with four women and one bathroom, so he had lots of patience,” laughs Cindy, whose sisters include Barb and Kathy, the latter of whom is the family’s third PWBA Tour champion as she won the 1975 Eastgate Ford PWBA Classic in Dayton, Ohio. 

“He just always made me so happy. I don’t think I ever could have done it without him. He had such a good outlook in life,” Doris says of Frank.

Which is saying a lot for a man who found himself on the front lines of a conflict as haunting as World War II, a time when he served in combat with the 14th Armored Division 501st Field Artillery Battalion and landed in Marseille, France, in 1944. 

“We hardly knew anything about his service,” says Cindy. “He wouldn’t talk about it. He drove tanks, and he actually was there when they liberated one of the concentration camps.”

Despite witnessing horrors no individual would forget after having been exposed to them firsthand as Frank was, the man’s approachable coaching style was infused with a positivity, optimism and supportive attitude that lifted the spirits of all who studied the game under the man, who went on to become a Greater Buffalo USBC Hall of Famer at age 93 in 2014 for meritorious service. 

“He’d always see the good in a person he was coaching before he’d correct anything in their game,” explains Doris.

Cindy adds that, “He wasn’t a harsh coach. He wasn’t one to brow-beat anybody. His approach was always to pick out the good and then we can work on other things you need to do. But he always gave that confidence to people and I really think that was key to his success” as a coach.

“Anything he said to us, it always was so reassuring,” Cindy adds. “Even when we were out bowling in tournaments and we’d get in a critical situation, whatever he said to us, we always believed. He would never lie to us, and we always felt like, whatever he said, he knew it was the right thing to say in that moment. That helped us in so many ways, especially with bowling being such a mental game.” 

That coaching style paid off handsomely as he watched Doris, then Cindy later on, achieve tremendous notoriety on the lanes. In addition to Doris’s three PWBA Tour titles, she was a mainstay in the grueling BPAA Women’s All-Star tournament, making the finals in that event three times. 

She won Team All-Events titles in the USBC Women’s Championships in 1970 and 1972, and defeated fellow Hall of Famer Patti Costello to win the nationally televised 1975 Brunswick Red Crown Classic in Baltimore, Maryland — an event billed as “bowling’s richest event for women” at the time that netted Doris a $12,500 payday (more than $70,000 in 2024 dollars). Her 1976 induction in the USBC Hall of Fame for superior performance was followed decades later by her 1998 induction into the PWBA Hall of Fame in the “Pioneer” category. 

Doris marveled at the selflessness Frank exhibited as he embraced her potential and served it above his own. Frank’s own prowess included a victory in the Greater Buffalo USBC Masters tournament in 1965, the second edition of an event that has gone on to become one of the most decorated local amateur tournaments in the country, with PBA Tour champions such as Ryan Ciminelli, Brad Angelo, Jack Jurek, Tom Baker and women’s legend Liz Johnson among its past champions.

“I said, ‘I can’t understand how you could give up this game to coach me.’ He said, ‘I want to see you bowl all the time. I’m giving up all my leagues and I’m just going to coach you entirely,’” Doris recalled. 

Frank fed his competitive urge on the golf course, which he and Doris frequented almost daily, and in playing the card game Bridge, at which they attained the Junior Master level as they participated in local and, at times, out-of-town tournaments. 

As Doris went on to transcendent accomplishment in bowling, she says, there was “never any feeling at all” of a competitive rivalry between herself and her husband. He was all about her success.

“As we had more and more success, he got more and more pleasure out of coaching us,” says Cindy, who went on to even more meteoric heights as she amassed 15 titles on the PWBA Tour including the 1992 USBC Queens. Cindy also finished fourth in the 1988 USBC Queens and recorded a runner-up finish in the U.S. Women’s Open in 1987, when Carol Normal took the crown. Like mom, Cindy also won two Team All-Events titles in USBC Women's Championships competition, hers coming in 1991 and 1994.

Cindy’s USBC Queens run in 1992 showcased all the tenacity that drove both players to glory in their respective careers. 

“I remember losing my first match the second day, so I had to win out [in the contenders’ bracket], and I had to bowl, I think, 24 games that day. And I hit so many tough pros. So many times, you have some amateurs in there. But, this time, I had to bowl the defending champion [Dede Davidson]. I bowled Carolyn Dorin [Ballard], Donna Adamek, Anne Marie Duggan. And even the stepladder was a tough field.”

It was tough, indeed, comprising five bowlers each destined to become Hall of Famers — Adamek, Carol Gianotti, Jeanne Naccarato, Dana Miller-Mackie, and Cindy, who edged Mackie by a stick with a seven-count on her final ball of the 10th frame following a double.

“I squeaked that one out,” Cindy recalls. “That shut her out. I just wanted to win it. I didn’t want to win it sitting there on the bench.”

That Coburn penchant for knowing what they want and getting it extends to Cindy’s daughter and Doris’s granddaughter Haley, who found herself disappointed with a lack of playing time during her freshman year bowling for St. Francis University in Pennsylvania. In typical Coburn fashion, she did not take that sitting down.

“They were a Division 1 school, and I didn’t really get a whole lot of playing time my freshman year. That summer, I was so upset with not getting any playing time that I practiced almost every single day — whether it was first thing in the morning when the center was open or closing down the center at night. I thought, ‘I’m never going to give my coach a reason to not play me again.’

“After that, I don’t think there was one frame I didn’t bowl the rest of my college career,” Haley beams. “I was All-Conference the next three years — two First Teams and one Second Team.”

The fruits of Haley’s determination hardly stopped with her graduation from St. Francis. Just this year, she defeated none other than Liz Johnson to win the Western New York Queens title. Weeks later, she made the show in the second PWBA Regional she ever bowled, the PWBA Eastern Pennsylvania Regional, ultimately finishing fourth following a 202-191 loss in the opening match to eventual champion Karsyn Lukosius. 

Cindy gushes about Haley’s gutsy performance in that event. 

“She was on the bubble the whole day, but she was never in the top four. She just kind of got wired in that last game, shot 250 (including a 10th-frame turkey) and snuck onto the show. That is just such a milestone, because it’s one of those barriers that you just break through. That’s how you gain that experience; you can’t just expect it to happen overnight. Little successes build on each other.”

The fact that the stepladder finals of that event featured yet another daughter of a PWBA Tour champion —18-year-old Melia Mitskavich, daughter of three-time PWBA Tour champion Jackie, was not at all lost on Cindy. 

“On the women’s side, you don’t see too many women who have gone on to have families and children who bowl. It’s kind of like a sacrifice, in a way. You almost have to decide. But, in that tournament, you also had the daughter of [three-time PWBA Tour champion Jackie Mitskavich]. Her daughter was bowling that tournament with Haley, and both of them made the finals! Melia qualified first,” Cindy says.

“That was quite an experience, having the daughters of two PWBA Tour champions doing that. I just thought that was a great moment for women’s bowling.” (For much more on that moment, see this issue’s “Action” department.) 

Haley’s determination shows not just in what she does on the lanes, but what she says away from them. Her ultimate bowling goals? To join her mom and grandma in the Hall of Fame someday, and to follow in mom’s footsteps at the USBC Queens. 

“My ultimate goal is to win the Queens like my mom did. I would love to join them in the Hall of Fame someday, too, but I think I’d really just love to win the Queens,” Haley says. 

That Hall of Fame goal of Haley’s most definitely would set a record that would stand the test of time, as the three would become the first daughter-mother-grandmother trio in the USBC or PWBA Hall, just as a Queens victory would make the Coburns the first family in women’s pro bowling to comprise three generations of PWBA Tour champions. Both Doris and Cindy can tell Haley all about what it feels like to join her family’s predecessors in such a prestigious institution as the PWBA or USBC Hall of Fame. 

“It was just such a thrill to follow my mom into the Hall of Fame,” Cindy says. “I guess I didn’t even realize it as it was happening. The Hall of Fame isn’t really a goal; it’s the culmination of everything you have done and people looking at your work. The fact that we both were able to do it, I just thought it was such a great reflection on my family — my dad especially. It’s very hard to do something like that without having that family support.

“They were all there to see me at my induction, and my mom walked me down the aisle at my induction,” Cindy says, her softening voice revealing some emotion as she reminisces. “Haley was about 9 months old when I was inducted, so my dad came up on stage with Haley and was dancing with her on stage. It was just such a fun family experience.”

Haley chuckles when asked if she remembers that moment, but provides the assurance that she has “seen the pictures a few times.” 

Which reminds Doris vividly of her own interaction with an 8-year-old Cindy the week Doris won her first PWBA Tour title.

“Here I am bowling my head-to-head matches, and Cindy is sitting right behind me, kneeling on the ground. Every time I’d come back from filling a frame, she’d say, ‘Mother, when are we gonna play putt-putt?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, in a little while!’ And when Frank heard what was going on, he said he couldn’t believe it, and he got her out of there so fast!”

“It probably relaxed her,” Cindy chuckles.

Cindy’s own first title is mingled with a memory that never left her mind. 

“I think I had qualified second, and that night we went out to get something to eat, and I got food poisoning,” Cindy says. “We were supposed to bowl a stepladder final around 3 p.m. the next day, and by 1 p.m. I still was so sick, laying in bed. I said, ‘Mom, I don’t think I’m going to be able to bowl. I can barely stand up.’ She laid in bed, put her head on the pillow and pounded her fist into the mattress and said, ‘You’ve got to bowl! You have got to bowl!’

“So, I said to my dad, ‘I guess I’m bowling.’ I ended up winning the tournament. That taught me that you’ve got to make the most of every experience. You’re in that position, just make the most of it and see what happens.”

And now, many decades later, it is up to Haley to see what will happen as she carries the Coburn-family torch on the lanes.