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Home > Archive > Jul 26, 2007

Still Playing for All the Marbles
By Stephen Vincent
When she was in junior high, Leola Peterson asked if she could join the school's marble tournament. She said the teacher thought it was a strange thing for a girl to ask to do, but he let her participate anyway. She won the marble tournament.
“I guess I was kind of a tomboy,” Peterson said. “I liked playing marbles; I liked playing ball, and I liked playing kick-the-can.”
Growing up in the tiny town of Sigurd, Utah, in the 1930s, Leola Peterson and her friends had to find games to play. From those youthful games with friends and high school basketball to hunting and fishing with her husband on weekends to playing in national bowling tournaments for more than 30 years and playing in national horseshoes competitions for the last 15 years, Peterson has embraced sports wholeheartedly.
“It's been a lot of fun,” Peterson said. “I don't know what people do when they get older if they don't have sports to keep them happy and healthy.”
It was in 1942 that Peterson first met a bowling alley. Neither Richfield nor Sigurd was big enough to have one. So it wasn't until she moved with her parents to Orem that Peterson discovered the sport that occupied a good portion of her adult life.
Back then, the pins were set by workers in the bowling alley. Peterson soon began regularly playing both bowling and duck-pin bowling, a form of the sport that uses thinner pins and a softball-sized ball.
“The game has changed to where we have automatic pinsetters and automatic scorers,” she said, “but the way you throw the bowling ball will never change, unless you find a better way.”
Peterson said she and her bowling ball have been able to see quite a bit of the country during the 30-plus years she attended national tournaments.
Her highest average was 163, but she said she is down to around 140 now. She has also had to switch from a 16-pound ball to a 10-pound one, to which she is trying to adjust.
She bowls in leagues at both Dixie Bowl and Sunset Bowl.
Peterson said she also likes the changes she sees in bowling alleys, as the alleys have moved toward being more family-friendly by banning smoking and drinking.
Bowling is a sport she raised her family on. Her daughters played, as did her sisters and brothers, and nieces and nephews.
“At our last family reunion, all the women and children went bowling while the men went and played golf, so we're still sports-minded,” Peterson said.
The one member of the family who didn't take to the sport was her husband, Darrel. He played with Leola and her sister and brother-in-law in a league for one year. They won the league, and Darrel decided bowling wasn't challenging enough for him, so he stuck with his first passion: music.
“He'd rather be playing his horns,” Leola Peterson said, “which he did from the time he was 7 years old until he passed away.”
When she moved to St. George in 1988, her son-in-law Dennis Ohms was president of the Southern Utah Horseshoe Pitchers Association. Up to that time, Peterson had only pitched horseshoes at family reunions.
But she and her friend, Cleo Wardle, began to play horseshoes.
“We've been pitching ever since,” Peterson said.
She traveled a few years ago with the horseshoe club to Japan to help teach the sport to seniors in that country.
“That was a really neat trip,” she said. “I never would have gone to Japan if it hadn't been for horseshoes.”
Like bowling, her success in her horseshoes has dipped as she has gotten older. At the top of her game, she could throw ringers 35 percent of the time. Now, she is around 10 percent.
Still, she enjoys being at Vernon Worthen Park during the fall, winter and spring to pitch horseshoes. They take the summer off because it is too hot.
But Peterson and some others will travel to tournaments around the state during the summer months.
Peterson said she enjoys how horseshoe pitchers root for each other.
“As far as a friendly sport, horseshoes is No. 1,” she said.
As for other sports, Peterson said she would still play basketball if she could, but she had to quit playing because she can't see the ball very well anymore.
But, in her high school days, she played on Richfield High's team. Back then, the girls played a half-court game. Peterson, who didn't hit a growth spurt until her senior year, was on the team because of her speed.
“I remember so well that I was the shortest one on the team because the teachers said to me, 'If you weren't so fast on your feet, you'd be too small to play basketball.' But I did all right.”
She also used to play golf, and, in one week, she and her two playing partners all got holes-in-one on the Twin Lakes Golf Course.
When she's not playing sports, Peterson spends her time volunteering at the hospital and St. George temple. She also visits 12 to 16 shut-ins from her church ward each week to deliver them a videotape of that week's Relief Society lesson, and she stays to chat with each one.
Even though those visits take most of her afternoons, she reasons that she would want someone to do it for her if she was in that situation.
“My four walls aren't big enough to make me happy,” Peterson said.
That philosophy not only drives her volunteer work, but is also the reason why she stays active through sports.
“You just got to keep doing the things you enjoy doing, so that you won't be homebound,” Peterson said.

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