Sat, Jul 04 2009
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Published November 09, 2008 12:24 am - Richey recovers from wreck, cancer to continue bowling Joyce Richey, a member of the Joplin USBC Hall of Fame, is a survivor.
A league bowler in Joplin for 54 years, Joyce has survived a car wreck and cancer (twice). The car wreck, which took the life of her mother, Madolyn Parker, left Joyce with two broken legs among other injuries. Medical personnel told her she would never walk again. They didn’t know Joyce. After bone grafts and six months of therapy, Joyce started walking with the aid of crutches. After a time, she started using a walker and, finally, a cane. She still has metal plates in both legs from the ankle to the thigh. The accident happened on Sept. 28, 1985, the birthday of her late grandmother, Pearl Victor. “Mother and I had been playing bingo near Seneca and were returning home when the accident happened,” Joyce recalls. “Mother never regained consciousness.” Joyce started bowling at age 16 with her grandmother on the Rosenberg Scrap Metal team in the Wednesday Newcomers League. “That was my introduction to bowling,” she said. “They didn’t have the programs for youth bowlers in those days.” It was during that league that Joyce developed her smooth but unorthodox bowling style of swinging the ball high over her head on her backswing. “I was using a 12-pound ball and that high backswing just came naturally,” she says. “After I married Ernie (Richey) in 1956, I went to a 14-pound ball, thinking that (the extra weight) would cut down on my backswing. It didn’t happen. Carl Richard (owner of the two Joplin bowling centers) gave me some good advice. He said: ‘Stick with it.’” Joyce, at age 70, still has that same arm swing. I’ve only seen one other Joplin bowler who had a backswing as high and that was Gene Smith. There was a time when Joyce had to cut down on her backswing. When she returned to bowling in January of 1987, some 16 months after the accident, she could only stand at the foul line and deliver the ball. “I would stand there, pump the ball three times, and then throw it,” she recalls. “The next year (1987-88) I got back to my four-step approach and my high backswing.” The mother of a son, John, and daughter, Kerri Simms, a grandmother and great-grandmother, Joyce still bowls one night a week, competing with teammates Rose Puckett, Mary Lou Halama, Heidi Burggraf and Jessie Gartner in the Hilltop Rollers League on Thursday nights at Bowl East. She’s had to miss some nights due to the treatments for cancer and a back injury, but Joyce is there most nights. Her cancer is in remission now, thanks to a maintenance drug which she says she has to take every eight weeks for two years. 
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