Every morning for years, Ray Simoneau began his day by opening the newspaper and scanning the local obituaries.

While not an uncommon ritual for many born and bred Nashuans like Ray, his reasoning was as unique as the man himself.

“He’d look through (the obituaries), stand up and say, ‘Well, guess I gotta go to work today,’?” his son Sean recalled with a laugh. “‘My name’s not in there.’”

But recently, as summer waned and September’s cooler, shorter days came into view, so did a growing sense that it wouldn’t be long before Ray would no longer be going to work, a lifelong seven-days-a-week, 12-plus-hours-a-day routine he treated more as an extension of himself than a means to make a living.

On Tuesday, the obit for which Ray watched, tongue-in-cheek, for years finally appeared, four days after he made his final visit to his beloved Leda Lanes and three days after he lost a valiant battle with pancreatic cancer.

Calling hours were held Thursday and the funeral was Friday for the local candlepin icon, whose motto, “Never close,” convinced his family to open Leda Lanes around 4 p.m. Friday, about the time the post-funeral celebration of life would wind down.

“That’s what he did when his brother died,” his son Howard said of Edgar Simoneau, who was 57 and president of Leda Lanes when he died in May 1982. “Close a half-day for the funeral, then open up. It was always his thing: ‘You never close.’?”

Born in December 1930 to Balcom Street residents Delphis and Leda (Soucy) Simoneau, Raymond Leo Simoneau was weaned on the Great Depression, an experience that probably contributed to the unbending, no-excuses work ethic he later instilled in four generations of family members who worked at Leda Lanes.

His passing comes three months shy of the 52nd anniversary of the day he, Edgar, their mother, Leda, and then-Mayor Mario J. Vagge celebrated the grand opening of their new venture, a small, boxy, 18-alley candlepin bowling center the brothers built on a 3.5-acre lot after moving a rambling chicken coop the seller threw into the deal.

Though it surely wasn’t needed that Saturday, Dec. 12, 1959, many grand-opening visitors took special note of a banner strung across the front advertising perhaps its most impressive amenity: air conditioning.

They never said as much, but the Simoneaus may have been motivated to install this rare, newfangled luxury after years of bowling and working in the swelter of Plaza Alleys, the old Railroad Square arcade they owned before and for several years after opening Leda Lanes.

Almost unheard of outside New England and parts of eastern Canada, candlepin bowling ranked at or near the top of the region’s favorite early and mid-20th-century pastimes. Fun, easy to learn and relatively inexpensive, the sport drew young and old to a busy network of candlepin centers that once dotted the map of every city and town.

The Simoneaus and their loyal customers, first at Plaza and later Leda, were right there in the thick of its popularity.

“When they built (Leda Lanes), everybody said they’d never make it out there in the boonies,” Louise Patterson, Ed Simoneau’s daughter, said when Leda celebrated 30 years in 1989.

Among those questioning the brothers’ sanity was Vagge, Howard remembers his father telling him. Indeed, for a businessman whose car dealership sat smack dab in the middle of downtown Nashua, it must have been hard for Vagge to envision bowlers traipsing “way out” the old Milford Road for a few strings.

Bowling’s popularity soon prompted local businesses and industries to form teams and leagues, whose numbers skyrocketed post-World War II. At the time, Nashua boasted several candlepin centers: Plaza; the Jonis brothers’ City Alleys, at Main and West Hollis streets behind the old Rosebud; and Nashua Bowlaway, on East Hollis at or near where Headlines is now.

On the heels of Leda’s opening came the Winnegs’ Gate City Bowl, an early ’60s arrival to a comparatively sparse Daniel Webster Highway. In Hudson, Earl Libby, Leo Noel and Adrien Labrie used their initials to name their new L-N-L Bowl on Lowell Road.

Nashua was introduced to tenpin, or duckpin, bowling in 1962 when the United Bowling Center, later Nashua Ten Pin Bowl, became Gate City Bowl’s neighbor. It closed in 1995 under the name Fair Lanes.

Between hosting more and more leagues over the years and its loyal base of families and date-night bowlers, Simoneau saw the need to expand, which he did by adding a dozen lanes and opening a snack bar, the first incarnation of today’s Kegler’s Den.

Another expansion in the early ’80s put lanes 31-36 in place of Kegler’s, which Simoneau and Howard moved to the other side of the building and reinvented as the restaurant-lounge we know today.

It was among the alleys, billiard tables, video games and a Kegler’s fresh off its most recent spruce-up that Simoneau asked to spend much of his precious remaining time, Howard said.

“That’s my dad; he insisted on coming here right up to the end,” he said.

The process was involved, but doable – they slid a frail Simoneau, too weak to walk, into a wheelchair, borrowed a wheelchair-accessible van and set out for Leda Lanes.

Though clearly failing, Howard said his dad had only one “real bad” day – Friday, the day before he died.

“He wanted to see the place one more time,” Howard said. “… I guess it was a sort of closure for him.”

A long, leisurely tour of the freshly appointed Kegler’s, with its slew of new, framed pictures along the walls, capped the cofounder’s final visit. Looking around, he smiled a bit, then fixed his gaze on a particular photo.

“It’s an old picture of the chicken coops,” Howard said. “When they first bought the land, they split the coop in two to move it. They’re still out back, being used for storage.”

They paused; tears welled in the patriarch’s eyes.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 31, or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.