Marty Cassio
Sport: Bowling
Born: August 15, 1904
Died: December 20, 1972
Town: Rahway
Martin James Cassio was born August 15, 1904 in Palermo, Sicily and moved to the United States at the age of 5. The Cassios settled in Union County, NJ and Marty went to work in a Rahway tailor shop while in grade school to help his family make ends meet. While carrying a bundle of clothes, Marty slipped and fell through a plate-glass window. He cut his right arm badly and it never fully developed; his ring and pinky fingers were permanently curled.
 Bowling was one of the few sports open to a young man with this handicap. It didn’t hurt that some of the biggest names in the game were Italian-Americans. Marty took to the lanes in his mid-20s and soon became known as The Bowling Tailor. Because he could not generate great power on his release, he focused on accuracy.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Marty anchored some of the NY Metro area’s top bowling teams—including Wagner & Adler and Bowling Journal—and he was a standout in American Bowling Congress tournaments, winning 15 in his career. He was arguably the country’s best bowler in the mid-1940s, and starred in AMF’s first bowling movie, entitled Ted Pin Magic.
Marty continued to be one of the sport's leading lights through the 1950s, capturing the Eastern Open title in 1955. In 1958, he was the first player inducted into the Union County Bowling Hall of Fame. Marty passed away at the age of 68 in his hometown of Rahway—a few months after entering the American Bowling Congress Hall of Fame.
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