Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  The game for which Moss was pleased to deny a license in the Times Amusement Corporation case was called The Sportsman (1934), an electromechanical hunting-themed game manufactured by O. D. Jennings and Company. For a nickel, players would launch ten balls, one at a time, across a playfield painted with fields and streams, then watch each ball tinkle down through a region of diverters like tiny pins and staples, ultimately landing in one of thirty holes with point values and pictures of birds, rabbits, or squirrels, or else skipping the holes and landing in a large region at the bottom labeled “MISSED.”

  Interestingly, a Coin Game Journal ad for The Sportsman, aside from bragging that “the mechanism works a thousand times out of a thousand,” strove to be clear about the game’s legality: “The Sportsman has been pronounced a game of skill by a multitude of legal judges, an attorney general and others with authority to speak. They say there is no difference between a skill table such as The Sportsman which pays out rewards automatically, and an ordinary pin table on which rewards are paid over the counter.” This was completely true. Thus, Moss decided, if The Sportsman was indistinguishable from an “ordinary pin table,” one needed simply to outlaw an ordinary pin table. And everything remotely like it.

  It’s not even clear that the distinction between luck and skill was all that important to Moss. Murray Goldstein, secretary of the Amusement Men’s Association, wrote in his affidavit about a conversation he observed in the office of the license commissioner between Moss and the owner of a Sportland location:

  Moss: Just a minute, do you award prizes?

  Owner: Yes, for skill, according to skill.

  Moss: Then your license is revoked.

  Here’s the loophole that The Sportsman, and so many similar games, had been using. Instead of coins, the machine might pay out tokens or nickel-sized slugs, non-legal-tender currency that you could use to play again. Phrased that way, it almost sounds like an innocent work-around to award free games in an era when machines couldn’t handle something so complex—instead of displaying “Credits: 1” and flashing the START button to indicate a free game, the machine would simply give the player a few tokens to reinsert.

  Or, like tickets at Chuck E. Cheese’s, the tokens could be exchanged for prizes.

  Or, unlike at Chuck E. Cheese’s, the tokens could be exchanged for cash.3

  So pinball and its operators couldn’t claim full innocence, a fact that did not escape Moss. Sounding like a stereotypical sourpuss, Moss harrumphed, insofar as an affidavit can harrumph, that “Chapter 317 of the Laws of 1934 was passed to protect our citizens against”—and I love this next part—“this vicious form of amusement.”

  “If it is claimed that this game is a ‘game of skill,’” continued Moss, “then why are not all holes marked with birds and tokens and why are not the slugs and tokens returned to the player, no matter what hole the ball finally rests in?” If the point of the game is amusement, he wondered, why does it cost money at all? I’m not positive, but I believe the answer to his question can be found in Economics 101.

  In addition to the sin of offering a chance outcome, Police Commissioner Valentine argued, the games were rigged to give the house an advantage (well, duh), rendering them not just a gamble but a rip-off. “Not only is the score made exceptionally high before a prize is awarded,” added New York assistant superintendent of schools Anthony Pugliese, “but the presence of the obstructing pins in front of and around the holes makes it expressly unprofitable for the player, with the result that very few prizes are given in proportion to the number of efforts made by the player.” That is, the pinball machines were not only games of chance but also games of chance that couldn’t reliably be won.

  What I find most fascinating about this period of pinball’s history, however, is a claim Valentine made in his affidavit that “if the dominating element in a pin game was skill, the amusement centers and other operators of such machines could not survive.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is how foreign the concept of “fun” was in the 1930s—there was an undeniable incredulity that anyone would spend their hard-earned nickel to watch balls bounce around. The idea must have sounded like a slot machine in which coins are inserted, a lever is pulled, and reels spin, but no money ultimately comes out. Who are these people who feed coins into the slot to watch pictures of cherries going around—idiots?

  The novelty of “leisure” in lean times, when schoolchildren frequently had to work to put food on their families’ tables—my own grandfather and his siblings were selling cantaloupes on the streets of Cleveland at the time—must have made pinball instantly suspect. But its Mob connections put the nail in the proverbial cement-lined coffin.

  Justice Frederick L. Hackenburg of the Court of Special Sessions, in his conviction of Mirowsky, the stationery and candy store owner in the Bronx, got right to the point—or, rather, got right far beyond the point when discussing the trinkets players could win: “There is a central place for people to go to for prizes. [The Mob] control[s] the entire game in the County through the central place. The next thing, they will be allotting territories, 20 central places. The next thing, when somebody walks across the boundary of the territory, we will find somebody in Bronx Park with five bullets in his head. It is an incipient racket. Before that racket grows I am going to step down on it.”

  The ban on pinball was also born of a “trouble in River City” attitude, a general disquiet among adults regarding the irascible youth who must be up to no good. But the adults worried La Guardia more; he felt that if a fully grown man was playing a game, there was either something wrong with the man or something unwholesomely addictive about the game.

  “It’s a perfect target,” Roger Sharpe told me, and it’s a topic he knows a lot about, since he’s the one personally responsible for upending the New York City pinball ban in 1976. “It’s just a game. It’s not as if there’s a person standing by it, taking money. It’s just standing there on the corner.” He recalled his own mother happily giving him $1.35 every week to pay for his junior bowling league but making him swear he’d never go upstairs in the bowling alley. And what was upstairs? Just people playing pool. Bowling: large ball, wooden lane, knock down pins. Pool: small balls, felt-covered table, get the balls in the holes. Yet the former had the air of purity and innocence, and the latter, seediness.

  Assistant engineer Gibala’s testimony in the Times Amusement Corporation case exemplifies this paranoia. Gibala described the ball as “tumbling to and fro in a distorted zigzag path through the labyrinth of passages, much, of course, to the possible amusement of the player, with results in the hands of destiny and not in his,” bouncing off pins and gadgets that are “apparently so tranquil and harmless, like a crack regiment on the parade ground” but were clearly “designed and determined by master-minds trained in the science and wiles of subterfuge.”

  Though they spelled the termination of many livelihoods at the time, the affidavits in the case have unintentional comic value today, as they use the most vaunted of legal language to describe a bunch of people playing pinball. For example, police officer Michael Duff reported that he “returned to the said premises 550 Bergen Avenue at about 8:30 P. M. of said November 19th, 1934, and again played the said ‘Drop Kick’ machine thirty times and made a total score of 159 points, for which deponent [Officer Duff] received coupons indicating such score. Upon presenting all of the coupons, that is, those received in the afternoon and those received in the evening, deponent received a prize, to wit, a bread box.”

  An article in Automatic Age advertising Drop Kick (1934) bills it as “the most thrilling action ever seen in a pin game.” Presumably the most thrilling action for D. Lee Plume, whose amusement center awarded Officer Duff the bread box, came when Duff promptly arrested him for running an illegal gambling establishment.

  The Times Amusement Corporation case was one of several, and in just a few years, La Guardia successfully transitioned his position from “refuse licenses for pinball machines” to “
ban pinball machines” to “smash pinball machines.” On January 21, 1942, when America probably had better things to worry about, he signed an order allowing police officers to greet pinball machines with sledgehammers.

  Historical photo archives show men in suits and hats burying implements of destruction inside the offending games, their faces full of self-righteous determination. Games were purged from the city, their remnants hauled off in barges and dumped unceremoniously in the Hudson River.

  In one instance, before 3,710 smashed machines were dumped in the Hudson, La Guardia even repurposed more than 2,000 of their wooden legs as—and it’s hard to get more blatantly symbolic than this—police billy clubs. By the end of his term as mayor, La Guardia would go on to order the destruction of more than 11,000 pinball machines.

  Around the same time, the federal government enacted the Salvage for Victory campaign, a recycling drive that urged all patriotic Americans to contribute scrap metal, wood, and even rags to the war effort. Pinball machines were, of course, made of metal and wood, so the Salvage for Victory campaign forced average Americans to ask themselves, “Do I really need this thing more than our soldiers would need its components?” Sorry, troops, no gunboats for you because we need the wood to make distracting time-wasters for kids, but if it’s any consolation, we’ll give some of the time-wasters wartime themes! In such a context, it’s easy to see how pinball machines, otherwise meaningless diversions, could seem downright unpatriotic.

  Once something is outlawed, it’s hard to reinstate. Pinball remained illegal in New York for more than a generation, and across the continent, similar bans proved difficult to revoke.

  In California, Oakland’s prohibition on pinball, for example, enacted in the 1930s, wasn’t repealed until the summer of—seriously—2014. Before opening in January 2016, the owners of a Montreal bar called North Star Pinball (motto on their website: PLAY PINBALL. DRINK.) had to convince city authorities to ignore still-active anti-pinball statutes. And as I learned from a 2009 Popular Mechanics article, in Ocean City, New Jersey, it’s still illegal to play pinball on Sundays.4

  Across the country, the legal community was all over the place with pinball, and a midcentury transcontinental drive would have taken one through jurisdictions of not only varying strictness but also varying friendliness to loopholes. In some places, the spring-loaded plunger was illegal, but the rest of the machine was fine. In others, players were not allowed to win free games, but extra balls were okay. It was kind of like trying to park in a modern-day metropolis, where every block has its own set of parking restrictions—two-hour parking from here to the curb, weekdays from 7:00 AM to midnight, except Zone 12 stickers, but you can park indefinitely on holidays, and you can’t park at all during a snow emergency. The variety was hard for players—but harder for manufacturers who had to churn out machines that they could legally sell in all of these places.

  Efforts to comply with or sidestep or invent around these rules yielded a few innovations of necessity that remain with pinball to this day. Manufacturer Harry Williams, for example, knew he could reinforce pinball’s role as pure amusement simply by removing the payout mechanism—but he knew players preferred a tangible reward they could win. How could Williams’s pinball machines offer a legally acceptable prize? What’s the unit of currency of fun?

  The answer came from a mechanically inclined teenager in Williams’s employ named Bill Bellah. He devised a gadget that allowed customers to accumulate free games: landing the ball in a certain saucer would rotate a number wheel, and as long as the number displayed wasn’t zero, pushing the empty coin acceptor later started a new game. Today free games are a natural, though rarer, part of the pinball and video game universe, but they began as a very specific solution to a legislative problem.

  One of the first games to use free play was Quick Silver (1935), whose ad in Automatic Age magazine listed ten reasons for operators to purchase the game, finishing by reminding potential customers that “QUICK SILVER legally performs every function of the slot machine and pay-out pin table”—emphasis theirs.

  Here’s what this meant in reality: the number of earned free games on the scoring wheel could easily be converted, under the table, to a cash reward. So a patron would win, say, twelve free games, but instead of playing them, he’d cash out—the operator would buy the free games from the patron and reset the scoring wheel. There were even machines that could count up to 999 free games awarded, in retrospect an obvious sign that people weren’t necessarily playing the replays they’d earned. And some machines combined free play and payouts in the same game—no wonder it was difficult to figure out whether anyone was breaking any laws.

  If a payout of free games—which was soon viewed as gambling and banned in many locations—was a half-assed version of a cash payout, it would not be until 1960 that pinball manufacturer David Gottlieb’s son Alvin helped develop a half-assed version of that, a reward even more ephemeral and piddling than a free game: an extra ball.

  This may sound insignificant. In modern pinball machines, an extra ball is listed alongside other rewards a player can earn, such as a few million points or starting multiball. But Alvin Gottlieb’s “add-a-ball,” as he called it,5 gave the player a reward that no one would mistake for gambling.

  “I wanted to give a little extra play to the game,” he told Sharpe in Pinball!, “but when the game was over, I wanted it to be over.”

  And that’s exactly what pinball’s future looked like in 1942: game over.

  La Guardia was certain pinball could contribute nothing positive to society. If only he could have seen Project Pinball.

  I’ve encountered representatives of Project Pinball at nearly every national pinball event I’ve attended. They’re easy to spot in their neon-green T-shirts as they run charity tournaments, solicit donations, and try to advance a cause that makes the uninitiated say, “Wait, you want to do what?”

  According to their mission statement, Project Pinball “places pinball machines in children’s hospitals,” thus making it one of the most hyperspecific 501(c)(3) charities imaginable. This unique endeavor started with Daniel Spolar, who runs an arcade called Pinball Asylum in Fort Meyers, Florida. Spolar is tall and clean-cut—picture Spider-Man’s newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson without the mustache.

  Incidentally, the first machine Spolar rehabbed (pardon the hospital pun) happened to be a Spider-Man (2007). He found the game in complete disrepair at Golisano Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida; it had been donated to the hospital by the family of an eleven-year-old boy who passed away. Unfortunately, the usefulness of this generous gesture had expired when the game broke, and Spolar wanted to set things right. He spent over 112 hours and $1,000 to restore the game, then donated it back to the hospital. When he visited to clean and repair the machine two and a half years later, he found that it had been played almost sixty thousand times—the equivalent of a new game played every half hour, twenty-four hours a day. The right flipper alone, he says, had logged over 1.5 million flips, which told Spolar that Spider-Man was definitely not sitting in a corner gathering cobwebs.

  At last count, there are 334 children’s hospitals in the United States. Spolar’s goal is as straightforward as it is ambitious: place a pinball machine in all of them.

  As of this writing, he’s almost reached two dozen hospitals across the country, with each game purchased using donations and maintained by a local volunteer. Spolar showed me a photo of sixteen kids crowded around a car racing–themed pinball machine called Mustang (2014) at Palm Beach Children’s Hospital at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, each child connected to an IV pole, all blissfully distracted by the game.

  He tells a story of a boy who needed recurring chemotherapy, which he hated, because it always made him ill. One day, when it was time to drive to the hospital for treatment, his mother searched the house but couldn’t find him—it turned out he was already in the car, eager to go to the hospital for chemo, because
he could play pinball there.

  Up yours, La Guardia.

  And it’s not just kids who enjoy the machines, Spolar says. The games usually sit in the family waiting room, giving parents, and occasionally doctors and nurses, an opportunity to relieve stress.

  Project Pinball’s list of successes keeps growing: Star Trek (2013) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Iron Man (2010) at Advocate Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The Wizard of Oz (2013) at UNC Children’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Shrek (2008) at Omaha Children’s Hospital. At the Oak Lawn dedication, Spolar recalls, so many Stern Pinball employees attended the dedication ceremony that Stern had to temporarily close its factory. All of the machines, of course, are set to Free Play—no quarters required.

  Still, thanks to pinball’s reputation, Spolar says it’s not easy to convince hospitals to welcome a pinball machine. Project Pinball constantly finds itself fighting the perception that pinball is old, large, loud, smoky, and inappropriate for kids.

  Spolar has learned to arm himself against these criticisms. He brings a large, specially cut piece of vinyl to hospitals and lays it on the floor to show the relatively small footprint of a typical pinball machine and distributes literature touting the family-friendly themes of the machines he selects.

  In the decades since La Guardia and other temperance-minded types ran pinball out of town, it has returned as a force for good. And Project Pinball is far from the only pinball charity. In Frederick, Maryland, for example, another impassioned player, Joe Said, founded Pinball EDU, with the mission of opening a Pinball Education Center, where he can offer STEM education and pinball therapy to children diagnosed with conditions like autism and cerebral palsy. The idea may sound strange, but as Pinball EDU’s web page reminds visitors, pinball is a play-based multisensory exercise that has already made a therapeutic difference in many kids’ lives—among them, autistic Canadian pinball prodigy Robert Gagno, who consistently ranks among the best in the world.