Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Well, not quite the end. On the backglass was a bingo card with the numbers one through twenty-five, and dropping the ball in one of the holes lit the corresponding number on the bingo card. At that point, it was no longer self-serve roulette but self-serve bingo; players tried to light lines of numbers, and the game awarded (wink-wink) “credits.”

  Aside from A-B-C, with its wheel, most of these machines had the exact same layout: twenty-five holes spread over the playfield and a rubber bumper here or there. According to Jeffrey Lawton’s book The Bingo Pinball War, Bally and another company, the thrillingly named United Manufacturing, spent the better part of the ’50s battling to dominate the bingo pinball market, each one-upping the other with new features. Most of these features were not physical gadgets, but ways players could potentially fill their bingo cards. A bonus for all four corners! Diagonal scoring! Play six cards at once!

  In other words, the bingo pinball market—thriving though it was—consisted of the exact same game manufactured over and over again with different rules and art. None had flippers, even though they had been invented. And for some reason, many of the machines were named after geographic locations, a list of which sounds like a where’s where of destinations considered exotic to the working stiffs of the ’50s: Tahiti (1953), Rio (1953), Palm Springs (1953), Havana (1954), Mexico (1954), Hawaii (1954), Nevada (1954), Singapore (1954), Manhattan (1955), Miami Beach (1955), Monaco (1956), Key West (1956), and Brazil (1956).

  As bingo pinball rose, fell, and became a footnote in pinball history, the trunk of pinball’s phylogenetic tree continued its growth to evolve into the game that ensnared me.

  The 1960s and early ’70s saw the invention of a few more playfield staples, like spinners, thin targets that flip around like pinwheels when the ball passes under them. Drop targets. Multiball. Manufacturers started experimenting with toys and gimmicks, many of which became the centerpieces of the machines they adorned. A 1970 Chicago Coin game, for example, used extralong flippers. It was called—will ingenuity never cease?—Big Flipper.

  I had the opportunity to play a game of Big Flipper at PAPA. Swinging the five-inch flippers at the regular-sized ball felt like trying to hit a softball using a roll of industrial carpet.

  Of course, not all of pinball’s novelties during this experimental period were keepers. There were two-player head-to-head pinball machines with two full playfields facing each other. There were miniature pinball games built into cocktail tables, underneath a flat piece of glass, which were probably played during either the most awkward or the most awesome first dates. In 1979, a new game called Hercules made Big Flipper look tiny. Marketed as “18 square feet of excitement,” Hercules had flippers the size of chicken drumsticks, a playfield so massive it was hard to reach both flipper buttons simultaneously, and, instead of a small steel ball, a billiard ball.

  Many of pinball’s oddities are the stuff of eBay clamor, as bidders overtop one another to enhance their collections. But for those without the time, money, or basement space to accumulate vintage machines, there are other places to enjoy the output of an industry struggling to find direction in a nation struggling to do the same: pinball museums.

  Pinball museums aren’t as rare as you might think. If Google can be believed, as of this writing, at least twenty thriving pinball museums can be found in Alameda, Banning, and El Cerrito, California; Seattle; Las Vegas; Roanoke, Virginia; Asheville, North Carolina; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Pittsburgh; the Wisconsin Dells; Tarpon Springs and Delray, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Hockley, Texas—not to mention Paris, Budapest, Krakow, and Rotterdam.

  That amazes the hell out of me. It means that twenty people, at a minimum, independently thought it would be a terrific idea to open a museum, an actual educational museum, solely on the subject of pinball.

  They weren’t all correct.

  In December 2010, David Silverman invested $300,000 into building the National Pinball Museum in Washington, DC. The idea made sense at the time—after all, DC is flooded with tourists seeking every other type of museum. Silverman housed his inside a former FAO Schwartz toy store, using two leftover dinosaur legs to dictate the motif of a floor-to-ceiling dinosaur pinball mural. He re-created a French ship—complete with rocking floor—to illustrate bagatelle sailing across the Atlantic, and he filled the space with dozens of machines from his personal collection of over nine hundred.

  It was a beautiful museum. I attended its opening-night party—the place was ten minutes down the road from me, for goodness sake—and I even got a membership card. I knew I’d come back often.

  Unfortunately, I never got the chance. Silverman, dreaming big, had built the museum inside a swanky mall in upscale Georgetown, where after only six months, the mall’s owners sent him a rather unwelcome letter.

  “In that letter it basically says we’re taking your lease . . . and we’re throwing you out in 60 days,” Silverman told the Georgetowner. The owners cited renovations, but there were murmurs that the museum’s general incompatibility with Georgetown’s swanky Georgetown-ness also didn’t help. Even Perez Hilton’s website eulogized the museum, calling its fate “a bunch of bullshizz.”

  Rather than recount the entire sad story of the homeless National Pinball Museum, I’ll let news headlines do the job:

  June 30, 2010, Washington Business Journal: “Pinball Museum Heading for Georgetown.”

  May 23, 2011, Washington Post: “National Pinball Museum to Close.”

  May 27, 2011, Arcade Heroes: “National Pinball Museum Looking for a New Place to Stay After Lease Revoked.”

  September 21, 2011, Reuters: “Nation’s Largest Pinball Museum to Open in Baltimore.”

  February 20, 2013, HuffPost DC: “National Pinball Museum Closing in Baltimore After Moving from DC One Year Ago.”

  August 8, 2013, Baltimore Sun: “National Pinball Museum in Search of Home Again.”

  April 21, 2014, WTOP-FM: “Former Pinball Museum Owner Selling Off Collection.”

  Silverman, who truly loved collecting pinball machines—his very first purchase filled an apartment so tiny that he slept, every night, underneath the game—began auctioning off his prized machines, one by one, to recoup his losses from having opened and closed two museums in two years.

  It seemed a cautionary tale, with much to caution against, particularly the choice to stake one’s financial future on the success of a pinball museum. But as I learned from a slideshow depicting Clay Harrell’s misadventures founding the Ann Arbor Pinball Museum, sometimes that success can be as accidental as the museum’s existence in the first place.

  In 2006, Harrell was already renowned in the pinball community as the star of a pinball repair DVD series and podcast called This Old Pinball. He began bouncing his collection of games through a series of initially friendly venues—an empty Rite Aid, a video store called Crazy Carl’s, a warehouse he named Tilt Town—in an effort to find a roof to keep them under without having to pay too much. He had no intention of building a museum, only the classic hoarder’s dilemma. But at Tilt Town, Harrell genuinely tried to turn his collection into something for all to enjoy, charging a yearly membership fee to play the games. Which worked fine, Harrell says, until his ads on Craigslist attracted the nut jobs.

  “Look around the room,” he explains, gesturing to the crowd of pinball enthusiasts I joined to watch Harrell’s public presentation on the tribulations of founding a pinball museum. “We’re all pinball people. We’re all fucking weird. But this set a whole new standard for what was weird.”

  As Tilt Town deteriorated toward what Harrell calls “a drunkard’s paradise,” a city manager showed up for a surprise inspection.

  “I basically told them to fuck off,” Harrell says. “You never want to do that to a city manager. They get really mad.” The inspection had been triggered, it turns out, by an online ad—not one of his but one posted by some joker advertising “pinball, booze, and hookers.”

  “This kind of gave a negative presentation to
the whole event,” deadpans Harrell.

  So he moved his 130 games to a new warehouse, which he called Flipper City, but this time with much tighter secrecy.

  “The first rule of pinball club,” he says, and you can guess what comes next, but here it is anyway, “is don’t talk about pinball club.”

  Harrell had now occupied four different venues in six years. He wasn’t a small businessman; he wasn’t building an arcade. He was simply looking for an affordable place to drink beer with friends and play pinball without running afoul of city ordinances.

  When a rent hike ousted him from Flipper City, Harrell knew he needed a new tactic. So when the opportunity arose to purchase a defunct VFW hall in Ann Arbor, he discovered a clause in its residential zoning laws that offered business exemptions for day care centers or museums.

  “We were just a club that I wanted to put all my crappy pinball machines in,” says Harrell, shrugging, “but now we’re a museum.”

  Kind of. The city voted to approve the Ann Arbor Pinball Museum, but for whatever reason—maybe “not in my backyard,” maybe general bureaucracy—it would only allow the museum to operate four weekends a year. It’s an attitude that Harrell summarized as, “We like that you’re a museum, but we don’t want you to ever be open.”

  At this point, you may be wondering, do people actually go to pinball museums? Isn’t it only a subset of a subset of the general public that would even set foot in such a place? To find out, I spent an evening inside one of the world’s most successful pinball museums, one that prides itself on its appeal to the masses.

  If you’ve heard of Asbury Park, New Jersey, you may be thinking of its connection to Bruce Springsteen—the Boss titled his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and kicked off his career there at the famous Stone Pony. But the seaside town, with its wide boardwalk and Victorian architecture, is also home to a place named New Jersey’s “Top Museum Worth Traveling For” by TripAdvisor’s FlipKey blog, granting it the honor of sharing a web page with the Strataca Kansas Underground Salt Museum, the Idaho Potato Museum, and the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin (where, seriously, they offer continuing education through a faux college called Poupon U and whose Mustardpiece Theatre has hosted such musicals as The Sound of Mustard, The Full Mustard, and Annie Get Your Bun).

  It’s the Silver Ball Museum, and like many of the world’s pinball museums, it was founded by accident. Rob Ilvento, who had previously risen to prominence by founding the Cluck-U chain of college-focused chicken restaurants while a sophomore at Rutgers, decided to indulge his daughter’s love for his Gottlieb Melody (1967) by purchasing additional games until they overflowed his home. In 2009, Ilvento moved his machines to the basement of a record and clothing store, then six months later, to the Asbury Park boardwalk. The museum now holds over two hundred games, representing about a third of Ilvento’s collection.

  Much like the PAPA facility’s 2004 flood, the Silver Ball Museum had a fun time in 2012 with Hurricane Sandy, which knocked the seaside attraction out of commission for two months.1 The difference between PAPA’s crisis and the Silver Ball Museum’s crisis was, according to a 2016 Washington Post article, a mere five inches—that’s how close the water level came to the bellies of the machines after Sandy. Let’s have a moment of silence, however, for the shorter video games that did not survive the flood.

  “Today’s arcades,” laments general manager Dan Toskaner, “everything is prizes. Kids win the tickets, and that’s all they want to do.” At the Silver Ball Museum, he’s seen what happens when a child, used to the neon lights and quarter pushers that constitute the de facto gambling of redemption games, presses START on a pinball machine for the first time.

  Sometimes, apparently, not much. Toskaner says he’s watched in frustration more than once as a child starts a game, presses the big flashing button or pulls the knob to launch the ball, then does nothing, unaware that flipper buttons exist. The child watches the ball roll down between the flippers, thinks, Well, that wasn’t thrilling, and loses interest immediately. They can figure out classic video games—at home, they play video games—but short of buying an actual, full-size pinball machine there’s no true way to duplicate the pinball experience in the living room.

  It’s a lament I’ve heard from more than one source. “Jersey Jack” Guarnieri, the CEO of Jersey Jack Pinball, told Pinball Magazine that in arcades and at trade shows without pinball fans, “the game is on free play and they have no clue what to do. They push the coin return button. It’s so sad.”

  At practically every pinball museum and arcade I’ve visited, it’s a given that the owner has to brag about the diversity of attendees—all ages, all skill levels, more than one gender. Sometimes, upon hearing the almost cliché declaration of “We get everyone in here! Even kids! All types!” one gets the sense that they may be exaggerating pinball’s diverse appeal just a bit.

  “Sure,” they say, “tonight it’s all pudgy middle-aged white men, but last month, you should have been here this one Tuesday . . .” However, on the Saturday evening in August when I visit the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, this is no lip service. It’s a legitimately popular hangout, just like arcades in the ’80s, only not unscrupulous. Just electromechanical family fun.

  There really are all types here. Grandparents and toddlers. Black kids and Orthodox Jews (it’s after sundown). Swimmers in flip-flops and packs of teenagers. Those who read the informational placards above every game detailing its role in pinball history and those who aren’t quite sure what this place is.

  Someone named Patrick is having an awesome eleventh birthday party.

  There are even guys playing pinball with their girlfriends. That means two things: One, couples are finding pinball to be a good date-night activity. And two, guys who play pinball on Saturday nights actually do have girlfriends.

  Even Springsteen himself has visited the museum, as have celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and the marginally less fun Governor Chris Christie.

  This is not an amusement park. There are no rides. No tickets, no prizes. Just vintage pinball, plus a few older arcade games, and everyone is having a blast.

  “People’s eyes light up,” says Toskaner. “‘Wow, that’s the machine I played thirty years ago when I was a teenager!’ People come happy, and they leave even happier.”

  The three primary ingredients for a pinball museum, then, might be delight, nostalgia, and general financial insolvency. “Thankfully the owner is not using this to make his living,” he admits, “and as long as it’s not losing money, he continues it.”

  And here’s why I think pinball has a future. I watch Patrick and his birthday party friends, between games of air hockey and Skee-Ball (the Silver Ball Museum has Skee-Ball machines from three different eras, none of them modern), go to town on a Gottlieb Knockout. That’s right: in 2015, I’m watching a pinball game made in 1950 being thoroughly enjoyed by a kid made in 2004.

  Running a pinball museum is a labor of love. It freaking has to be, because it’s sure not a way to make money.

  Tim Arnold, who owns the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, where I once dragged an entire bachelor party (not mine) for a few hours, readily confesses his massive facility is anything but profitable—not that it matters, since he donates the museum’s proceeds to the Salvation Army. Right on the Hall of Fame’s main web page, Arnold declares, “There’s no real economic reason for this to exist, or capitalism would’ve already built it.”

  He’s right. Based on standard business principles, there’s no reason pinball museums should exist. Then again, there’s no reason pinball itself should exist. It’s inefficient, unnecessary, complex, and breakable. That’s what makes it so charming.

  And thankfully, after decades of hiding in shadows, the kind of family fun I witnessed at the Silver Ball Museum is finally legal again. For this, we can thank the man who played a particularly crucial game of pinball, a game that undid everything Mayor La Guardia did to rid New York Ci
ty, and the world, of the scourge of pinball: Roger Sharpe.

  5

  How Josh and Zach’s Dad

  Saved Pinball

  * * *

  ON MAY 13, 1976, Roger Sharpe, a young writer with a drooping black mustache the size of a kielbasa, sat in a meeting of the New York City Council. He was preparing to play what has become the single most important game of pinball in history.

  “I grew up pinball ignorant,” says Sharpe, who has since become one of the most revered figures in the pinball world. “I can’t even call it pinball deprived. I just didn’t know that the games existed.”

  That all changed when he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he triple majored in business, English, and journalism. Because a triple major apparently leaves gobs of free time in one’s schedule to hang out at bowling alleys, Sharpe hung out at bowling alleys, which often had pinball machines.

  Burgers, bowling, beer, and pinball. It all fit together. “And I,” says Sharpe, “was just absolutely terrible.”

  He describes a day he watched a fraternity brother playing Buckaroo (1965), miming each prop that contributed to his character: “Hamburger. French fries. Soft drink. Cigarette.” Sharpe waxes rhapsodic about how the man embodied coolness, cradling the ball on one flipper while using his free hand to eat or smoke, bobbing his head as I imagine hepcats did in the ’60s. “It was like a light turning on,” he says.

  “It became something of an obsession, rather than a compulsion,” Sharpe clarifies. He chooses his words carefully, and why not? Sharpe is a former managing editor of GQ. “It was just glorious. I mean, I was good. It was something that just kind of came to me.”