Pinball Wizard
When I was growing up in Newburgh, New York, my aunt and uncle had both a juke box and a pinball machine. When my sisters and I would go to their home to play, we and our cousins went downstairs to their rec room, selected our music, then fought over who got to play with the pinball machine. That was in the 60’s and the machines were considerably less complex as compared with those of today.
Although pinball has become extremely popular in Seattle, it wasn’t always chocolate and roses. In fact it had a pretty sketchy past here in Washington’s largest city.
In 1960, Seattle’s mayor, Gordon Clinton, shut down pinball around the city because of increasing numbers of pinball associated bombings. According to 2019 article in the Seattle Times, “Eleven years and a few dead bodies later, a grand jury indicted the city council president, the police chief, the former King County sheriff, and cops up and down the chain of command on charges related to bribery, extortion, blackmail, sex work — and pinball.”
The Times continued, “One of those bodies belonged to “pinball king” Ben Cichy, who controlled Seattle pinball licenses — and was a close friend of King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll. On May 31, 1969, Cichy was found dead in 5 feet of water near his yacht on Yarrow Point. In an unusual move, his autopsy was delayed until the chief medical examiner (Carroll’s brother-in-law) got back to town, and then conducted it without any law-enforcement witnesses — against protocol for such a sudden and high-profile demise. The death was ruled an accident”.
The atmosphere is quite different in these places now. I did a search on pinballmap.com to see how many places one could play pinball in Seattle. There are 13 locations in the city with ten or more machines, with the Seattle Pinball Museum maintaining 50 or more machines available to play. Seattle has about 484 live machines in the city, with a ratio of 1:1,835 people, making it the number 2 city in the country for pinball. Portland is number one with 1:1,141. The Seattle Pinball Museum also has the oldest machines, going back to 1960, with one 1956 machine that is only available as an exhibit.
I visited (and played) at the Seattle Pinball Museum. Because of its tight space, I knew that it was a place I could neither conceal myself taking pictures nor impose myself and my camera into the players’ spaces. I thought this would be a great way to spend the day with my 16 year old grandson, Joe, and he agreed to come, to play and to be a subjects in my photos.
The machines were lined up by age, starting with the oldest. The early ones were the type I remembered from the ‘60s, with the bumpers that light up and ring when the ball hits them. As we moved from one game to the next the technology changed gradually, but the difference from first to last was so significant. From a single ball with bumpers to five balls and flashing bright lights with rotating colors, in a fully electronic environment. Add-A-Ball Amusements in Fremont has gone a step further. Once the arcade closed in 2020 because of Covid, one of the staff came up with the idea of using foot pedals rather than hands. The games are now fully hands-free, including the flippers.
Another thing that has changed over time is the total score one could achieve. In early games top scores just reached 1,000 points. The last game we played was scoring somewhere over 5 million points. It seemed to increase even faster than inflation!
The order of the games represented not just a history of pinball machines but took us through the social culture of the world we lived in during those times. Some of the themes of the games with the year the game was manufactured, include Swing Along (1963), Stardust (1971), Godzilla (1998), Lord of the Rings (2003), The Sopranos (2005) and Star Wars The Mandalorian Project (2021). One game has 2 women pole dancing with men oo’ing and ah’ing behind them. I resisted posting a photo of the pole dancers because of my feelings about the subject, but because it is so representative of the times I felt compelled to include it.
The customers represented all age groups, from children through maturity. All ages, male and female, came in groups, some in pairs and some all alone. It appeared to be a popular place for dates based on several of the photos I could not post!
Joe and I had a great time. In between shooting photos we competed against each other on about half of the games, with him winning most. He had fun and I had fun, and that was just fine with me.
