mid-life crisis cure

In 1976, when I was 11, I left the Bay Area to live with my father in Massachusetts . He was a professor at Umass and I would spend a lot of time at the Student Union Hall where they had about 15 pinball machines. I was always drawn to pins and would play any and all I came across but when I started hanging at the Hall I really fell in love with 70's Gottlieb wedgeheads. At the time I didn't realize exactly why but they just felt smarter and most had drop targets, every kids favorite. Sky jump, Abra Ca Dabra and Atlantis were the ones I considered among the best but there was one that stood taller than the rest, you know the one...... El Dorado! I would play that game until my legs got too tired to hold me up. Pinball was my escape for those next few years and I remember how I felt as the video games started replacing my EM buddies around 1980. It was the end of an era and I knew it. My quarters vanished quickly as I tried to learn the tricks of the new SS pins and they felt cold and sterile by comparison. I also had recently discovered girls and pinball disappeared from my life for the next 20+ years.

So fast foward to around 2002, when my 12 yr old son kept wanting me to play video games with him and I sucked at all of them, he asked with tempered disgust, "didn't you play video games when you were a kid?" and I said "no man, I played pinball".I really hadn't thought about it since those last days at the mall arcade but suddenly I was flooded with pinball memories. It was like a door in my head opened and I was back in the Hall and the mall again. The pinseed was planted. I didn't decide to buy a pin until around 2010 when my daughter was about 8 and she wanted me to play video games with her. We had the same talk about why I wasn't good at her games and how I loved pinball when I was a kid and then it hit me... I could actually buy a pin! Of course I first looked for El Dorado and quickly learned that my favorite games were some of the hardest to find. I finally found a Sky Jump nearby and bagged it. Little did I know what monster was being created. Man, I was hooked all over again and as ya'll know, once you buy one you want more, a lot more.

Over the next few years I learned enough about fixing EM games to buy "project" games cheap and slowly get more of my prized wedgeheads. I also discovered all those amazing 90's pins that I never played and decided I needed to expand the harem to include some of the best from that era as well. So my passion as a kid is now my mid-life crisis cure and I have bought, enjoyed and sold/traded many top pins on both the SS and EM lists. Right now I have about 15 or so, half in storage waiting to be brought back to life and half in my house to my wifes dismay. The restored original MM is my crown jewel but my Abra Ca Dabra is my sweet little baby! I have had El Dorado twice and sold them each time along with several others but I will never sell Abra.

So in closing I just want to praise the unique and magical thing that is pinball! Pinball machines are more than fantastic games that reflect our cultural and creative spirit, they are for some of us, old friends we lost contact with and found again. They can reconnect old memories and bring them back to life. For me they feel almost "alive". I love all pins for one thing or another, even the misfit pins are cool cause they're still pins. Stern gets a LOT of grief but at least they're trying and for the most part keeping the torch lit. Thank you to everyone who had a hand in the creation and progression of pinball machines since their birth and thank you for reading my story, pinball for life! Sully