My Pinball Odyssey

By NeonBaller

October 27, 2024

This story got featured & frontpaged on October 31, 2024


16 days ago

Growing up in the 1960s in a small town, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to pinball because most of the pinball machines were in (or so I was told) those adult hangouts known as bars and, I was still at least a decade or more away from legally being able to enter one. I knew the machines existed though, because every now and then, I caught a glimpse of a pinball machine in a magazine or on one of the three television stations we could receive on our black and white TV (with the aid of an antenna perched on our rooftop).

Fast-forward to the eye-opening summer of 1969 and, amidst the coverages of the first manned moon landing in July and the spectacle that was the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August, a friend told me that there was now a pinball machine locally in a place accessible to kids. Not long after, armed with my then life savings of maybe three dollars (earned by picking up discarded soft drink bottles in the ditches alongside the sleepy streets and selling the bottles back to the grocery store for two cents apiece) I made my way to the promised land. My buddy had been right! There was a pinball machine located inside of our towns version of a BBQ joint. I stood and watched grown-ups (who were probably just high school kids at the time) play a machine called “Pit Stop.” I waited my turn, dropped a coin into the machine and, embarked on a journey that continues for me to this day.

Through the years, lots of other things came along which captured my attention, my time and my coins (girls, cars, sports, foosball, concerts, video games, family, career, etc.) but my lifelong love of pinball had been established and I would revisit the hobby at various times in my life (for varying lengths of time). Now that I’m retired, I'm grateful to have the time to learn to appreciate the mechanical workings and inner beauty of the machines.

I’ll never be a great technical pinball machine player but, I will always love to play!

Story photos

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Comments

11 days ago

Great story! Thanks for sharing!

6 days ago

Cool story

What machines do you like working on the most?

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