The first one is free...

I must have been about 13. My Cousin-in-law had a Jumping Jack in his living room that I liked to play for the pure fact that I thought it was cool to see a pinball machine in the living room of a house. When they moved, they asked if I wanted it, only condition being that I could never sell it, and if I wanted to get rid of it, I had to give it back to him. Needless to say, I still have it 23 years later. When I was in my senior year of high school, I took a second job at our local arcade, Funway Amusements in Batavia IL. I can still remember the pin lineup along the back wall, and when I opened the arcade up, the pins were the first thing that came on, with their attract modes and the solenoids all testing out at once in a symphony of electronic voices and sounds. The Adams Family, Funhouse, Pinbot, Checkpoint, Road Show, Whirlwind, Bad Cats, Fish Tales, Barb Wire, and a few more that escape me at the moment. Being young still I couldn't afford them when they came up for sale from time to time, that Bad Cats was awful expensive at $300... Checkpoint equally unobtainable at the same price. I would drag my friends up to Galaxy North on Friday and Saturday nights when I wasn't working to play pinball and pool. "Gala" as we called it, had an all-star lineup, and was a known test ground for the pinball/arcade manufacturers a stones throw away near Chicago. I remember a full line-up of Data East machines, which were practically new then, gleaming and lighting up along the upper level of the arcade. Those were the days. The last days, actually, of the arcade as most of us knew it. Pinball was on the decline then, with Gottlieb rolling out it's last machine (Barb Wire) the year I graduated, and Bally/Williams 2 years after that with Cactus Canyon. When I worked at Funway, rare were the times I saw more than 2 people at the pinball area, and the token count on them was never high when I emptied the coin boxes. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Virtua Fighter were earners though, the lines to play them stretching through the arcade. Fast forward 7 or 8 years, and on a visit back home to my parents, I took a look at the the old Jumping Jack in the basement. The bug bit again. Within a few months I had bought a couple non working early SS Ballys, for about a hundred bucks each. Fixed them up, played them, and bought a couple more. It's stayed with me ever since, the times have changed and so have the prices, but it's still just as fun. And yes, Jumping Jack is still with me, the one that started it all.