Jericho, NY
In 1968, while I was a sophomore at Roslyn High School in NY, my friends and I played Chicago Coin's Gun Smoke pinball. We would go to the corner luncheonette every day and pump coins into the machine non-stop. After that I only got to play when I would take my kids to a local arcade every once in a while.
Fast forward 44 years to 2012. My family and I had been living in our current home for 27 years when I decided to pull out an old game that a former owner had left in our attic. This machine was probably too big for them to move to their new home so they just left it there. It was a 1953 United Cascade Shuffle Alley. When I checked it out, I saw that it was in amazing shape for a machine that had been left in an attic with large temperature extremes. I contacted a local EM repairman who taught me how to restore it. Many hours later and with a bit more help from him I had a working, attractive Shuffle Alley.
This prompted us to clean up the old playroom and convert it to a gameroom. We had always wanted a pool table so that was our next addition. In the meantime, I was searching for my old Gun Smoke to no avail. We decided to buy a new pinball machine and bought an Avatar LE. Literally hours after taking delivery I received an email from a guy who wanted to sell a working Gun Smoke! My wife and I drove 18 hours round trip from NY to VA and brought it home. Suffice it to say that when I had my high school friends over for a game night they were more than blown away!
Soon after we added a Slugfest (my grandson's favorite) and then a slot machine. At this point I had caught pinball "fever" real bad. We bought a Williams Indiana Jones (our favorite machine) and have ordered a Wizard of Oz - Emerald City (took delivery 6/13....LOVE IT!).
Don't tell my wife but I had a contractor in to see about moving a wall to make room for more machines. There are just so many great pinballs out there!
