Denver, CO
I got into pinball because a dive bar right by my last place had like 7 machines on the backside of the bar to where you could order a beer from the pinball room, which was many times just me or my friends. It was so awesome; sort of like a double sided fireplace except with beer. They always had a nice assortment of games on rotation and as soon as one went down within a few days it was fixed or replaced with something else. It was seldom any of the machines had any issues, at least as far as I knew. I remember seeing the same people up there playing games on certain nights I would go. When they were there many of the games would already have a credit in, so I'd look around and when no one claimed them would play them. One night this happened and there was this guy just destroying these machines. Like, would play one game for a half hour, then get bored and walk away, but had already racked up free games. I didn't understand the context, so I told him 'hey man, you have free games to play' and he kindly replied, 'oh, these are all my games so it's not a big deal'. I hadn't ever thought about the business of coin games at bars and naively thought each location owned their own or something, but immediately things clicked that it's a third party and they must take cuts of the profits. I got to talking with him about our favorite games and told him I was looking for a Whirlwind, and he replied saying they are around and to check online or if he heard of something would give me a call. I ended up getting a very nice one shipped and when I told him the price he laughed and wanted to check it out because he couldn't believe how much I paid for it. Looking at it now it makes me laugh at how inexpensive it was in today's world. I'm glad he wanted to check it out because I had a locked coil and didn't know the first thing about fixing it. He swung by, said it was a pretty nice machine which made me feel a little better, then lifted the hood and checked things out. He didn't have a spare coil so replaced it with the knocker coil and for a few years I didn't think much of it. At some point after getting more machines and learning my way underneath the playfield I realized the coil strength for the knocker isn't the same as the flipper, so quickly moved that coil back to the knocker and fixed the flipper. Turns out my playing didn't improve as much as I had hoped haha. Unfortunately, that bar shut down not too much later and I'm still so sad about it. I met a lot of great people there and sort of stumbled upon it on my own, discovering this cool scene. While the bar is gone, my love for pinball still exists. I doubt I would have pulled the trigger on the Whirlwind without knowing someone who could help me if (when) it failed. So thank you to the Cuckoo's Nest for getting things going for me as well as Donavan Stepp for coming over to teach/bully me about how easy pinball repair can be. Only half joking because I know now how running around the city for very minor issues wasn't worth his time, but he did it anyway at that point to keep me engaged, but also let me know if owned these older games it was in my best interest to learn how to fix them, which I did.
Update: we moved to a new house in 2022 that can accomodate all of my games in one room as well as a better area to work on them if I need to.
