This topic hits home so closely, I am compelled to post. Some may find this interesting. It’s a walk in time from Gene’s purchase of Williams rights to production of Big Bang Bar and after, from my experiences with him. His struggles, his genius moments, his sad but funny moments, and the moments of a guy who was in over his head, but pulled through. He used misdirection at times to buy more time from pin community, to the legal folks at Williams, his competitors and others. He tried to do a lot of horse trading to get by an succeeded. I will try and write this in installments as it spans from January of 2000 to 2008. In the end you may not respect how he conducted himself, or his motives, but he did get some things going and reproduced BBB in the end.

My brother and I got into the pinball hobby in November of 1999. We met some real great folks and local pinheads in Chicago. Some great guys like Chris W., Terry and Dave N., Brad C., John “It’s Money” K. and others. Even associated with Pat C. for a time. Miss the late night pin sessions and greasy pizza. In January of 2000 I met Gene and his stepdaughter Kim at some pin show. I got to be friendly with them both, and Kim started to reach out to me and others for pin advice and technical advice at times. Just kind of worked out that way. I don’t remember the month but later that year, Gene announced he was the one who purchased the Williams rights to produce parts and games. Williams and others will dispute he had game building rights, but it was unclear. At this time, he was awaiting the arrival of two semi trucks filled with the remains of the Williams parts inventory. Kim reached out to me and my brother and a few other persons to come down to Bloomington, and help with sorting the inventory. I had no idea what an event this would be. From the amount of NOS parts to the massive bins they were stored in. We were completely unprepared for this task. In the next entry I will go through what arrived, the months it took to inventory everything, and realizing how much more than just parts were received. Williams just dumped everything into this trailer, parts or not. Will also talk about the super hot and freaky A frame building where all the Capcom stuff was stored. Holy cow there is a lot to cover. More to come.

Note, I want to go on record right now that the one person who was with us during inventory, found all the BBB artwork, mechanical drawings, parts inventory list (with parts cost and vendor who produced the prototype parts), manuals, schematics for playfield, color charts, everything you would need to go into production by accident. He was in the Capcom building and found this in a drawer. This individual can remain anonymous if he desires, but it was his pressing and suggestion to re-build BBB. Gene at the time was more consumed with the Williams inventory task ahead, and money he laid out. He didn’t have the heart or cash to tie up into another big project. He thanked this fellow for his insight and tabled it for a later discussion. I and my brother were totally disappointed he did think it was worth the effort at the time, but it did come true in the end. More on this later.

Thanks
Dougram

Installment 2

Before I write about the Williams inventory and BBB, I wanted to lay out what the IPB compound looked like and the “New Building” layout that housed most of the Williams parts. (With and add on in 2006, it became the BBB assembly area.). Gene and Kim called it the new building so that’s what we all called it. This helps with the discussion later on.

Overview of Gene’s property & New Building Layout for Williams Parts Inventory (As I remember it.). See pics.

Also Gene’s house was about 5 miles from IPB. It was an older small house that had been added onto many times with no thought or plan. A hallway would end and you turn and it’s a giant room, then again and again. All crazy layout. My brother called it the Franken House. By his house he had another building that was his gym. In the gym is where Gene had a workout room, the other three Pin 200 prototypes, and a locked room. The pin 200 prototypes. One was Magic Blocks and the other was Playboy. The third was a hodgepodge of parts and assemblies that looked like a rough test machine. No playfield or artwork. Just mechs. Lastly the locked room was his personal office with real abstract paintings.

Pin2000
The Magic Block game had a wizard, and some Tetris like block holograms that would fall and be bashed by the ball. Real simple oval geometry to the game. Had real cool miniature melange lights on top of the flasher domes giving a great light effect. Was about 85% complete for mechanics, but only 20% for software. Didn’t do much.

The Playboy pin 200 had a splash page that was killer. I would have bought one if they had ever made it. Envision a hologram of the word Playboy across the screen. A playboy bunny laying on top of the letters from P to Y, facing downward, hand under chin, one leg bent up at the knee. Classic Playboy pose. She was semi cartoonish with pronounced features, and her leg dangled back and forth. She winked and giggled every few minutes. Super awesome to see in person. Someone else has game play and some of the hologram girls for each month. The splash page as I recall had the most detailed graphics.

The last component of his compound was a set of metal corrugated shacks near his house. They were real rough structures made of thin metal. No windows and all the roofs leaked. In side was his big collection of pins from all periods. Many in super rough shape, some nice and some in between. Buckets were all over on games, on floor, everywhere collecting rusty rain water. Didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. Why have such a huge collection you can’t play or even admire. I felt like I was looking at one of those harder episodes. Just strange but he did have the largest personal collection of pinballs.

More to come
Dougram

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Installment 3

It’s the summer of 2000 and the weekend is arriving when the two semi trucks will show up containing all the Williams parts inventory. Some environment background to give the new folks some understanding of the parts desert we were experiencing at this time. William has closed it’s doors. Parts availability is non existent. Some distributors have small amounts of parts left in existing inventory. Game specific parts are getting grabbed up fast. Common parts are becoming hard to find and people are buying them up in fear they won’t parts to keep games running. Pinball Machines exist out in the wild and are also getting scooped up fast. The dilemma is you find a beat game, needs game specific parts, and the decision to buy or not to buy rests on what parts you can get. A common practice of parts hoarding begins to emerge. The only way to get precious game specific parts is to barter with other hard to find parts. People start buying up parts for games they don’t have just to have barter strength. This worsens the parts availability and things are tough and cut throat in order to survive this hobby. Friendships develop, but many become strained over everyone trying to grab the same nut. It was crazy and not a good time. This went on well into 2002 as Gene ran into delays in getting pats made. More on that topic later.

We agreed with Gene and Kim we would arrive on Friday and work all weekend to get the tucks unloaded. It’s a hot, not summer and this won’t be fun. We arrive in Bloomington in the morning. Gene buys us breakfast while the trucks arrive. We join up at the “new building” and the semi trucks are waiting. In attendance are five of us who were asked to help, Gene, Kim, Georgianna and three of Gene’s workers. Some paperwork is completed and the doors to the truck opened. Right at the back of truck one are two RFM pins. One is a prototype, no serial number, lots of color and mechanical notes on it. Second is a fully built and working RFM, looked brand new, with no serial number. Working non documented game. Both are unloaded and taken into building. As we progress, the trucks were filled with pallets shrink wrapped with stacks of parts. Probably 30 plus pallets. Some metal bins, drums, stacks of glass, two giant iron bins of legs and some shelving. Also lots of big boxes filled with rubbers, flipper bats, five playfield racks with playfields, stacks of translights, architecture cabinets with large drawers, tons and tons of heavy metal parts like screws, rivets, gates, ball guides, pcb boards in electrostatic bags and bare non populated boards, power supplies (heavy pallet), ramps. Ramps were both populated, partially populated and bare plastic. Takes us all day Friday and half of Saturday to get trucks unloaded with a forklift. Pallets wear dropped in roughly the areas near the shelves they were to go on. Raw materials or big items were placed in the middle of the overflow building for later determination of where to go. Some interesting things I saw in bulk.

1. Stack of pin 2000 glass. Stack was chest high, with black tar covering each piece of glass.
2. Williams pcb test machines. Many.
3. Two wooden coffins filled with two fully populated NOS MB playfields. They were fullY populated assemblies pulled right off the production line and put into these Williams chests.
4. Cases of NOS TAF ramps un assembled. Just the dark smoked plastic but separated by craft paper.
5. Tubes and tubes of artwork in half barrels.
6. Every metal part ever made for a pinball machine.
7. Barrels of rubbers black and white.
8. Lots of legs, various sizes and a large bin of rejects.
9. Stacks and stacks of translights.
10. A full upright T2 machine gun game.
11. So many rivets, bins of rivets, barrels of rivets, boxes and parts trays of rivets.
12. Pallets of Williams labeled boxes saying packed sub assemblies.
13. Playfield racks with RFM playfields, Dirty Harry playfields, Flintstones, T2, Party Zone (1), Junkyard, CC (1), and others.
14. Open barrel filled with plastic artwork screens of cabinets, playfields, everything screened on a game. All the TAF artwork was banded together saying orig and gold.
15. More ramp full assemblies in long half boxes. Lots of SS boneY beast ramps, WW spine chiller ramps, Roadshow ramps, and others.
16. A giant box with a complete NOS metal supercharger ramp from The Getaway.
17. Some work benches and storage racks.
18. Lots of super “Im loosing my shit” views of parts through the pallet wrapping. More in the next installment.

To end this installment we finished up on Sat unloading. We then took a break, and started later that day. We started the process of unpacking pallets, and counting inventory of parts. Gene wanted us to count the parts by hand. One guy said it’s gonna take me three months to count 10 million rivets. Let’s weight one rivet, then the container and divided by the individual weight to get a count. Gene said ok, so we went out to rent some scales. We’re beat at this time and really haven’ even discussed how we are to get compensated at the end of this. By the t8me we come back, it’s lat3 so we decide to grab dinner and regroup the next day. We wind up sleeping in Genes screened in poach with a noisy ceiling fan that kept us up all night.

As we unpack pallets, it becomes clear there are a lot of highly desirable parts here. I don’t think they realized what they had. I was really trying to keep my excitement inside which was hard to do. More to come on the next installment. I will detail out the unbelievable finds next.

Thanks
Dougram

Some more interesting tidbits. Some may know this and some may not so I will try and provide some clarity and events as I remember them. Gene had a ten year exclusivity on producing Williams parts from Williams. At year seven years, Williams could extend the contract for another ten years, let his contract expire, or extend parts rights to others if they weren’t happy with Gene’s fulfillment of his end. Gene’s lawyer was smart enough to work in a clause where Williams legal team was required to pursue violators. Williams had to spend legal resources to stop people from violating Williams copyrights and court costs if it came to suing. Gene just needed to identify and call out to Williams who were to be shut down.

At year two, Williams approached Gene about buying the pinball game rights to remanufacturing games. Gene had no excess cash and couldn’t leverage himself any further. He and Kim approached myself, my brother and one other individual in manufacturing, to try and form a separate corporation to produce games. He would provide the parts, and we would work on the manufacturing aspects. I asked him how much. He said 2.2 million. Possibly we could negotiate to 2 million, possibly a bit less, 1.8M best case scenario. We met several times to see if it could happen. Talked to some banks and were able to get some small loan commitments. With a lot of leveraging, homes, 401ks cashed out, etc, we could come up with the 2 million, but left us nothing else. We figured we needed another million to get up and running with assembly lines, people, small facility, tooling, etc. We told Gene it was a no go and thanked him for the opportunity. He then shopped it out to his lawyer and then his doctor friend. Both turned him down, so the Williams offer died on the vine.

By year seven, Williams started re-negotiating his contract. By this time, 2007, I had been removing myself from the situation as my family got larger, I moved, and started a new job. Regardless, Kim started letting me know that negotiations were rough. Williams wanted to let other legitimate manufacturers start making parts. They licensed the ramps guy to officially make ramps and molded parts with Williams licensing. Gene was ordered by Williams to start sharing films, molds and the like to the ramps guy. The ramps guy paid a lot for his license as I recall. In the interim, Gene got a call from the plastic injection molding company saying they had hundreds of Williams molds in their storage area. The company was downsizing and Gene should come and get his molds. Gene got his truck, ran to IL the next day, and loaded up his truck with every mold imagine able. I know cause I saw them at Gene’s facility. The truck was so heavy it broke down twice on his way back to Bloomington. What a complete stroke of stupid luck. Instead of calling Williams to find out where molds should go, they called Gene cause they thought he had the only rights. Let me just say that the next few years Gene shared NOTHING with the ramps guy. Not molds, decals for ramps, artwork, nothing. Everything needed was there in Bloomington, but this was Gene’s way to fight back cause he was pissed. He felt he should have the only rights toe everything Williams. This is what got Him in big legal trouble. Laughlin kept paying his monthly contractual payment to Williams and later sued Gene for millions in lost revenue, penalties to a Gene for him not complying and Gene trying some shady tactics in the end. This was the start of Gene’s demise. He let his ego get in the way of business. The other sad aspect is Gene had difficulties producing parts, cause of many reasons to be discussed. He had all the films and molds needed, others who wanted to produce parts, but he wouldn’t play nice. The pinball community suffered in the end.

Thanks
Dougram

Just for some clarity.

Chad - The parts guy at Atlas was Romero not Fernando. He was a big, tall Latin guy with a real deep voice. He used to answer the phone "Romero Here". He got cancer real bad later on. I went into the location one day and didn't even recognize him. He had lost so much weight and lost his hair completely. He passed shortly there after. Just to reminisce for a second, Romero was a super guy. He came off real rough at first like Steve Young. I got to talk to him so much he got friendly later on. In Oct of 1999 I bought a CV pin, and the plastic covering the DMD was bent real bad. It got caught on the mini play-field like they all do, and got bent upward. I was having a real tough time finding the part number in the book. He tried looking it up a few times and thought he had it. When the ordered parts came it was the wrong plastic. He then gave me the phone number to the Williams parts lady directly. I called her an explained what was happening. She helped me track down the right part number, and I then had Romero order the right plastic for me. In Nov, I got a beat Scared Stiff. I needed a play-field bad. The VUK hole was blown out. I called the lady at Williams on a lark. I asked her if they had this play-field and she said no. She then said hold on let me check by sub assembly part number. She cam back after ten minutes and said they had one NOS SS play-field as a sub assembly. This had all the holes drilled ready for install, (more than the blank has), all intended mylar applied and all t-nuts applied. It's pulled right before it goes into assembly and into a game from what she indicated. She said to me, have your distributor order it right away as it's the only one. In addition, if you are ever going to need anything else order it now. I wasn't getting the last statement at first, and then realized what it meant. I was able to get some stuff out of Williams before they closed. Mostly for SS, CV and TZ. If it wasn't for Romero, this would have never happened. God rest his soul.

I also don't recall any shopping cart. The place had a small counter in front, and small metal rack behind the counter with all the pinball game specific parts. Wasn't much to go through. Some SWE1 plastics, and few ramps and that was it. To the left was a window where Romero sat in his office. Down the long hallway were other offices, and one area with Billiard tables and a few Foosball games on display. It wasn't set up to walk around with a cart. Are you possibly thinking of Mazco or American vending?

To Mr. Bally Australia, these are the actual conversations I had with Gene and Kim. If you read all my posts closely, you will find my retelling of when Williams games manufacturing was offered to Gene way before you had it, and he passed on it. Go back and read all my posts before you start telling everyone what they lived through was bullshit. Please try and contribute constructively. I never saw any contracts, just retelling of my experiences with the principal parties. If you have more detail, then share it and help make this community better informed. To just say this is bullshit and I know more is childish.

Dougram

Ok guys. Reading this is just bringing back more and more memories of my time there. What I say below is not elaborated. These are facts as I witnessed them.

Gene Gene The Dancing Machine (Tidbits About Gene Himself and BBB)
To understand Gene, you have to understand his philosophy and how he worked. People just didn't get it, and after trying to work with him, found themselves at a disadvantage. Lots of stories about this already. Understand that Gene ALWAYS tried to pay someone or reimburse someone for their time without paying cash out of pocket. It was always a barter system or a carat he would dangle in front of you. This way he would get what he wanted, not have to pay you much to keep your work going, and then have the outcome he wanted. I saw this first hand. However, on the flipside, he and Kim were super nice to me all the time I was there, and my compensation was clear and tracked. I made sure to deal with Kim on that aspect after hearing stories from others. Kim always held up their end and were super nice to me. They really did try and treat me like family and I appreciated it.
Someone in a previous post nailed it about the workers there. The people working at IPB were always family members with no interest in pinball, folks who were on the cusp of society and near homeless, or friends needing a paycheck. One of his standard things was to offer folks a place to live while working there. He would let them stay in one of his slum properties, and that counted as part of their compensation. I remember one time there was a guy who was seal coating the blacktop one day, then was working on the roof, and lastly was asked to come in a pick and count parts. Then there were others who had worked there so long, they knew exactly where everything was, and kept the place going. It was a real mix of characters.
I also remember one time I was invited to their Christmas party. It was a combination of IPB workers, and other workers who did stuff for Gene. These two guys were outside with me on the porch and were smashed drunk. Smoking with one hand and drinking with the other. The one guys says to the other, the only thing that would make this night better is if we had pistols. The other guy says, damn yeah, we could shoot them off in the air and no one would bother us cause it's Christmas. (Hand to god this happened.) I swear I couldn't stop laughing. These guys were dead serious.

BBB - It Almost Killed Gene and He Definitely Lost Money
I'm jumping ahead a bit but here are some tidbits about BBB. Gene always wanted to make a pinball machine. It didn't matter what game it was, he just wanted to be able to say he made games. He himself told me this one night at dinner. When he left from the table, Kim filled me in on the history. He had accomplished everything he wanted to do from a collecting standpoint, but always felt like he was somewhat of an outsider to the guys working at Williams. At the Expo dinner, these guys would go on about designing this game, being the head of this department at Williams, and other guys being recognized for lifetime achievements. You got to remember Gene was 100% ego. He always had to be the center of attention and the guy on top. Especially in front of Georgianna. His goal was to make a game no matter what. He tried this when he bought Capcom and tried making a game called Pool Player. Someone showed the flyer. This was right when Williams closed and he bought the parts rights. He bailed on that venture and focused on the parts business. Choosing BBB was just because he had all architecture diagrams, list of parts, etc. He thought it would be an easy thing. Money started flowing in from the parts business, Kim was handling the store, so he ventured out to make his game and his mark. This is fact right from Gene.

Note, jumping ahead again but here are some headaches during BBB, that added to his stress level and caused him to have a heart attack. Gene wanted church hill cabinets to run the playfields and cabinets. CHC did not want to do this for him and deal with 150 to 200 playfields. Small run for them and not worth their time. I know this from both parties caused I verified this fact later on with someone at CHC many years later. CHC wanted to make their own game and were designing Vacation pinball. Gene, while holdings Williams exclusivity, renewed one of their expiring patents for the ball trough assembly used on the later Williams 90s games. He now had exclusive rights on the ball trough. (Williams was pissed.) He made a deal with CHC where they could use his ball trough for Vacation, and in turn they would run the playfields. (I think he sourced out cabinets to a cheaper local company. More on that in a minute.) The following shit show occurred with this deal.
1. Gene shows up in Cicero IL, to pick up the playfields. He starts saying I want this one discounted cause of imperfections, I want this one for free, I want this one for discounted cause its lighter, blah blah blah. The head guy at CHC says basically take it all as discussed or F off. Gene then takes all playfields at original deal parameters.
2. Early in BBB game assembly, while ball geometry is being tested, the clear coat and artwork begins completely peeling off from the ball friction. Like one of those scratch off lottery tickets. They test other playfields, and then same is happening. Gene is pissed and starts blaming CHC that they did it on purpose to sabotaged his game. He tells Kim we have too much time and money invested in this. Words are exchanged with CHC, with no resolve. Gene says go with them as they are. Kim says I am the one who is going to get massive amounts of calls after game delivery and we are going to get sued. The solution is as follows. They take all 190 playfields to the local Ford dealership in Bloomington. They go to the collision department and make a deal to have all the playfields clear coated again with automotive clear. Luckily this takes care of this issue, but a lot of stress with this.
3. Prior to the above, the BBB cabinets arrive in Bloomington, and they look awful. The purple is off, the sidewall paint coverage does not go down far enough into the cabinet. The fading shows when the playfield is set at the target height. In addition the cabinets are rough as hell. The back box purple coverage does not extend to the edges, and inside the back box paint is missing. Gene says go with it as is. Kim and Gene fight for days, and finally someone is brought in to sand and repaint most of the cabinets.
4. The two aliens sitting at the bar in the game cannot be remade easily. The artwork is lost and engineering diagrams lost. The originals were made by an art studio, and the guy was no longer around who did it. They took the two off of Gene's game, and have them remolded from the originals. He has 400 or so produced and it was costly. When installed in a sample game, the ball runs off the track in their mouths. They spin, and the ball doesn't release from their mouths. Somehow the mouths are too deep. More issues to deal with and this is a showstopper. More arguing and stress on everyone. Solution is to add a blob of paint in the aliens mouths so the ball doesn't come to a complete rest. This works after a lot of tweaking.
More and more issues like this occur during production.

This entry is getting long so more to come covering the following:
1. Gene asks Gary to assemble BBB. Gary says 1Million to get him off his case. He doesn't want to help gene because it is competition.
2. They company who was going to assemble / populate the playfields screw Gene and asks for more money. Double original quote.
3. Gene wants me and my brother to create wiring harnesses for BBB. He shows us one giant spool of black wire he got at an auction. Says we can make color coated wires with sharpies and some paint. We pass on this. He has to outsource this.
4. The black light assembly is no longer available and company who made it is out of business. He has to buy some assemblies from China, take them apart and reassemble.

At one point Gene has to sell property, several parcels on his compound, to keep the project going. He has a massive heart attack and goes to the hospital. More on this to come. Quadruple bypass. Kim is real worried his not going to make it. I will post more tomorrow. The saga continues.

Thanks
Dougram

Next Entry

I will try and clear up some things because I feel enough time has passed and I can say these thing with a clear conscience. Will try and touch base on some common threads / questions above.

Williams Inventory
Gene got a ton of highly desirable parts in the Williams parts purchase. In addition to the parts received at delivery, Gene showed up at Bloomington one day with four added pallets of parts. These pallets contained lots of highly desirable game specific parts. According to Gene, this had something to do with finding additional warehouses and parts inventories from manufacturers who wanted the stuff out of their way. Gene elaborates some on the podcasts previously posted. Anyway, my point being that at one time, stuff just started showing up. One example is when Gene bought TAG. After Gene bought TAG, he got a lot of the tooling, and paint equipment to produce playfields, etc. A stack of playfields showed up one day on a dolly cart. (Cart you use to move a fridge or a couch.) Kim says to me and my brother, can you look through this and tell me which playfields look good and which can be sold right away. We dig in.
Top of stack has about 25 NOS TOM playfields. OMG.
Next stack of 20 are NOS T2 playfields. (15 are perfect / 5 have some registration issues but very slight.) OMG
Last 10, were RFM playfields. All perfect. Sweet.

The weekend of the parts move, I couldn’t come back and stay all day Sunday. In addition some of the inventory process occurred during the following weeks. Took some time to get everything unpacked. Upon going back and helping throughout this process, I ran into the following cool stuff / OMG moments.

Walking near the pinball legs one day I see a stack of white plastic headers, a stack of decals, and a shiny NOS Whitewater header!!!!!! I nearly shit myself. There was a stack of white bare plastic WWH2O headers. (20) Next to them was a stack of NOS WWH2O header decals. They came on a thick cardboard stock, with a perforated edge. Peel and stick the cardboard decal onto the header. These were the subcomponents to make the header. Next to that was about 5 or 6 completed headers, mint, perfect NOS. I put this in memory because I had recently purchased a routed WWH2O that needed this. I was away for a week. When I got back to Bloomington, they were mostly gone. All went to one distributor. Not sure who. I was able to get one of the last ones before they were gone. Oh man.

I’m digging in overstock one day. Overstock were the parts sub-assemblies that went out to companies and came back with something added to complete to the assembly. Painted artwork, airbrushing, assembly required. Boxes were all sealed up with shipping tape. Kim says see what’s over there that we can sell. I open a box with four NOS Scared Stiff aprons. Prototypes from what I am told. Artwork was different. Open another box and four NOS Monster Bash aprons. Another box, Fishtales mini playfields. (Boat) Another box, WWH2O mini playfields. Another box, NOS Borg ships. Another box, Boom Balloon assemblies. Another box, JY car wall assemblies. One real long box, NOS NBA Fast Break linked games Header, small board and wiring kit to link up two NBAFB games and play against each other. Another day I find NOS TZ clock boards bare. Cherry DMD displays in anti static wrap up the wazoo. I told Kim they have a shelf life and should be sold right away. They sat.

Ok, my point being is that most of these highly desirable parts went to the big distributors spending lost of cash with IPB. Individuals, or small distributors didn’t have a chance. If you were lucky and could talk to Kim and they knew they had something in stock, they would sell it to you. Or if the BC guys could get it and sell it to you, you got it. It was literally like trying the lottery any time you called. Hit or miss. But when you hit, it was big. The added problem is that Kim was running parts, but was getting pulled in many different directions. Gene says he let her run this division, but you have to know that Kim had to justify about every move she made to Gene. He was on top of her at all times, inserting his opinion and telling her to do things differently. Lots of moving targets, attempts at reproducing parts, and Kim had to be the quality control person for parts that came in. This was a daunting task. If she missed something, people screamed then Gene screamed. In addition, when you found something wrong, you got screamed at. Why didn’t you catch this in production? Send it out as is. Kim all the time trying to satisfy collectors high standards. (Example, TAF playfields are run. No one notices the red rug pattern screen is missing. Hundreds of playfields screened and clearcoated.) Now what. OMG there was a lot of yelling for a week.

Backstory of the Bear Cave guys. As the BC guys started to insert themselves into the mix, I had started removing myself from helping IPB. At that time I wasn’t there in any frequency, had less and less time as my family grew, and the vibe was getting bad. The BC guys had an accounting background but were heavy into the pinball hobby. I think they lived in Saint Louis MO. One of the guys got friendly with Kim, and suggested they work and help Kim going forward. They stayed at one of Gene’s slums while they were there. They were there a week or two on, then went back home for a week. So they were on and off. Probably why it took them lots of time to get parts back to anyone. Once they got themselves in place, I got a real strange vibe from them. Maybe it was me being too sensitive, but I felt like they were pissed I was there. They didn’t seem to like it when I cam down to help Kim with her projects. They were also real interested on my compensation structure. Later on I found out their relationship with IPB was terminated. I heard from Kim and Gene some of that story. Since it is hearsay, leave it be that they were promised an exclusive distributorship with IPB, and the terms of this didn’t work out. They say one thing, Gene says something else. Didn’t work out.

At this time BBB was getting up and running. I did see lots of BBB parts in the added on area connected to the parts wearhouse. Gene and Kerry do a good job of explain that whole thing in the podcast. I did know Kerry prior to him going down there from the Chicago scene, and was glad he went. Please don’t forget that his friend Brian also went down there and did a lot of the process work too. He buddied around with Kerry a lot and was a super nice guy. I really liked him. Used to see him at shows and such. Don’t recall his last name but pics of them out there while building BBB.

Thanks
Dougram