In the 70’s when I was in my teens, my buddy and I used to visit a pool hall which also was a large pinball arcade. Pete was the owner and liked pinball machines. All the pinballs were EMs from the sixties and seventies but there were also two games that had wood trim. A 1952 Gottlieb Quartette which had these weird things I’d never seen before (trap holes) where the ball just fell into them and did nothing. What? Gee, that's boring, I thought! The other was 1959 Gottlieb Lightning Ball and boy did I have a great time playing it as the balls flew around just like lightning. Because seeing wood trim was new to me, it had that cool older look, too. I remember standing in front of that Lightning Ball with big round eyes after the first time I played it and exclaiming to my buddy, "I’d pay a HUNDRED DOLLARS for this game!" Now you have to understand my economics back then. I was from a humble family and having a hundred bucks all at once was an astronomical sum.

Several years later, I now had a job, living on my own, and one day a friend called me up at work to say that Pete was selling his pinball games and maybe I would want to know this. I hurried down there after work and bought four machines. One of them was that Lightning Ball and, yes, as part of the package deal, he sold it to me for… a hundred bucks.

If you had told me when I was that poor teenager that I would someday own that very machine at the price I exclaimed, I would not have believed you!