I got hooked on pinball while in grade school in the 70s. Every Wednesday I would go with my dad to his weekly bowling league. I would watch his team bowl, organize the rental balls, bring their empty beer bottles back to the counter and sometimes I would be allowed to help score. Each week, dad gave me a dollar to spend. Usually that meant one bottle of pop for 25 cents and then the rest I spent on pinball. This was when you could play 1 game for 10 cents or 3 games for a quarter. In 1979 my mother brought me to the home of a coworker whose husband bought, fixed and sold pinball machines. He had maybe 20 or so in his garage set up for sale. He had at least that many more in his basement that he was working on. Needless to say, I left dreaming of having a pinball machine. I bugged my parents for weeks and even made a pinball machine out of my legos. About a month later, we returned to her coworkers house and we were shown a few of his new purchases. One of these was a Bally Hi Deal which he just bought and would sell "as is" for $250 and told us that it did work and he would set it up for free play, but any mechanical issues after we took it home would require us to pay. I was very excited. My dad, not so much. My mom, trying to consider this expensive toy. This was a lot of money for my parents. Needless to say, my parents made a major sacrifice for their son who was hooked on pinball. We moved the machine into the basement and played it for hours. One of my greatest memories is of how my mom and I would spend time cleaning and waxing it. Over the years it was played less and less and I often felt sad that it just sat in the basement unused. Around 2010 I asked my dad if I could move it to my house and he thought that was a good idea. This allowed me to finally change the rubbers and ball which had been in it for over 30 years. Hi Deal has worked with few issues for the last 42 years.
Fast forward to 2015. I finished my basement to better accomdate the games I had begun to acquire and now had a dedicated game room. In early 2016 I found a Star Trek the Next Generation, my holy grail game, and after having the price shock wear off and feeling much the same as my parents way back when, bought my first pin. This led to buying a Tee'd Off and Star Wars Ep1 in 2017. In 2018 I had looked for some time for an Addams Family for my daughter who became interested in my new hobby. In 2019 I bought my No Good Gofers from my friend who I got into pinball and sold the SWEp1 to make room for my first new game. In early 2020 my Medieval Madness remake SE was delivered. My only new game. Later in 2020 after a summer of looking for an Williams Indiana Jones, one was finally found, but I needed to sell the Tee'd Off to make room. So for about a year, my lineup is complete. Each time I go downstairs to play, I try to play Hi Deal at least once in memory of my parents who allowed me to enjoy these great machines .

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Hi Deal is family. My oldest daughter will get it someday.