Southwest Airline's Spirit Magazine is my favorite of the in-flight magazines. Every time I flip through an issue, there's always at least one or two articles that are right up my alley. This month, there's a nice, long feature on the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.
From Spirit Magazine (photo by Phil Torrone of MAKE:):
"My brother and I learned to fix the machines using the Machinery's Handbook," (museum founder Tim Arnold) says. "Back then, in the early '70s, you could buy a broken-down machine for 50 or 100 bucks, fix it up, nurse it back to health, and make 20 bucks a week off it. We ended up renting an 800-square-foot storefront in East Lansing. There were some minor details: Pinball was still illegal in Michigan, and we were under 18. We were putting machines in bars we weren't supposed to be allowed into. My brother and I saw ourselves as bandits. It was organized crime, except that we weren't very organized." This was an impressive bit of technical entrepreneurship when you consider that the average college graduate in electrical engineering needs two years of tutelage under a skilled repairman to master the art of fixing old games.Now all the games are beginning to bear the patina of yesterday. At the height of the pinball era in the early '90s, the industry produced about 100,000 machines a year. Today only one company, Stern Pinball, remains, and it makes about 10,000 machines a year. "We have a saying: The last ice man makes the most money," Arnold says. "Back in the '20s, you had thousands of ice men in every city, delivering ice to every home. Then refrigeration came along, and nearly all the ice men went out of business. Nearly all. You still have a guy delivering ice to bars and restaurants. There's room in every town for one ice man. That's what the Hippie and I are." He peered at me through his aviator glasses. "We're the last of the ice men."
Link to Spirit Magazine article, Link to PT's photo post on MAKE:
