I was watching Dead Boy Detectives with my lady and wife when a blast from the past showed up as part of the soundtrack.
Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart from their album 90125. You can go find it if you wish.
The song got me thinking about some of my old favorites. One of those is Pinball Wizard by The Who.
I learned to play the pinball when I was about 12. When I went to University, they had two pinball machines in each dorm snack shop. Those machines ate 100s of quarters. Back when it was a quarter per game and five balls per game.
This was the soundtrack of those days of playing the silver ball.
Pinball machines? Wow, that brings back some memories…
I had a friend that I would occasionally visit on the weekends in a university town. Lots of parties and things going on. He had a part time job collecting and doing cleanup work on various quarter grabbers. He introduced me to the owner of the company, and after finding out I worked on electronics stuff, asked me if I could take a look at a few pinball machines that he couldn’t quite figure out what was actually wrong with them. (Old relay logic mostly, but some electronic ones as well..) I didn’t have much trouble fixing them, so he was interested in having me wander over maybe twice a month.
I eventually went to work for the guy while attending school in that town. The company had the contract to provide quarter grabbers for the university ‘game room’ and also had stuff out in most of the taverns and bars plus one ski area. (I got a good deal on that, I could ski for free as long as I checked on the machines every hour or so.)
After the game room would close for the evening, we would go in and collect the tokens from the machines, collect the cash and reload the token dispenser, then do cleanup and maintenance. We’d always invite the student ‘office help’ that ran the student union desk to come in and play whatever they wanted while we worked.
And that is how I met my wife of now 43 years. She was a friend of one of the office gals and of course wandered in with them for after hours freebies.
I enjoyed working on the gear in the game room, but not so much in the taverns and bars with all the jerkwads leaning over and offering ‘advice’ and breathing in my face while I fixed the juke box or whatever. Back then, smoking was allowed and some of the insides of those machines probably looked worse than the lungs of the patrons.