Taped to the door of a small room next to the factory floor at Stern Pinball is a memo telling employees they have to sign up to play the company’s latest game and test it for bugs. “If you don’t sign up,” it says, “you obviously don’t want to work at a pinball factory.”
Pinball has its roots in games such as the 19th-century French bagatelle, in which players used sticks to push balls into numbered holes on a table. But Chicago has always been the center of the modern game. In the early 1920s the city became the base for the coin-operated machine industry, manufacturing peep-show and gambling machines, and in 1929 some unknown Chicagoan invented a coin-operated pinball machine. In 1932, as the country was sinking into the Depression, another Chicagoan, Raymond Maloney, designed the first pinball machine that could be mass-produced. The game was called Ballyhoo, and according to Michael Colmer’s Pinball: An Illustrated History, more than 50,000 of the machines were sold across the country within seven months.
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Most of the early machines were designed just for entertainment, though some rewarded winners with cash, and gamblers routinely bet on the outcomes of others. The games were popular even though many people were desperately poor. “Inexpensive entertainment, diversions from the issues and problems of the day-to-day were most definitely in favor,” says Roger Sharpe, a Chicago native and author of the history Pinball! “If you could be entertained and have a chance to make some money, so much the better.”
But the image stuck, and pinball became a target of antigambling zealots. According to Sharpe, the first antipinball law was probably enacted somewhere in the rural south in the mid- or late 30s, and bans then “spread like wildfire” through small towns.
La Guardia’s campaign attracted lots of publicity around the country, and soon mayors of other big cities–Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City–followed his lead. Even Chicago banned the games, though illegal pinball machines remained scattered around the city. But the ban was rarely enforced during the three decades it was in place, and Sharpe remembers machines in the train station at Randolph and Michigan, in a game room in a building that stood on what’s now Block 37, and in a game room on South State.
By that time interest in pinball, which had dropped off in the early 60s, was surging again, partly in response to the 1969 release of the Who’s pinball saga Tommy and the 1975 movie of the story. But even though business was booming, the games were still illegal in many cities, including Chicago and New York City.
New technology, especially microprocessors capable of producing endless flashing lights and ringing bells, was changing pinball machines. In 1976 Gary and Sam Stern decided to leave Williams Electronics and try to make it on their own. Stern says Williams “was a public company, and we didn’t necessarily agree with what they were doing. It was time to go.” He refuses to be more specific. The two bought Chicago Coin from a bank that had foreclosed on it and rechristened it Stern Electronics. Stern says it became the “fourth or so” biggest manufacturer, and they ran it together until Sam died in 1984.
