The Museum of Pinball will soon be no more and its machines will have new homes

Lucas Esposito/USA TODAY NETWORK

Men of a certain age—middle to dotage—have been known to attempt to turn back their clocks with fast cars, faster women, and even pinball machines with fast flippers. Fast cars can kill a man. Faster women can make him wish he were dead. So except for one small technicality, I would be one of those men who fall into the safer, third category.

I love pinball machines. I grew up on them, as I’ve written, in Chub Dodge’s emporium in the small town of Nowata in northeastern Oklahoma. My eyes lit up like those wondrous machines’ flashing lights when I timed right the flipper’s arc of contact with  the little steel ball and sent it caroming into hubs of points and divots that coughed up still more. They even flipped the ball out and back toward the player. When that led to a free game clicking up and registering on the face of the machine, it was better than sex.

Of course, I didn’t know what sex was then. Now, I am too old to remember.

It must have been good, though, because when I read in The New York Times that the Museum of Pinball was this weekend putting 700 pinball machines, and even more arcade games, on the auction block, I began feeling guilty as sin. Neil Vigdor wrote that bidding would be held this weekend in person or online. I could bid. It used to cost as little as a nickel or quarter to play Chub’s machines in the 1950s. I always had that.

Now, I have a credit card. More than one. I would need them. The most-prized machine, a 2018 “Pirates of the Caribbean” collector’s edition, in the auction that might produce as much as $7 million, could sell for as much as $35,000. I would have to increase my credit limit to buy a machine like that $35K baby. Sadly, there is no use. I have no place to put it. I live in a condominium built on a slab. I could not get my purchase up the stairs to the loft, and my “office” looks as if it has been hit by one of those furious winds that have earned Oklahoma a bull’s-eyes in the heart of Tornado Alley.

John Weeks, founder of the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California, told Vigdor he bought his first pinball machine when he was a child and opened his first arcade when he was 17. He tried mightily, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun, to find the right place and space to keep his museum open and thought he had done so but the deal fell through because of cost and the fact he would not have been able to reopen soon enough to survive. Remodeling the building would have taken longer than he realized. I could have warned him. I spent a working lifetime in similar newspaper buildings from California to Florida. Weeks planned to relocate to Palm Springs in The Desert Sun newspaper building, but his architect said it would take four months just to remove the printing press. If you do not know printing presses, they are large, heavy, and noisy.

Having been for more than 40 years a part of the newspaper business, I might have suggested to Mr. Weeks that he reconsider putting his museum in such a building. As it turned out, Weeks decided he had no place to go and that, like newspapers, his nonprofit business and the love of his life, could not survive as he and we know them.

“It’s just sadness,” Weeks told The New York Times. I can relate.

I was never happier than standing at the business end of a Chub Dodge pinball machine and whiling away the hours before hustling off to the Nowata Star to fold my newspapers. They were so thin we could create a tri-corner shaped missile perfect for flinging onto subscriber’s porches and roofs or, if nursing a sore arm, into the bushes.

I am not sure whether I would have enjoyed being a part of the 331 pinballers who at the Museum of Pinball in 2015 set a Guinness World Record for the most people playing pinball simultaneously. Some summer afternoons during my youth it felt as if I singlehandedly played 331 games, but that has to be an exaggeration. I would have run out of money and time before I could have completed that many. I’m not sure that the Museum of Pinball helped itself by being “open only about nine days a year.” Vigdor explained that it “mainly hosted events” and averaged “about 9,000 visitors annually.

That may belong in the Guinness book as a losing business model, one I might have come up with because the pinball machine business was the furthest thing from my mind. It was my life. In any case, I had no mind for business. Captain’s Auction Warehouse in Anaheim, California, was liquidating the Museum of Pinball’s inventory. Auction company owner Chris Campbell had worked for years with Museum’s owner.

“While it’s disappointing to see the Museum of Pinball close its door,” owner Weeks told the Desert Sun’s Brian Blueskye, “I am confident that Captain’s Auction Warehouse will steer the games in the right direction . . .” I am sure that is true, based on what Campbell told The New York Times. “Personally,” Campbell admitted, “I’m sad about it, but I am optimistic the equipment will move to good places. The interest is insane.”

As far as I’m concerned, the right direction for a machine would have been the back of Chub Dodge’s wonderful establishment. But it’s too late—even for the leftovers from the weekend to be sold September 24 through 26. Mr. Dodge has gone to his reward for making me and many other Nowata kids happy and so has his emporium. Nowata is not the same. I am no longer Little Stevie, promising pinballer. I don’t even know if my reflexes remain good enough to stand up to the best of the best pinball machines.

That does not mean that there is nothing left of Chub’s. Sandra Dodge Craven, Chub’s daughter, reminded me of that. “I am a Nowata girl, through and through,” she once told me in a letter. “I was born in Nowata. My husband and I raised two boys in Nowata.” So Sandra knows Nowata better than I do, yesterday’s Nowata and today’s.

“Nowata is certainly not the same as it was growing up,” she wrote, “but I still have many fond memories and I have never wanted to live anywhere else.” Sandra and I are of the same Nowata generation. My life and ambitions took me away but my heart, in many ways, never left the place and those I first loved, including Chub Dodge.

Those memories are what remain and now, the end of the Museum of Pinball has caused them to come flooding back. I still see the flashing lights and hear the sharp sounds of Chub Dodge’s pinball machines that are museum pieces of my mind.