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Naïve lad that I once was, I did not know that I had embarked on a criminal enterprise in the back of Chubb Dodge’s emporium. Chubb never struck me as the kind of man who would lead impressionable youth astray in order to fleece them of nickels and dimes.

I mentioned Chubb and his establishment—a place of wonders and endless educational possibilities—in my recent book, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. Chubb’s was not what broke my heart; in fact, it filled heart with joy and these days, it fills an old man’s, with fond memories.

In the 1950s in Nowata, Oklahoma, I became a pinball wizard on machines at the back of Chubb’s. If I had been a student of history then, and the internet had not been years in the future, I could easily have looked up the checkered history of pinball. That would not have stopped me, though, because I was addicted to the flash of neon and the bells and whistles of machines whose names I cannot remember but do know I could sometimes beat.

I should have been able to win reasonably often given the number of coins I poured into those devil devices. At least that is how one of New York City’s great mayors, Fiorello LaGuardia, seemed to regard the early pinball machines without flippers. They were, in LaGuardia’s opinion, “insidious nickel-stealers” that as good as picked the “pockets of school children in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money.”

Chubb would not have taken my lunch money. Besides, I earned the coins I fed into his pinball machines by delivering the Nowata Daily Star. The newspaper was located down an alley and across a street from Chubb’s. Some of us paperboys liked to kill time waiting for our papers to come off the old flatbed press by going up that alley to Chubb’s or down the same alley to the pool hall, which we were not of an age to enter since it sold liquid refreshments of the alcoholic sort—the diluted 3.2 beer that Oklahoma at that time self-righteously limited its younger adults of drinking age to consuming.

If evil was to be found, it would have been in the pool hall, not at Chubb’s. Pinball, as Ken Dowell pointed out in “TILT! The History of Pinball,” a 2018 article on offtheleash.net, “was not invented as much as it was an evolution of earlier games”—specifically, Bagatelle, a French tabletop game played with marbles that may first have been introduced in the United States by soldiers fighting on America’s side in its War of Independence. So France was Independence-fighter and introducer of pinball’s precursor? Chubb—Mr. Dodge to me?—didn’t tell me that. France: What a country!

We holier-than-thou Americans, of course, had go and try to spoil pinball by criminalizing the machines. Did you even notice how often America does that? “With the production of the first coin-operated machine in 1931,” Christopher Klein wrote in “That Time America Outlawed Pinball” for history.com, “it has been viewed by many as a menace to society. . . . “Criminal elements were said to control a large segment of the industry” and “it didn’t help pinball’s image that most of the machines were manufactured in Chicago, a hotbed of organized crime during the Great Depression.”

Well, I can tell you that Chubb Dodge was no Al Capone. Quite the opposite. He was so nice to members of the young criminal element who frequented his store that in hindsight I am glad to have contributed my nickels and dimes to the well-being, if only in a small way, of his family. When Sandra Craven, Chubb’s daughter saw her father and Chubb’s mentioned fondly in my memoir she wrote to me, noting that though we didn’t know each other—she is slightly older than me—she knew my of parents and the house in which I grew up, and my story rang some bells (not pinball) with her. “I thank God every day,” she told me, “for all the wonderful memories that I have of my growing-up years and what a wonderful life I have been able to enjoy.”

Chubb Dodge’s and his pinball was no small part of what made my Nowata wonderful. The machines were the vintage after the tilt mechanism had been invented (1935 by Harry Williams) and players no longer could manhandle the machines in an effort to force the silver ball to go where they wanted for higher scores and extra games. Defined as a game of chance in its earlier days and thus, arguably, gambling, and therefore evil, flippers turned pinball into a game of skill. I must have had some, because on good days I occasionally racked up so many free games I had to either leave them on the machine for the next player or be late in folding and delivering the newspaper to my customers.

Now that would have been a crime. Responsibility scores higher than fun and games.

It can be surprising the ways in which we learn responsibility and the places that it occurs. That was, I think, among the many reasons my Mama allowed me great independence to find my own way whereas her mother had kept her close. It was a gift to me that Mama later cursed having given me such great quantities. She may not have always liked the outcome of my independence but the streak was as much a consequence, I think, of the time and the small town in which I grew up and loved.

I do not know what I would have become or how I might have turned out given different parents—especially Mama—place and friends, even people I did not know well. They made me feel safe to risk what seemed impossible to me or to others wrong. Pinball is but a small example. I also don’t know what I would have thought if I had known that the machine I loved in a place I felt good and safe—Chubb’s—was supposedly “bad.”

How can loving something so much be bad? I can still hear the sounds of the machine, see its neon flashes light up the riser that towered above its glass face, feel the smooth plastic of the flipper buttons beneath my fingers on each of its sides. Like others, I’ve known my share of bad days but the Golden Age of Pinball, from 1948 to 1958, were some of the best, and I have Chubb Dodge’s in Nowata, Oklahoma, to thank for them.