When I was in Jr. High School, I had a friend who used to invite me to go with his family on a vacation in the Summer to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. This was in the early '70's.
It was a seedy beach town that had been popular around WWII. No one sunk a penny into the place after that and it slowly deteriorated. Nearly a ghost town on the beach,
The beach itself was wonderful, 29 miles North of Cape Ann,
which pushes the warm water of the Gulf Stream from the shore to the outer banks, leaving behind the colder ocean of the North Atlantic to break onto the beaches from Gloucester to Maine.
Hampton Beach was best know for its' surf, chilly water and Honky Tonk boardwalk along which languished every imaginable down at the heels salt water taffy, blown glass, shell shop, bait store, and its crown jewel, The Hampton Beach Casino. Years before the Casino had attracted big acts and big crowds. The acts disappeared and were replaced by pinball machines, rows and rows of them: Ballys's, Gotliebs's, and the lowly Williams's. Pacheco and skee-ball ran a distant second and third in popularity to pin ball.
Every other shop on the boardwalk was a pinball arcade, but the Casino was the largest by far. Long before "Tommy", pinball was enormously popular, although it was dogged by a bad reputation attendent on hustlers, gangs lowly atmoshere. No self-respecting establishment would have a pin ball machine. It would be like hanging a sign in front of your place of business, "Dump".
Hampton Beach seemed comfortable with it's reputation as a "bad town", even though it was dry. To me Hampton Beach meant freedom, late nights, illicit fun(my friend's mom had a taste for Canadian Club so we stayed out until the sun came up), and Gottlieb and Bally pinball machines, and .10 a game, 3 games for a quarter. It was a kid's dirty little corner of heaven. I hit a site http://vpreview.blogspot.com/ that reminded me of how much fun I had as a kid, playing pinball to win free games.
It didn't stop as I grew older. When I was older, we'd hitchhike the 90 miles to Hampton, meet someone, crash on the floor of a guest house (a night sleeping on the beach was too buggy, and worth a night in jail if the local cops caught you--funny how fast those fat guys could run).
I can't remember much ever bothering me then, although I'm sure things did. Today I had a tough pain day, and the meds didn't work. Before the maelstrom of stabbing cramping feet, I played a bit with my 2 youngest kids. We went to a bowling alley, which is now as sanitized as pinball. In the back, sadly at the end of the line of new huge, glitzy, multi-level, expensive (too big to tilt) pinball machines was on old broken Bally, Hokus Pokus. That thing must have been from the '50's or 60's. I remembered it from when I was a kid. The increments of scores on the new games are in the multi millions; I think a High score on Hokus Pokus was 20,000.
Shit, I want to be a pinball machine at the Casino on old Hampton Beach, not one of those new ones. I'd grudgingly flip out points on a mechanical counter, tilting the players out so they lose the bets they'd made, and the free games they'd earned. Just like the old days. I'd blink in morse code, "Later, sucker". Then I'd break for the night. Perhaps my plug would fall out of the socket; maybe just a short. But, I'd work again tomorrow. Yeah, I'd work again tomorrow.
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