The Unsung Saviors of Pinball

Pinball is seeing a resurgence in poplularity these days. Baracdes can be found in every major city with rows of gleaming new pinball machines from companies like Stern, Jersey Jack, American Pinball and Chicago Coin.

There are also plenty of vintage pinball museum type operations dotted around the country. In the New England area we have Pastime in Manchester Center, Vermont and the Electro-Mechanical Museum in Pawtucket, RI as well as the granddaddy of them all, Fun Spot in Laconia, NH.

But what may escape the younger players today stepping up to the lastest machines like Elton John, Godzilla or Foo Fighters are the unsung heros saved the vintage machines when the pinball market collapsed in the late 90s.

People like Jersey Jack in NJ, Pinball Warehouse in Wakefield, MA and the Youtube icon Todd Tuckey of TNT Amusements, in Southampton, PA.

These were the pinball fanatics who showed up to arcade bankrupty auctions and hauled away the classic pinball machines and stored them in their basements or restored them and sold them to collectors.

Williams closed its pinball division on October 25, 1999 after high losses with the Pinball 2000 concept that integrated a PC screen into the pinball game. It was an attempt to shake up the market and compete with arcade video games.

Without these pinball fanatics who saw the decline of location pinball and every pinball manufacturer leave the market until Stern Pinball entered the market (not to be confused with Stern Electronics) these playable works of art would have been lost.

I got a chance to meet one of these pinball savior, John Reuter or “Ballyman” as he goes by in the pinball circles, of Gorham, ME.

John managed to save over 100 vintage pinball machines, most from the 80s heyday. Not only once but twice because he had to rebuild his collection from scratch after a tragic house fire.

It was a strange coincidence running into John as I recall back in the 90s dreaming of owning my first pinball machine and subscribing to Game Room magazine where I vividly recall a cover story with a picture of John standing in front of his burnt out house. I could feel the pain, here I was pining for a pinball machine and this poor guy lost an entire collection to a fire.

Well in the following years John plopped a new house on the old foundation and started to rebuild the collection. The reason I made the two and a half hour trip up to Maine was because my pinball buddy T was buying a couple of his machines – a working Bally Viking and a Gottlieb Sinbad project.

This particular Viking had an interesting back story. John said it came from a guy who had this amazing basement decked out with diner furniture and arcade games. He and the wife were selling off the collection, buying an RV and were going to tour the country. John bought all their games and then ran into them a few years later when they decided the RV thing was silly and wanted to see if they could buy the games back.

T and I took off around 2:30 for another one of these pinball adventures I seem to get involved with – T is constantly buying, trading and selling machines as he enjoys fixing them up. I didn’t know much about the situation other than it was going to be a long trip up to Maine and the guy had “a lot of machines”.

When we showed up at the non-descript house mostly hidden by trees, I didn’t know what to expect. John opened the door to what would have been a two car garage and wow what a collection complete with a home theater.

I thought that was it but then he led us to what was the original basement of the first redition of the house and the collection stretched all the way down – sixty machines in all, mostly 80s classics like Stern Seawitch, Falthom, Ali, Nine Ball as well as a few newer machines like Led Zepplin. It was an amazing collection and John hosts tournaments there so he is very gracious about sharing his collection with other pin heads.

In all he says he has over 100 machines, some in storage, some stashed at friends houses and some on location.

We didn’t be back home with our purchased Bally Viking pinball machine until after 10 pm after listening to John’s stories about the hobby, his collection, tournament organizing and just loading up the machines.

Check out this short documentry film about John “Ballyman” Reuter – https://newenglandfilm.com/festival_film/2010/a-lifelong-love

Pinball History