San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FOUNDER GAMBLES ON SAVING PINBALL HALL OF FAME
Donors helping museum get by after hard pandemic year
For more than a decade, the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas has welcomed anyone with a spare quarter — or four — to play hundreds of old bleeping, flashing, f lipping, clicking games dating to the late 1940s. Located three miles from the Las Vegas Strip, the quirky arcade/museum has long been worth the cab fare for visiting pinheads. Then the pandemic hit. A government mandate forced it to close for 12 weeks, and then placed limits on capacity. Tourism traffic took a wallop. All told, the Pinball Hall of Fame’s revenue is down nearly $500,000 compared with recent years.
It’s a story that’s become all too familiar. Across the country, museums and attractions (along with restaurants, businesses and nonprofits) are struggling.
“No museum has been able to fully escape the impacts of the pandemic, and it has impacted museums of every type, size and location,” says Laura Lott, president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which represents museums, science centers, arboretums, gardens, zoos and other cultural institutions.
Many organizations are resorting to online fundraising platforms, like Gofundme. That’s the case for Pinball Hall of Fame founder Tim Arnold, who launched a Gofundme in hopes of bringing in $200,000 needed to help pay the bills to complete construction on a new, larger building on the Strip — which was in the works well before COVID-19 — that is scheduled to open this spring. To date, he has raised more than $155,000.
“We have to come up with a check for the builder the first of every month,” Arnold said last month. “It was doubtful we were going to make it to March 1, but with the money that came in we’ve probably got March 1 taken care of. And that leaves April 1.”
Run as a nonprofit, the pinball museum has, in the past, donated part of its proceeds to local charities. Now, with the museum’s own future in limbo, Arnold is hoping that the cast of characters who have plunked coins in the games through the years will come through.
For some Las Vegas visitors, a trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame, with its 200 or so machines, is a part of the regular itinerary. That’s the case for Gregory Crosby, a former Las Vegas resident who moved to New York City in 2004. Crosby says playing pinball there is part of his “sentimental routine” when he returns to Las Vegas.
“I love the beauty of the machines and enjoy playing them, even if I’ll never be a pinball wizard. To see them lined up, all from different eras, is to enjoy a montage of late-20th-century popular aesthetics,” Crosby says.
He adds that the Pinball Hall of Fame is a “uniquely Vegas institution . ... I make it a point to tell friends who are visiting Vegas to seek it out, as it’s something that visitors don’t often know about.”
When — and if — the new Pinball Hall of Fame opens, it will be three times the size of the current location, with plans for nearly 750 games. In addition to pinball, Arnold owns a wide variety of video games and mechanical amusements from the last 70-plus years: Mold-arama machines from Disneyland, mechanical driving and flying games, fortunetelling machines, baseball games, quasi-gambling machines.
He knows the history and highlights of each of the games — including an old BB machine gun game from the famed Riverview Park, a sprawling amusement park in Chicago that operated from 1904 to 1967. “This is a self-contained, fully operational machine gun that uses BBS that ricochet, spark and make a lot of noise,” he explains.
For Arnold, 64, his pinball history dates to about 1972, when he was 16 and a pizza parlor near his home in East Lansing, Mich., was selling pinball machines for $150. He pooled his money with a brother and a friend and bought Mayfair, by Gottlieb, and set it up in the garage. Like a magnet, it drew in neighborhood kids, and Arnold charged them 10 cents a game, or three for a quarter.
“Pretty soon that was paid for, so we went out and got another one,” he says. As other friends toiled for their money, shoveling snow or delivering newspapers, he put his pinball machines in local businesses and split the proceeds with the business owners.
In time, Arnold and two brothers owned seven arcades in Michigan. Operating the businesses was, to Arnold, far more fulfilling than the time he spent in college. “I just wanted to be a pinball pirate,” he says.
Around 1990, he sold his share in the arcades and moved to Las Vegas to work toward his dream of opening a pinball museum. He built a storage facility on his property to store his 1,000 machines and hosted pinball parties, called “Fun Nights.” He donated the proceeds to local charities, like the Salvation Army Southern Nevada. He also started a nonprofit organization called the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club, with the goal of raising money for a building that would, in time, be home to the Pinball Hall of Fame.
Since opening in 2006, the Pinball Hall of Fame has been run purely by volunteers. There’s no admission fee, and parking is free. Machines take quarters because pulling a real coin out of your pocket and putting it in a slot is all a part of the arcade experience. As Arnold sees it, the Pinball Hall of Fame is a nod to the low-price Vegas of yesteryear. “We’re of the old model of Vegas where we throw open the doors, put the sawdust on the floor and say come on in,” he says.
That model was working well as recently as early 2020. “A year ago, we were doing gangbusters,” Arnold says. At that time, plans were moving forward for the new Las Vegas Boulevard location, where he was betting on tourist foot traffic from nearby casinos, like Mandalay Bay.
Now, to make up for lost revenue, Arnold has cut costs where he can. He’s sold some machines and hosted events. But it’s just not enough for a coin-fueled emporium in a town fueled by — and, at the moment, failed by — tourism.
“We’re kind of proud of the fact that we’ve gotten this far ourselves. But we had to get over our whole pride thing and realize there are people out there that want to help and can help because they can afford it,” Arnold says.
He needs to move out of the current location by April 5 and hopes to open the new location the next day — assuming no delays from permitting and other matters — to eliminate any downtime. He’ll be fixing up and adding games there gradually. In time, if you look hard enough, you’ll find the earliest games he purchased, including Mayfair.
But Arnold’s not one to get sentimental. Rather, he’s up against a deadline. And he knows that in this game, there’s no free play. “We’re heading for the rocks here,” he says. “We need some help.”