Pinball museum looks to keep game going
The Pacific Pinball Museum opened 13 years ago with a secret handshake, not an endowment. It operated one night a week, with lots of booze and few rules.
“You came in through the back door,” Larry Zartarian says. “We didn’t even have a front door.”
Now the Alameda museum has a board of directors led by pinball collector Zartarian, a concrete mission for education and preservation, and an unrivaled collection of 1,300 games that span the entire 80-plus year history of the art form.
At the center is museum founder and director Michael Schiess, who has collected an army of the most talented tinkerers and artists in the region, and persuaded them to work for free. Their goal: To create nothing less than the Smithsonian of Pinball in the Bay Area.
But with big goals come bigger risks. As the museum grows, organizers have learned, not all challenges can be conquered with stubborn
will and moxie.
“Now we’re at this point where the collection has grown so big, it’s like this giant souffle that could collapse if we don’t have the financial support to keep it going,” says Zartarian, who works in wealth management as his day job.
The museum is at a crossroads, but it has always been that way. Historically, the Pacific Pinball Museum has operated like a game of pinball, with unexpected bounces, elated victories and out-of-nowhere rebounds into disappointment.
The museum started in 2002 as Lucky JuJu pinball, a collection of friends playing and fixing less than a dozen pinball machines in the back room of a store on Webster Street, Alameda’s second-biggest drag. Schiess was an artist/ engineer repairing exhibits at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum, and he quickly learned to admire the rugged indestructibility of pinball machines.
“I was seeing these science exhibits all over the world, and people just beat the crap out of them. I thought, ‘What if you made science exhibits out of pinball parts?’ ” Schiess says.
Not long after Lucky JuJu opened its (back) door, Schiess visited the Smithsonian museum. After finding no pinball exhibits, he contacted the museum.
“They made it very clear they weren’t going to pursue pinball in any form as any kind of American heritage or historical thing,” Schiess says. “So we saddled ourselves with this responsibility . ... We just saw that nobody else was doing it. A lot of people just look at these as games, and don’t realize the history, and we don’t want that to be lost.”
That’s just the beginning of the soliloquy. Seemingly every member of the Pacific Pinball Museum hierarchy has the speech memorized: Pinball is art. Pinball is science. Pinball is American history.
Schiess can show the colorful artistic backglass of any of the 90-plus pinball machines currently on the museum floor and point out 10 things people would never notice at first glance. He makes pinball machines with clear sides and lends them to other museums, so visitors can see the brilliant engineering in motion. The museum’s latest interactive exhibit, “The Art & Science of Pinball,” opens Saturday at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland with some of these machines on display.
Schiess knows the history of every machine, whether it was confiscated by Oakland police in the 1940s, or spent time in Herb Caen’s living room. (It’s true, the museum has the renowned Chronicle columnist’s pinball machine, which Schiess proudly says was played on by “the three Jerrys” — Garcia, Brown and Lewis.) The museum eventually leased the storefront adjacent to the original back room speakeasy and opened as a nonprofit. Then it expanded into the property next door and a storage facility on the Alameda Naval Base. Zartarian made available his collection of about 100 electromechanical pinball machines from the 1940s to ’60s, and other major collectors donated hundreds more games.
But the museum’s greatest physical asset may be its volunteer base, a group exemplified in the museum’s Monday fix-it night, where some volunteers drive from three counties away to work for pizza.
Start with “Google Mike” — Mike Harris — a 32-year-old software engineer who spent hours hot-wiring the sound chip on a “Back to the Future” machine, just to add Michael J. Fox’s voice to the soundtrack.
Then there’s Christopher Kuntz, who fixes pinball machines for a living. He ends a long day of work, then drives to the museum at his expense to fix more pinball machines — this time for free.
Schiess’ wife, museum curator Melissa Harmon, even enrolled in paralegal classes at the local community college, so the museum could save money on lawyers.
But good intentions only go so far. As the museum scales up, the executives are learning that building a foundation isn’t like fixing a pinball machine.
Last year’s Shoot the Moon Expo is a good example. The museum leased a larger warehouse on the old Alameda Navy base, with hopes of luring corporate clientele who would pay big money to host events and retreats — and maybe be inspired to become a corporate angel backer for the museum’s future plans.
In true Pacific Pinball Museum spirit, the result was cinematic. The expo space looked glorious, with twinkle lights, movie-screen-size artwork slung from the rafters, and experimental art made out of pinball parts and musical instruments.
Children flocked around a hands-on science exhibit breaking down pinball components into their simplest scientific terms. Casual fans who came to play the modern machines gravitated toward a 1930s baseball game that used no electricity, learning from a staffer a little history and mechanical engineering.
It was a pinball advocate’s dream come true.
Then the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland happened a few weeks later, making cities across the Bay Area more concerned about gatherings in warehouses. Museum officials say they learned that the last-minute exhibition permit they received for the expo wouldn’t be immediately duplicated. When a corporate client offered money to use the space, they had to say no.
Now they’re working on the next plan, their Smithsonian of Pinball still out of reach.
“All this time we’ve been occupied acquiring games, restoring games or having fun playing the games and sharing them with the public,” Zartarian says. “We’ve never had to worry about or even think about ‘How can we get a capital campaign going?’ ”
Alameda City Manager Jill Keimach sympathizes, even as the museum and city are occasionally at odds over permits involving the warehouse (it has since received another one-time permit for a May 3 pinball-and-beer event) or details surrounding the Carnegie Campaign, a long-simmering attempt to turn the city’s Carnegie Library into a pinball museum.
But like seemingly everyone who has spent time with the museum operators, Keimach is openly rooting for them.
“We want to keep them in Alameda,” Keimach says. “The pinball museum fits in beautifully with (this community). It’s homegrown to Alameda, and we want to preserve it.”
The constant frustrations lead to the same question: Why not just go back to passing the hat and playing with their friends?
“It sounds corny, but for me I do not like our throwaway culture,” Schiess says, raising his voice over a cacophony of bells and bumpers in the room. “We seem to be the only ones in the whole wide world actively preserving the early form of pinball and everything that goes with it.”
So the pinball enthusiasts trudge forward with the belief that if they can explain to the world what’s in their hearts, people will look at the machines the way they see them.
Which leads to a final soliloquy, this one from Zartarian:
“Pinball has kind of a sordid past with gambling. We don’t appeal with people in the opera and symphony crowd,” he says. “And on the other hand it doesn’t appeal to the folks on a guilt level. … You get those things in the mail with the heartwrenching pictures, and you think, ‘I’ll write you a check, because I can’t stand the suffering.’ What are we rescuing here? Orphaned pinball machines?
“We’re trying to elevate pinball on a science and art and history level to a more highbrow crowd. That’s our challenge.”