Former pro golfer’s game room chock full of pinball
Whether to keep alive memories of childhood or a lost relative, show affinity for a character, animal or sports team or to reunite a set of something separated generations ago, every collector has a story to tell.
It could be an autograph they secured, an auction they won, a game they attended or an antique they stumbled upon.
Some are in it for the nostalgia, others for the hunt, and many with an eye on making a buck.
For the next eight days, the Daily Times will shine the light on a few collectors in our area.
We hope you enjoy these stories as you collect the last few items on your holiday checklist.
UPPER CHICHESTER — Ed Dougherty didn’t know why his non-drinking grandfather had an affinity for Marcus Hook taprooms, and being 5 years old, he didn’t much care as long as he got his hush money.
“Pop would give me two nickels to play pinball while he took care of his business,” Dougherty said of John Vincent Coyle, who died in January 1955. “At that age I could barely see over the glass, but when those lights went on I was in heaven.”
Dougherty learned to play pinball at Market Street mainstays like Clank’s, Fat’s and the Paradise Bar on post-war machines with wooden rails, wooden legs and depictions of dancing girls on the back glass and playfield.
A few years later he started feeding his lunch money to the machines at Chris’ Sandwich Shop at the corner of Ridge Road and Yates Avenue after classes let out at Holy Saviour and St. James.
“My favorites are the last two machines I played with my grandfather before he died, Diamond Lill and Lady Luck,” said Dougherty, a combat veteran who was awarded a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars for valor for his service in Vietnam. Today, those two machines and about 40 others are housed in a 2,000-square foot game room on the second floor of Dougherty’s Larkin Road home.
“In 1992 I won enough money to make it into the field of the 1992 PGA Championship in St. Louis,” said the retired PGA and Champions Tour golfer. “A good friend who caddied for me, Bob Greninger, had (a) book about pinball machines at his house, and I realized while I was reading it that I knew all the machines from the early years.”
Already a world-class collector of model trains, Dougherty decided to try another track.
“I saw an ad for a Roto Pool machine in the Daily Times, and I bought it for $30,” he said. “It was filthy, but I fixed it up and got it working. Then I bought one more and another after that.”
Tired of leaving train shows empty-handed, Dougherty started devoting more of time and prize money to his new hobby.
“I was in the heavyweight division of train collecting, but pinball was a whole new thing and something that interested me,” said the 66-year-old Linwood native. “All hell broke loose in 1994 when I bought four machines at a pinball convention in Chicago.”
Carolyn Dougherty said her husband’s golf career put him on the road for 35 to 40 weeks a year and gave him a great network to find collectibles.
“The more publicity he got, the more people would walk up to him on the golf course and say, ‘I’ve got something you might be interested in,’” she said.
When Ed and Carolyn would make the annual trip to their home in Port St. Lucie, Fla. in advance of the upcoming golf season, they would often have six or more pinball machines in tow.
“I would break them down — the head, the body and the legs — and put them in the back of the van,” Dougherty said. “We have a three-car garage down south and on rainy days I liked to take them completely apart, spread out all the parts and clean them up.”
While train collecting requires a good chunk of space, Carolyn said pinball machines are a different animal.
“This used to be an 1,100 or 1,200 square foot house,” she said. “Now it’s 8,000 and most of it’s Ed’s. His stuff encroaches on the whole house.”
In addition to the operational machines that stand side-by-side on the red carpet in his massive game room, Dougherty also has 200 other machines in various stages of disrepair.
“I am better at cleaning them than I am at repairing them. I can hit a 3-wood left or right but when I look at two wires I have no idea what they do.”
Dougherty uses an assortment of products to recondition his machines, including razor blades to clean the outside of the glass (“You can’t touch the backside
because they are reverse painted, he said), steel wool on the wood rails, and a stiff-bristled toothbrush on the playfield.
For repairs, spare parts and painting, he relies on Wide Area Repair, an arcade and pinball machine service shop in Downingtown.
“Ed calls me about four or five times a year either to repair machines he’s just bought or to do general maintenance,” said owner Ray Brackins. “He does as much as he can do, and then he asks me to complete it.”
Brackins said Dougherty is the only collector he knows who only dabbles in wooden rail machines. (His newest was built in 1960, the year steel rails were introduced.)
“There are a lot of collectors out there,” he said. “When pinball machines started disappearing from public places, they started popping up in people’s homes. Anything coin operated is still fairly popular, like video games, though the older machines from the ’50s and ’60s don’t have nearly the following as the stuff from the ’90s.”
Dougherty’s collection includes machines with names like Happy Days, Niagara Falls, Hawaiian Beauty and Classy Bowler. He also owns Minstrel Man, a game featuring entertainers in black face that is considered among the most controversial ever produced.
Brackins said pinball machines were not manufactured with longevity in mind.
“These were money-making devices that were only supposed to last a couple of years until a vendor came around with the next model,” he said. “They were viewed as gambling devices and a way to hide income, which is why they attracted a lot of underworld people.”
Pinball machines were once banned in several parts of the country, including New York City from 1939 to 1976, and subject to Prohibition-style raids.
“Back in the day people looked down on pinball the way they looked down on prostitution and drugs,” Brackins said. “Eventually that faded away, and pinball began to be seen as a form of entertainment.”
While pinball machines dominate the Dougherty game room, they have plenty of company. The space also features a full-size skee ball machine, massive shuffleboard table that had to be hoisted into the house with the help of an industrial jack, antique Coke machine and cash register, Wurlitzer jukeboxes, craps and billiard tables, Sun Chief slot machine, an entire wall of mounted guitars, dozens of beer signs, clocks, and other breweriana and vintage phone booth that once stood in a Minnesota drugstore.
There are also a few nods to an improbable golfing career that netted the former Edgmont Country Club pro more than $6 million before injuries and multiple surgeries forced him into retirement. He played his last competitive round in September 2008.
An adjoining 1,000-square foot room is filled with a fraction of Dougherty’s train collection, including a huge Lionel layout that used to be on display at Storytown USA amusement park (now Great Escape Fun Park) outside Lake George, N.Y. His oldest train predates Carolyn’s 97-year-old mother, Rose Liott, by six years.
“We have great parties up here,” Dougherty said. “People’s grandkids come over, and they have a lot of fun playing all these games they’ve never seen before. The only rule we have is no running.”
Dougherty has trains and other items packed away at his childhood home in Linwood and in his oversized Boothwyn garage, which houses one of his impressive toys, an ermine white 1963 split-window Corvette.
Another classic car, a 1957 Chevy, was recently sold to help offset the purchase of the former Fidelity Bank building at 10th and Market streets in Marcus Hook.
“We bought it last August and plan to open a train shop there and use it to store inventory,” sad Dougherty, who has owned E&T Trains in the lower level of the Booth’s Corner Farmers Market for several years. “I’m sure we’ll probably have a few pinball machines out on display as well.”
Dougherty claims there is no common thread in his collecting other than how much he enjoys it.
“I might be stuck in the ’50s — who knows?” he said.
But the more he talks, the clearer it becomes that his trains connect him to his late mother, Mary, who bought him his first set before he was even born, and the pinball machines to his grandfather and younger brother Shawn — the recipient of the first machine Dougherty ever purchased — who died of lung cancer three years ago.
It was not until he started collecting pinball machines that Dougherty finally got around to asking his mother why her dad spent so much time in Marcus Hook bars.
“She told me he liked the horses and went down there to see his bookie,” he said.