Brief history of bingo pinball machines
Bingo pinball machines appeared in
1951 and were an offshoot of another popular pinball-type game known as a one-ball racehorse game, according to
Nick Baldridge, of Richmond, Virginia, a collector and restoration expert who produces the “For Amusement Only” podcast and runs a Facebook group by the same name devoted to pinball.
The bingo machines were popular in many states, but the tide began to change when big-name politicians like
New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared predecessor machines to be illegal gambling devices in the 1940s and destroyed many of the machines by taking an ax to them in public events.
A law — the Johnson Act of 1950, which barred interstate shipment of the games except to destinations where they were legal — and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Korpan in 1957 designating them “slot machine gambling devices” spelled the end of legal machines in jurisdictions other than Nevada and a few “free” zones in Maryland that allowed gambling.
“They were frequently rounded up and destroyed depending on the locality and legality … Las Vegas being a big exception,” Baldridge said. “Almost all of them exist in collectors’ homes now.”
But the machines also vanished in Nevada in the early 1980s when the state Gaming Commission reclassified them as “Class 2” gambling devices, meaning they no longer could be placed in arcades or other nongaming spaces.
The reclassification put them in direct competition on the casino floor with more profitable slot machines and newer technology like video poker. That proved to be the death knell for bingo pinball.
Tim Arnold, co-founder of the Pinball Hall of Fame, said he has at least one of the bingo machines in the warehouse, though it has a burned-out motor. But even if it was operable, he wouldn’t be able to make it available for public play because of that restriction, he said.
Mike Brunker