It seems like a million years ago, but there was a time when my friends and I would go to a five and dime called G.C. Murphy on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, and play pinball.

We were good boys. Choirboys, actually, at the National Cathedral. Thursday night was rehearsal night, when we’d all meet in the bowels of the cathedral and then wind our way up into the choir stalls. The choir stalls were lit; the rest of the cathedral—nearly a quarter mile of cut stone and empty chairs—was dark. Those night rehearsals were like standing at the mouth of a vast cave and singing into the void.

It was exhilarating and slightly scary. I suppose what I was feeling was a kind of awe, although I didn’t know it at the time. The music we sang was technically demanding and required a great deal of practice and attention.

In other words, the experience was a lot like writing; i.e., summoning all of one’s concentration and technique as a bulwark against a great dark mystery.

In the long hours between school and Thursday night rehearsal, we fortified ourselves with junk food, camaraderie, and money-wasting games of skill and luck.

The G.C. Murphy was an unremarkable store in the middle of an unremarkable neighborhood in the middle of an unremarkable decade: the 70s. But it did have a pinball machine, and sometimes even two, way in the back, on a landing between the main floor, where you could buy all sorts of cheap plastic things, and the basement, a cool, alluring place which featured ladies’ foundation garments.

I’m sure there were other wares down there, but I remember it as a sea of black tricot.

There we were, three or four pre-adolescents, suspended half-way down the stairs between the world of housewares and the forbidden planet of the Ladies.

The overwhelming world of adulthood, with all its bourgeois trappings, loomed all around us. Was it any wonder that we threw ourselves with such abandon into those games, with their garish artwork, flashing lights, and ringing bells? What was a pinball game, after all, if not a metaphor for trying to win just one more chance to play, set against the absolute certainty of “Game Over?”

I think about those Thursday afternoons a lot. I’m sure they’ve improved in hindsight, which has a way of stripping out the petty rivalries and physical torments of that difficult time in a boy’s life, and casting whatever’s left in the rosy glow of nostalgia.

But I do remember how fiercely we laughed, and how we lost ourselves so completely in our games.

I was working on a poem about it a couple of years ago when I ran into a problem: I couldn’t remember the games we played. I mean, the exact titles. Back in the day, I must have spent a hundred hours staring score reels that were spinning just inches from a name like “Gold Rush” or “Flash.” How could I forget something so obvious?

A writer builds his story with concrete details. So I began to research pinball in the 70s. My research led me to eBay, where there’s a thriving market in old pinball machines.

Before I knew it, I’d bought one! And not even one I’d played as a kid. A more modern game (Big Guns, a Williams title from 1987, if you must know).

It was fun. My daughter even liked it. The fellow who sold it to me turned out to be a highly respected restorer of games, Bill Heatherly, over in Mechanicsburg. He led us into his temple of rare restored games and let us play.

Which unfortunately led to game number two (not a pinball machine, at all; a crane/digger game, made by Williams in 1956). This one didn’t work. So I started to learn about fixing games.

I learned about soldering, schematic diagrams, stepper motors, and switch relays. I discovered that I tend to like the earlier games, called EMs, short for “electro-mechanical,” as opposed to modern SSs, or “solid state,” which use computers. I learned that coin-op games are a fascinating reflection of an era’s technology and culture.

For instance, a very disturbing game called “Atomic Bomber (Mutoscope, 1946)” which you can play over in Jimmy Rosen’s arcade at the old Sledworks in Duncannon. The goal of Atomic Bomber is to drop, well, atom bombs, on a cityscape which scrolls below the crosshairs of your bombsight.

Dropping atom bombs on civilian populations hardly seems like a fun game to us today. But at the time it was made, America had just ended a traumatic and bloody war by doing just that.

I highly recommend a visit to the Sledworks on a Saturday, complete with a malt (made with Hall’s ice cream!) at the vintage fountain Jimmy salvaged from an old drugstore.

And if you, too, should get bitten by the pinball bug, I have two recommendations. Start reading a Google group called “rec.games.pinball.” And get to know Jim Palson of JT Amusements (www.jtamusements.com) in Duncannon. He’s an expert in all matters pinball, with a special focus on Gottlieb games. But he can help you sort out virtually any problem you have with any game of any era. He’s practically a national treasure, and very generous with his advice on “RGP,” as we pinball fanatics call the Google group.

You can never return to your youth. But sometimes you can get pretty darn close by pressing a “Start Button.”

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 03 December 2009

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com