Coin Slot Magazine - #029 - 1977 - June [International Arcade Museum]
WHERE HAVE JILL
THE FLOWERS 60NE?
By Dick Bueschel
When the Sheriffs Office instructed the Louisville, Kentucky, police
to line up all the slots on the courthouse steps after a crackdown
over half-a-century ago the thought was to create a photograph
that would serve as a warning to illegal slot machine operators that
the free-and-easy days of the past were all over. Maybe it worked,
but the long-term results are far different. No longer a warning,
today it's a treasure. The picture survived long after the salad days
of the machines it illustrates, giving us an insight into what slot
operating must have been like in the early twenties.
A lot has been written about the popularity and the then rapid
demise of the automatic color wheel floor machines of the late
1890s and early 1900s, with the suggestion made that they dis
appeared like dinosaurs as soon as the three-reelers showed up.
Equally, cabinet gum venders reportedly went the same way when
the Bell side venders took over, with counter games a rarity until
the 1930s. Yet here they all are, side-by-side, sitting and standing
in the sun together just as if they wanted to tell us how wrong we
could be when we try to make judgements long after the fact.
It's like finding the bones of Pithecanthropus, Homo Sapiens
and Neanderthal Man around the same prehistoric campfire site
proving they swapped stories about the same hunt.
This picture was hidden almost as deep as an ancient campfire,
for it lay all but forgotten in the vaults of the Photographic
Archives of the University of Louisville until author Michael Lesy
included it in his marvelously nostalgic book REAL LIFE.
.com
m
u
e
Louis
ville in the Twenties published by Pantheon Books in 1976.
It
ran there, uncaptioned and unidentified,
A follow-up to the
m: us
o
r
f
archivist led to an d
original
ed print. -m
oa .arcade
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ow the
Feast your D eyes on
www hardware. Oh, what a collection this would
/
/
:
p
tt is 1923 or earlier; more likely 1921 or 1922. It
make. The h date
can be dated because all of the side venders are for gum and there
are no F.O.K. machines.
It was in the spring of 1923 that O.D.
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