Coin Slot Magazine - #044 - 1978 - September [International Arcade Museum]
These machines are big machines, and their distribution quite
often seems to be close to home. But you can't follow that as a rule;
only as a tendancy.
Which brings us to our "Most Wanted" trade
stimulator, the Ganda SKY SCRAPER of 1898. Here's a machine
that stood tall on any location; and I mean tall! SKY SCRAPER is
well over seven feet high. Exactly how high isn't known becuase no
examples of the machine are known, or at least don't seem to be.
And that's strange. The SKY SCRAPER is the kind of machine that
would normally have been saved, if only because it's so different. It
isn't very complicated in a mechanical sense, really consisting of a
Canda COUNTER PERFECTION on a standing base, with four more
of tbe mechanisms stuck on top of that, making five in all. You got
a lot for your nickel with five sets of card reels all spinning at once,
a total of twenty-five reels-to simulate a table full of poker players
for one coin.
This isn't the only five-hand card machine made by the Leo
Canda Company of Cincinnati. Canda made another one in 1899
which was simply called the CARD MACHINE, only now the mech
anisms were clustered two plus two plus one at the bottom so the
machine didn't stand so tall. When Canda folded his slot machine
business around 1901 the big producers in Chicago and Detroit
grabbed the Canda trade machines as their own. Mills picked up the
JUMBO, JUMBO GIANT, PERFECTION and UPRIGHT PERFEC
TION machines, and the SUCCESS card machines; Watling the SUC
CESS machines; and Caille Bros, in Detroit modified what they got
and started making the Canda COUNTER PERFECTION as the SUC
CESS card machines under their original name just as everyone else
did.
But no follow-on producer seems to have picked up the SKY
SCRAPER, making it solely a Canda machine. That shouldn't have
discouraged the survival rate because the SKY SCRAPER apparently
had a production run of at least two or three years. We know that at
least one was being sold on the used machine market as late as the
1920s as it appears on the Bernard Sicking sales sheet. There are
probably more, and the odds are that at least one collector or per
haps a country store enthusiast has one of the machines standing
around.
The Canda distribution pattern may be a clue to discovery. The
big five-mechanism Canda CARD MACHINES have shown up in
Michigan, Ohio, and possible Iowa and Southern Illinois. Canda
JUMBO GIANT machines have ranged even farther, with examples
found in Western Pennsylvania and Nevada. Canda JUMBO machines
were located in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Any of those areas are
prime for a SKY SCRAPER. For my money, Cincinnati and Louis
ville are the primest of all. So why hasn't one surfaced? It probably
has, only the rest of us don't know it yet.
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