Coin Slot

Coin Slot Magazine - #060 - 1980 - February [International Arcade Museum]
THE COIN SLOT "MOSt Wanted" List
By Dick Bueschel
WATLING'S
A lot of the "Most Wanted" machines are slots
erby Racing Machine
that few people have ever heard of, with many
readers seeing them for the first time in print. At
the opposite end of the scale are the "Most Wanted"
machines that collectors in the know have secretly
been looking for for some time.
Watling DERBY!
Then there's the
If you've been collecting coin
machines for over two years or more you've prob
ably heard of the DERBY.
It's the only "Most
Wanted" machine that already has an established
price,
and
the
only
one
that has
been widely
sought and widely illustrated for some time.
Yet
for all of its publicity and hoopla the machine has
never shown up.
Not completely, anyway. That's
the interesting part about the Watling DERBY.
It
half survives, and fortunately it's the better half
that has survived the years.
In this lies a tale.
Back in the early 1970's Pasadena, California col
lector
Burton
A.
Burton started tracking down
old coin machine operators and makers to find
antique machines and slot paraphernalia.
Armed
with loads of charm, a nose that could root out an
old slot behind a concrete wall and some money in
his pocket, Burton started his search.
It brought
him to Chicago, and incredibly to John Watling.
Watling
had
no
track
with
the
army
of poor-
mouthed collectors that had been knocking on his
door for years, but faced with a combination of
Burton's charm and the money - the money being
a great part of the charm -- John Watling opened
his heart and his mind to Burton. He also opened
The greatest Automatic Amusement Machine
evei" kuilt.
his storeroom door.
Can be operated any place in the
world as an amusement device. The players can
form a pool amongst themselves and do their
own guessing, each player selecting a horse, the
winner taking the prize, or the proprietor can
give prizes in trade to the person guessing the
winning horse. Write for further information.
Burton came out of it with an armful of paper,
old
photographs,
and
some crazy
mechanisms.
One would think that a hit such as this one would
have led to a truckload of Watling ROL-A-TOP
and TREASURY machines.
com
.
m
off
to an
eu
No way!
That stuff
was gone long ago; sold off for cash and licensed
m: us
o
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f
ded cade-m
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r
wn Manufacturing
Manufacturer:
Company
w.a
Do Watling
w
w
/
/
Location:
Chicago,
Illinois
:
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h DERBY
Machine Name:
that the Watlings had kept for one reason or ano
Date Introduced: Around 1908
mechanism that has some horses on a circular race
© The International Arcade Museum
English producer in the 1950's.
What
Burton has was the old junk - the really old junk --
ther and that had little or no cash value to a coin
machine operator in the past.
Amongst this pile
of nuts, bolts, pipes and parts was a complicated
http://www.arcade-museum.com/