Tom Nieman came into the coin industry almost
by accident. A graduate of the University of
Michigan in 1971, he was looking for a job utilizing
his degree in Radio, TV, Film, but he was finding
nothing. He was married and had one child-he had
responsibilities- and he needed something, any-
thing to tide him over until he could find what he
was looking for.
At this point, BiU O'DonneU, Jr. of Bally, a
childhood friend, offered him a job with Bally. It
was not a particularly exciting job, washing down
machines for Carousel Times, then the operating
subsidiary of Bally. But it was a job to keep his
family until he found a "real job. "
Luckily, he never found that real job. Instead he
progressed in the company, from machine washer
to truck driver to soliciting leases for game rooms.
He ran a route for Carousel Times in Michigan for a
year. Then it was back to Chicago, and when Bally
bought American Amusements [and renamed it
Aladdin's Castle], there was the chance to come into
the corporate end.
Tom took that chance and went to work in
marketing and sales under Ross Scheer. He worked
with Paul Calamari, hustling equipment on the
phones. He met distributors and learned sales,
though he's stiU not sure he made a good salesman.
His present position as promotions director was
the result of slow evolution.
Tom and wife SaUy have two boys Tommy 7 and
Matt 4, and they have another child on the way.
And Tom feels finally settled in at BaUy.
He likes the team concept at the Chicago-based
firm. "You've got to have designers, you've got to
have art people, you've got to have marketing
people, you've got to have sales," he told us. "There
is no individual or one group of individuals that can
make something big. The promotions need a
tremendous amount of cooperation from every-
body." Obviously they've gotten that from the
beginning; Tom's very first promotion, the tie-in
with the movie Tommy was nothing if not
"something big."
8
It was through that connection that his present
position evolved. "I was always under the
impression that we could seU games on more than
just their features," he said. "We could do it, I
thought, by addressing ourselves to who was
playing the machines. "Tommy addressed the same
audience.
"How then did the connection finally come
about?" we asked.
NIEMAN: When The Who originally did the rock
opera, Tommy, in 1968, I think it was, they wrote
Bally and requested permission to used the trade
name BaUy in the song, Pinball Wizard. And
somebody here at Bally-and nobody knows who it
was, nobody will admit to it-wrote back and said,
"Sure. We don't care." And they did. So we could
have taken advantage of the connection at the time,
but we didn't.
PLAY METER: Who finally put the two together?
NIEMAN: Well, I had a good friend who was in film
in New York and I was talking to him and he was
saying how they were finally going to make Tommy
into a movie. This would have been in 1973 or 1974.
I said, "You're kidding." He said, "No. The Who is
going to be involved in it and it's going to be just
like the album." So I started snooping around to see
who was going to handle it in the United States, and
I found out it was Columbia. So I threw maybe a
dozen phone calls into New York and somebody
finally gave me a number in California and I got
through to the fellow who is now national director
of promotions and expositions for Columbia. And he
loved the idea .
So I'd sold him. Now I had to come back and sell
Bally. "We could make a game out of this contact." I
said. "And I think it would help us." It didn't go
over real big here in the beginning because they
just didn't see the connection. It was a matter of
plugging away and especially trying to get our
artists excited about it. Meanwhile, after getting
some ideas about what the picture was going to look
like, I made a commitment to Columbia to show up
in New Orleans- they had their first press confer-