C.O.C.A. Times

by Bill Howard
Juggler
Patie"ce tleveloper
Over the Top
Little is known and less has been written about one
of the most interesting of the coin operated producers of
the roaring twenties, the Boyce Coin Machine Amuse-
ment Corporation of Tuckahoe, New York. Dick Bue-
schel lists seven machines as having been manufactured
by Boyce: OVER THE TOP, JUGGLER, WEE GEE,
PATIENCE DEVELOPER, PENNY BACK GUM
MACHINE, TWO PENNY RACING MACHINE, and
RUNABOUT. Yet this historian extraordinaire only
features WEE GEE in his all inclusive Guide to Vin-
tage Trade Stimulators and Counter Games, see pages
214 and 112. I have never seen an example of the last
three machines mentioned above, and doubt that any-
one else has, although I do have the ads for all Boyce
machines except for RUNABOUT, OVER THE TOP,
JUGGLER, WEE GEE and PATIENCE DEVELOPER
are all in my collection and featured on page 132 of
Every Picture Tells a Story.
30
Wee 0-ee
My interest in the Boyce machines originated from
my habit of periodically going through every page of
every issue of Coin Machine Journal, Automatic Age,
and Billboard·· to collect every ad for every machine
that I found interesting as I turned library micro fish
wheels into visual oblivion. The unique, interesting na-
ture of the Boyce line stood out over and over again.
As I viewed these ads of the four Boyce machines I
own, only WEE GEE is in any way comparable in de-
sign or mechanics to any other machine that I know
of. Nothing compares to JUGGLER, OVER THE TOP
OR PATIENCE DEVELOPER.
My first acquisition of a Boyce machine came early
on when I purchased OVER THE TOP at Chicago land.
Manufactured in 1925 at a cost of $10 and billed as
"The most fascinating skill challenger of them all",
this wall machine was "built like a battleship". See
Automatic Age, where its ad appears on page 44 of the