Bill Kline


Before video games and Xbox and Wii and whatever else the silicon crackerjacks will soon devise, there was pinball. Not the dizzying, flashing-lights digital pinball you now see in arcades hard by the beach or in the least-trafficked side corridors of shopping malls.

Rather, I'm talking about vintage pinball, those mechanical marvels with one-ball-at-a-time play and handsome artwork and easily seen targets and easily understood strategy -- and when you needed only 44,000 points and had five balls to win a game. Back before uber-technology and insidious pinball-scoring inflation cheapened points and forced players to score a half-million or even a million on just three balls to win one lousy free game.

It was the mid-1970s, and on the ground floor of the Hetzel Union Building on the campus of Penn State University, there was a row or two of these classic pinball pleasures.


The Buccaneer. Jacks Open. Monte Carlo. They were a joy to play. They took skill to play. And they were true to your effort. If you were good, you could win.

Our favorite was the Buccaneer. Two or three of us from our dorm would meet at the HUB and hammer that machine for hours at a time. Whenever someone from our group would peel off to go to class, someone else would drop by to take his place.

And in the rare event you played solo and had games racked up, you would never leave to eat lunch or attend class or do homework. No way anyone there was giving up free games to a stranger. Besides, we didn't want some other guys to take over our turf, our machine, ''the Buc,'' as we called it.

I last played the Buc, as I figure it, about 30 years ago. Oh, I had haunted many arcades and dives over the years in search of the Buc, particularly that first decade out of college when a young man's responsibilities were nothing more than kicking ass at his job.

But those old-school pinball machines became harder and harder to find, banished like Flash-O-Matic bowling or electric football to the obscure public-access cable stations on the indoor amusement menu. Most of them, I reckon, had been gutted for scrap or dumped in junkyards or were rusting and rotting in abandoned warehouses or even crushed, like my pinball dream, in industrial trash compactors. The horror.

30th reunion

A month ago, while cleaning the house, I came across a piece I had written in college on pinball vocabulary. Chatter and ribbing were plentiful when we played and, over time, we had developed our own catalog of colorful terms, such as ''air time'' and ''back door'' and ''match factor.''

Reading that glossary triggered something inside, a feeling that I wanted to -- needed to -- play 1970s pinball again. The Buc, in particular.

Oh, I always hoped that some day, somewhere, probably in the rec room of a collector, we'd have a happy reunion, the Buc and I. And, indeed, occasionally I would stumble across one of the '60s or '70s classics, such as Space Mission or Aztec. But never my true love, the Buc.

Tugged by that feeling of nostalgia, I called Brian Hein of Whitehall Township, who with his wife, Denise, runs an annual pinball convention in the Lehigh Valley. He, in turn, directed me to Cliff Piel of Center Valley,

And so it happened.

Two weeks ago, at Cliff and Lisa Piel's home in their '50s-diner-themed playroom, in a corner, stood the Buc. Proud and tall and alluring.

(Well, this was not officially the Buc. This model is called Ship Ahoy, but it was built at the same time by the same manufacturer -- Gottlieb -- and is the exact same game as the Buc, except that instead of winning a free game by reaching a certain level of points, you win an extra ball.)

The Buc.

The feel is back

My love had returned after all these years, albeit with a different name, its married name, you could say.