In 2024, we worry about people spending too much time on social media. We complain that they (not us, but the others) are locked into their smartphones, never putting the devices down and diving into their phones to escape the reality of dealing with loved ones.
Before smartphones, video games and television were ruining our children.
Parents whined that their kids never played outdoors anymore. Mom and Dad said that the younger generation lived like vampires, afraid of the sun, and their lack of activity was obviously a detriment to society.
The whining never stopped. It poured from generation to generation. Those who were young and hypnotized by TV and Pong now complain their kids are addicted to smartphones and apps for everything.
Oh, if only we could go back to the fifties when there were only three or four channels on television, and everything on the screen that drew us like moths to its flame and dominated our living rooms was in black and white.
Think again. In the late 1940s and especially the 1950s, parents, teachers, preachers and politicians raged against the evil posed by new technology, which enabled the creation of a radical form of entertainment that was captivating America.
The pinball machine!
Or, as they were known in the days of “I Like Ike,” pinballs.
Bright. Loud. Flashy. Full-Color (as opposed to black-and-white movies and television) millions of America’s children and adults were dumping God knows how many nickels into pinballs from sea to shining sea.
In York, South Carolina, Police Chief Jim Boyd Jr. told the story of a local businessman who begged Boyd to stop him from playing pinball.
“He said, ‘Every time you see me in a place playing those machines, you come in and get me,’” Boyd explained. “He told me it was like a disease. He just couldn’t pass a pinball machine without putting money into it.”
From nearby Rock City comes the story of a boy who called the police to report he’d been robbed of his newspaper route money. Police Chief W.S. Rhodes said, “The boy spent the money playing pinball machines and was afraid his father would punish him.”
That boy was not alone.
Donald A. Cornwell, circulation manager of the Hammond Times newspaper, reported three recent cases of newspaper carriers pouring their entire route collections, nickel by nickel, into pinball machines.
“They (pinballs) are more vicious than slot machines,” said Cornwell. “They take your money faster and give you less in return. When they are made available to small children, it is all the more vicious.”
A man who owns a little Rock Hill, South Carolina store said he watches kids captivated by the games. “They play nickels like they were popcorn.”
It only takes twenty nickels to make a dollar.
Of course, that caught the interest of the Mafia. Since organized crime knew a motherlode when it saw one, gangsters took over the pinball business.
But the criminal element isn’t what sparked outrage against pinballs—it was the evil posed by this new form of entertainment and the idea that fathers were losing monthly mortgage payments as they gambled on the far-off chance of winning a free pinball or even shut your mouth, a free game on the machine!
Newspapers across the country railed against pinballs, including a weekly paper called The Spectator in Joliet, Illinois.
Two people led The Spectator -- William McCabe, the publisher, and his partner fighting crime, Amelia Jo “Molly” Zelko. They pissed off gangsters and politicians.
Not just because their weekly paper attacked pinballs, but Molly also ran column after column attacking what she saw as corruption inside Joliet’s city hall.
Thugs attacked William. He was beaten nearly to death with spiked baseball bats, and Molly disappeared, never to be seen again. Molly told a friend she would kick off her shoes and run for the hills if gangsters came after her swinging bats spiked with nails.
Guess what? Police found her shoes and her car. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, that was all.
I am working on Molly’s story for a Shocking True Crime Stories book.
This tale has everything -- two crusading journalists, the Mob, pinball machines, political crooks and corruption, Jimmy Hoffa, and even the general counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, Robert F. Kennedy.
Dead or Alive! A Shocking True Crime Story coming soon!
In the meantime, since we have gangsters on our collective mind, what about the Black Hand gang of the 1920s? Could they be responsible for a bombing that killed three children in Brooklyn?
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