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The Names Have Been
Changed To protect The Innocent
Well the boys at Bally were trying to keep the
machines alive and disguise them by hiding certain features and changing
the names to work around the various laws going in place and to fool / foil
the police by creating bingos with names that weren’t listed on the “banned
pinball” lists.
On the surface it
sounds pretty lame (almost ridiculous) since it’s pretty hard to hide the
bingo them unless you completely get rid of the cards as we know they did
with a few of the games to smuggle repair parts back-and-forth across the
country.
So if we theorize
as to why so many bingo were allowed to have escape from being confiscated
and destroyed several things come to mind, all of which were true: Corruption
and kickback existed on several levels, the police and officials were also
playing the games, the shear number of machines made (in the last two weeks
I have seen one website claim that Bally alone put out 91 models and read a
book that states the number to be an even 100 bingos) and on location were
impossible to locate and isolate, that as the states crack down the
machines where shopped out and past on to the private sector, just as many
were put in various forms of storage, and just as many were sequestered in
backrooms and brothels.
As you read
through my pages you will see specific examples and reference to all of
these except the last item about the brothels – Hmmm! I wonder if one of
you has a story to share about this.
Some Of The
Six Card Games And 1 Single Card
 
 
 
 
These 8 pins
clearly show us a couple of the tricks being used to work around the laws
imposed on the “multi-coin” bingos.
“Single Coin” became one of the themes of
the day, replay meters were eliminated or fixed to a maximum yield., and
“For Amusement Only” started popping up as a very common slogan. On the
Beauty bingo you see the little white tag above the playing field – I’d bet
dollars-to-donuts that it’s an “amusement only” moniker and they took it
all the way on the sled machine and painted it right into the backglass art
work.
The “sled” theme
is interesting in it’s own right, where on earth did they target this
machine for – Alaska?
We know the
Beauty machine had to be one of the “Fun” games or a “Spot-Em” reworked for
some yet unrecorded reason. These games where the “Ohio Dime Games” that
came out in the years 1959 to 1962. Part of the Ohio ban on pinballs was
the elimination of the “Freeplay Games” – The games with scoring wheels
that racked up and recorded free replays as the players scored 3, 4, and
5-in-line number combinations.
Check out the
Beauty a little closer, one of the machines with no replay meter right? Not
exactly, on these machines they reverted back to having numbers painted in
the artwork that would light up under the right winning conditions. In this
case making up the fringe around the top of the circus tent. An example of
a typical score would be 400 for a 3-in-line. Did the operators / owners
pay out on these wins – I’d be willing to bet some did.
It would be some
time before Bally made any more 6-card games, next on the scene was the
“Red-Letter Games”, the “Futurity Games”, the “OK Games” and in 1971 as the “20-Hole Games” started
appearing we saw a new set of 6-cards with “Ticker-Tape”, “Stock-Market”,
and “Wall Street”
Pretty “fancy-pants” names for a set of bingos –
Makes you want to look at what the markets were doing in the early 70s and
how Bally was making out :)
If you look at
the playing fields for the 6-card bingos I show above, they all have the
deck used on the “Fun Games” so this helps isolate the timeframe some for
us. Look at the “Six Shot” machine for a glimmer. Today as I was looking
back through my files and notes, I noticed that a man from Ohio was the guy
selling the “Six Shot” that sue helps narrow the history of that pin.
I also saw two
notes referencing that one of the trick to legalize these illegal pins was
to remove the “knock-off” switches up underneath the cabinets that were
used to wipe out the accumulated replays when the player went to cash out
for the day. For all you bingo-novices get on your knees and check out the
bottom of your playing field cabinet.
Well some trivia
and thoughts for ya – To let you know, these
are some of the rarer bingo pics you ever find, so enjoy!
Well here’s a real find, even after 10 years it looks
like the “Shoota-A-Line” theme was still being used to mask some of the
6-card bingos – or – did the theme get so popular in some places they
changed this “Ticker-Tape” so it would fit in
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