Ok be honest

Rob Keeble

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Location
GTA Ontario Canada
How often did u play pinball at the local convenience store growing up?

For me it was just about a after school ritual lol.
Poor store owner.

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Never, my parents never allowed us to play the games or machines at the exits of stores. My dad told me, "if you have time to be uptown, I'll buy more animals for you to feed and clean up after."
 
THis is probably age and location oriented. Pin ball was a biggie for me at the Winchell's Donuts shop downtown. I renewed my interest at the college coffee shop to the detriment of my studies ;-)
 
Never have played one in my 71 years! When I was a sweet little boy, you never played pinball machines, pool or went into a bowling alley...it was suppose to make you go blind ... or something.
 
Not pinball so much, but Pole Position at the local arcade was my go to. Mostly because all the other games always had lines. Had my name on the wall for quite awhile with the high score. At the local Safeway they had a spaceship game called Scrambler. Never saw it anywhere else though. I played it a bunch, but my brother was addicted for sure as we walked by the Safeway on the way to and from school everyday.

Wish the games were still big and bulky so kids have to walk or ride their bike somewhere to play them. BIG pet peeve of mine is kids glued to xBox and such. :(
 
Nope, at best it was a solid seven plus miles to town and I don't remember the shops there having pinball, it was a pretty small town.

They do have one in the break room at work, and I work with a couple fellows who are quite good (one played professionally for a while). For a while there was quite a bit time spent on that by some of them but since they started out about a 100x better than me with no experience I never played it much.
 
I lived in a small town in the midwest and we had lots of pin ball machines. Nickle a game and if you were good enough you could play for hours on that nickle. I never was very good but I had a cousin that would often play for an hour or more and I doubt that he ever spent more than .25 at a time. Store owners must have liked it or they wouldn't have been there. Used to actually be 5 balls in them not one that got replayed. So you could use Newtons thrd law to pop the glass and the store owners didn't like that..
 
Dabbled with pinball, but didn't really start sinking the quarters until the Defender video game showed up at the 7-11 a block from the house. Spent quite a few hours at that one. I've also gone through several periods of my life (starting in about 8th and 9th grade) where I played quite a bit of pool. I've now been playing in pool leagues for nearly 25 years. I only get out to shoot one night a week these days, so I'm not as sharp as I when I was playing 6 or 7 nights a week. (Back in my drinkin' days.) :beer:
 
Like a couple of others here, grew up on a farm, we were share croppers in my early years, so rarely ever had two nickels to rub together, much less often two quarters... I think the first time I played a pinball machine was in the Navy... found it boring and never went back.

Another oddity in my youth, my dad would not allow cards in the house... no gambling.... but he was a big big domino player and his favorite game was "42"... which is in fact a form of the card game "whist", only played with dominoes. I never got much out of playing dominoes, but learned to play cards in the Navy (Navy must have been corrupting me??) and for a while was a pretty good Whist player... not so much any more.
 
Never, too. Same as many, lived on a farm. Also, pinball was considered gambling in the Bible Belt because you could "win" a free ball or a free game. Dominoes were fine in Texas, too, especially 42. It's like spades just played with dominoes. Still play when the family gets together. I grew up with some uncles and aunts who were real domino sharks..
 
Honestly? We didn't have the money for pinball or anything like that. I think I rode the rocket ship outside the market once because a guy gave my mom a nickle. We'd walk the railroad tracks for hours, much to the dismay of our parents because we didn't have cell phones, to get bottles for a Rally Bar...5 cents and bottles were a penny for turn in.
 
Never have played one in my 71 years! When I was a sweet little boy, you never played pinball machines, pool or went into a bowling alley...it was suppose to make you go blind ... or something.

Hmmm, I think that was the girly mags in the magazine rack that supposedly did that ... :eek:

I do not recall any pinball machines at our local hangout -- the drug store / soda fountain. The only machine that place had was a tube tester. My dad would load me up with tubes, and I'd hop on my bike and go try to see if any were bad.
 
I played it a lot, although here in Spain we used to play more "futbolín"futbolin.jpg I think it is called table football in english, that allowed four of us playing at the same time.
We used to spit on the holes of the shafts to lubricate them when they didn't slide smoothly enough. The center of the sides edges used to have a worn out depression thanks to the tradition of hitting on it twice before throwing the ball on the center of the field.

When playing pinball, and the ball fell through the side runs to the hole, we gave a strike with the hand on the front edge of the machine while maintaining the flippers at their highest position and the ball would jump back up to the playing area without trigging the "tilt".
 
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