![]() “I had no intention of being in the arcade business,” he said over the phone. Growing up in Bloomington-Normal, he bought his first pinball machine on sale from a local arcade when he was in high school in the mid-’80s. John Yates, the owner of the two arcades, says God “worked in a weird way” and led him to pinball. The way that a town so small it doesn’t have a grocery store - most residents shop in Bloomington-Normal, the college town 15 miles away - came to be in possession of one arcade machine for every seven or eight residents is a strange one. Pinball Paradise and its nearby sister building, the Arcadia Arcade Museum, are two fully functioning arcades nestled in the middle of McLean, holding about 100 games from the 1950s through the ’90s. You’re in one of the tiny town’s two pinball and arcade museums. You pass under a sign reading “PINBALL PARADISE,” and suddenly everything is dark and neon and beeping and dinging, full of tourists. The color scheme shifts when you enter the old town bank, and things aren’t so quiet anymore. There’s a library, a museum, and a hardware store in the town square, but (with the exception of the truck stop) the local businesses are only open part-time if at all. These days, McLean is quiet, surrounded by the cornfields people keep to themselves. McLean weathered the loss of the railroad as a primary artery of business and culture, and then of Route 66 after the iconic roadway was decertified in 1985, though its truck stop on the modern Interstate 55 is still going strong. This downtown square used to host parades, gatherings, and harvest festivals, back when the railroad was the lifeblood of McLean in the early 20th century. The town square looks like something out of a Western: brown brick buildings baking in the summer sun, surrounding a single red pavilion in the middle of the square, where families sometimes gather after church. The press generated around the violent struggle for control of pinball is a lens for which to study the culture, politics, and underground world of southern Illinois.McLean, Illinois, has a population of 750 people and 100 pinball machines. However, the lucrative money the machines could help generate in small towns allowed their tolerance, even when the machines were used for the purposes of illegal gambling. ![]() The close tie of pinball machines to the gambling industry in their early inception caused many Americans to view them as mechanisms of vice. His murder marked a high point in a struggle by organized syndicates fighting for regional monopolies on the coin-operated machine industry, especially those machines related to gambling. In January of 1960, Bunice Tyner, a resident of Marion, Illinois was murdered in what the local press dubbed a pinball war. ![]() Pinball uniquely filled the role as a gambling device because of its ability to appear as a game of skill and amusement rather than of chance and speculation. ![]() Pinball inherited this role from slot machines, which were often disguised as novelty toys or vending machines to circumvent increasingly strict anti-gambling laws in early twentieth century America. Pinball was seized upon by organized crime for its ability to pass as an amusement device rather than a gambling mechanism.
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