Pinball wizard

Tucker Wachsmuth hasn’t met a vintage machine he doesn’t love

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Jun 4, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Tucker Wachsmuth flicks the switches in his Southeast Ninth Avenue basement, and rows of vintage pinball machines come to life. Lights glow, bells ring, and soon the air smells of heated dust.

You don’t need coins down here, of course. Wachsmuth has about 100 games, 35 of them up and ready.

Right now Kings & Queens is on. As the score mounts, the score reels go chunk-chunk-chunk, and more bells ring as the ball careens between the bumpers, which let out spasmodic thumps. You can feel the vibrations through the hand rests.

Suddenly comes the sound every player lives for, the hard thock of a free play credit. A little “1” appears behind the glass, and all is good with the world.

Wachsmuth, 56, calls himself Tucker the Shucker in his job at his family’s restaurant, Dan and Louis Oyster Bar, but at home he’s a vintage pinball machine collector dedicated to preserving the hands-on experience in a world of flat screens and remotes.

His collection stops in the late 1970s, just before digital readouts came in. He’s all about electromechanical: Springs, relay coils and scoring drums are as important as rubber and lights, glass and birch Ñ and much more important than chips and screens. For him, contemporary pinball machines are just not fun to work on, rather in the way that some find modern cars too computerized to be worth tinkering with.

“I’m not that fond of working on solid-state stuff,” he says. “If a chip goes bad, can I replace the chip?”

Boxes of parts are stashed along his workbench. Wachsmuth gets a thrill out of bringing a broken machine to life. Eagerly unlocking one, he squats and points out the various solenoids and switches that animate the game. There’s the tilt mechanism, a dangling rod in a steel collar, and there’s the knocker (the free-game noisemaker), a strip of metal tucked in a dark corner. The rest is a pre-motherboard mess.

He likes the machines to be played and prefers signs of real wear and tear to mint condition. That, and a lack of space, means that seven of his 35 machines are being fostered by friends. But keeping them going can be hard work. “When they break, they don’t want them cluttering up their home,” he says.

Wachsmuth is mild-mannered and soft-spoken. There’s a tinge of regret in his voice when he says that none of his three kids have shown any interest in fixing pinball machines.

“When they were little, I think they weren’t sure if the other kids were coming to play with them or the machines,” he says. “Later on in high school they really enjoyed it. We would sit down there and play cards and listen to music.”

He also has a bar taken from the Pago Pago tiki bar on Southwest Stark Street and a vintage Seeburg jukebox with the original 45s. “My kids know all the early rock ’n’ roll numbers,” he says with pride.

Games evolve visually

One of Wachsmuth’s favorite machines is Rocket Ship, designed in 1958 by Roy Parker, the star designer of the 1950s for the manufacturer Gottlieb. A skyscraper that doubles as a scoring section looms over cartoon female astronauts in tight clothes. It’s gone from cool to quaint in 50 years.

He’s arranged his machines in chronological order. Early pinball, from the 1930s, looks really dull. The games were like horizontal, slow-motion pachinko: wooden boards with compartments made of pins into which the balls might land, scoring points. There were no flippers or lights.

“Gottlieb made one in about 1932 called the Five Star Final, because they thought the fad was over,” he says. By the late ’30s, however, the games had lights, noises and brightly colored artwork. The black-and-white misery of the Depression was giving way to Technicolor optimism.

On Four Stars the theme is four starlets, with guys waiting for them backstage. “It’s the sexiest-looking game of that era,” he says. He has Captain Fantastic, the game based on the rock opera “Tommy.” The back glass depicts Elton John playing pinball. And Kings & Queens was the game Roger Daltrey found in a dump in “Tommy.”

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